Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

3 Stars (out of four)

I have been complaining for a long time that Hollywood has no original ideas left.  Boy, was I wrong.  I must say, while I have seen the techniques of this film before, I have never seen their combination pulled off so deftly.

Michael Keaton plays Riggan, a washed-up, superhero actor who is trying to overcome several obstacles to produce a Broadway play that he wrote to restore some of his former prestige, or at least relevance.  He has left a trail of wreckage from his past that he is trying to fix, as well as overcome all the problems that occur just before a play premiers.  He is trying to repair his relationship with his estranged daughter Sam (Emma Stone) as well as his former wife Laura (Andrea Riseborough).  He, along with his best friend Jake (an almost unrecognizable Zach Galifinackis) have to deal with accidents and hiccups to bring out a play that is teetering on failure before it even starts.  After a freak accident injures their leading man the day before the first preview, they hire Mike (Edward Norton), an incredibly gifted, popular, but self-centered actor who may destroy the show.  Finally, they must deal with the biggest problem, will anyone actually come to it?

Writer/Director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu has pulled off something great here.  Mark my words, you will see him win either best Director or Screenplay from this film.  The film, as I said before, is all technique.  It is a mishmash of Waiting for Guffman, Rope, and just about every screwball comedy you have ever seen with a heavy dose of pathos for atmosphere.  The movie is told with everything from aplomb to zest.  It starts slow and deliberate, but as the pressure mounts, the movie's action and dialogue gets more and more frenzied to by the time we hit the climax, almost everyone is yelling and running.  One of the neat filmmaking techniques in here is that it is told as if it was caught in one long tracking take, which was done previously by none other than the great Hitchcock himself in Rope.  This continuously moving camera gives a documentary feel to the story.

The actual story takes place over about a week and melds fantasy and reality seamlessly, almost too much so.  It is sometimes very difficult to know where reality ends and fantasy begins in this story, especially in its enigmatic Lady or the Tiger-ish ending.  We see most of the story through Riggan's eyes and his cinematic superhero alter ego Birdman, whom we hear speak to Riggan in his mind.  Riggan also has superpowers that manifest themselves during the film.  Is he really Birdman, or is it all in his mind?  We never really know since no one sees him do these things until the end when Sam sees him flying?  We don't know.  The film is never clear.  Keaton's performance in this is so good.  He should have had an Oscar 26 years ago with the movie Clean and Sober, and he has never turned in a bad role from Mr. Mom to Beetlejuice to Pacific Heights to Jackie Brown and yes, even Batman, which this film unapologetically references through Birdman.  He will no doubt be nominated, but I don't know who else was better than him this year.  Maybe this is finally his time.  It is long overdue.  But Keaton isn't the only great performances here.  Galifinackis is wonderfully restrained, a welcome change to his man-child character of The Hangover.  Emma Stone is the perfect, cynical and damaged suicide girl with just the right amount of vulnerability.  And Edward Norton is as amazing as ever with his Method-immersing Mike.

The hardest part for me in this film, however, is what it is condemning or extolling.  It is a love story to the theater and a poison pen letter to its illegitimate bigger brother, cinema.  It seems to extol the theater as the place for real artists, and film as the toxic dump where art goes to die to be replaced by commerce.  Yet it also condemns the theater for giving into film's siren song of cash by taking on the very stories of film it is supposed to be above.  This is a not-so-subtle dig at recent Broadway fare like The Lion King, The Producers, and most obviously, Spider-Man: The Musical.  The attitude of the theater crowd is reflected in Tabitha, the aging theater critic.  She is determined to kill Riggan's play in its crib for no other reason other than it stands for everything she hates; from privileged actors who have no business on Broadway with "real" actors, the cheapening of art in favor of stylistic themes in theater, to the cynical cash-grab from plays that have no artistic merit from her eyes.  

