Planck's Constant

My kids (aged 23 and 29) have a hard time watching great black and white films from the 30's and 40's. They need color, modern camera movements, present day speech patterns and cultural references, and actors they can identify with. They can still enjoy The Magnificent Seven (1960) with a 128 minute runtime but will balk at Akira Kurosawa's Black & White The Seven Samurai (1954) at 160 minutes and with subtitles.

I suspect my grandchildren will need to see a newer, interactive version in 3-D, tactile-feel, smello-vision and a runtime of about 28 minutes.

But back to The Island. Did I mention that Scarlett Johansson was in it? I mention this again because I like to see movies with characters I like to look at. Would this movie have been more enjoyable with an actress who had tremendous talent but looked like this?

I don't think so.

Many viewers complained about how unbelievable the whole thing was: the semi driver not stopping when he had to notice his load falling off for 5 minutes and cars exploding behind him; how our two heroes could fall off a building and land safely inside a construction net 40 stories below; that they get hit by an armored car so hard that it cuts a police car in half yet are not in a coma, yada, yada. I don't think any of this should be unbelievable. What is unbelievable is that Michael Bay listened to Steven Spielberg and set this plot in 2015.

I can suspend disbelief in a lot of things in a movie, but cloning entire human beings within the next 10 years? The original script called for 80 years from now. That, I can certainly see. Putting the action a decade away is so disconcerting, it's as if I were watching a movie with Hitler breakdancing. I had to keep telling myself "ignore the idiocy - ignore the idiocy".

And when will modern movies stop making people hang up in 30 seconds lest the government find out where they are calling from. Hello, caller-id anyone? The signal carries not only your phone number, but the address and name of the owner of the phone. Today, a criminal would use a pre-paid phonecard so that when he called anyone they would see the ANI of the phonecard company not the payphone he was calling from. By the time the feds got the records from the phonecard company, our perp would be far, far away.

Did I mention how hot Scarlett looked in that tight blouse? Let me note that this film has so many continuity blunders that I wonder if they're not accidental a la Hudson Hawk (1991). But ignoring technical, technological, and continuity matters the movie has plenty of action in the last act with some of the best cars-getting-demolished I have ever seen. I would have liked to have seen a little more romance between Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, but Michael Bay is not famous for romance.

I don't know if this was intentional but the turning point in the film came when Lincoln-Six-Echo (McGregor) discovered a butterfly which should not have existed in a contaminated world. If you recall, chaos theory precisely describes what happened next. The exact phrase is, "a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo could cause tornadoes in California.”


femail.com.au - Scarlett Johansson - The Island Interview, Excerpt:

Q: Just wondered what appealed to you with this particular role, was it the idea of playing an innocence of all of the contexts of the modern world and how difficult that was to hold on to when you were doing all this intrinsic action sequence?

Scarlett: I mean when I got the script it was just a really fantastic script. It was exciting, it was adventurous, it was fun. You know of course when you are reading a script and it says slides down a drain pipe or something you don’t actually think that is ever going to happen until 7.30 in the morning on the day when Mr Michael Bay says just slide down this drain pipe and then we will do it again from another angle and again from another angle.

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Honorable mention to Steve Buscemi who always adds a meaty texture to any film.

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