Forgetting "Knowing"

***FYI, mild spoilers in here because it was the only way I could talk about this film. Don't read if you don't want to know. I don't give away everything, but a few tidbits of info.***

Yesterday afternoon, I topped off my spring break with one more jaunt to the theater. This time it was to see last weekend's box office hit Knowing, which stars Nicolas Cage. Now, if you read this blog or know me in any capacity, you'll know that I have a hard time saying that I didn't like something. Usually, I find enough nuggets of goodness (parts that I liked) to more or less enjoy a film (or book or experience... etc.). Not so with this film. I'm not going to say I hated it - because that isn't strictly true. But I wasn't a huge fan.

Let me start by saying what I did like so I don't just rip it apart all at once. First of all, I really do adore Nicolas Cage. He can do no wrong in my eyes. His presence on the screen made the film more or less workable. Second, I applaud the writers for the basic premise of the film - the idea of a sheet filled with numbers coming out of a time capsule, and having these numbers spell out all the natural disasters, etc etc... That is cool. Also, I like some of the ideas presented in the film. The presentation of science versus religion, determinism versus randomness, of the inevitability of our planet's destruction... those are a good set of ideas to build a film around. Particularly the last one. We're so worried about mutual destruction through nuclear power, about global warming, starvation, and wars (all things we could more or less try to change) that we don't realize that a simple burst of energy from our sun - a bit of radiation - could wipe us out before you can say "uh oh." All I'm saying is that if the end is going to come - in that big cataclysmic sense - we're probably not going to be able to do much about it.

Okay, now onto what didn't quite work. My main problem with this movie is that it had no genre. I expected it to be in the sci fi action adventure realm - and those elements are there... but there's also the haunted house angle, coupled with an undertone of child-devil or the exorcist, mixed in with a religious allegory, layered right on top of a Close Encounters-esque alien invasion story line. What the hell kind of audience is this film going to appeal to? It's too scary for the soft-weight, nerdy, sci fi types... too outlandish for the hardcore horror fans... and there's too much fiction for the intellectual scientific types. No matter who sees this film, it seems to me that there is going to be an element that just doesn't quite fit.

Next: there was no character development, relationships, or emotional attachments for the audience to latch onto, for the story to be more real. The relationship between Cage's character and his son Caleb was painful to watch - laden down with horrible cliche lines like "Don't make me ask you twice, Caleb!" and "Do your homework, no TV tonight." Additionally, Cage's character was supposed to be a hurting widower, slowly becoming a drunk - but even though he was downing massive amount of whiskey, it really only resulted in a few extra naps. The characters were all the epitome of flat and static. Backstory came in little bursts, but nothing ever truly came of it. Last but not least, there was no romance between Cage and his female counterpart Rose Byrne. I'm not saying that every good film has to have a romance - but this movie could have used one to lighten it up, make it more poignant.

Let me just take a moment to go back to one of the things I've already said: I liked the premise of the story. This wasn't even a case of "good idea, bad execution" (like the so-so film Vantage Point, for example)... I just would have taken this good idea in a completely different direction, and I probably wouldn't have taken it in the end-of-the-world direction at all. Allow my imagination to run free for a moment...If this had been a film I was making, here's what I would have done. Keep the beginning the same all the way through when Nicolas Cage gets the sheet of numbers. Keep the woman who wrote the numbers alive and bring her back into the story somehow - not quite sure what I'd do there yet. Anyway, Cage's character figures out what the numbers mean - matches them up with history... but instead of seeing only 3 future dates, there are more. Maybe 10. He and his buddies at MIT start working with the numbers after the plane crash - when they start to believe him. They finally figure out a formula that makes sense - that generates the future numbers, etc. They start looking at the components of the formula, and maybe find that the time and scale of these disasters are directly proportional to negativity poured into the universe - people killed, corruption, human destruction, etc. Something to do with a natural balance of positive and negative energy. Kind of like positive and dark matter. Conservation of Energy or something like that. They figure out that there's a way to balance these things out, and though they're not able to stop all the bad things from happening, they lessen them. Nice happy ending where father realizes that the negative feelings over his wife's death has been hurting his son and he has to make up for it. Voila! Feel good film.

This is getting quite long so I'll be sure to wrap it up now. I want to stress that I didn't hate the film - it just wasn't quite "for me." Nicolas Cage was fun to watch for 2 hours and the CGI (particularly at the end) was kind of cool. It was an interesting mix of ideas and elements, and a good end-of-the-world film. You'd have to watch it to know your own opinion - others I've spoken with liked it, while some hated it. As a complex film, it's going to be very dependent on the person seeing it. But, hey, you can't have an ace in the hole with every film you see, right?

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Time goes by...

I've been singing the beginning of Madonna's song "Hang Up" all night long... "Time goes by, so slowly... time goes by, so slowly." I guess it's just been on my mind today, what with having my schedule thrown off at school because of CSAP testing at school these two weeks, having a relaxing weekend (aka lots of time on my hands), and of course, having that mysterious and unfathomable force, Daylight Savings Time, throwing everything off today.

Time's one of those things... one of those topics that you could easily spend hours contemplating, thinking through, and attempting to figure out, (kinda like what happens after death or the Stock Market). It's a silly concept really - little numbers that add up to other numbers, that add up to our days, our weeks, our years... that add up to all our moments spent on Earth - yet it's amazing how much it governs our lives. I've always been fascinated by how arbitrary it is... how not-rigid it is, when we make it seem all-powerful.

