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Jake Gyllenhaal's Source Code: BUMP THREAD for Amanda's Bowie Info (2011)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Movie Review: Multimedia
Source Code (2011)
Behind the Train Scenes of 'Source Code'
Uploaded by TheNewYorkTimes on Mar 31, 2011
click to actually see the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKgqhL3dx2Y&feature
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKgqhL3dx2Y[/youtube]
Duncan Jones, the director of the action thriller "Source Code,"
narrates a look at the film's train sequences.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/31/source-code-review
Movie Review
Source Code (2011)
Altered minds, altered states and bags of style –
this sci-fi thriller is a superb follow-up for Duncan Jones
By Peter Bradshaw
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 31 March 2011 15.00 BST
Future shock ... Michelle Monaghan and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Source Code is about conspiracies, altered minds and altered states, far-fetched in the most elegant and Hitchcockian way, and the sheer outrageousness of it all is muscular and streamlined. The film is about modified reality and inner space, and there are points of comparison with Christopher Nolan's Inception. But the world of Source Code seems to me more interesting, and more able to incubate real drama, real suspense and even some real humour.
At its centre is Colter Stevens, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a US army helicopter pilot who has crashed in Afghanistan. When he comes to, he finds himself in civilian clothes aboard a crowded commuter train arriving slightly late into Chicago on a glorious summer morning. He appears to be in someone else's body: that of a suburban teacher. Opposite him sits Christina (Michelle Monaghan) who behaves as if a brief nap has merely interrupted their highly flirtatious conversation, but she is then increasingly alarmed as Colter, wild-eyed and panicky, demands to know what is happening and what is going on.
After eight minutes, a catastrophic event then hurls Colter back into a situation that is in some ways even more perplexing. He is in uniform, injured and immobilised in what appears to be part of a wrecked military aircraft. Is this real? Or is it the train that's real? Through a video monitor, he must communicate with a woman who is evidently now his commanding officer. Goodwin, played by Vera Farmiga, treats him with the same unreadable solicitousness as Kevin Spacey's robot-voice did with Sam Rockwell in Moon.
Without consenting, Colter has evidently been dragooned into a new mission using futurist technology known as "source code"; he has been brought back from Afghanistan – or has he? – and ordered to relive the past eight minutes on a Chicago commuter train over and over again until he discovers vital information. Ripley and Jones show how each metaphysical go-around discloses more clues; each makes Colter fall for Christina a little more, and each makes the thought of losing her seem more unbearable.
With its train setting and Chris Bacon's score imitating the jagged clamour of Bernard Herrmann, the movie is clearly indebted to the Hitchcock of North By Northwest and Strangers on a Train. But it's also a particularly tense and fraught kind of Groundhog Day, and just as in that film, repetition endows banal, forgettable events with an eerie familiarity and inevitability.
Yet in the Bill Murray movie, our hapless hero had all the time in the world, an infinity of time, as many Groundhog Days as he needed, to learn the piano until he was at the level at which he could casually appear to be a brilliant pianist to impress a woman. Making an impression on a woman is not wholly absent from Colter's mind either, but he can't just repeat his eight minutes ad infinitum, because the security situation is pressing and time is running out. Each time he starts again, his own physical condition in the mysterious cockpit deteriorates, and Goodwin and her shadowy boss Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) are keeping secrets from him.
Source Code is glitzy and hi-tech in a 21st-century way, but also has something from an earlier age: it is a story from the Twilight Zone, with hints of Philip K Dick, and traces of the television world of The Prisoner and The Fugitive. With its weird deployment of playing cards in one scene, Jones has channelled The Manchurian Candidate – perhaps specifically through Jonathan Demme 's Iraq-themed remake – and the overall effect is smart and to the point.
In its own way, Source Code also aspires slightly to the status of comedy, and Colter's increasingly wan and desperate conversations with Goodwin from his mysterious pod reminded me a little of David Niven's radio conversations with Kim Hunter's June in A Matter of Life and Death – as he plummets to his certain death, Niven's character exploits his prerogative as a dying man to flirt with this radio operator.
This isn't exactly what is happening here, and Colter's affections are engaged with Christina, not Goodwin – but equipoised with the action and thrills, there is a serio-comic sense of fantasy and romance that have been endangered by this terrifying situation in one sense, but in another sense made possible by it. Source Code is absurd, but carries off its absurdity lightly and stylishly. It is a luxuriously enjoyable film. Jones has put himself into the front-rank of Hollywood directors, the kind who can deliver a big studio picture with brains. With twists and turns, and at breathtaking speed, this film runs on rails.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/our_picks/index.html?story=/ent/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/03/31/source_code
Our Picks: Movies
Source Code (2011)
Pick of the week: Jake Gyllenhaal
in the cool, romantic "Source Code"
The "Groundhog Day"-style action flick "Source Code"
blends a tricky three-level plot and a surprising love story
By Andrew O'Hehir
Thursday, Mar 31, 2011 18:32 ET
Near the beginning of Duncan Jones' surprisingly human techno-thriller "Source Code," we see an aerial tracking shot moving across some Midwestern woods and a lake, where we see a flock of geese accelerating toward takeoff: Whoppa-whoppa-whoppa. It's just a few seconds of dazzling outdoor color, perhaps artificially enriched, in a tick-tock puzzler that mostly takes place in enclosed spaces, but it's a nice little metaphor too: The geese are about to take off, and so's the movie. We also have no idea, the first time we see those geese, how well we'll get to know them and how much affection we'll feel for them before the whole thing is over.
