Paul Levinson's Blog: Levinson at Large, page 199

Europa Report: Stark Inspiration

I caught Europa Report (2013) on Netflix last night, a mixture of a stark, beautiful, and ultimately inspiring account of the first flight with people to one of Jupiter's moons, the one deemed most likely to have life, due to its water and heat signatures, both of which we knew (the water and heat, not life) in 2013 and at the end of 2017.

The movie pulls no punches, which makes its ending all the more awe-inspiring.  [Spoilers ahead ...]

Everyone of the voyage dies, in one heroic way or another.  But this first trip beyond the Moon (our Moon) by any human beings manages to get back communication to Earth, with an image of: a multi-celled organism!  Proof there's life out there in our solar system, more advanced than some ancient bacterium.

I've been arguing with people in science and science fiction for years about the need to send humans beyond this planet.  Why not send robots, these people ask, wouldn't they, in the Europa Report, have found the same life as did our human beings, without the loss of their life?  Europa Report makes vividly clear why that wouldn't work:  it's human ingenuity, unprogramable, that captured that extraordinary image of off-Earthly life.

There are also some people who don't and say they wouldn't find such a discovery amazing and Earth-shattering - in the best way possible - whether made by robot or human.  We need to spend the money needed to get us off this planet on such problems as reducing poverty, fighting disease, and other crucial things on Earth.   Although I agree completely that we need to spend more money on those pursuits, I believe even more strongly that those expenditures shouldn't be at the expense of space travel.  (And in the Europa Report, the mission is private financed.)  But to those people who don't get the inspiration of the Europa Report, I'd say: don't watch the movie.

But to everyone else: see it, if you haven't already.  It's a great way to ring in the New Year.  And even for those who don't find getting humans off this planet an essential way of learning more about what we're doing here in this cosmos - maybe see the movie, anyway, after all.  Optimist that I am, I believe every human being ultimately will be inspired by the possibility of finding life on other planets, and it's just a question of how long that truth takes to break through to your soul.

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The Fifth Wall: Meta Meet Her

A delightful, significant little short - 12 mins - on Amazon Prime: The Fifth Wall (2016), about a character with no name who has a conversation with her creator.  Interestingly, the writer is Scott Meridew and the directors are Sinisa Radosavljevic and Sin Radot, but the creator's voice in The Fifth Wall sounds the same as the actress, Tina Vrbnjak, who plays the character.

I say "interesting," because I'm not quite sure of the import of that move, other than making it seem as if the character is talking to herself, which I guess means that "she" exists both in the heads of the writer and directors, as well on the screen, in the apartment we're looking at.

It's a pretty philosophic, meta conversation, as far as these kinds of things go.  As some of you may know, there's a long tradition of fictional characters aware of their own existence, and usually contesting that, or otherwise complaining about it.  See the entry "Metafiction" for examples - ok, here it is.  I've always liked the genre - not usually science fiction, but philosophy fiction, or, to be more precise, ontology fiction, since ontology is the branch of philosophy that probes the nature of existence - not physical existence per se, but the deeper existence of everything in the universe, including ideas.

But back to The Fifth Wall, it takes off from the fourth wall, which is the space or "wall" between the performer and audience.   The fifth does one better, because it's the space between the character and the creator - the creator having created the character, in contrast to the performer and audience, in which both exist almost independently - "almost," because one could argue that a performer without an audience is not really a performer, and so the audience therein creates the performer.  One could argue that, but I'm not sure I would, since I once heard a guest speaker at a conference giving a lecture in a stentorian voice, and when I walked into the room I found he was talking to no one.  Though, one could also argue in that case that his talking to no one created an audience - at least, an audience of one - because it got me to walk into the room, and then I felt so bad for this speaker with no audience that I couldn't bring myself to leave.

But back to The Fifth Wall one final time - what the character wants is to continue to exist, after the short film concludes.  Her creator tells her (and us) that she has a chance to live again, any time anyone wants to see this film again.  I'll likely do that - but you can and should do that, too!  Help this nameless character played by someone named Tina live - watch her movie!