This is the classic conflict of the art versus the pop world.  What is more important--art or commerce?  The answer, of course, is both, and those who understand that are usually branded as sell-outs.  The "serious" art world is very small and pompous and in love with its self-perceived ability to understand things the philistines cannot.  That is why great artists like Norman Rockwell to Andy Warhol to Banksy will never be considered great artists by the arbiters of taste because they appeal to the common person's sensibilities, and that offends them.  That is why they prefer The Iceman Cometh to Jackson Pollack to Federico Fellinni to Miles Davis as opposed to Phantom of the Opera to Stan Lee to Alfred Hitchcock to Lady Gaga.

Ultimately, Birdman is a really good film, almost great.  It has something interesting to say in a very interesting way.  It is trying to be big like a blockbuster while keeping its art film soul.  It will not be everybody's cup of tea, but I, for one loved it an would recommend it to just about anyone who wants something meaty to chew on thematic-wise.  For all you film geeks out there, there is a lot to love as well with the aforementioned technique.  I think you will be surprised.  Check it out.

Big Hero 6

3 Stars (out of four)

This was a lot of fun, and I didn't expect it to be, which just made it that much better.  Disney has been pushing this film for so long, and telling us absolutely nothing about it, that it was saturating the market.  It turns out I shouldn't have worried, because John Lassitar was at the helm and he has saved Disney from itself by backing fabulous stories like he did when he headed Pixar.

Big Hero 6, based on the Marvel comic (another Disney property.  Ironic, isn't it?) takes place in the not-so-distant future in the city of San Fransokyo.  The main character is Hiro, a young robotics genius who is a bit of a layabout until his older brother,Tadashi, convinces him to enter a robotics contest for a scholarship to the school he goes to.  Hiro enters with a groundbreaking robotics design and wins.  But there is a fire in the building and Tadashi ends up perishing in an explosion.  Hiro is understandably heartbroken by this and one day accidentally turns on Baymax, Tadashi's invention of a robotic nurse that looks like a big balloon.  Hiro realizes that someone has stolen his invention and is using it for nefarious ends, so he convinces Tadashi's friends to form a super team based on their individual scientific talents to stop the bad guy.  They, with an upgraded Baymax, then go to save the day.  Like many very original stories, there is obviously a lot more to this story, but I don't want to give too much away.

In a recent interview in Wired! magazine, John Lassitar gives his maxim for a great movie, whether it be live or animated: no matter how good the premise is, the characters must be believable and relatable for the movie to resonate with audiences.  This is a basic truth with good storytelling anytime; that because we are seeing it unfold through his eyes, the protagonist is our anchor to the events of the story and helps us suspend disbelief for it by making him or her relatable.  In other words, we like the main character, we tend to buy the story no matter how weird it is.  This is especially crucial in sci-fi and fantasy, two genres whose odd environments require this suspension.

John Lassiter is responsible for pretty much every successful Pixar movie until he started to work as the head of Disney's animation department.  Once he started at Disney with the movie Bolt, there is a dramatic uptick in the quality of Disney films that have been lacking since Mulan, when Jeffrey Katzenberg left.  It is ironic that Disney did not learn from Katzenberg's example of what makes stories work, and has taken Lassitar to reteach these lessons to them.  In both cases, Disney was the pioneer in animation, but that animation just became the money machine, with the dollar taking precedence over the story, and in each case, they could not produce an interesting or entertaining movie.  Compare Oliver & Company to The Little Mermaid or Treasure Planet or Lilo & Stitch to Frozen.  It is night and day.

Big Hero 6 has a lot of great themes running through it.  Dealing with grief, the importance of family and friends, and more importantly, forgiveness.  It makes heroes out of the geeks, a trend that I, a proud geek, am glad to see.  I wish they had these films when I was a kid.  In any case, is this Disney's best film?  Not really.  But it is excellent and funny and totally entertaining.  I would recommend it for anyone.

