What's Next for Nolan

Kieran here. It was announced yesterday that Christopher Nolan's next feature film will be released on July 21, 2017.  Very specific release date for a project whose title/plot/cast have yet to be revealed, but this is Christopher Nolan after all. I can't think of too many directors who could announce a new project with very few details well over a year in advance and generate this kind of excitement. He's the "arthouse" director of choice for moviegoers who generally scorn the arthouse and yet he's often the fulcrum of the problematic "the Academy doesn't respect populist fare" argument. Quite an odd space to occupy in the consciousness of the cinematically minded.

With this new project, speculation about plot details and recitations of an ideal roster of actors are sure to follow. Questions of genre definitely loom in the back of the mind when you consider Nolan. He tends to work within some combination of sci-fi, mystery and thriller, though it's certainly not on every director to stretch, genre-wise. 

We're much more interested to see if Nolan's characterizations of women (or lack thereof in some cases) changes at all. Regardless of one's opinion about Nolan's overall output, it's hard to refute with any sincerity the argument that female characters in his films often get short shrift. Will this new project be any different? Interstellar, his most recent effort, is the closest he's come to handing the reins of a movie over to a female character. He does ultimately opt for following Matthew McConnaughey drifting solo through space, but you do still get what appear to be the first glimpses (with Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway) of Nolan attempting to imagine female characters from the inside out. Sure, you  could argue that these two women were motivated by their relationships to men, be it paternal or romantic. And yet there was an interest, however marginal, in women that's just not present in his other films.

I instantly thought of Viola Davis, who fit so well into the cold, eerie aesthetic of Steven Soderbergh's Solaris and how rarely she's given front-and-center focus in her non-televised projects. I would be fascinated to see what Davis could do at the center of a Nolan-helmed sci-fi outing. At any rate, aren't you curious to see if Nolan continues to improve his female characters after Interstellar or do you suppose we're in for more spectral wives and asexual audience surrogates?

Will Nolan ever give us a female protagonist?

What would you like to see from Nolan? Which actress could ignite his curiosities in an interesting way? Discuss in the comments.

On "Mr Robot" and "Humans"

Welcome readers to a new series, currently without a name (help?), in which various members of Team Experience will be discussing a television show or shows each Tuesday. It's our way of expanding our horizons a bit but without drowning the site in TV or limiting us to only one show as has previously been our habit with "Mad Men" or "American Horror Story". To begin, please glance furtively around, turn up your paranoia sensors, and slip into something uncomfortable with us as Lynn and Nathaniel discuss the somewhat menacing pair of "Mr Robot" (USA) and "Humans" (AMC). 

NATHANIEL R: Hi Lynn. If you want to know why I'm pairing these two shows it's because I fear we've reached the tipping point of contemporary film and television's obsession with autism or any one on the spectrum thereof (i.e. everyone in our age of staring at our phones instead of each other). Lately I've been thinking a lot about E.M. Forster's Howards End and its edict "only connect"  It seems so transgressive now, to demand as much. 

This preference for disconnection paired with the still raging epidemic of antiheroes has made the television landscape rather chilly. The danger is that everything starts feeling the same or at least like variations on the same. How radical would a really warm and friendly prestige cable series feel now?  I bring this up mainly because, though, "Mr Robot" is confidently acted/written/directed and does feel like its own show... I couldn't stop thinking of "CSI: Cyber"(my deepest apologies) as its sort of brain-damaged country bumpkin cousin because of the cyber crimes that feel like sci-fi and "Dexter" as its more sociopathic father because of the confessional 'i am deeply crazy but I'll attempt to explain myself' narration. 

Mostly I bring up "only connect" because I find both shows almost painful to watch; everyone needs a hug. Do you want to hug them?  [More...]

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Oscars vs. Blockbusters? No, It Isn't That Simple.

