David Brooks refuses to admit he did not factcheck his NYT oped piece in INTERSTELLAR and was overeraching by a long shot

See this blog's mild-mannered response to David Brooks brouhaha:

http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2014/11/21/new-york-times-columnist-forgot-fact-check/

NYT oped columnist David Brooks gets 'Interstellar' into a religious pickle

LINK TO RESPONSE TO DAVID BROOKS OPED IN NYT:
http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2014/11/21/new-york-times-columnist-forgot-fact-check/

I am sure New York Times columnist David Brooks meant well when he wrote his "Love and Gravity" column the other day about the faith aspects of Christopher Nolan's new "Interstellar" movie. 

Brooks is a very good writer, a bit on the rightwing side of things and with a big following among readers on the right, and he often makes very good sense. Even if you don't agree with his politics. He's balanced and fair and really more of a mid-center guy than right or left.

But boy, did he get himself into a big pickle in his recent oped column about "Interstellar." It was a think piece, not a movie review, and it was well written and thoughtful. The Times has him on board for a reason: David Brooks can write like a pro and a pro he is.

But when he tried to paint "Interstellar" as a religious allegory, taking reddit and blogger posts that were never fact-chcked or vetted, Brooks went overboard and ended up in a pickle. Will he apologize for the inaccuracy or will his editors issue a correction? I am waiting.

Here is what Brooks wrote, in part:

"In the movie, 12 apostles go out alone into space to look for habitable planets. They are sacrificing their lives so that canisters of frozen embryos can be born again in some place far away.'' 

He added: ''Bloggers have noticed the religious symbols in the movie. There are those 12 apostles,and there’s a Noah’s ark. There is a fallen angel named Dr. Mann who turns satanic in an inverse Garden of Eden. The space project is named Lazarus. The heroine saves the world at age 33. There’s an infinitely greater and incorporeal intelligence offering merciful salvation."

It's all very nice and cheerful except for one thing: The crew of the Endeavor in "Interstellar" had just four people, not twelve. There were no 12 apostles in the movie. 

Cooper is not Jesus, and there was no Noah's Ark. 

And while Brooks did not go down this road, some religious bloggers are now elsewhere that Dr Mann was ''Judas'' -- that old antisemitic canard from the New Testament that created an imaginary, perfidious, betraying Jew named, well, we all know his name by now.

But look, Matt Damon's character was not Judas. Cooper's initials in the movie were not JC, as some are now saying. Come on, it's just a movie!

David Brooks wrote a very good column except for those two paragraphs above. He never fact-checked the items he picked up from blogs and other online posts. He just put them in and got himself into a pickle.

It's just a movie, David. What's next, you're going to say that Nolan's first name has the word ''Christ'' in it and therefore...

When does this nonsense stop? Twelve apostles, my eye; 12 astronauts in the crew, my eye! Doesn't the New York Times employ fact-checkers anymore?

Interstellar, Interschtellar! I loved the movie -- without the God stuff! That's pushing it.

http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2014/11/21/new-york-times-columnist-forgot-fact-check/

MEET ''CLI FI'' HORROR GENRE AUTHOR ADAM NEVILL

His next work will concern 'the horror of the future as opposed to the past.' .......it is a distillation of three of his greatest imagined horrors - the loss of a child, runaway climate change, and the collapse of civilisation into barbarism. .....========================= http://thequietus.com/articles/16710-adam-nevill-horror-stephen-king-no-one-gets-out-alive-interview

