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Thursday, August 4, 2016

August Film Club

Our two films for the month of August are Inception and Interstellar.

Inception will be showing Thursday, Aug. 11th at 6:00pm (please note the earlier start time to accommodate the longer running time)



Inception is a 2010 science fiction heist thriller film written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.  The film stars a large ensemble cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine.  DiCaprio plays a professional thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets.  He is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased as payment for a task considered to be impossible: “inception”, the implantation of another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious.


The films currently holds an 86% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 325 critical reviews.  Roger Ebert awarded the film 4/4 stars saying this of the film in his review, “The story can either be told in a few sentences, or not told at all.  Here is a movie immune to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew how it got there.  And telling you how it got there would produce bafflement.  The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality.  It’s a breathtaking juggling act.  The movies often seem to come from the recycling bin these days: Sequels, remakes, franchises.  Inception does a difficult thing.  It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does.  I thought there was a hole in Memento: How does a man with short-term memory loss remember he has short-term memory loss?  Maybe there’s a hole in Inception too, but I can’t find it.  Christopher Nolan reinvented Batman.  This time he isn’t reinventing anything.  Yet few directors will attempt to recycle Inception.  I think when Nolan left the labyrinth, he threw away the map.”

Here's the trailer:



Interstellar will be showing Thursday, Aug. 18th at 5:30pm (please note the earlier start time to accommodate the longer running time)



Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Michael Caine.  The film features a crew of astronauts who travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity.  Brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan wrote the screenplay.  Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, whose work inspired the film, was an executive producer and acted as scientific consultant.


The film holds a 71% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 294 critical reviews.  Matt Zoller Seitz writing for Rogerebert.com gave the film 3 ½ /4 stars saying this in his review, “There’s something pure and powerful about this movie.  I can’t recall a science fiction film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome” in which so many major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down their cheeks.  The movie’s science fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional drama about basic human desires (for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts-one that treats the star voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance.  Here, more so than any other Nolan film (and that’s saying a lot), time is everything.  “I’m an old physicist” Brand tells Cooper early in the film “I’m afraid of time.”  Time is something we all fear.  There’s a ticking clock governing every aspect of existence, from the global to the familial.  Every act by every character is an act of defiance, born of a wish to not go gently.”

Here's the trailer:


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