Johnny Depp plays a scientist who has more than just his eyes on the future of artificial intelligence in TRANSCENDENCE
TRANSCENDENCE (Wally Pfister, 2014)
Opens Friday, April 18
www.transcendencemovie.com
In 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, forecasting the next stages of artificial intelligence and its effects on humanity. That idea is taken to a whole new level in Wally Pfister’s overblown and ultimately ridiculous Transcendence. Johnny Depp stars as Dr. Will Caster, an AI expert targeted by R.I.F.T. (Revolutionary Independence from Technology), a terrorist group led by Bree (Kate Mara) that is calling for “Evolution without Technology.” After a conference, Will is shot, and his wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), and best friend, Max (Paul Bettany), consider uploading Will’s brain into his supercomputer, PINN (Physically Independent Neural Network), before he dies. While Evelyn wants to keep her lover alive any way possible, Max considers the potential ramifications if they succeed. And succeed they do, beyond their wildest expectations — and far beyond any kind of plausibility, leaving the audience openmouthed in amazement.
Max Waters (Paul Bettany) and Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall) meld man and machine in sci-fi thriller
Oscar-winning cinematographer Pfister has shot most of Christopher Nolan’s visually dynamic films, including Memento, Inception, and the Batman reboot, but his first directing foray is a major disappointment after a promising beginning. Written by debut screenwriter Jack Paglen and photographed by Jess Hall (The Spectacular Now, Hot Fuzz), Transcendence, of course, looks great, although its visual splendor becomes repetitive as the film reaches new levels of stupidity. Even the cast, which also includes Morgan Freeman as a sage research scientist, Cillian Murphy as an FBI agent, and Cole Hauser as a military officer, seems more and more disoriented as Pfister and Paglen deliver a frustrating mess that, for good and, mostly, bad, evokes such genre classics and cult favorites as Demon Seed, Colossus: The Forbin Project, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, Donovan’s Brain, Night of the Living Dead, and, yes, They Saved Hitler’s Brain. Transcendence is an ever-more-absurd Orwellian nightmare headed by a power-mad twenty-first-century HAL 9000, another attempt at portraying man as God for the umpteenth time since the original Frankenstein, and a stupefying failure at that.
In her 2010 book Good as Gold: 1 Woman, 9 Sports, 10 Countries, and a 2-Year Quest to Make the Summer Olympics, athlete and journalist Kathryn Bertine detailed her attempts to participate in the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. A former figure skater who shared her experiences on ice in 2003’s All the Sundays Yet to Come, Bertine has now made her first documentary, Half the Road: The Passion, Pitfalls & Power of Women’s Professional Cycling. Filmed for less than $10,000 and then funded by an 
John Boorman’s Point Blank is an oxymoronic psychedelic film noir, a violent psychological thriller about a determined man dead set on vengeance. Lee Marvin — on quite a hot streak following Cat Ballou, Ship of Fools, The Professionals, and The Dirty Dozen — stars as the one-named Walker, a sincere, old-fashioned man who is double-crossed by his wife, Lynne (Sharon Acker), and friend, Mal Reese (John Vernon, in his film debut), when a deal goes bad on Alcatraz. Searching for Reese, Walker hooks up with Lynne’s sister, Chris (Angie Dickinson), a sexy femme fatale who owns a hot club in the Bay Area. As Walker makes his way up the criminal organization ladder in his quest to get the $93,000 he’s owed, he leaves behind a bloody trail that keeps getting messier and messier. Adapted by Alexander Jacobs and David and Rafe Newhouse from Donald Westlake’s first Parker novel, The Hunter, Boorman’s film is like the antihero Walker himself, purposefully out of time and place. Walker is essentially an anachronism as he makes his way through Point Blank, evoking John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s classic Western The Searchers. The Summer of Love seems to have had no effect on Walker, who still primarily dresses in dull colors — until Chris brings out the color in him, particularly in one memorable scene in which they both are wearing bright yellow and spy on Reese’s hideaway through a yellow telescope. Film noir is by definition set in a black-and-white world, but Walker can’t hide from the old ways anymore, as he shows when groovy colored lights flash on him in Chris’s club.
“Beginnings are always difficult,” suave thief Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) says at the beginning of Trouble in Paradise, but it’s not difficult at all to fall in love with the beginning, middle, and end of Ernst Lubitsch’s wonderful pre-Code romantic comedy. It’s love at first heist for Gaston and Lily (Miriam Hopkins) as they try to outsteal each other on a moonlit night in Venice. Soon they are teaming up to fleece perfume heir Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis) of money and jewels as the wealthy socialite takes a liking to Gaston despite her being relentlessly pursued by the hapless François Filiba (Edward Everett Horton) and the stiff Major (Charles Ruggles). Displaying what became known as the Lubitsch Touch, the Berlin-born director has a field day with risqué sexual innuendo, particularly in the early scene when Gaston and Lily first meet (oh, that garter!) and later as Madame Colet’s affection for Gaston grows, along with Lily’s jealousy. Loosely based on the 1931 play The Honest Finder by Aladár László, which was inspired by the true story of Romanian con man George Manolescu, the 1932 film remained out of circulation for decades during the Hays Code, and it’s easy to see why. Trouble in Paradise is screening April 18-20 at 11:00 am as part of the IFC Center series “American Hustlers: Grifters, Swindlers, Scammers & Cheats” series, which continues April 25-27 with Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve before concluding May 2-4 with Stephen Frears’s The Grifters.
Husband-and-wife filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash follow a flock of sheep herded by a family of Norwegian-American cowboys on their last sojourns through the public lands of Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in the gorgeously photographed, surprisingly intimate, and sometimes very funny documentary Sweetgrass. In 2001, Castaing-Taylor, director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, and Barbash, a curator of Visual Anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, found out about the Allestad ranch, an old-fashioned, Old West group of sheepherders who still did everything by hand, including leading hundreds of sheep on a 150-mile journey into the mountains for summer pasture with only a few dogs and horses. Director Castaing-Taylor uses no voice-over narration or intertitles, instead inviting the viewer to join in the story as if in the middle of the action, offering no judgments or additional information. The film begins with shearing and feeding, then birthing and mothering, before heading out on the long, sometimes treacherous trail, especially at night, when bears and wolves sneak around, looking for food. Slowly the focus switches to the men themselves, primarily an old-time singing grizzled ranch hand and a cursing, complaining cowboy. Castaing-Taylor and Barbash spent three years with the sheepherders and in the surrounding areas, amassing more than two hundred hours of footage and making to date nine films out of their experiences, mostly shorter works to be displayed in gallery installations or for anthropological reasons; Sweetgrass is the only one that has been released theatrically, offering a fascinating look at something that is destined to soon be gone forever. Sweetgrass is screening April 17 at 6:30 in the Focus on the Sensory Ethnography Lab section of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Art of the Real,” held in conjunction with the Whitney Biennial, and will be followed by a Q&A with Barbash. The inaugural festival runs April 11-26, featuring more than three dozen works that push the boundaries of documentary film.