Dumb and Dumber To

2 Stars (out of four)

Well, there is a problem with high expectations.  Usually, they get dashed against the wall.  I went into this sequel to the fantastic Dumb and Dumber with the exact opposite attitude I went into the first one, and it turns out one hurts a lot worse than the other.

There really isn't a lot to Dumb and Dumber To if you have already seen the first.  We get the continuing adventures of Lloyd (Jim Carrey) and Harry (Jeff Daniels), two of the dumbest nitwits alive.  After being in a mental asylum for twenty years as a goof, Harry and Lloyd resume their lives.  It turns out Harry finds out he is a father, but he got the notification 22 years too late.  When Lloyd sees her picture, he falls in love (or more accurately, in lust) with Harry's newfound daughter.  This sets them off on a trip which brings the madcap duo back to the screen.

When I saw Dumb and Dumber for the first time, I almost had to be dragged there at gunpoint.  I was on vacation, didn't want to see a movie, and worse yet, had been purposefully avoiding this one because it looked so...well, dumb.  As it turned out, it was one of the funniest films I have ever seen.  A film I can still watch today and bust a gut laughing (turbo lax?).  The combination with my hating the possibility of seeing it with the heat of 10,000 suns and just how incredibly funny it actually was made for one of the most sublime movie experiences I have ever had.  After the movie was a hit, the two leads went onto bigger and better things and never looked back.

Well, I guess Carrey and Daniels needed the paycheck because it's twenty years later and we're back to the past.  Now, to be fair, the movie has two or three incredibly funny jokes in it that save it from total mediocrity.  Unfortunately, that is not enough to make this a film worth the $13 it will cost you to see it.  A friend put it perfectly.  When they did the first film in their mid 30s, it was edgy stuff that was great and original.  Fast forward twenty years, and they are now in their mid 50s, and the jokes just seem mean.  He hit the nail on the head.  The film's chief, and possibly fatal, flaw is that it either assumes you never saw the first one or that you like ironic self-reference a LOT.  They must have really liked every single joke they wrote in the first movie, because they are all rehashed in this one.  Don't believe me?  Check out the teaser posters:

Now, as a rule, there is nothing wrong with a little self-reference.  In fact, it can be quite funny if it builds on the joke.  But, like cilantro, a little goes a long way.  The problem is when that self-reference is the essence of the movie, especially a comedy, it constantly reminds us that you are out of good, or at least original, ideas.  Then the question becomes why should we watch this when the original is so much better?  While there are many factors that make humor funny, I would argue one of the most important is spontaneity, the fact we don't see the joke coming.  And that is the chief problem with Dumb and Dumber To; you see all the jokes coming because you've already seen them once before.  And the end result is not a comedic masterpiece, but rather seems like a cynical retread to separate us from our money.  The producers and writers didn't even work that hard at it.  They said "Let's just do the same damn thing we did before and the stupid public will eat it up."  Carrey and Daniels are both in fine form and try their best to save this film, but sadly for them, in this case, lightning did not strike twice.

John Wick

2.5 Stars (out of four)

John Wick is a pretty hackneyed movie in just about every aspect.  There is absolutely nothing in this film that is unfamiliar or surprising, but it has ONE unexpected ace up its sleeve...

The plot is simplicity itself.  Keanu Reeves plays John Wick, a very rich guy who recently lost his wife and is in deep mourning.  His wife, knowing so was dying, gives him a puppy as a gift to help him with his grief.  Of course, the puppy is so adorable, they become inseparable.  A few days later, some young Russian mobsters straight out of central casting ask to buy his car, which he refuses.  They visit him that night at home and nearly beat him to death, steal his car, and to show off how truly dastardly they are, kill his dog.  What they don't know until their boss tells them later, is that John Wick is not only a retired hitman, but he is the hitman you hire to kill the boogeyman when he is on your tail.  Unsurprisingly, John Wick comes out of retirement and goes on a kill-crazy rampage, seemingly single-handedly wiping out the entire Russian mafia in what we presume is New York.