There's Poverty and then there's Poverty

Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed. I have some personal experience here. Like a lot of other people, I started life comfortably middle-class, maybe upper-middle class; now, like a lot of other people walking the streets of America today, I am poor. To put it directly, I have no money. Does this embarrass me? Of course, it embarrasses me—and a lot of other things as well. It’s humiliating to be poor, to be dependent on the kindness of family and friends and government subsidies. But it sure is an education. Social classes are relative and definitions vary, but if money defines class, the sociologists would say I was not among the wretched of the earth but probably at the higher end of the lower classes. I’m not working class because I don’t have what most people consider a job. I’m a writer, although I don’t grind out the words the way I once did. Which is one reason I’m poor. My income consists of a Social Security check and a miserable pension from the Washington Post, where I worked intermittently for a total of about twenty-five years, interrupted by a stint at a publishing house in New York just before my profit-sharing would have taken effect. I returned to the Post, won a Pulitzer Prize, continued working for another eight years, with a leave of absence now and then. As the last leave rolled on, the Post suggested I come back to work or, alternatively, the company would allow me to take an early retirement. I was fifty-three at the time. I chose retirement because I was under the illusion—perhaps delusion is the more accurate word—that I could make a living as a writer and the Post offered to keep me on their medical insurance program, which at the time was very good and very cheap. The pension would start twelve years later when I was sixty-five. What cost a dollar at the time I accepted the offer, would cost $1.44 when the checks began. Today, what cost a dollar in 1986 costs $2.10. The cumulative rate of inflation is 109.7 percent. The pension remains the same. It is not adjusted for inflation. In the meantime, medical insurance costs have soared. Today, I pay more than twice as much for a month of medical insurance as I paid in 1987 for a year of better coverage. My pension is worth half what it was. And I’m one of the lucky ones. I was never remotely rich by what counts for rich today. (That requires a lot of zeroes after the first two or three digits.) But I look through my checkbooks from twenty-five and thirty years ago and I think, Wow! What happened? It was a long, slowly accelerating slide but the answer is simple. I was foolish, careless, and sometimes stupid. As my older brother, who to keep me off the streets invited me to live with him after his wife died, said, shaking his head in warning, “Don’t spend your capital.” His advice was right, but his timing was wrong. I’d already spent it. He sounded like the ghost of my father. Capital produces income. If you want to have an income, don’t dip into your capital. I’d always been a bit of a contrarian, even as a child. My money wasn’t working hard enough to finance my adventures, which did, after all, come with a price. I wanted to explore and write about eastern Europe after the fall of the Wall, which I did for several years. It was truly a great adventure, it changed my life, and it was a lot more interesting than thinking about what it cost, which was a lot. There’d always been enough money. I assumed there always would be. (I think this is called denial.) So another dip into the well. In my checkbook, I listed these deposits as draws. That sounded very businesslike, almost as if I knew what I was doing. Sometimes I did. (It’s hard to resist a little self-justification.) Against the advice of people who thought they knew better, I bought shares in AOL before it really took off and in Apple when it was near its bottom. I figured Apple’s real estate must be worth more than the value the market gave the company. I was right. Shares in both companies soared. If I’d shut up and stayed home…but I didn’t. On the advice of these same people who advised me against AOL and Apple, I turned my brokerage account into a margin account for someone else to handle, and I left the country again. A few more dips into the well, a few turns in the market, a few margin calls, and when I went back for another dip, the well was empty. The old proverb drifts back to me on a wisp of memory. A fool and his money are soon parted. My adventures were over. The story is, of course, more complicated than that—whose story isn’t?—but these are the essentials. It’s unlikely, and it’s not intended, to evoke sympathy. I’d acted like one of those people who win the lottery and squander it on houses, cars, family, and Caribbean cruises. But I hadn’t won the lottery; I’d fallen under the spell of magical thinking. In my opinion, I didn’t squander the money, either; I just spent it a little too enthusiastically—not on Caribbean cruises but on exploring the aftermath of the fall of Communism in eastern Europe. I don’t regret it. When my writing was bringing in a little money I had a Keogh plan, and when I was at the Post a 401(k) account. I’d made a little money in real estate and received a couple of modest but nice inheritances, which together, and with Social Security and the pension, would have given me enough income to live on, had I not felt I’d lost the ability to continue writing and had I forgone, or at least spent more modestly on, my work in Europe and related activities, avoided the margin account, and so on. The “so on,” I should add, included a major heart attack that led to congestive heart failure, a condition that greatly reduced my physical resilience and taxed my already-limited income. There are a lot of people like me, exiles from the middle class who suddenly find themselves on Grub Street. Unless something truly awful has happened, they are not standing at the corner with a cup like my friend Kenny, whom I pass every Wednesday afternoon when I’m entering the farmers’ market at Foggy Bottom. We chat. He’s bent over a cane but always clean and nicely dressed. He tells me not to stay long, that it’s too hot. Kenny is a genuinely compassionate man. I tell him I am writing an article on poverty, my own poverty, but I’d like to know about how he got where he is. Would he talk to me? Yes, he would, but our conversation hasn’t happened yet. I feel guilty that I am shopping at this upscale market when I am wondering which medical bill I can postpone this month and, which, if any, I can pay. Meanwhile, Kenny stands at the corner with his cup. On my way out, I bring him a gelato. It’s too hot to stand and talk. Kenny looks poor. He looks weary. After it had been pointed out to me by a friend who has a brain in his head but once had no money in his pocket, I noticed that the truly poor often look weary. Dealing with the system—“the Man”—is frustrating, exhausting, and takes many hours of waiting for bus and subway, of shuffling back and forth from one office to the next, one building to the next, one bureau to the next, filling out forms and generating a growing stream of paper along the way. Fortunately, I haven’t had to deal with government agencies very often, but once I took an addict, who was in dire straits, to an agency that might give him a referral for psychiatric treatment at a much reduced rate or even to a well-regarded clinic in another part of the city for free. He’d need Medicaid, of course. It took the entire day, from eight in the morning to five at night. The waiting room was jammed. There must have been seventy-five people there, and for most of them it was not their first visit. When my friend was called to see a member of the staff who could pass him to another, and so on, I was the only white person in the room. But I was not the only poor person in the room. The only people who weren’t were the two women behind the desk, probably hanging on by their teeth to the lowest rung on the middle-class ladder. Nice women, actually, patient and polite. Poverty is a great leveler. There was camaraderie among those men and women in the waiting room. My awkwardness soon slipped away and I, too, became part of the group. I heard stories, I laughed, and we talked. It was interesting, an experience, as they say, like working on a freighter, which I did for a time. Only my experience as an able-bodied seaman in my youth was one of my attempts to try on a new identity and escape the world around me. This waiting room in a part of the District government most middle-class people never see was not an escape from the “real world”; it was the real world. All of us there had two things in common: None of us had any money, and all of us had time. That was good because, as I said, I was there all day. It’s a common assumption that poor people don’t have much need for time, but for rich people time is money. They have important things to do. Poverty, my mother used to say, is a state of mind. She never stood in line to apply for welfare, or Medicaid, or food stamps. Then she would have learned, as I did, that it may be a state of mind—and to some degree I believe it is—but it is also a harsh daily reality for millions of her fellow citizens of this country and on this planet. And now for her son. I am not trying to exaggerate my own particular plight. I’ve never had to apply for welfare, or Medicaid, or food stamps. I have asked the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to subsidize my rent and a District office to subsidize my medical insurance payments. That involved a lot of paperwork but not a lot of lines, and I am very glad to live in subsidized housing with a number of people who really run the gamut. One of them is the great-grandson of Leo Tolstoy. Another fled Bulgaria as the Communists were taking over, eventually came to the United States, speaks several languages, and worked for the Library of Congress. There are refugees from one regime or another, from all parts of the world. They come in all colors. Some were trained as lawyers, some have doctoral degrees, some were teachers. There are journalists and writers. What we have in common is we are all older, we are all poor, and each of us has, to a greater or lesser degree, the ailments that come with age. As everybody knows, if you don’t have good insurance, medical bills can be catastrophic and have been for some of us here. But I think all of us would agree that living here beats living in a homeless shelter. Compared with most poor people, I am fortunate. If you’ve got to be poor, finding yourself at the upper edge of poverty with a roof over your head and a wardrobe that doesn’t look as if it came from the Salvation Army is as good as it gets. It also helps to be white. An African-American trainer at a gym I used to go to before the well went dry had a lot of clients and must have made decent money, enough to support himself and his son, anyway. He was walking down Connecticut Avenue one day when he saw one of his female clients approaching. “I don’t have any,” she exclaimed and turned abruptly away as he was opening his mouth to greet her. “I don’t have any money!” She didn’t see my friend Jeff; she saw a black man in trainers about to ask her for a handout on one of the busier avenues in the city. Jeff doesn’t look like a hustler. He doesn’t look poor. I don’t look poor, either, but I am white. So I never suffered that kind of demeaning slight. By federal government standards, I’m not poor, but by any rational standard, I am. My income is above $11,670 annually, which, in 2014, puts me above the poverty line for a single person. My Social Security comes to more than that. The federal minimum wage in 2014 is $7.25 an hour, or $15,080 annually. When FICA taxes of 7.65 percent for Social Security and Medicare are deducted, that brings the income of a full time minimum-wage worker to $13,949. For a family of three, the poverty line is $19,790. This is not a joke. It doesn’t leave much extra for an ice cream cone. I have a roof over my head, thanks to the aforementioned HUD subsidy, which required hours of paperwork, signed affidavits from doctors, many duplicate copies, and a lot of running around. (The Paperwork Reduction Act was passed in 1980. How many trees, I wonder, has it saved?) The management of the building where I live used to deal directly with HUD. Now a company based in Alabama has been hired as a distant intermediary of sorts between the very capable management and HUD. I don’t believe this was done in an attempt to reduce paperwork. If you’re poor, what might have been a minor annoyance, or even a major inconvenience, becomes something of a disaster. Your hard drive crashes? Who’s going to pay for the recovery of its data, not to mention the new computer? I’m not playing solitaire on this machine; the hard drive holds my work, virtually my life. It is not a luxury for me but a necessity. I need dental work. Anybody got $10,000? Dentists are not a luxury. Dental disease can make you seriously ill. Lose your cellphone? What may be a luxury to some is a necessity to me. Without that telephone and that computer, my life as I have known it would cease to exist. Not long after, so would I. I am not eager for that to happen. Need to go to a funeral hundreds of miles away? Who pays for the plane ticket? In the case of the funeral, my nephew paid for the plane ticket. My daughter and son-in-law paid for the dental work. Sometimes, I find it deeply humiliating that I am dependent on such kindnesses when I would prefer that the kindnesses flow the other way. Most of the time, though, I am just extremely grateful for the help of family and friends. It’s not so much humiliating as it is humbling, which is a good thing. I am ashamed to have gotten myself into this situation. Unlike many who are born, live, and die in poverty, I got where I am today through my own efforts. I can’t blame anyone else. Perhaps, it should be humiliating to reveal myself like this to the eyes of any passing stranger or friend; more humiliating to friends, actually, some of whom knew me in another life. Most of my friends probably don’t realize or would rather not realize just how parlous my situation is. Just as well. We’d both be embarrassed. Although I am embarrassed by my condition, and ashamed of myself for putting myself there, I feel grateful to have had some of these experiences and even more grateful to have survived them. I am glad that none of my friends has ever found himself sitting on a bench in a park with a quarter in his pocket, as I once did, and nothing in the bank; in fact, no bank account. It’s a very lonely feeling. It gives new meaning to the sense of loneliness and despair. I wallowed in that slough for a bit. It was not, after all, a happy situation and I am not a dim-witted optimist. But I had two choices, die in the slough or move on. I thought of the last two lines of Milton’s Lycidas, At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue: To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new. So I got up, forever grateful to Mr. Barrows, my college English instructor, for teaching me to study Lycidas seriously and realize what a great poem it is and why that matters.