Jurassic World just beat The Avengers box office tally to become the third highest grosser of all time (when you don't adjust for inflation) which has Awards Daily wringing its hands over what the Academy should do to better honor the types of films people pay to see. As you may have guessed The Film Experience has strong feelings about this topic (including suggested new Oscar categories) all of which we will share with you right now...

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Say What? Charlize & Emily

Amuse us. Add a caption or dialogue to this image of Emily Blunt and Charlize Theron on the set of The Huntsman. (No Snow White this time. It opens in April 2016) 

Women's Pictures - Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days

On April 29th, 1992, the Rodney King verdict set Los Angeles on fire. Over 6 days, crowds rioted in South Central LA, protesting the acquittal of four LAPD officers who had been videotaped beating a black man. This was not LA's first race riot, but it came at a fraught time for the city, when the skyscrapers that were supposed to signal the start of a new era of prosperity loomed over widening economic and social gaps. By May 4th, it was clear that though the riots had "officially" ended, they had left a scar on the psyche of the city. Over the next few years, that scar would surface in one of Los Angeles's most prominent exports: film. After the Rodney King riots ended, a series of scifi blockbusters - including Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days - took to the streets of LA to predict the worst for the city's future.

Strange Days (another collaboration between Kathryn Bigelow and ex-husband James Cameron) is part of a group of dystopian action thrillers that cropped up in the wake of the Rodney King Riots. Escape from LA, Demolition Man, and Strange Days used their futuristic settings to do what science fiction does best: they created an allegory for contemporary fears about violence, inequity, and police brutality. 

Los Angeles is a good setting for a dystopia. Unlike New York City, America's Melting Pot, where people from different socioeconomic backgrounds intermingle on the street, Los Angeles is more a series of villages connected by highways. In LA, communities whose names are synonymous with wealth and prestige set their gates a handful of miles from infamously poor neighborhoods. But the two worlds never meet.

According to the movies, only three groups travel between these separate-but-unequal islands: cops, criminals, and entertainers. Lenny Nero, the protagonist of Strange Days, is all three: an ex-cop turned con-man who sells recorded memories and emotions via a "SQUID" machine - data discs that play directly in your cerebral cortex. When an anonymous donor leaves Nero a clip of his friend's rape and murder on New Year's Eve 1999, Nero and his friend Mace (Angela Bassett) get pulled into a plot that involves murdered rappers, police coverups, music producers, and Nero's lost love (Juliette Lewis). But bubbling under this detective story is a growing sense of unrest between police and the populace.

James Cameron's screenplay sets up a lot of ideas - drug allegory, the nature of memory, police militarization, the right to riot, institutional racism - and it is Kathryn Bigelow's very heavy duty to sort through these themes while also keeping the film on track. Miraculously, she is mostly successful. Though the structure of the script sometimes lags under the weight of its own ideas, Bigelow keeps the film moving at a clipped pace. Her fascination with point of view also becomes literal in Strange Days. the SQUID machines record from first person POV, which Bigelow uses to occasionally comic, often thrilling, and (in one incredibly intense murder scene) chilling effect. By virtue of its technical difficulties, First Person POV can look gimmicky on film, but Bigelow overcomes the difficulties to instead stage a series of fantastic action pieces.

The only failure of the film is not in its setup or its action, but in its conclusion. The complex problems of racism and violence which had occasionally bubbled to the surface - mostly in a B plot surrounding Angela Bassett's character - are neatly solved at the end of the film, though this denoument does give one intense image: a SWAT team beating an unarmed woman. It's probably too much to ask for moral complexity from an action thriller. Though insipred by riots that had proved there were still no easy answers in reality, Strange Days is still a product of its genre; commodified violence for the sake of box office. 

This month on Women's Pictures...

7/23 - K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) - Hands down the most requested film after Point Break, this film follows Harrison Ford racing to prevent a nuclear holocaust via submarine. (Amazon Prime) (Netflix)

7/30 - The Hurt Locker (2008) - The film that put Bigelow's name down in history as the first female director to win the Academy Award is a thriller about a bomb squad in the Iraq War. (Amazon Prime)