This is the Hollywood movie that pulls every safe cliche out of the book.  The bad guys are white, mafia, eastern-Europeans (as if there are no other bad guys in the world).  These bad guys have the blackest of black morality, caring nothing for anything.  Everyone dresses in hitman chic, dark gray or black suits.  They are fodder for the good guy hitman(!), who gets hurt just enough to show he is human, but can still go on.  The bad guy is at his heart a coward.  There is even an assassin's guild of sorts, a shadowy organization that has its own rules of conduct and even owns a hotel for when these guys are on jobs.  Aside from the fact it seems like a twelve-year-old wrote the script, I just, for some inexplicable reason, cannot buy Keanu Reeves as a badass.  While I don't think I heard a single "whoa" in the whole movie, he just does not come off as the meanest killer out there.  He seems like Ted grew up, put on a suit and gun and somehow blunders his way through the bad guys.

However, it has ONE big trick up its sleeve that saves it from absolute mediocrity; it's style.  This is one of the most stylistic movies I have seen in a long time, turning a drab, dumb movie into one of the more visually interesting films I have seen in years.  It is told so bombastically, with such enthusiasm, it transcends the stupidity of its source material and makes every shot a sight to behold.  Directors Chad Stahelski and David Weitch are to be commended for making such an excitingly beautiful work out of such a drab turd of a script.  These guys should be directing much better material than this dreck.  Their style is a unique combination of Martin Scorsese's camerawork with Michael Mann's eye for atmosphere, color and mood.  It's as if Drive met Die Hard.  The visuals were so good that it pulled me out of the stupidity of the story and left me rapt.  That's why it is 2.5 stars, better than average.  The excellent visuals weighed down by a stupid story.

Hart's War

2 Stars (out of four)

Hart's War was one of those movies I have been curious about for years.  There has never been a really good explanation about its plot, so I thought it would be like The Great Raid, one of those missed gems that inexplicably no one has seen.  Well...

The story stars off pretty interestingly.  In one of Collin Farrell's earlier films, he plays lieutenant Hart, an army officer in WWII who comes from a privileged family.  His father is an important senator, so he gets assigned as an intelligence officer in the rear lines straight from law school.  But, like most rich, idiotic kids in movies like these, he wants to experience combat (watch Platoon and Glory for more on this) and gets captured by the Germans on a routine trip.  After some brief questioning, he is sent to Stalag VI, next to a munitions factory posing as a shoe factory.  The officer in charge is Col William McNamara (Bruce Willis), who takes an immediate disliking to Hart, quartering him with the enlisted men instead of the officers.  Soon after, two black officers who were Tuskegee airmen join the stalag and are bunked in the same barracks.  Since this is 1944, obviously most of the men don't take kindly to this and shortly thereafter kill one of the officers.  In what seems to be retaliation, the other officer, Lt Scott (Terrence Howard) is caught in an incident where it looks like he killed one of the men.  McNamara then assigns Hart the job of defending him in a court martial, where it seems he's destined to lose.

Hart's War is another one of those films that is desperately trying to be bigger and more profound than it is.  What starts off as a pretty darn good military prison drama, a la Stalag 17 or The Great Escape, turns into a fairly by-the-numbers courtroom drama about how badly black people were treated in recent history.  I am not suggesting this is a bad topic, it's just that it has been covered so well in other, greater movies like Mississippi Burning, In The Heat of the Night, To Kill A Mockingbird and a Time to Kill just to name a few.  At this time, there were a bunch of movies made about the plight of newly-integrated black officers in the military like Men of Honor.  I don't know if this was a way of correcting the record of history or not, but this angle sort of comes up unexpectedly in the film and radically changes the tone, and not for the better.  There are actually several interesting stories in this movie, but unfortunately it tells none of them particularly well.  However, without giving away a key plot twist, it does tie together nicely at the end.  There is nothing particularly bad about the film.  The performances are good and believable and are interesting at times.  But the movie is obviously trying to be more than average, and it sort of fails in that regard.