Have you ever had a moment where it feels like time must be wrong, must be some how befuddled? For example, I typically get home from school at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and feel like my day is over, like it's already the evening. But on weekend, that's usually the time my day is truly beginning, when I've gotten through sleeping in, eating breakfast, reading, or messing around online, puttering around the house... and finally sit down to do homework or scholarships or something productive. How can those be the same times?

The same feeling - the thought that one moment that is mathematically the same as the day before could feel so radically different - occurs everwhere. How is it that a morning of block classes feels like ages, while I can sit through a 2 or 3 hour movie and still not want it to end?

And how is it that an idea that turned into a governmental decision, which in turn was passed into law, causes us to jump up one morning (or evening,if you think ahead), and suddenly change this concept of time, the time-space contiuum, the all-powerful force that we have created to govern our days? How is it that 8pm can suddenly be 9pm, that we can just lose an hour - lose a bit of time - then and there?

Well, this is turning into quite the philosophical waxing, but I find time really odd... I mean, it's like looking at English grammar or the metric system. (Why the heck through ever be prounounced throo? Why are there 5280 feet in a mile?) Why do some months have 30 days, some have 31, and that silly random February is stuck there with 28 - wait, wait - sometimes, 29? It's just weird.

And so I know many of you woke up today bemoaning the lost hour - I was one of you last night, watching my reasonable 11:15pm bedtime turn into past-midnight with the click of a clock button. But this evening when the sun was in full swing at 6:45pm, when I wasn't eating dinner with the moon beaming through the window, well, that was kind of cool.

Although, come to think of it, I'm not looking forward to getting up in the dark tomorrow. It was just getting light at 6:30 in the morning. Ah, well... That's time for you, always changing its mind.


P.S. Though I usually hate the spring side of DST, just for the record, it was pretty darn easy to just flip the hour up one on the clocks, rather than having to go all the way through the cycle to go back an hour. =P

Beating the System

Book Review: Bringing Down the House

I thought I'd try something different today... meaning I'm planning on not talking about movies (for once, right?). I recently had the chance to read a book truly for myself. While I admit I did enjoy re-reading Pride and Prejudice and really loved The Great Gatsby, these books were assignments, and, as such, not as enjoyable as a book I picked for myself and decided to read for fun. With a bit of time finally on my hands the other day, I selected a book that had been on my "list" and my shelf for quite some time, a work of non-fiction entitled Bringing Down the House by author Ben Mezrich .

This book, a New York Times Bestseller, was the inspiration for the Columbia Pictures film 21, released in 2008 (Okay, I guess I will still be talking about movies). Roughly speaking, the book and film tell the story of the M.I.T. Blackjack team - particularly one student, Kevin Lewis - who learned to "beat" the game of blackjack using card counting techniques, thus winning millions from Vegas and other Casinos around the country. Interestingly, card counting is not strictly illegal... as long as you are not using machines or tampering with the casino's equipment, you're merely using your brain to enhance your chances of winning. However, this is not to say the casinos are going to be particularly thrilled if they catch you at it; quite the contrary. The book continually reinforces the message that if they catch you, you're basically toast.

The book was very refreshing for me, not only because I hadn't read something for myself in a while, but because it had been a while since I'd read a fast-paced and non-fiction book like this one. In fact, the last one I can remember was the novel that inspired Catch Me If You Can, by the real Frank Abagnale. The narrative style of the story is very interesting; it's written from the first person P.O.V. of the author, yet it tells Kevin's story from a nearly omniscient perspective. In addition to the straightforward storytelling of the events, Mezrich also interrupts the almost fiction-like narrative with depictions of scenes from the interviews he did as research for the novel, describing in detail the hooker named April he met in a smoky Vegas club, the solitary technology and security designer for Vegas casinos, and the ex-Blackjack club member Jill, still going for a few rounds of cards before the meeting.

As I had seen the movie when it first came out, the typical experience of book-then-movie that is often disappointing was somewhat reversed. Instead, I was simply left noting the differences, non-judmentally. This was refreshing also; I'm sick of trying to keep myself from asking "how dare they change ___?" or "why'd they leave out ___?" For those of you who may have seen the movie, there are a few things to keep an eye out for. First, the casting in the movie was, honestly, despicable - especially since it was based on not only a book but a real-life story. Almost all the members on the blackjack team are asian, part of the typical genius M.I.T. student body. While I absolutely adore Jim Sturgess (Gaaaaaahhhh, *drool* <--Clicky) and have nothing against Kate Bosworth, it's amazing that only one asian actor made it into the film. As for plot, there are two major deviations. The wonderfully acted and murky Cole Williams (yay Lawrence Fishburn!) basically doesn't exist in the book. While there is a similar character, a man who works for a PI firm employed by casinos to catch cheaters and card counters, he has a much smaller role and the reader learns very little about him. He's more of a presence that the main characters feel and one whom they know little about. Second, all that kitschy Hollywood romance between Bosworth and Sturgess, as well as the big climactic finale (which I only vaguely remember now - someone fools someone else and walks away with millions?), that isn't really in the book either. In plain ol' English, the book is more real - there's no climax right at the 1:45 minute mark... we merely get a snapshot of these people's incredible lives and experiences. In all, I really enjoyed this book. It's a fun and fast read. While I felt confused by the flashy card counting in the movie, I actually learned a lot about it... and while I wouldn't be prepared to try it in a casino any time soon, I definitely feel like I understand the principle. If Catch Me If You Can, Rain Man, Good Will Hunting, Ocean's 11, or the film 21 itself floated your boat, I'd say you'd enjoy this book too. It's an amazing story - and all true!

P.S. I also reviewed this on Sazze.com, here. Similar thoughts, but slightly different!

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