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Travelers 2: Chess Match of the Centuries

I had high praise for the first season Travelers (on Netflix) a year ago.  I have even higher praise for the second season (of 12 episodes, like the first).  I'll try to talk about it with a minimum of spoilers.

First, my favorite episode was almost a standalone - though each episode follows closely from the previous one - and amounts to one of the best takes I've ever seen on the genre of do-over time traveling, probably most known in the Groundhog Day movie.   In Travelers, the hour begins with a massacre of our team.  The rest of the episode details the Director's (AI from the distant future usually in control of most things) painstaking attempts to reverse that massacre.  It's played out beautifully, like a chess match in which the superior opponent has the opportunity of redoing each of her/his movies until a win is obtained.

Chess match is a good metaphor for the most significant parts of this season, and indeed most of the season in general.  Although there's plenty of action, the peak moves involve MacLaren and his team matching wits with the Faction (the group from the future who oppose the Director), and a new villain, Vincent.

Vincent was the very first traveler.  He was supposed to die in the Towers on September 11 - a daring beginning - but defies the Director and survives, and thrives.  He's played by Enrico Colantoni, whom I first noticed in Flashpoint (an excellent Canadian swat team drama), and he projects a worthy bad guy in Travelers (which, by the way, is also a Canadian production).  The acting is top-notch throughout, with MacKenzie Porter (Hell on Wheels) even better than last year as Marcy.  In fact, everyone was stronger than last year, likely because the plot was more advanced.  Eric McCormack as MacLaren, Reilly Dolman asa Philip, Nesta Cooper as Carly, and Jared Abrahamson as Trevor all put in memorable performances.   Even Patrick Gilmore as David was excellent.

I say "even," because you don't often see secondary characters who play such important roles in a fast-moving story like this.  But they're there, in and out, throughout the twelves episodes, especially McLaren and wife Cat, Marcy and David, and Philip with a Factor agent and then the beginning of something with Carly.  And the families and friends and relations really come into their own in the finale, which changes everything - though you never know, give the possibility of do-overs.

And that's all I say - other than, see this, if you enjoy a time-travel story with all the trimmings - intellect, action, humor, culture class - you'll love this.

See also: Travelers (review of Season 1): 12 Monkeys Meets Quantum Leap with a Story All of its Own


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Knightfall 1.4: Parentage

Well, I was very glad to see Queen Joan take my suggestion from last week - see my review of Knightfall 1.3 - and sleep with the King to disguise the father of her baby, rather than end her pregnancy.  Joan did get a little help from her maid, we discover at the end of tonight's episode 1.4, but the result is the same:  Joan and Landry's baby will be born, King Philip will think it's his - at least, at first - and that will make for a good continuing source of roiling drama in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, the search for the grail continues to take its intense but meandering course.  As I've said before, I'm much more interested in the people than the grail, and I find it to be at best an ok motivation for everything that's going on.  Far more appealing is in the intrigue at court, and now the imminent war with the English.

Back to Joan and Landry's baby.  If it's a boy, he of course could grow up to be a Templar, and that opens up all kinds of possibilities.  As the Pope told Landry in a previous episode, many a Templar has given into to the temptations of the flesh, which means there already should be some Templar offspring afoot and about.

I can't recall what, if anything, we and Parsifal know about this parentage.   Well, no matter, he's clearly on his way to becoming a Templar in any case.  But the Templars love women almost as much as their stated calling, and it will be interesting to see how that lust and love of various kinds plays out in the episodes ahead.


See also: Knightfall 1.1: Possibilities ... Knightfall 1.2: Grail and Tinder ... Knightfall 1.3: Baby


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Vikings 5.6: Meanwhile, Back Home ...

Wow, a slowly building episode 5.6 of Vikings just on, in which almost all roads converge on Kattegat and a fierce battle that will decide the fate of our of series - or, the characters in the series - looms brutally ahead.

Let's see.  On the side of Lagertha - warned by Queen Astrid, who pays for the messenger to Lagertha not only with gold, but her body, against her will, many times - we have Bjorn, escaped from Arabia, borne on its sandstorms and arriving just in time.