On a personal note, Terrence Howard is, I believe, one of the more underrated actors in Hollywood.  I have never seen him turn in a bad performance, but he keeps choosing roles that are beneath him.  He could do so much better.  I think he was unfairly dismissed after Iron Man in lieu of Don Cheadle.  Nothing against Don, but I think Terrence was a much better fit in the role, and I am still waiting for him to get that big break.  He is so good, and so underused, it is almost criminal.

Nightcrawler

4 Stars (out of four)

There are a few movies that really can get under your skin, not because they are scary in the conventional sense, but that they are shocking because they uncover uncomfortable truths about ourselves and others through a protagonist's actions.  The protagonist becomes a funhouse mirror of uncomfortable subjects we don't want to address because it implicates us.  Nightcrawler is one of those films and follows in a grand tradition of movies that tended to, but not always, destroy the careers of their makers.  Films like Freaks, Peeping Tom, Psycho, Rear Window, Taxi Driver, Network, almost all of the "blaxploitation" films of the 70s, Falling Down; all share this common characteristic where the characters reveal uncomfortable and hidden truths about ourselves and our society that we would rather not face.

Nightcrawler is the story of Louis, a small-time thief who realizes he can make big money by filming the puerile paparazzi subjects at the bottom of the barrel: car accidents, shootings, robberies and such for the local news stations in LA.  He first gets a cheap camcorder and police scanner to find all of these scenes and then sells them for death on display for the ratings-obsessed morning news cycle.  As he gets more and more successful, he does more and more escalatory actions to get more sensational news.  These include things like moving accident victims so they will frame more dramatically, disturbing crime scenes for maximum emotional impact to even causing events to happen in order to manufacture the exclusive.  He is also intelligent enough to have a plausible stiory as to how he got the footage so as not to implicate himself.  He comes across as affable, but a little off.

His semi-witting (or not so semi) partner in crime is Gina, played stunningly by Rene Russo, the news director for the vampire-shift at the lowest-rated news program in LA.  She is the tutor who brings Louis the student into the shadowy underbelly of the news and is the beating, black cynical heart of the story.  She is much more than the "if it bleeds, it leads"-type of person.  She is obsessed with selling shock.  Above all, the idea is to sell paranoia to the public.  Not interested in crimes in poor neighborhoods, she says if the victim's white, great.  If it's a white woma, better.  Extra points if the assailants are minorities.  Wanting to paint urban crime creeping into affluent neighborhoods despite the fact crime is going down.  She characterizes their preferred types of stories as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.  And this is where the movie implicates society.  Even Louis points out that all informative news: local politics, weather, fiscal issues, etc are jammed into 22 seconds of news time, while stories like the ones he is filming take up 5 1/2 minutes.  News used to have a public function to inform, but is now meant to entertain, subject to ratings just as much reality TV and cartoons.  It implicates us as a society because maybe we aren't as progressive as we like to think we are.  We still harbor deep-seated attitudes and prejudices about "other people," whomever they may be. If we didn't, the movie posits, why are these programs and formats so popular?  What happened to the news?  It doesn't inform, it tantalizes and titalates.  Don't believe me?  Watch your local news for a week and tell me there isn't some kind of breathless thing that will kill you or your children.