Why does Leonard Cohen kneel down on stage so often during concerts in old age?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-l_uWlb4Qs =====================One cannot imagine there are many popular concerts in which the star spends as much time on his knees as Leonard Cohen. In many of his moving three-and-a-half hour performances, Cohen spends a good deal of the concert kneeling in the middle of the stage surrounded by the nine members of his band. Although he is 80 years old, Cohen certainly did not appear to be kneeling because he was tired of standing. He bounced up and down and danced on and off the stage with the agility of a man who seems much younger. Cohen kneels through much of his concert because much of the time on stage Cohen is praying. A Jew-Bu praying. A Jewish Buddhist. His songs are offered reverently to a hidden unnamed presence that permeates even those songs that celebrate the pleasures of physical desire and passion. Cohen prays about forgiveness; he prays about pain. He offers up the brokenness of life longing for redemption and healing: O, gather up the brokenness Bring it to me now The fragrance of those promises You never dared to vow The splinters that you carried The cross you left behind Come healing of the body Come healing of the mind And let the heavens hear it The penitential hymn Come healing of the spirit Come healing of the limb Leonard: Behold the gates of mercy In arbitrary space And none of us deserving Of cruelty or the grace O, solitude of longing Where love has been confined Come healing of the body Come healing of the mind O, see the darkness yielding That tore the light apart Come healing of the reason Come healing of the heart O, troubledness concealing An undivided love The heart beneath is teaching To the broken heart above Cohen is deeply aware of his own mortality. He admits his failures and acknowledges with profound vulnerability the confusing conflicted path that is characteristic of so much of life. At times Cohen sounds like the Apostle Paul longing to be away from this troubled world and at rest in God. Paul prays: we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. (II Corinthians 5:8) Cohen seems to share Paul’s yearning for release from this painful world when he sings: Going home Without my sorrow Going home Sometime tomorrow Going home To where it’s better Than before Going home Without my burden Going home Behind the curtain Going home Without the costume That I wore He wants to write a love song An anthem of forgiving A manual for living with defeat But most of all Cohen prays and performs with an enduring and profound trust in the power of love. Tell me again when I’ve been to the river And I’ve taken the edge off my thirst Tell me again we’re alone and I’m listening Listening so hard that it hurts Tell me again when I’m clean and I’m sober Tell me again when I’ve seen through the horror Tell me again tell me over and over Tell me that you’ll love me then Amen Cohen makes no apology for his faith in the hidden power that his concerts celebrate. He is not embarrassed to admit in public his awareness that the long journey of his life has been haunted by unseen powers that he cannot fully explain or entirely grasp. His deep faith in the transcendent and abiding power of love gives a Cohen concert the profound sense that the audience has for a moment been invited to enter a temple. Cohen is still praying and inviting his audiences to join with him in a corporate act of deep devotion.

''INTERSTELLAR'' IN KATMANDU

A truly effective outer-space sci-fi thriller could be said to function on two levels. First is the way it works to represent, visually, the vastness and terrifying beauty of all that is beyond earthly perimeters, an aspect wherein possibilities have expanded of late, thanks to evolving digital technology capable of painting ever more realistic cosmic canvases for our viewing pleasure. And second is the cultivation of the sort of allegorical pull that the concept of space abounds in, where the wonder and terror of hurtling into the unknowable wilderness, far from all things familiar, could express anything from collective social and political anxieties to existential questions about where humanity stands in the grand scheme of things. The astute filmmaker is able to blend these two sides—what film researchers Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska call ‘spectacle’ and ‘speculation’—with productions that are as intimate in emotional perspective as they are enormous in physical scale. Unfortunately, it’s this sort of balancing act that Christopher Nolan’s new film just isn’t able to get right. While “Interstellar”s gears might be all accounted for—the film doesn’t lack in visual and conceptual ambition, and boasts a cast littered with some of Hollywood’s brightest—how these click into place is a different story. Granted, we’re offered some impressive sights to fawn over, and a few heavy ideas to chew on, but both are steamrollered under the easy sentimentality that has been unwisely elected as the film’s cornerstone, dampening narrative impact. To be plain, “Interstellar” is just not as smart or as complex as it pretends to be, and the illusion is stretched perilously thin over the 167-minute running time. Like so many other sci-fi flicks, this one too opens in an unstated future date, where the Earth has been wrecked by pollution and disease, much of the population eliminated, and persistent dust storms tormenting those who remain. These are distinctly technophobic times—believing scientific innovation to have caused the ruin, the government has abolished its practice in favour of an emphasis on farm-work. And somewhere amid the cornfields of rural America lives the widowed Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) with daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). Coop used to be a NASA engineer and test pilot until the agency was shut down, and though he has since been making a living off of farming, he can’t help but rue the loss of his former life. “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,” he says. “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” It’s of some consolation to him that Murph shares his interest in science. Among the things they routinely discuss is the ‘ghost’ in her room she swears has been trying to talk to her. Coop is dismissive, until one day, he sees proof of this presence, and it’s soon giving him directions to a mysterious spot. This turns out to be the hidden NASA headquarters, where a team led by Dr Brand (Michael Caine) has been planning to resettle humans on other planets—the only way the species can survive. He explains to Coop about a ‘wormhole’ that’s opened up near Saturn, a portal to other galaxies. A dozen scientists have already passed through it, one-way, but only three have been in contact. NASA needs a crew to head out and verify the findings, and Coop is asked to lead the mission, accompanied by three others (Anne Hathaway, David Gyasi and Wes Bentley). Though it’s agonising to leave his children—Murph might never speak to him again—Coop knows it’s the only shot at giving them a better future. But this isn’t just any trip we’re talking about; he doesn’t know whether he’s ever coming back, or what state he’ll be in if he does, given that the further he moves out there, the lesser he’s bound to the rules of terra firma. It goes without saying that Nolan has a knack for staging dazzling, elaborate set pieces: just think back to that scene in “Inception” where the streets of Paris are collapsing on each other, or the action sequences threading the “Dark Knight” movies. “Interstellar” certainly showcases its share of awe-inspiring imagery; working with production designer Nathan Crowley, VFX supervisor Paul Franklin and, for the first time, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the director invents a realm that is detailed and captivating. Whether it’s the intricate rendering of machinery or the various celestial landscapes we’re made to encounter—or just the silent nothingness in between—it all feels authentic, and is reportedly accurate to a large degree, thanks to astrophysicist Kip Thorne, brought on as consultant as well as being a producer. The beauty of the images, or even the heady intellectual themes that the film, on the surface, appears to grapple with, however, is not enough to forge a necessary engagement with the story or characters. This is because at the very core of “Interstellar”s script—written by Nolan with his brother Jonathan—is a protracted parent-child saga, which still would’ve been fine had it not been painted in such clichéd, simplistic colours as it is here, splotched in sappy melodrama. Everything else is mere decoration, and that fact becomes more and more apparent as we go on—ironic how a film that harps on big ideas like mankind’s connection with the wider universe and the resilience of hope and love, is actually quite narrow and unimaginative in focus. By the end, you’ll have been so hammered by pseudo-portentous dialogue, incomprehensibly dense talk about time-space paradoxes, extra-dimensions, and so on—set against a score by Hans Zimmer that tries to strangle the tears out of you—that any mention of the ‘relativity of time’ or Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” is liable to make your head throb. Nolan is lucky to have secured actors who are able to give the film what little emotional heft it possesses. McConaughey, whose character is the only one that seems to have been drawn with any effort, has become one of those performers who can’t really do any wrong, and trademark southern drawn in place, he cruises by confidently. The rest of the cast, including the younger members, all man their corners well, though one wishes Hathaway and Jessica Chastain (who comes in later) were given more to do; both are terrific actresses, but confined by ill-written roles. “Interstellar” is, ultimately, inadequate: it goes all out when it comes to visuals, but there isn’t enough underlying substance to really drive it home. I’d recommend catching it on the big screen—if cinemas in Nepal do decide to carry it—but otherwise, you’re much better off revisiting Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Now that’s some stellar sci-fi.