That shot ends by locating a commuter train on its way to Chicago, which is where an Air Force helicopter pilot named Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up disoriented, unsure where he is or how he got there, let alone why the pretty young woman sitting across from him (Michelle Monaghan) keeps calling him "Sean." By the time Stevens works out some basic facts about his situation, including the startling discovery that the face he sees in the bathroom mirror isn't his own (although it matches the ID in his wallet, which belongs to a high school teacher named Sean Fentress), a huge explosion rips through the train, obliterating him and Monaghan's character and a whole lot of other people. (Summit Entertainment has posted the first five minutes of "Source Code" on YouTube, and it's among the better teasers of recent memory.)
When Stevens wakes up again, he's upside down, strapped into some kind of decrepit metal space capsule, with an all-business female officer (it's the ever-terrific Vera Farmiga, working wonders with a role that could have been nothing) talking to him through a low-quality video connection, apparently from a base code-named Beleaguered Castle. She's able to use some "Manchurian Candidate"-style tricks -- a sequence of playing cards, a story containing code words -- to reorient him a little bit, and urges him to go right back into the simulation or training exercise or whatever it is and try to find the bomb and the bomber. Waging an internal battle between military discipline and simple human confusion, Stevens demands to be briefed: Why can't he remember anything since his last mission over Afghanistan? Has he been evacuated to the United States? When can he call his dad? What and where is this creaky vessel that seems to be leaking hydraulic fluid?
Eventually those questions will be answered, but not here of course. Spoiler warning: I won't go beyond the first set of plot revelations, those widely available in the film's publicity campaign. If you've avoided those and want to continue to do so, please step away from the Internet, sir. The double mystery in "Source Code" is deftly handled by Jones (who also made the intriguing sci-fi indie "Moon," and is pre-famous as the son of rock legend David Bowie) and screenwriter Ben Ripley, who forge an interlocking double helix of discoveries as Stevens relives the train bombing, "Groundhog Day" style, over and over again. Despite warnings from Goodwin (that's Farmiga's icy officer, who does warm up a little) and her twitchy, Strangelove-esque boss, Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), Stevens begins to use his eight-minute sessions aboard the doomed train to learn what he can about his own fate, as well as to sort through the clues and characters around him: the grouchy stand-up comic, the college student, the older woman with the tote bag from a military hospital, the douchey guy with the Bluetooth headset and the rest of them.
Stevens runs through his "mission" at least six times, in fact -- not counting the ones that speed by in tiny fragments -- and each one is a little different. Not just because he pursues different threads of the story each time, discovering where the bomb is planted or harassing a Middle Eastern-looking guy in a suit (innocent, of course) or stealing a gun or making unauthorized phone calls to the Air Force, but because he gets to know his role as Sean Fentress a little better, and pays more attention to the winsome Christina (Monaghan), who has evidently been waiting a while for Sean to make his move. If the science behind what's going on in the super-secret time-travel and/or astral projection project at Beleaguered Castle is almost pure hokum, there's just enough pop physics, and more than enough real human psychology, to lend this intriguing popcorn movie some depth.
Jones keeps the plot mechanics whirring on at least three levels, if not four (once you count Stevens-as-Sean's burgeoning romance with Christina and Stevens' subtly shifting video relationship with Goodwin), which may distract you from some of the film's odder strengths and liabilities. Goodwin and Rutledge keep exhorting Stevens not to overthink his situation, and they may as well be addressing the audience, since I'm not sure suspension of disbelief can cover all the logical and philosophical fallacies embedded into this "Quantum Leap"-style yarn. Still, I agree with them: That's not the point.
Ingeniously, Ripley and Jones withhold nearly all the canned characterization or "relatable" back-story material you'd expect from a conventional Hollywood thriller. Everything we learn about Stevens and Christina and Goodwin by the end of the film comes from their actions, not their words. That lends "Source Code" an elusive, almost arty shimmer beneath its glossy, action-movie surface. I suspect it will play well on repeat viewings despite (or possibly because of) its unsolvable plot koans. Gyllenhaal begins the movie playing Stevens as a clean, controlled, masculine Hitchcock-type hero, engaged in an individual struggle against the cruel machineries of God. By the end of "Source Code" he's become a different kind of hero, one who has stepped out of time for a moment and gotten a glimpse behind the curtain of existence, à la, I don't know, Dave Bowman in "2001: A Space Odyssey" or a Zen master or something. He has learned what we all already know but have trouble remembering, that all we ever have is right now: Someone spilling Coke on our shoe, a girl to kiss on a train, the sight and sound of geese taking off from water.
Ellemeno:
After reading these, I found myslef humming "Ground Control to Major Tom..." and didn't know why at first. It's David Bowie's son, innit?
RouxB:
I'm just happy I can go see a Jake flick without worrying.
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