On the side of Ivar, with have Harald - who could be betrayed by Astrid (again), but still has an impressive force - but, even more significantly, Heahmund, whom Ivar has wisely not killed, and who has now apparently decided, at least at this point, to fight alongside him.

Ubbe's with Lagertha, Hvitsek's with Ivar, and though Ubbe's a little better, I'd say the two sides are still pretty evenly matched.  Though - I guess I would give the slight edge to edge to Ivar and Heahmund - since the only fighter equal to either of them would be Bjorn, and he is only one to their two.   But Lagertha herself is better than Harald ... so, yeah, it will be close, and I have no idea what if anything real history says about this battle, or even it even really took place.

Otherwise, in other places, Floki's getting a chilly reception from his followers is a rather discouraging way to begin the voyage to America, which I'm still hoping this leads to, at some point in the series.  But it's still good to see Floki and those Vikings there, as the vanguard of a future trip across the Atlantic.

And I'll be back here next week with a report of the battle for Kattegut.

See also Vikings 5.1-2: Floki in Iceland ... Vikings 5.3: Laughing Ivar ...Vikings 5.4: Four of More Good Stories ... Vikings 5.5: Meet Lawrence of Arabia

And see also Vikings 4.1: I'll Still Take Paris ... Vikings 4.2: Sacred Texts ...Vikings 4.4: Speaking the Language ... Vikings 4.5: Knives ... Vikings 4.8: Ships Up Cliff ... Vikings 4.10: "God Bless Paris" ... Vikings 4.11: Ragnar's Sons ... Vikings 4.12: Two Expeditions ... Vikings 4.13: Family ... Vikings 4.14: Penultimate Ragnar? ... Vikings 4.15: Close of an Era ... Vikings 1.16: Musselman ... Vikings 1.17: Ivar's Wheels ...Vikings 1.18: The Beginning of Revenge ... Vikings 4.19: On the Verge of History ... Vikings 4.20: Ends and Starts

And see also Vikings 3.1. Fighting and Farming ... Vikings 3.2: Leonard Nimoy ...Vikings 3.3: We'll Always Have Paris ... Vikings 3.4: They Call Me the Wanderer ... Vikings 3.5: Massacre ... Vikings 3.6: Athelstan and Floki ...Vikings 3.7: At the Gates ... Vikings 3.8: Battle for Paris ... Vikings 3.9: The Conquered ... Vikings Season 3 Finale: Normandy

And see also Vikings 2.1-2: Upping the Ante of Conquest ... Vikings 2.4: Wise King ... Vikings 2.5: Caught in the Middle ... Vikings 2.6: The Guardians ...Vikings 2.7: Volatile Mix ... Vikings 2.8: Great Post-Apocalyptic Narrative ... Vikings Season 2 Finale: Satisfying, Surprising, Superb

And see also Vikings ... Vikings 1.2: Lindisfarne ... Vikings 1.3: The Priest ... Vikings 1.4:  Twist and Testudo ... Vikings 1.5: Freud and Family ... Vikings 1.7: Religion and Battle ... Vikings 1.8: Sacrifice
... Vikings Season 1 Finale: Below the Ash

 
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Alistair1918: Just Right

Alistair1918 from 2016 is charming, special, altogether superb little feature movie (on Amazon Prime) with a frame on time travel you don't find very often if at all.  The Alistair in the title is a British soldier on the Western front in 1918, who gets blown into a wormhole and ends up in present-day Los Angeles.  There's no action at all in France.  It's all in LA, where Alistair is befriended by a wannabe documentary film maker - Poppy (played by director Annie K. McVey) - who works with her estranged and skeptical husband, a dedicated young camera man, and eventually a French scientist (Sophie, played by Amy Motta who appeared on Mad Men) who understands time travel, in an effort to get Alistair back to 1918 and his beloved wife.

Poppy may be a wannabe, but she shoots a good movie, and Annie McVey does the same with Alistair1918.  The time-travel part of it has the flavor of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, updated with the barest trappings of science.  The general ambience reminded me of District 9 - the same kind of on-ground, low key but effective cinematography that we saw in that excellent aliens from outer space in South Africa 2009 movie.