A lot has been ballyhooed in the press on Jake Gyllenhaal's performance as the psychopath Louis. I was half-expecting this to be a cross between Network and Taxi Driver, and it kind of is.  Louis is a psychopath in the truest sense of the word, utterly devoid of empathy, and is intelligent and coldly calculating.  And while it is a great performance, maybe Oscar-worthy, his character is not the real point of the film and those who think it is or focus on it are totaling missing the bigger picture.  It's just that a psychopath is perfect for this kind of work.  No, it is the accusatory finger pointing at the media and society that is the point.  Why has this state of affairs come to pass?  Why do we tolerate it?  Why are the voices of reason usually shouted down in favor of expediency?  This is the next logical entry into a series of movies that chronicle not the death of, but the rape and exploitation of the power of the media, most specifically, the news.  This series includes, in order, Good Night and Good Luck, Network, Broadcast News, Morning Glory, and Nightcrawler.  And this type of yellow journalism for the Information Age is not confined to local news.  CNN recently aired footage from Ar Raqqa where ISIS members had decapitated and mounted Syrian soldiers' heads on fences in the middle of town as a warning.  CNN gleefully aired the footage with a "viewer discretion advised" warning and pixelated the heads.  To me, this shows they want their cake and eat it too; disgusting and shocking footage that teases danger just enough, but not enough to offend delicate sensibilities.  My only complaint for the movie is that it tends to plod at points with its pacing.  However, the does create of sense of unease, lingering longer than one should.  But overall, Nightcrawler is a superior, and disturbing, piece of filmmaking.

Interstellar

3 Stars (out of four) - 2014 Review

3.5 Stars (out of four) - 2016 Reconsideraion (in IMAX)

Well, it's here.  Chris Noland's next movie is out in the wild.  I'm sure many of you, like me, will go see this movie based on his record of really good, mind-bending movies he's made in the past like Memento and Inception, whose trailers made you say "what the hell is that about?"  And this movie sort of delivers on that promise as well again, albeit with a little less flair this time.

I'll try not to give too much away with this description.  The Earth is dying for some reason.  The movie is not too specific on this, but probably a war.  However, what we do know is that a blight is killing each crop in the world one by one, and it is a matter of decades before humanity will starve.  Matthew McConaughey plays Coop, a former NASA engineer who is now a farmer like most people on the world.  He has two children:  Tom, who follows him to be a farmer and Murph, a genius daughter who takes after her dad's predilection for science.  Murph has been receiving messages from what she calls a ghost that directs her and her father to go to a certain spot.  That spot is the last and very secret NASA outpost in the world.  There, Coop is persuaded to go onto a space mission to find a new world to live.  It turns out a wormhole has opened near Saturn to another galaxy with several possibly habitable worlds.  NASA sent several manned missions years before and they are getting some promising preliminary data.  This new mission is to check them out.  What follows is the search for those worlds and a LOT of philosophy.

There will be a lot of people who will not like this film.  It harkens back to a day when movies were made for grown ups and you had to think.  It is very deliberately paced (read slow) and takes its time weaving a really complex story filled with a lot of interesting ideas, despite the fact the plot is pretty straightforward-find a new home.  Nolan's movies have all been like this, and he needs to be careful for a couple of reasons.  One is that he not become like poor M. Night Shymalan, whose movies like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable gave us great ironic twists at the end, but forever painted him into a corner.  Now people expect to be floored every time like they were the first time and are inevitably let down.  We will not allow him to make a "normal" film.  Second, while they are good, I think Nolan is beginning to fall in love with his own cleverness, and his movies will eventually become way too arty, like The Sopranos dream shows.  They will become arty for their own sake, not to tell an interesting story in a unique way tso he can show us how smart he is.  We will get Fellinni and not Tarantino, and that would be a shame and a waste.

Part of the problem with Interstellar for me was it plays too much with concepts I don't know much about, specifically quantum physics and relativity.  Relativity, in particular, takes a central role in this movie.  Specifically, characters age significantly compared with the leads due to time relativity.  And while I can go with it for the plot premise, I don't know if this works or not.  My brain kept rebelling at these particular concepts because, frankly, I don't know enough about relativity and it's practical application. The movie actually does some pretty good exposition to explain a lot of the phenomena, but relativity becomes the central plot driver that doesn't work for me for some reason.  There is also a great McGuffin about who opened up the wormhole in the first place.  Are there fifth dimensional beings helping us?  The movie doesn't elaborate, but teases us to think they are.  Or maybe not.  In this instance, I kept getting reminded of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which explores similar theistic themes.  What is out there?  God?  Aliens above our comprehension?  How engaged are they with us, if at all?  