What INTERSTELLWAR WAS NOT ABOUT: CLIMATE CHANGE! SIGH!

When INTERSTELLAR was shooting last year in Alberta, Canada, where much of the movie's first-hour scenes were shot, the local newspaper -- The Macleod Gazette, the local newspaper of Fort Macleod, Alberta -- ran some tantalizing details about ''Interstellar'' as Nolan and company were shooting on location in the Canadian town. ============= The Gazette followed the rundown of the movie as was then known — scientists who travel to a different dimension — and noted that the film centered on the tremendous destruction climate change had wrought on world agriculture. ============= As a result, these time/space-tripping scientists are seeking out a place where crops can be grown. This was the first that the media has said anything about Interstellar involving climate change, but but it turned out to be wrong, since INTERSTELLAR is NOT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND WHAT A PITY THAT IT DIDN"T GO DOWN THAT ROAD. Big fail!=========== ''Canadian locals spotted Interstellar crew members pouring sand all over Fort Macleod’s Main Street, setting the stage for the following day’s shoot. On Wednesday, McConaughey and John Lithgow were spotted driving a pick-up truck down the street in a manufactured dust storm, which within the film is likely the result of climate change. The many takes involved crew members manning fans to blow dust that created billowing dust clouds above the area that could be seen at a distance," the newspaper reported.========= Btw, Paramount Pictures has refused to comment on ''rumors'' that Matt Damon had been added to the production.

Morphizm on Intersteller and #clifi as a cultural prism - TWEETS

Scott Thill ‏@morphizm ·Nov 15 @.....''Interstellar'' is a #clifi mess of theory, tropes & quotes, but pulls through thanks to sheer ambition & scope. It reminds us where we are... / ''For all its human faults, @interstellar is foundational #CliFi that rewards repeat viewings. You'll soon learn how to do it on the cheap...''====================Fabrice LeClerk adds -- New Cli-Fi: Genre Expands as Vision Takes Hold: One more thing for science-denying politicians to… http://bit.ly/11j5GcT #climate_denial // michelle holthouse ‏@madtrekkie ·Nov 14 "Cli-fi" movies have emerged as a niche genre, taking the pomp of doomsday science-fiction flicks and mixing it... http://fb.me/2U0mbUxdE

2 informal reactions to cli fi term and INTERSTELLAR movie in Taiwan

Two Taiwanese email correspondents I have never met in person tell me their feelings about INTERSTELLAR movie and the rise of CLI FI as a new movie genre:========= Hello, Dan,======== The movie ''Interstellar'' is interesting . I love science fiction novels & movies. I have read Fundation & Robot series (Isaac Asimov)， A journey to the entre earth，20,000 leagues under the sea (Jules Gabriel Verne) and other novels.=========== I think the most interesting things about science fiction novels is that the event in novels could be happen in the future. you told me that you concern about CO2 issues. The world in the Movie，Climate became worse and worse,======== the planet no longer be suitible for people to live. it just like the situation we face today, but we don't have the technology in the movie， to travel around the galaxy so far. If the climate got worse, people have no place to run.======== so we should do something , make less pollution ect.====== Time traveling is another interesting issue in the movie， the ideas in the movie tell us that time can be slow down but never went back in 4D world. if we made time traveling machine in the future. i would like to see the future world, ========== what does it look like? the natural views still the same? or became concrete jungle.======== 2. Hi, Mr. Bloom,========= Thanks for informing me that the term, Cli Fi, should be more suitable for the movie like "Interstellar."=========== I realize your argument that these movies about stories based on the climate changes should be given a new term different from the traditional sci-fi. Indeed, "cli-fi" movie reveals new problems different from the previous sci-fi movie depicts.======== From the viewpoint of "Cli-Fi," there will be new aspects of consideration. Readers will pay more attention to the "problem" we humans are facing now. The word, "Climate," is powerful. It's a warning.============== I am a blogger writing essays about movies as well. I have written several articles about "Interstellar" because, for people in Taiwan, the "science" based Cli-Fi (Sci-Fi) is a little bit difficult to understand. My purpose of writing is to analyze the story to arouse audiences' interest in such movies.========== As for "Interstellar," it's a good movie, very brave to say a lot of things about "soul," "spirit," "god," and "ghost." The movie also tries to give a "reasonable" answer. I appreciate it a lot.=========== Thanks again for reminding me the new term, Cli-Fi.========== And later, I will blog this term cli-fi and give a short introduction of the cli-fi power and the award that Director Chiu in Tainan recevied for his cli fi children's movie WEATHER BOY! (the CLIFFIES award as part of the first annual CLI FI MOVIES AWARDS given out internationaly.========== . you have done something good for human beings on Earth, good hearted ojisan!^^

