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| Photo Courtesy of PF Productions |
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Wes Anderson's latest farce is amusing and enjoyable and certainly must-see for any Anderson fan. It continues his fascination with pastels, words packed together, the center of the frame, and light hearts unshaken by the outside world. Anderson does at least acknowledge the existence of an outside world in this one and suggests some of the darker elements of 20th century history going on at the time - but he still can't bear to deal with those elements head on. The SS is now the ZZ - the Zig Zag division. While they're villains, they're cartoon ones. When it comes time to recount the tragedy that would befall so many of the characters, it is rushed through at the end in dialogue with no visual depiction (such tragedy too unbearable, I'm sure). Anderson's work is what it is and is enjoyable for that. This is great fun to look at - Anderson has always had a flair for color, composition, and selection of sets (the aging hotel spa straight out of the 1960s sticks out for me for whatever reason). His characters are as marionettes as ever. Anderson has a steadfast nostalgia for childish innocence and, while worthwhile fun in movies such as The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson works harder than ever to keep his world encased in the snow globe, protected from the outside world by a delicate plate of glass. Screened in the theater at the Noho 7.
Particle Fever (2014)
Director Mark Levinson brings us a documentary detailing the turn-on of the Large Hadron Collider ("LHC"), a massive particle collider located in Europe that physicists hope will help them solve some of the largest remaining questions about the nature of our universe. Levinson (assisted by editor Walter Murch and theoretical physicist David Kaplan) makes sure to present the issues in layman's terms (although it will help to have some passing recollection of your high school science courses). While the film makes feints at explaining the nature of the universe, why the LHC is important, and what discovery of the Higgs Boson means for science, what really is at the heart of the film is showing the human side of the people involved. Rather than as talking heads, the scientists are portrayed as walking around - or for one scientist, rowing, running, and cycling. They are humans involved in a very human quest for understanding, even if they occasionally stand at chalkboards doing equations that make most of us turn away. There is some drama involved. First, when the LHC is first turned on it fails and becomes something of a PR disaster as they are forced to immediately engage in massive repairs (apparently it still has not reached full power). Then, Levinson depicts two competing theories of the universe that depend on what the LHC will find. As physicists wait for the LHC to be turned on, we see two older physicists chatting about how their entire adult lives will have been wasted if the results from the LHC aren't what they expected (and as one experimental physicist reminds us, the results of these things are almost never quite what the theorists expected). This is an enjoyable documentary and well worth a watch. You'll need to have at least some fascination with science to really love this one, but you need not be a science or math geek. Screened in the theater at the Playhouse 7.
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