How We Got to Now is a new PBS series with Steven Johnson explaining how six inventions and innovations transformed the future to create our world.
They are:
REFRIGERATION – How our mastery of “cold on demand” helped give birth to at least four million babies, created the golden age of Hollywood and unlocked the secrets of the universe.
CLEAN – How our battle against dirt created the sidewalk, the swimming pool, the flat screen and the iPhone.
LIGHT – How our quest to harness light changed our genetic make-up, gave birth to Times Square, Las Vegas, video downloads and an artificial sun.
SOUND – How the journey to harness sound created the modern world of instant communication, but also helped put thousands of planes in the sky, changed the face of warfare and created a new way for teenagers to rebel.
TIME – How our journey to calculate time helped create international trade and travel, victory for the North in the Civil War, GPS and understanding of the origins of human life.
SIGHT – How our quest to see better helped us see the world differently, whether right in front of our noses with the birth of eyeglasses or far beyond our visible universe with the creation of the telescope.
Meet the Mormons is a feature-length documentary that tells the stories of six members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from around the world. The film will appear in theaters across the United States beginning on October 10th, 2014. The goal of this production is to help people understand the Mormon faith in a more complete way and to see how the gospel of Jesus Christ leads Church members in their lives. All proceeds from the film will go to charity.
Interview: Matthias Malzieu of “Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart”
Posted on October 5, 2014 at 8:00 am
First it was a concept album of ethereally bittersweet songs from the French group Dionysos, and then it was a graphic novel, and now, writer/musician Matthias Malzieu has brought his tenderhearted fantasy love story to the screen in the animated Jack And The Cuckoo-Clock Heart. It is a gentle fairy tale about a boy with a cuckoo-clock for a heart who is told he must never fall in love, but who cannot help falling for a visually impaired singer, available on DVD and Blu-Ray October 7, 2014, with both English and French dialogue.
With some help from a translator, I spoke to Malzieu about creating this omni-media story, which, like “Hugo,” is a fictional tale but features real-life pioneering filmmaker Georges Melies as a character. He said, “Surrealism was the esthetic influence. We made a lot of researches and found a lot of Jules Verne, George Melies, this moment of history when medical things, magic things, and inventions, science, were completely mixed, charlatanism, religion, doctors, scientists -– a fog of sensation between all these things. Everything was possible for real. The story takes place in this moment of history, steampunk, trains, steam machines, first cameras, all these magical machines that seem to have a soul. It brings up the nice problem of the character, a machine with a soul. It has joy like a human, but the technical problems of a machine.”
One of the most striking scenes in the film is a train ride.
“The train is the link between the dream and reality,” Malzieu said, “all the atmosphere and spirits of the movie in one scene, dancing strange monsters, like a dream but scary, dance and silence just after a very loud scene with a lot of punk rock music and movement. Then just rocking in silence with no melody, the poetry and simple human emotion at the same time.” He went on. “The train and the music drive the dreams of escape of the character. The train is on paper to show it is fragile and small and even a breath can move it but it’s exciting. This heart’s way of doing it with human hands, little things we like that a lot of people can see and feel all the mechanics.” He explained that he identified with Melies, a stage magician before he became a filmmaker and pioneer of special effects. “Making a movie was very close to making a magic trick, telling a story with little magic things. The producer and animators are like a magic tool of my own dreams, a human magic tool, always fragile, and delicate.”
He worked with illustrator Nicoletta Ceccoli in creating the look of the film and said it was “like Christmas to receive her messages, a strange train with wings, a character with a xylophone on his spine, not too soft a look, though. It had to be alive but look like porcelain, maybe a little Pinocchio-esque but with very realistic eyes, and bodies not too elastic.”
The opening scene, with a woman trying to reach a midwife before she delivers her baby on the coldest day in history, had to be “intense and funny and mysterious at the same time.” The main character has a clock instead of his heart, “so when I think about the movie I really want to show the emotion that he can bring with his machine. I would like to film a lot of the cogs and mechanical aspects. With this mechanics he can love or not love, be a human and a machine. I like the poetry that brings this together and want to see inside of the heart in a metaphoric way and a real way. The art and mechanics of the character are similar to the connection between George Melies and his camera.”
This movie is “about love in a passionate way.” The lead female character is a visually impaired singer, “She did not trust herself, so when she is angry she has vines with thorns around her. She is supposed to know everything about this emotion but she is scared by Jack who is different, and she rejects him because she is scared of herself. When you are too scared of doing bad things you do bad things. She thinks she can’t risk breaking his heart. She’s scared, not of Jack but of making bad things happen to him.”
Malzieu says the story started with the idea of the character, about falling in love deeply and being different. “In the book, I wrote sometimes love can turn us into a monster of sadness, sometimes a monster of wonder, sometimes similar. A character with a mechanical heart is different so I can talk about the difference between people in a poetic way, and about the fragility. Jack’e heart needs to be wound every morning to stay alive. And love is dangerous. He can’t fall in love but he will try to, and people will try to break his dreams.”