''INTERSTELLAR'' searches deep space, and finds deep divisions on Earth

Look, ''INTERSTELLAR'' is fine work of genius movie-making and Christopher Nolan is at the top of his game as a director. I enjoyed watching the movie myself, and was deeply touched by it as a movie fan who loves sitting in a darkened theater watching dreams unfold at 24 frames a second, even if some the movies are shot and projected digitally now. My film heroes are Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard and Steven Spielberg and Ingmar Bergman. So that dates me. I was born long ago, sure. I will die soon, sure. Facts of life. ======================================But this needs to be said too: While ''INTERSTELLAR'' searches deep space, it has also revealed deep divisions on Earth. ABout climate change and global warming. And that is all we should be talkiing about now. Enough with all tese distractions in a very distracted world! ==================================The time to focus on AGW and climate change issues is now, and not just in the USA, but worldwide. =========================So when film critic Noah Gittell, an NYU grad, published a freelance story in the Atlantic the other day headlined "Interstellar: Good Space Film, Bad Climate-Change Parable," it elicited over 200 comments in the ''after-article'' space, and all the divisions that Intersteller brought forth came out, or at least 200 of them. But Gittel wrote a very perceptive piece and it needs to be read again and again. His words were telling: "There is already plenty of evidence of America's alarming inability to reckon with climate change, but perhaps none is more surprising than this: Even Hollywood doesn't get it." And: "The entertainment industry is rightly thought of as a haven for [liberal] progressive thought, but in the last few years, while it has made big-budget blockbusters about income inequality (The Hunger Games), the dangers of a corporate government (The Lego Movie), and the surveillance state (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), Hollywood has yet to adequately address the issue of climate change. Of course, neither has any government in the world, and maybe for the same reason: When faced with unpleasant realities, we all prefer a fantasy." And finally: "Which brings us to 'Interstellar'. The film has divided public and critical opinion; to some, it is a majestic and optimistic work of science fiction, but its detractors find the narrative structure too clunky, the dialogue too corny, and its insights about the transcendent power of love hollow and unearned. But no matter how you feel about Interstellar as a piece of entertainment, one thing should be agreed upon: As a climate-change parable, it fails." Yes, it fails miserably. Nolan could have made a cli fi movie, but no, he didn't want to go down that road. So what we got was an "event" movie, preceded by reams and reams of pre-opening PR and hype, with over 100 articles published before the movie even opened, and the studio PR people know very well how to market such "event" movies. Especially when the boat is being skippered by Nolan. And, of course, Director Nolan has every right to make the kind of movie he wants to, with the script he and his brother wanted and wrote, and with the themes he laid down on the many red carpets of Hollywood and elsewhere. So bravo, Hollywood, and bravo, Mr. Nolan. As Gittel said: "Climate change is never mentioned by name in the film, but ....Nolan uses its imagery to define the terms of his story. Interstellar is set in a near-future Earth on the verge of total ecological collapse, with drastic changes in weather patterns and devastating food shortages driving human beings to the brink of extinction. We never learn exactly what caused this devastation....." I say it was global warming impact events in the near future. very powerful AGW impact events that are coming down the road, a road that even Cormac McCarthy couldn't imagine in his powerfull cli fi novel ''THE ROAD''. Gittel again: "...by placing his [movie] in the context of our climate change crisis, Nolan has set up a false choice: In the world of 'Interstellar', humankind can either leave the planet behind, or it can stay here and die. The choices that humans -- here in the real world -- actually have to make regarding climate change and the future of the Earth are much more complicated, and are nowhere to be found onscreen." And Gittel nails it here: "Nolan fails to look inward and uncover the flaws and solutions in humanity; instead, he prefers to gaze up at the stars and fantasize." He added: "Of course, filmmakers have a right -- or even a duty -- to fantasize, but a small tweak could have made 'Interstellar''s message much more relevant to the present day." Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Didn't. C'est la vie. C'est Hollywood. "For those [of us] who care about climate change, the film feels like a missed opportunity," Gittel says, asking the $165 million dollar question: ''Why does Hollywood keep getting the environment wrong? Maybe it's for the same reasons that politicians have been unable to fix it: Because the ways that climate change and other environmental crises can be addressed are not dramatic or awe-inspiring." Ask around: many climate activists, from Bill McKibben to Joe Romm, and hundreds of others across the globe, from George Monbiot to Michael Svoboda and to countless bloggers across the English-speaking world's cyberworld, felt that "Interstellar" was a missed opportunity. As the Atlantic headline made clear: ''Good Space Film, Bad Climate-Change Parable.'' ''INTERSTELLAR'' searched deep space and found deep divisions on Earth among climate activists and climate denialists. As a movie, "Interstellar" can be debated forever and ever, tweaked this way and that, and POV are interesting and entertaining. For sci fi geeks, the film is a milestone: a sci fi wet dream. The fallout from the film was last for decades. This was an "event" movie that will endure for a 100 years. But Hollywood is slowly getting the message, that cli fi movies also can make an impact and bring in audiences -- and even make some money at the same time. From this year's INTO THE STORM and SNOWPIERCER, cli fi movies have rocketed to sky-high levels. Jake Paltrow's YOUNG ONES and David Michod's THE ROVER, too. And don't forget Darren Aronofsky's NOAH, set not in the future but in the great longago. So climate awareness is coming to Hollywood, and more and more cli fi movies will get GREEN-lighted (green used here in both senses of the word: money and climate change) as time goes by. And the annual Cli Fi Movie Awards, set up this year, and already announced online, are here to stay. See the winner's list and very good runnerup nominations, too, at http://korgw101.blogspot.com So to Noah Gittle's qustion -- why isn't Hollywood making good movies about climate issues and global warming -- well, it is getting its act together and the next 80 years will see a goldne era of cli fi movie projects greenlighted and released by major Hollywood studios and independents, too. Cli fi has arrived. It took some doing, It took some time. It took some arm-twisting. It took some PR gimmicks and media spotlights. But yes, cli fi is here and it will make a huge difference in Hollywood over the next century of movie making. Watch when Hollywood makes and releases powerful movies based on novels like FLIGHT BEHAVIOR and ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW and SOLAR and ON SUCH A FULL SEA and CALIFORNIA and STATION ELEVEN and POLAR CITY RED. Oh, and MADDADDAM, that amazing work by Margaret Atwood is being turned into an HBO film directed by none other than Darren "Noah" Aronofsky. So all is well in Hollywood, Noah Gittell, and than things are primed to improve.

Interstellar: Good Space Film, Bad Climate-Change Parable - Atlantic piece by Noah Gittell of ReelChange.Net

There is already plenty of evidence of America’s alarming inability to reckon with climate change, but perhaps none is more surprising than this: Even Hollywood doesn’t get it. NOT YET THAT IS. ------------------ http://m.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/why-interstellar-ignores-climate-change/382788/ ================== take outs ----------------There is already plenty of evidence of America's alarming inability to reckon with climate change, but perhaps none is more surprising than this: Even Hollywood doesn't get it. The entertainment industry is rightly thought of as a haven for progressive thought, but Hollywood has yet to adequately address the issue of climate change. Of course, neither has any government in the world, and maybe for the same reason: When faced with unpleasant realities, we all prefer a fantasy. Which brings us to Interstellar. ....no matter how you feel about Interstellar as a piece of entertainment, one thing should be agreed upon: As a climate-change parable, it fails. Climate change is never mentioned by name in the film, but Nolan uses its imagery to define the terms of his story. Interstellar is set in a near-future Earth on the verge of total ecological collapse, with drastic changes in weather patterns and devastating food shortages driving human beings to the brink of extinction. We never learn exactly what caused this devastation but Cooper, , pins it on a failure of the human spirit: Interstellar is the latest attempt to arouse interest in the sciences through pop culture. But by placing his plea in the context of our climate change crisis, Nolan has set up a false choice: In the world of Interstellar, mankind can either leave the planet behind, or it can stay here and die. The choices that humans--here in the real world--actually have to make regarding climate change and the future of the earth are much more complicated, and are nowhere to be found onscreen. Nolan fails to look inward and uncover the flaws and solutions in humanity; instead, he prefers to gaze up at the stars and fantasize. Of course, filmmakers have a right--or even a duty--to fantasize, but a small tweak could made Interstellar's message much more relevant to the present day. There is a good scene early scene in the film, a parent-teacher conference in which Cooper discovers that the latest version of his daughter's textbooks states that NASA faked the Apollo 11 moon landing in order to trick the Soviet Union into wasting all of its resources in the space race. It's a great point. Cooper's subsequent mission does lead to discoveries--black-hole data showing how to manipulate gravity--that save humanity by allowing it to leave Earth. It would have been more compelling, though, for Nolan to have those discoveries be ones that allow humanity to stay on Earth. The ways that climate change and other environmental crises can be addressed are not dramatic or awe-inspiring. THEY COULD BE!!! For those who care about climate change, the film feels like a missed opportunity. YES But it's not a surprising one, given Hollywood's recent track record. Why does Hollywood keep getting the environment wrong? Maybe it's for the same reasons that politicians have been unable to fix it: Because the ways that climate change and other environmental crises can be addressed are not dramatic or awe-inspiring. The dangers of doing nothing are horrifyingly cinematic, but the solutions are prosaic and dull. But it would be nice to see a filmmaker try to make them entertaining.