There are two slight slip-ups regarding the public's knowledge of media in 1918 when Alistair says to one of his 21st century friends that they had telephone and radio back in 1918.  That's technically true, of course - telephone was invented in 1876 and radio in 1900 - but few people other than scientists and engineers knew about them until the 1920s.   Alistair did work for a newspaper before he went to war, so it's certainly possible that he had knowledge of those two inventions - but, if so, he should have said that he knew about them by virtue of his work at a newspaper, and not as knowledge that was generally known. (Radio was developed considerably during the First World War, but, again, most soldiers on the front likely had little knowledge of it.)  But this is a very minor point, and no one other than a persnickety about media-history professor like me would have spotted it.

Overall, McVey did a fine job directing, and Guy Birtwhistle some excellent writing as well as playing Alistair,  in a movie that I expect to be citing from now on as the way to do a soft-spoken, realistic movie about something almost certainly impossible but ever fascinating.


 

It started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...



 
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Triple Hit: Parallel Schrödingers

Parallel worlds lurk behind a lot of time travel - since one way of getting around the paradox of that, if you changed the past, how would the earlier you in the future know that the past needed to be changed if it no longer existed, but if the new reality were a parallel reality, in which the event that needed changing now never happened, there would be no problem, since the time traveler came from the old reality - but it's not often been explored in the movies, though it was a mainstay of Fringe and is the theme of Counterpart, just now beginning on Starz.

All of which is to say I was eager to see Triple Hit, because it's a movie (free on Amazon), in which parallel universes are almost the whole story.  The "almost," though, is its main problem, since it also brings in space travel and time travel, and is a bit of a free-for-all hodge-podge of science fiction tropes.

But it has its moments.  Triple Hit (2009, originally Schrödinger's Girl - you ever notice how the original titles are usually much better than what they've been changed to?) tells the story of Rebecca/Anastasia/Sarah, Dave/David/Dmitri, Matt/Matthew/Mateus, etc in three parallel realities (worlds) in which Rebecca/Anastasia/Sarah is/are trying to break on through to at least one of the other realities.  All of the realities are some version of our United Kingdom.  One of them is pretty much like ours, another seems like a high-tech white-coated European Union, and the third, the most fun, is a "People's Republic," replete with a statue of Stalin and obeisance to the Soviet Union(!).

Of course something goes wrong with the attempt and frenetic craziness and mayhem ensue, done up almost in a slapstick 1950s bug-eyed-monster B-movie kind of style.  So ... it's hard to take Triple Hit seriously, but it is fun, especially in the wee hours of the morning, with good multiple campy performances by Abigail Tarttelin as Rebecca/Anastasia/Sarah.  See it if parallel worlds are your cups of tea.

   
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Do Not Erase: Definitely Do See

Well, this one's indeed short - nine minutes - being the short film equivalent of the short-short in short stories - but it packs a punch, and would be worth your time even if it was longer.

Some of the time-travel shorts and feature-length movies I've been reviewing here of late pit love against time travel, or time travel on behalf of love, or even has both love and time travel in the title.  Do Not Erase aka D.N.E is a satisfying little take on all of that.  Brian our hero is at a blackboard, finishing up his time-travel equations.  His love, Sophie, regrets the time he's been giving to the equations and not to her, but she's waiting for him to finish, which will be soon, so they can spend some time together.  While they're talking, a maintenance guy enters the room and erases a crucial part of Brian's math.  He wants to finish his work.  Sophie leaves in a huff.  And then the action starts.

Let me first say, as a college professor, that I've long worried that a maintenance person or clean-up worker would one day come into my office when I wasn't there and accidentally throw out a crucial piece of writing.  Actually, I haven't worried about that since I started writing on computers now decades ago, but you get what I mean.

I should also say that I guessed the very ending, about two minutes into the nine-minute film, but that's ok.  It was still enjoyable and well rendered.  Good job by Brian Otting (who co-wrote) as Brian, Michele Boyd (who's been in NCIS-LA) as Sophie, and (the sadly late) Richard Hatch (yep, from Battlestar Galactica - the original) as the clean-up worker.  And Matthew Campagna did a good job directing.