He describes Melies as “a fantastic inventor and magician, like the doctor of love, the opposite of Madeleine,” who builds Jack’s heart. “She’s like the mother. She wants to protect, but maybe too much protecting. Melies is the opposite. He wants adventure and thinks it is good for the health. That’s two different visions of life.” And Malzieu finds appealing “the analogy between the camera and the heart – a machine with soul and emotion,” so he has Melies make a romantic movie inside the movie. He is “the father, the friend everybody dreams to have, clever, funny, creating fantastic things all the time.”
“Left Behind” is being marketed as Christian entertainment, but it does not qualify in either category.
It is far inferior to the modestly budgeted but sincere straight-to-DVD starring Kirk Cameron, based on the blockbuster best-selling book series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, itself inspired by the Book of Revelations. This version has a bigger budget and a real, Oscar-winning movie star, Nicolas Cage. But what it doesn’t have is any meaningful spiritual content aside from referring to a couple of Bible verses and the underlying premise that people of faith are taken up to heaven while those who did not live Godly lives are “left behind.” All of the significance and context of the book and the original film are swept away for just another disaster movie. This is not a movie about faith or grace. It is a movie about a plane that is in the air when the Rapture occurs, so that children and babies disappear along with some of the passengers and crew, and the sole remaining pilot (Cage) has to keep everyone calm and safe while he thinks about how he should have listened to his wife (Lea Thompson), a believer, instead of being driven away by her faith into a possible dalliance with a flight attendant.
With a musical score that sounds like the music you are stuck with on hold waiting for tech support and cheesy special effects, it feels like a low-budget disaster film from the 1970’s. There was laughter throughout the theater in one scene where a plane crashed in a parking lot because the stock footage used for the explosion was so clumsily inserted. And when Nicolas Cage plays a pilot on a plane in trouble, it is a huge disappointment that we only get one brief outburst. What is the point of putting the Cage rage-monster in a film if he doesn’t blow his top? Instead he just alternates between moping and steely determination, not his strengths.
But the real failure here is the hollowing out of the storyline. It is a sad irony that a movie intended to warn about the dangers of soullessness is itself so empty. At the end of 2014, it turned up on most critics’ worst of the year lists.
Cassi Thomson (who plays a devout Christian on “Switched at Birth” and a Mormon on “Big Love”) is Chloë, who comes home from college to surprise her father on his birthday only to find out that he won’t be there. Her father is the heroically named Rayford Steele (Cage), and he is a pilot and he will be flying to Europe. She waits at the airport to say goodbye to him before he leaves, and rescues a handsome television reporter named Buck Williams (Chad Michael Murray, in the film’s best performance) from a woman who tries to warn him of a coming Biblical catastrophe. Then Chloë sees her father walking to the gate with a flight attendant. There is something about the way they are leaning toward each other that indicates a close relationship. Chloë is devastated. It turns out Buck is on Ray’s plane, and Chloë gives him a message for her father.
Suddenly, when the plane is over the Atlantic and Chloë and her brother are at the mall, people disappear, taken out of their clothes. The rest of the film is Ray in the plane and Chloë on the ground, trying to figure out what has happened and why and what to do next.
The book and the original film had provocative notions of how current world events were playing into the predictions contained in Revelations. There were characters who represented the forces of evil and there were characters trying to make sense of what it meant to be left behind. This version has none of that. There is the thinnest gloss of faith-based content, as though the filmmakers are afraid of offending a mainstream audience. Even worse, it appears they assume that the faith-based audience is so loyal they will not care about cardboard characters, clumsy dialog, painful attempts at humor involving a little person, and poorly-staged action scenes. I hope that the success of well-made faith-based media this year will make it impossible for the filmmakers here to complain that the criticism of this film, which showed up on most of the 10 worst lists of 2014, is based on bias.
Parents should know that this film has a great deal of peril and violence, discussions of infidelity, sad losses, drinking and drugs, and some disturbing images.
Family discussion: What separated those who were taken and those who were left behind? What would you have written on the ticket envelope Chloë asked Buck to deliver?
If you like this, try: the original film with Kirk Cameron and the book series
. It is a gentle fairy tale about a boy with a cuckoo-clock for a heart who is told he must never fall in love, but who cannot help falling for a visually impaired singer, available 
, itself inspired by the Book of Revelations. This version has a bigger budget and a real, Oscar-winning movie star, Nicolas Cage. But what it doesn’t have is any meaningful spiritual content aside from referring to a couple of Bible verses and the underlying premise that people of faith are taken up to heaven while those who did not live Godly lives are “left behind.” All of the significance and context of the book and the original film are swept away for just another disaster movie. This is not a movie about faith or grace. It is a movie about a plane that is in the air when the Rapture occurs, so that children and babies disappear along with some of the passengers and crew, and the sole remaining pilot (Cage) has to keep everyone calm and safe while he thinks about how he should have listened to his wife (Lea Thompson), a believer, instead of being driven away by her faith into a possible dalliance with a flight attendant.