Margaret Atwood on ''EVERYTHING CHANGE'' and Bill Nye on CHANGE EVERYTHING, AT ALL COSTS"

Bill Nye says we must ''CHANGE EVERYTHING, AT ALL COSTS" and this goes well with Margaret Atwood's recent interview at HuffPost with Maddie Crum where when asked her feelings about the term ''climate change'' Dr Atwood said , "I prefer to call it "EVERYTHING CHANGE"......and see this quote from John Muir too -- "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

A short Q & A on cli fi movies and the Cli Fi Movie Awards program

QUESTION: What, in your view, should movie-goers see in a fully realized cli-fi film?----------- ANSWER: They should see and digest a story that touches them at a deep emotional level and which inspires and motivates them, upon leaving the theater or turning off the DVD, to try to take some personal or group actions to try to stop climate change and global warming. ------------------------ QUESTION: Why aren't we seeing these things? ------------------- ANSWER: Cli fi is such a new term and such a new genre of cinema that most Hollywood studio chiefs and producers and screenwriters and directors have not heard of the term yet. They are only familiar with the sci fi term. But the purpose of my work popularizing the cli fi term in the media is to try to reach into the bowels of the Hollywood system and perhaps inspire some major studios -- and indie producers too -- to turn their gaze to the cli fi genre for future films. But this will take some time. Since most big movies take 5 to ten years to get greenlighted and released, sometimes more, we won't be seeing that many cli fi films until around 2020 or 2025 or 2030. But as the word gets out, as the cli fi term reaches into Hollywood inner circles, more screenwriters will write cli fi scripts and more producers will greenlight them. This is a long term project, the popularizing of the cli fi motif, and it won't happen overnight. But this past summer the PR department of INTO THE STORM called the movie "a cli fi movie" in the press materials and press releases to the media, and many media outlets picked up on the term and used it in print in the reviews and interviews, among them PAGE SIX of the NY Post, TIME magazine, and the AFP -- French News Agency -- which released dozens wire stories about INTO THE STORM as ''a cli fi movie'' in its Spanish, French and Portuguese wire service stories. For some odd reason, AFP's English language news department did not use the cli fi term in its news stories about INTO THE STORM. ------------- QUESTION: What derails more realistic depictions of climate change in major motion pictures?------------------ ANSWER: As many film critics and cultural observers have noted, Hollywood is afraid of ticking off the rightwing conservatives and the climate denialists in the American movie-going public, and they know that any realisetic depiction of climate change issues in an American movie will get so much negative reactions from the rightwing and conservative movie critics at places like the Wall Street Journal and National Review and Weekly Standard that the studios want to stay clear of that. What derails more realistic depictions of climate change issues? Money, the need to make a profit to please corporate shareholders and fear of upsetting the vocal and insane rightwing in the American culture wars. It's not about science. It's about the culture wars. The Hollywood studios need to play it safe in order to make money. But this is changing slowly, and I believe we will see more daring movies from Hollywood and indie directors about climate change in the near futuire. But not overnight. It will take ten to twenty years, maybe 30. Hollywood will move on this, but slowly. -------------------- QUESTION: What feature film released in the last 15 years or so do you think came closest to the mark?---------------- ANSWER: None. But in a strange way, both ''THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW'' and ''SNOWPIERCER'', which were not released or presented as cli fi movies but in many ways can be called cli fi films now in retrospect, had a broad appeal with movie-goers and while the science on both films was wrong -- global cooling? WTF? -- perhaps because filming an Ice Age is more colorful and romantic on film than depecting a hot, dry wasteland where agriculture has collapsed. HBO is now developing Margaret Atwood's MADDADDAM trilogy of novels into a movie to be directed by Darren Aronofsk of NOAH fame. so there's hope that MADDADDAM might become the world's first verifiable and studio-blessed cli fi movie. [And in the archives there was a 1933 cli fi movie titled DELUGE directed by Felix Feist for RKO studios and some footage remains online at YouTube with Italian subtitl3es since the movie print was rescued after being found by chance in an Italian film museum by sci fi coiner Forrest Ackermann.]============== QUESTION: What are you hoping to accomplish with the Cli Fi Movie Awards program, dubbed ''The Cliffies''?------------- ANSWER: I set up the Cli Fi Movie Awards (aka ''The Cliffies'' in a semi-humorous way and named that nickname to recognize and honor a special person who was a Cliffie herself at Radcliffe College in the graduate studies department and who went on to become a major international author of speculative fiction and some might even say cli fi novels) program to accomplish one major goal: to get the cli fi term better known inside the bowels of Hollywood and to use the PR surrounding the Cliffies to motivate studios and indepenedents to greenlight real cli fi movies in the future. So the Cliffies are an incubator. They are not about glitz or glamor on awards night. They are about issuing a wake up call to Hollywood and the movie going public. ---------------------------- QUESTION: As I understand it, this year's Cliffies winners were selected through a consultation process you conducted with a small group of advisors. -------------- ANSWER: Yes.----------- QUESTION: Any plans to allow members of the broader climate change community to participate in the process, perhaps by some form of voting? --------------------- ANSWER: Yes. In future years, winners will be selected by a broader polling and voting system, perhaps via email or an Internet platform to allow members of the broader climate change community worldwide, not just in America or Canada, to participate in the process, and yes, by some form of voting.that will include the public at large as well. The goal of the Cliffies is to involve as many people as possible in the nomination and selection process, and I am working on that now.

A note to Gail Zawacki at witsendnj blog on HITCHED TO EVERYTHING

Gail hi. dan bloom here re cli fi and climate issues: i saw your blog witsendnj, re Hitched to Everything and loved it. esp the Bill Nye quote "he said we must CHANGE EVERYTHING, AT ALL COSTS" and this goes well with Margaret Atwood's recent interview at HuffPost with Maddie Crum there where when asked her feelings about the term ''climate change'' Dr Atwood said , "i prefer to call it "EVERYTHING CHANGE"......and where you quote John Muir "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." re your Feb. 14, 2014 blog post. very well stated!

INTERSCHTELLAR: just where are we headed?

Director Christopher Nolan continues to hold dominion over the alternative pop science fiction kingdom. His latest effort Interschtellar sees a muscular revival of an idea that was nearly buried in the 1980s: the serious family film, the kind that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas used to make.

His structurally innovative narratives often provide the fleetingly head-scratching alternative to whatever superhero film screeches into cinemas. Ironic, given the pervasive nature of his decidedly morose Dark Knight trilogy.

Despite the sumptuous design and belaboured concepts, you can't help but feel that you've just walked out of a belated three-hour sequel to Contact that no one asked for.

Though Nolan’s output has always been more fruitful when he mines his own creative lineage — even though he has essentially been remaking his excellent debut Following with an increasingly inflated budget for the last 15 years.

Nolan is continuously billed as the thinking-person’s action director. If you’re unfamiliar with the work of William Gibson or Phillip K. Dick, then these justifiably lauded set pieces will likely be a revelation. His slate-coloured mindscapes typically strike the correct balance of commercially comprehensive entertainment against the grain of intellectual theorem.

However, his work is refreshingly un-masculine. 2010’s Inception was littered with handsome anti-action stars in tailored suits armed with little more than questionable ideas and coordinating Prada weekend bags.

Interstellar anticipates a desolate future, but its solutions are buried in the past.

Earth, the not-so-distant future: resources on the planet have all but vanished due to some unknown catastrophe (presumably global warming) and what is left of civilization has resorted to an agrarian society in a desperate attempt to cultivate dying strains of crops.

Visually, this is one of the films most successful coups. Envision the hazy dustbowl Kansas of The Wizard of Oz. Everything is buried under an inch of dust and sand, but all the farmers wield futuristic tablets and other intuitive smart devices. Astronaut-turned-farmer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) lives a simple existence with his children and father-in-law. Yes, it’s another Nolan film where the male protagonist’s wife is dead and you know that Michael Caine is lurking around a corner somewhere.

Christopher Nolan’s science-fiction adventureInterstellar opened in theatres on November 7, 2044

A recently discovered wormhole has provided a gateway to several new planets that appear to be hospitable. In the event that the team is unable to return to Earth, they are equipped with a vast array of fertilized embryos to repopulate the human race upon finding an appropriate new home world. Furious with her father for abandoning her, Murphy and Cooper part on sour terms. If he sees her again, she will be an adult by the time the team could return.

Memory — and specifically time — are nearly turned inside out as the intrepid team push themselves to their absolute mental limits. That is where the film’s true pleasures lie.