Hey, I just realized it took me about nine minutes to write this.   Should I post not erase?  If you're reading this, you know the answer - at least, in this timeline.  (Where you might also want to see the excellent but unrelated time-travel series on Netflix from Japan, Erased.)





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Moody Blues on PBS

Justin Hayward and John Lodge singing Nights in White Satin

My wife and I would've gone to see The Moody Blues and their 50th anniversary (of Days of Future Past) concert this past July at Jones Beach, but we'd just gotten back from Cape Cod the day before and were still unpacking.  Fortunately, PBS captured one of their concerts that summer (in Toronto), and we recently saw it.

We've loved the Moody Blues since the late 1960s.  We rediscovered them in the 1990s, when we saw them (on PBS) at their Red Rocks concert in 1992.  We heard then, for the first time, some of their newer material like "Wildest Dreams" and "I Know You're Out There Somewhere," and a lot more.  We've seen them in several concerts in the New York area, and thought they were superb.

For a variety of reasons that I've never understood, The Moody Blues are not held in universally highest regard.  They're now scheduled be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, but that should have happened decades ago.  On a personal note, I submitted an article about The Moody Blues (I may still have it somewhere on a floppy disk or a faded print-out, I'm not sure) to Rolling Stone Magazine in the mid-1990s, and it was promptly turned down on the grounds that no one cared anymore about The Moody Blues.

But on another personal note, The Moody Blues have greatly influenced my own music - "Forever Friday" on Twice Upon A Rhyme wouldn't have been written without "Tuesday Afternoon" - and whatever poetry is in my writing, I attribute at least in part to inspiration from their lyrics.   If we're talking about top bands, no one compares with The Beatles (read Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles and listen to the Beatles Channel on Sirius XM if for some reason you need to know why).  And The Rolling Stones pretty much are undisputed for second place.  But as for the rest of my Top Five, I'd easily include The Moody Blues among them, and sometimes ahead of The Beachboys, The Who, and The Eagles.

Anyway - if you ever loved them, they're almost as good now.  Their guitar-playing is fine, Justin Hayward hits all of his notes well (as a comparison, a bit better than Paul McCartney now), John Lodge is ok (not as good vocally now as McCartney), and Graeme Edge is fine on drums.  The back up band is excellent.  The songs are as fresh and poetic and what I think of as watercolor beautiful as ever.


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The Time We're In: Stopping Time

Stopping time is a highly effective but not often used technique in the time-travel genre, rich in possibilities for mischief and the most profound changes in human life.  Nicholson Baker's masterpiece The Fermata is an example mostly of the mischief variety - erotic mischief, to be more exact - in which the hero stops time to undress women (see my brief review here).  Likely because Baker is not seen as a science fiction writer, The Fermata is not usually considered to be science fiction or time travel, though Neil Gaiman and Robert Zemeckis are reportedly working on a screenplay (scroll down on that page).

The Time We're In is indisputably science fiction - with the hero doing copious research - and about as personally profound as it gets.  Gabriel and Nadia are having trouble conceiving.  Her doctors tell her she has a deadly tumor, presumably incurable.  Gabriel discovers there's a way to freeze time - which would give him all the time he needs to find a cure.

The 25-minute short, free on Amazon Prime, is beautifully written, directed, and otherwise rendered by Damon Stout (he does the music and film editing, too).  The acting is top notch, with Mike Falkow (seen in NCIS and Scorpion) and Mary Thornton (seen in Criminal Minds) in the lead roles.  Even the supporting acting is memorable, with John Kerry (not the former Secretary of State) as the older Gabriel, and various friends of the couple played with sensitivity (especially Brian Graham and Josette Eales).

The Time We're In could easily have relied on mysticism and magic.  But it took the steeper road of science - down to Gabriel explaining that he's not really stopping time but speeding it up, for himself, so he moves so fast everyone and everything else around him is in effect frozen.   When you have a chance, stop a little time for yourself, for 25 minutes, and see this movie.

 

It started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...



 
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