Good Movies

After going to the doctor the other day, Hubby came home with movies that he’d bought with a voucher he’d gotten for Christmas. He got Grosse Pointe Blank, which I hadn’t seen, War of the Worlds and The Village. They are all cool and contributed to my (our?) excellent holiday.

I’ve heard people rave about Grosse Point Blank, I think mainly due to John Cusack, which is fine – he’s cool. I really liked this movie, it was fun and Minnie Driver is cool. The whole premise of killing people is kind of ridiculous which makes it funny. It kind of reminded me of The Whole Nine Yards (also a good movie).

I saw The Village at the movies. I liked it then and I like it now. I think the acting is great. The revelation of the plot is done gradually and seamlessly. It is a good reflection of so many emotions that are usually too complicated to express; perhaps they were able to act them out because everyone feels those things, you don’t need that much description to know what they are. Love, desire, jealousy, desperation, grief, loss, most of all there was hope, from start to finish hope was the key to the movie. Really it’s a warm fuzzy theme disguised as a thriller. It’s scary and startling but leaves you feeling good anyway.

Whenever someone mentions War of the Worlds someone else mentions that they don’t like Tom Cruise. Isn’t it funny how he went from being such a stud in Days of Thunder and Top Gun and now people can’t stand him? He probably hasn’t changed that much, he’s still a pretty good actor. The good thing about this movie is that it doesn’t matter if you think you don’t like Tom Cruise because his character isn’t that likeable, but he acts it well, what more can you ask for? Dakota Fanning does a good job in this film too. The special effects are great (there’s a couple of weird blue screens, but overall it very cool). I think they did computer generated graphics for most of it, for all the “tripods” and the lightning, people and buildings exploding (naturally they wouldn’t be allowed to disintegrate real people), the CG was good.
I loved the direction they took throughout the movie depicting the mob mentality. After the lightning strikes everyone goes to investigate, they’re all wary but their curiosity far outweighs any fears. Then a tripod comes out of the ground and they run screaming, then they realise it’s not doing anything so they stop and go back (there’s a reason they say curiosity killed the cat). Then they start disintegrating and everyone runs screaming again. driven away from their homes they all walk, I don’t know if they have any idea where they’re going but they all walk together. They all put up photos and signs begging for information of their loved ones, even though no one’s phones work and everyone is too concerned about themselves and their loved ones to care about those putting signs up. When Cruise’s character drives towards a ferry with his two kids in a minivan the crowd mobs the only working car, one guy yells “you could fit twenty people in that car” as if he cares that there aren’t more people in the car, he really only cares that he isn’t in the car and doesn’t care that they have a crowd of hundreds and that you can’t possibly choose who will go in the car. The family gets dragged out of the car and one man with a gun gets in, one man who was perfectly capable of walking takes the car and the crowd nearly let him get away with it… until they shoot him. It was incredible the way they showed the survival instinct in people, they work together a little but in the end they can only care about themselves.

War of the Worlds came with a second disc with special features, most of them interviews with Steven Spielberg, the actors, the graphics guys, the music guys, they even got H.G. Wells’ grandson and great-grandson to come and talk about the man himself. H.G. Wells wrote the original novel, he had a degree in Zoology and sort of fell into being an author when his books were so successful. One thing annoyed me in these interviews, Steven Spielberg said that he thought it was “interesting that a scientist allowed himself to have an imagination because, you know most scientists just work from absolutes and they don’t allow themselves to go, you know, beyond the ah, known universe.” What?! Okay I don’t disagree with him claiming that Wells was a “scientist slash philosopher” and yes, he obviously had quite an imagination, but to claim that most scientists work from absolutes and don’t have an imagination is just ridiculous.
One of the most well-known, household names of science is that of Albert Einstein. Some of theories, still accepted over a hundred years later, would have seemed pure fantasy to some people at the time.
When Alexander Fleming came back to a mouldy staphylococcus petri dish after the weekend he didn’t think “Ewww” and throw it away. He used his brain, his knowledge and his imagination. He thought, “Hmm, it seems that the mould is releasing something that I can’t see, which is killing the bacteria around it.”
Galileo, arguably also a scientist/philosopher, but considered one of the major forerunners of the modern natural sciences had to defend his claims that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, to those who claimed it was heresy. Science wasn’t absolute then and even though we have many established and accepted theories that we work from now, science is not “absolute” now.
These examples are old and well known, which is why it seems obvious to me that it takes quite a bit of imagination to look at something and figure out how and why it does what it does, to sift through the many theories of how something works to find the explanation that best fits the observations. I’m sure many scientists have lives outside of their work too, some might paint, some might write poetry, some might play music and play games of imagination with their little children. To say that most scientists don’t allow themselves to have an imagination is like saying that most film directors are aloof and don’t know how to live in the real world.

Three good films, one annoying statement, one really long post. Cheers.