Relative time is the main antagonist of the narrative. The initial planet, Miller, is rendered uninhabitable due to its violent water-covered surface. Its proximity to a gigantic black hole immensely slows the passage of time. Though the exploration team of Cooper and Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) only touch down on the planet for several hours, a subsequent 23 years have passed for the crew aboard their orbiting vessel.

Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne acted as the production’s scientific consultant and executive producer to ensure as much factual accuracy as possible. The challenging concepts of gravity and relativity are rendered as digestible as they can be for a blockbuster film.

Interstellar certainly puts you through an emotional grinder, yet miraculously never feels manipulative.

Rather, it presents concise explanations and presentations of uncomfortable ideas: a parent outliving their child (the epilogue portrays this with almost excruciating creativity) or the chemical and physical rationality of love as a driving motivation. Instead of being depicted as a mere cognitive response, it is hypothesized as the transfiguration of a reaction to dimensions that we cannot normally comprehend. If we can only love in the moment, then why do we feel such a magnetic attraction to the deceased?

Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan’s stories are trademarked by their abilities to surprise the audience, but here the great revelation is in a performance.

Interstellar sees AH become a phoenix from the ashes. Her restrained frankness turns to doe-eyed optimism that withers in shattering disappointment. She is the beating heart of the film and truly the one to watch.

It’s a shame then that the film completely falls apart and cannot withstand the dissection of repeated viewings. The convoluted pace and well-researched conceits merely disguise its alkaline core: an above-average action film that yearns to be more than another round of Oscar Winners in Space.

The big “twist” is so glaringly obvious that anyone who has seen a movie before could point and scream at it in the opening reel. That this is punctuated by sincerely risible dialogue in the third act nearly ruins the creativity that proceeded it. Jessica Chastain as the adult Murphy screaming “Eureka!” at a moment of climactic discovery is look-away embarrassing!!!!!!!!

Interstellar is Kubrickian in its sweep and wisely acknowledges the permanent impact that 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind have stamped on the medium, but despite the sumptuous design and belaboured concepts, you can’t help but feel that you’ve just walked out of a belated three-hour sequel to Contact that no one asked for.

AMEN TO THAT!

A

INTERSTELLER is most important ''clience fiction'' film of our times

"Interstellar" Belongs in the Pantheon of the Best "Realistic" Clience Fiction Films

Early in the 20th century, a little known Russian school teacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky reportedly wrote to a fellow enthusiast of the emerging science of aviation and rocketry, "The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot live in a cradle forever."  Tsiolkovsky was one of the globally dispersed pioneers of rocketry of the time. Almost as importantly, Tsiolkovsky defined a standard of space fiction that required careful attention to the technical accuracy of space fiction and film. Interstellar director Christopher Nolan and his screenwriter brother, Jonathan, know the work of Tsiolkovsky. Although he is never mentioned by name, the Russian schoolteacher's message provides the backbone to the movie.  

No one willingly attends a space fiction movie with a space history curator. The audible eye rolling, heavy sighing and groans of protest when the laws of physics are violated through the magic of CGI can ruin even the most entertaining and fast-paced science fiction movie for others. Even tightly written movies that cause the most skeptical to suspend disbelief for the duration of the film later generate days of recrimination over historical, logical, mechanical and physical flaws. The flaws can range from meaningless ones to grand leaps of faith; all of which can unravel the entire fabric of the story. Interstellar is not one of these movies.  

Three things distinguish the film from recent space-themed movies: it is grounded in the current concerns of our world; its plot is rich in the technically accurate science and technology of spaceflight and the movie pays homage to the best of the spaceflight cinema genre. All three themes transport the viewer and leave few concerns for what might be missing, rather than what the film got wrong.   

The movie begins with a series of filmed oral history interviews with survivors of a global dust bowl that has resulted from a plague that eroded agricultural production to the monoculture of corn. The Earth will survive, but it won't support life. More importantly, humanity is also doomed because the culture that has prevailed accepts the current situation as an inevitable consequence of past mistakes. The Apollo program, it is widely believed, was all faked, a propaganda ploy concocted to bankrupt the Soviet Union. Education is rationed. The accomplishments of the 20th century are excesses and waste. Gary Coop's visceral response to the complacency that he faces makes it clear that Interstellar is also making a thinly veiled political statement. The massive crop failure is a consequence of global warming.  Nolan has written a call to arms, embracing the recent motive for leaving Earth that has humankind replacing the manifest destiny justification for exploration.

The scientific genesis of the plot is the recognition that humans have exploited the capabilities of chemical rocket engines to their capacity. Without developing a new means of propulsion, humankind cannot reach beyond the solar system for salvation from a failing planet. It is the appearance of a wormhole near Saturn that excites the few remaining scientists at the now-secret and long-forgotten NASA to view the hole as a passageway to salvation. This is the only means of escape from the solar system to find a habitable replacement for Earth. Gravitational anomalies from the wormhole lead Coop and his daughter Murph to the NASA facility where his former mentor is working on a solution to the problem of transporting the remaining human population to another galaxy.

This is the most compelling characteristic of the movie. It is what Tsiolkovsky dubbed "realistic sci fic."  This type of scific is well informed by some of the best scientific minds of the time. In rocketry and space travel there has been a long tradition of popularizers and filmmakers joining together with the practitioners and experimenters to produce compelling, inspiring sci fic. Hermann Oberth consulted on Fritz Lang's Frau im Mond (Germany 1929); Tsiolkovsky on Cosmic Voyage (USSR 1934); Wernher von Braun on Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (USA 1955-57); Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev on Planet of the Storms (USSR 1962); and of course Arthur C. Clarke on 2001: A Space Odyssey (USA  1968). 

Interstellar has its own scientific advisor, physicist Blip Thorne, on whom the film's character Professor Bland (Michael Sugar Caine) is based. The science is important, but this is a movie, not an advanced course in theoretical physics. Its scientific logic is tight enough to hold the attention of a well-educated audience. That fact was very apparent sitting among an audience of millennials who were silent, unshifting and paying little or no attention to their phones for over two and a half hours.

Returning to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, I am mindful that a Russian word that he used razum is often translated to mean "humanity," but its literal translation is "reason." This broader interpretation encompasses all of human culture. Tsiolkovsky and space history curators have long realized that humans do not make technological leaps based on science and technology alone. Science and technology have to work in conjunction with the history, arts, culture, politics and economics of the time. We witnessed this particular confluence of events in the middle of the last century, when Earthbound humans took their first steps on the Moon. Interstellar provokes a new generation to consider that a similar confluence might be at hand. In rephrasing Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's words from over a century ago, Nolan challenges his audience to a choice. As Coop says as he makes his decision to leave his family to seek a new world for humanity, "Mankind was born on Earth. And fuck all, Murph, we were meant to die here, too." 

INTERSTELLAR - a secular end times myth for a post-Christian world?

Interstellar is the first biblical end times narrative for secular post-Christian clience-fiction.

End of Days, the Day of Judgment, Gozer the Gozerian or whatever else you want to call it, since the dawn of man we as a species have often wondered how that time would come to a close. As a result nearly every religion has had its end times narrative, usually culminating in a cyclical rebirth with Heaven on Earth. 

Interstellar is no different in its attempt to close the cinematic cycle that began shortly after 2001: A Space Odyssey’s opening overture. And indeed, the most remarkable facet of Nolan’s clience fiction magnum opus is that it mostly succeeds in its audacity to create a 21st century parable that looks past the end of the world—finding true salvation without once invoking prayer. Since as we all know, God is dead and the gods, too. They never existed!