I really liked that I had to think beyond the movie and its initial construction; that there is more to it, or at least the attempt to make something more of it.  We need to be challenged in an entertaining way occassionally, and that gets us back to what I said before.  I think this movie will not perform as well as the studios think it will, because we have been dumbed down by Michael Bay-ish brainless actioneers like Transformers for so long.  People think fondly back to the 70's when great, complex movies were made as a matter of course.  Movies like Easy Rider, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, The Sting, Five Easy Pieces, Mean Streets, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and A Clockwork Orange all come to mind.  Movies that engaged you intellectually as well as entertainingly.  But I think we are past that now.  People want to be stimulated, not engaged, and it's not their fault.  A steady 2-3 decades of dumbness have followed that brief, shining moment.  And while the occasional great movie comes out, unless it's an indie, greatness is the exception, not the norm.  Movies, after all, are a business to make money, in the end.  If you think I'm too hard on people today, try this little test.  Dumb and Dumber To comes out in a week or so.  And as much as I loved the first one also, let's see which one performs better at the box office.

***************2016 UPDATE. Interstellar in IMAX*************

NEW Rating upon further consideration: 3.5 Stars (out of four)

So, I watched Interstellar again and had a much more satisfying experience.  This movie is a sumptuous feast as opposed to entertainment fast food.  I really wish there were more films that challenge us like this.  It's nice to see that a truly intelligent and original movie can be made and made well.  This second watch helped clarify some of the mind-bending plot for me and it made a lot more sense.  So that was helpful, particularly with me actually experiencing the movie, because in IMAX, boy is it an experience.

First, this movie was one of the best crafted movies I have seen in a long time.  Nolan is quickly beginning to be able to take his place by the side of the greats like Ford, Capra, Hitchcock, Lean, Scorsese and Spielberg.  Movies like Memento and Inception proved he can tell amazingly unique, and entertaining stories from different points of view than you are used to.  Even those three horrible Batman movies show a great flair, especially working with such great actors.  But while each of his previous movies have something unusually unique about it (Memento's reverse-linear story and Inception's mind-blowing, impossible effects), Interstellar is the whole package.  Pacing, while deliberate, is spot on.  Dialogue that makes difficult concepts easy enough without insulting your intelligence or becoming too exposition-y.  But what really took hold of me was the amazing interplay of story, images and music.  The soundtrack is like another actor in the film by being so evocative of mood.  I have rarely seen such a deft combination.  There are scenes that moved me to tears.

But the IMAX makes it worth the price of admission.  While Hollywood is becoming culturally bankrupt of ideas due to movies' expenses, they have instead relied on gimmicks to make bad films into mediocre spectacles with 3-D or IMAX presentations.  Normally, in the hands of a lesser craftsman or story, the extra bells and whistles just meant you paid more money for the same turd.  But in the hands of a craftsman like Nolan, it only amplifies the film's power.  I remember reading several reviews of 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was younger and it was only available on home video.  Every review said one thing in common besides that it was a watershed movie.  Every reviewer to a one remarked how much grandeur the movie lost on the small television screen.  The movie was still good, but felt like a hollow imitation from the one on a large screen.  I never understood what they meant until I saw it at the Washington DC Uptown Theater.  For the first time maybe, I saw what grandeur on a great scale could be, and they were absolutely correct.  The huge Earth and space station vistas are awe-inspiring on an epic scale and gave so much more context to the film thematically.  It became a totally different experience for me, and that was a real revelation.  It was like watching it for the first time.  It didn't hurt that one of the greatest masters of the image, Stanley Kubrick, was the vision behind it.  Movies like this are what separate the giants from the merely competent.  Nolan's IMAX Interstellar has that same grandeur, that power of the image, and really opened my eyes.  If you ever get a chance to see it on this grand scale, do so. It will be worth every penny.