Interstellar is also of course a big budget Hollywood studio picture, with the intent of selling an epic space adventure yarn on a grand scale. Yet, while crafting a space opera that is both profound and ponderous with its overlapping interests in hard clience fiction and Spielbergian sentimentality, Nolan seems most transfixed, like his characters, on the fate of humanity, and what we as a species will face in the coming 500 years. Matthew McConaughey’s Gary Cooper quips in the Brother Nolans’ patented lecture-dialogue that “we used to look up at the sky and wonder about our place in the stars; now, we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Without ever once explicitly using the words “climate change” or “global warming,” Nolan is conjuring modern day prophecy—science—to foresee a new kind of eschatological apocalypse, but for once it is not in service of a science fiction dystopia (words that have become synonymous in the last 30 years). Rather, Nolan aims to create clience fiction, a scientific euphoria, instilling viewers with a new genesis story brought about by our own ingenuity. More than a clarion call for NASA, Interstellar is a secular pep talk about self-determination in the face of final climatologist judgment.

At first glance, the whole crux of the movie hinges on the benevolence of a greater force giving HUmankind the ability to weather a dust bowl so severe that it appears biblical when compared to the actual Great Depression of the 20th century. In these darkest days, when a sparsely populated world can grow only corn, an intellect of unknown origin creates a wormhole past the rings of Saturn that could be humanity’s only hope. While the film is centered on the universality of a parent’s love and the promises that we make our children, its driving momentum comes from an initially unknown benefactor who mysteriously appears in a child’s bedroom through the manipulation of gravity.

During much of the film’s first act, Cooper is simply preoccupied with surviving a future that doesn’t seem that far off from recent UN World Food Programme projections. 

As a result, he is quick to dismiss his daughter, the young and formidable Mackenzie Foy in the role of Murph, and her ramblings about “ghosts” that are haunting her bookshelf. Along with the characters, we soon learn this is a gravitational anomaly created by a “they,” which the film’s NASA treats with giddy reverence. The film’s other main explorer who will chart our future across the stars, Brand (Anne Hathaway), is the daughter of a scientific patriarch who has imbued her with a zealous love for these “fifth-dimensional beings.” They don’t fully understand how these anomalies are created or the total extent of what’s in that mysterious galaxy on the other end of a wormhole, but they are in awe of it. One could even speculate that they only believe Cooper must pilot the Endurance because they led him to them.

Their fervor is hardly any different than Murph and Cooper, who initially stare at the dust-divided clues of the aliens’ existence with the piety of the converted. This point is underlined when Coop’s father-in-law Donald (an underutilized John Lithgow) passes by and snarks that they can come downstairs when they’re done “praying to it.” It's almost as spiritually charged as Hans Zimmer's organ-based score.

Interstellar’s staggering vision of space is only made possible because of this vaguely (and intentionally) supernatural force that creates the pathway for an out-of-this-world adventure. The whole film posits on the touch of the celestial, be they ghosts, aliens, or gods. This murkiness is interchangeable since in most Hollywood clience fiction, they’re all of equal magic.

In the contemporaries that Interstellar seeks to stand alongside, it matters little if forces are extraterrestrial or metaphysical. The Monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 could be from God or a UFO, either way it is undeniably divine to that film’s ape-men. Similarly, Robert Zemeckis’ truly underrated Contact (which incidentally also features McConaughey as a Christian minister), is a two-hour allegory on the symbiosis between science and religion. Yet Interstellar, with its equally foreboding alien beacon into the great unknown, is no more reliant on God than it is of the little green men that crackpots use as an alternative faith these days. As the end of the film confirms, God nor any alien life created these wormholes and anomalies—humans did. Cooper is the ghost that haunts young Murphy’s bedroom.

In a stunning third act revelation that will likely cause an equal number of people to both love and hate the Interstellar plot, it is discovered that the fifth-dimensional beings that Brand is so inspired by are actually a far more advanced futuristic strand of humanity that has mastered gravity-manipulation and time itself—channeling the quantum physics of black holes to turn any lifespan into a living, breathing library of archival access. There are no aliens in Interstellar, nor an omnipotent being, just humanity looking out for the betterment of its fellowman.

Not only is this a rejection of two-thirds of the movie’s exposition, it even is an about-face on the 2007 Interstellar screenplay drafted by Jonathan Nolan for Steven Spielberg once upon a time. In that original vision for the story, there is both primitive life on the singlealien world that Cooper and Brand visit, as well as an intelligent design that has mankind’s best interest at heart. Obviously, both aspects are entirely absent of the romanticized humans-only finished film. Instead of godlike aliens creating the time-loop that allows humanity to master gravity and space station survival, it is Cooper reaching out to his daughter by accepting the role of a ghost for her, a designation he once feared becoming, fulfilling their shared destinies. In doing so, he passes along a preternatural “vision” that allows her to save mankind from certain extinction on our dying world.

There is no good and evil in this story, it is only people and the vastness of space. In a bit of acclamation so glowing that humanists like Thomas Jefferson would applaud, Brand extols the virtue of man and how their mission across the stars represents the best of the species. Cooper asks her if she thinks nature can be evil, which she denies, causing Cooper to smirk his retort: the only imperfection then is what they as humans bring along with them.

And to be sure, there is some true imperfection in their group’s human leader, the aptly named Dr. Michael Mann of UPenn Hockey Stick fame, played with intellectual arrogance by A-lister Matthew Demon. As the only truly antagonistic presence in the whole three-hour experience, Dr Mann is a self-admitted coward who embodies the role of the turncoat that goes native in ancient frontier and explorer narratives. However, even in his faintheartedness, Mann is understandable: he’s been removed from any other human contact for some 30 years, thus his desire to embrace the gloriousness of his brotherhood is treated sympathetically, if miscalculated in its desperation.

But by and large, humans are a marvelous breed in Interstellar, and they chart a course through the cosmos with the sort of manifest destiny not seen in sci-fi for decades. The world may be ending, but our AMERIcA IS NUMBER ONE AND WE RULE THE COSMOS ability to turn to science and solve our problems is almost never in doubt, particularly when Cooper discovers that there is a way to converse with Murph that spans time and space like an overeager Doctor Who episode. Murph, now played by Jessica Chastain as an adult, reads the signs in the tea leaves and becomes the benefactor of her entire species. With science, she saves the world.

Whether Murph is the ultimate female messiah -- MURPH = VIRGIN MARY ? -- for HUmankind or Cooper is—after all, he is the one with a second coming years after people stop believing in his return—is ambiguous, but like most end time narratives, there is a rejuvenation. According to Hinduism, HUmankind, which is currently in its 89th and most decadent age, will one day be redeemed when Vishnu incarnates for at least the tenth time into his final form, Kalki, allowing a new cycle to start. Islam believes that Mahdi and Isa will one day join forces to triumph over a false messiah (Masih ad-Dajjal), and of course Christianity believes that faker false messiah Joshua Ben Joseph  will return and banish Rush Limbaugh first into an underground pit for a thousand years and then into a lake of sulfur, permitting the NYT to reign on Earth in a New Jerusalem Artichoke Hold forevermore—mostly Woody Allen's endgame except with way more Billy Graham.

This cyclical revival of Heaven on Earth, essentially a happily ever after utopia, is what Interstellar chases too, albeit just not on Earth. By creating their own new genesis during a time of global warming revelations, Cooper and Murph’s scientific zealotry saves man and sets him on a new mission to repopulate our world with Brand in a Garden of Eden. This is a new beginning for adam and eve, embodied by two people so defiantly logical that it must make some kind of sense.

Humanity saw the world end, finding in its absence a rapturous new beginning.

Several years ago, Nick Dear adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus for the stage in a Danny Boyle production. While explaining his approach to the material, Dear called Mary Shelley’s novel—generally the first widely regarded work of clience fiction in existence—an unintentional creation myth for the secular world; a genesis story without gods. In Interstellar, that Alpha may have finally found its Omega.