'Space Oddity' In Space: Yes, Astronauts Are Still The Coolest Humans

This is Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield, performing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" while floating around the International Space Station. You may have last seen the space station team walking around in outer space fixing stuff.

Yes, you will never do anything this cool. You could miniaturize Jay-Z and put him inside your iPod, inherit sixteen billion dollars, bring James Dean back to life, time-travel to 1968 to hip-nap Joan Holloway's hips, give birth to Miles Davis, and hire Stephen Hawking to help you develop the capability to spontaneously turn into a Corvette anytime you wanted, and you would not be this cool. Nothing is this cool.

Astronauts, right?

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Loving 'Gatsby' Too Much And Not Enough

Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby.

Daniel Smith/Warner Brothers Pictures Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby.

Daniel Smith/Warner Brothers Pictures

[I really hope it goes without saying that this piece about the film adaptation of a decades-old novel gives away the plot of a decades-old novel. But: Be aware.]

The sheer zazz that Baz Luhrmann introduces into The Great Gatsby is so imposing in quantity that it's surprising that it can get out of the way enough not to be the biggest problem in the movie. Luhrmann, after all, loves his swooping cameras and party scenes, and Gatsby gives him the best excuse for excess that there is: a story about excess.

Directorial playfulness turns out, in fact, to be one of the film's strengths, from an inventively exhausting party sequence to the mix of music on the soundtrack. The tracks from Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey have gotten most of the attention, and they're used well to remind us what such rich, young, perfect people might listen to now. But there's also era-appropriate material, including a clever segue from "Let's Misbehave" to "Ain't Misbehavin'," along with a perfect deployment of an overclocked "Rhapsody In Blue," which revels in its own stair-climbing excesses.

Where Luhrmann runs into trouble is not with his flashy glitz, but in his treatment of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel: he is too faithful on one hand and too cavalier on the other.

It's clear that everyone involved so loves the prose of the book that they felt the film could not exist without it — could not exist without, probably most importantly, Nick solemnly intoning, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Apparently convinced that this could only be a voice-over and a voice-over needed to be explained, Luhrmann and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce came up with not one but two framing devices: Nick telling the story of Gatsby to a psychiatrist and Nick tapping out the tale on a typewriter. (The final shots related to Nick's writing project are, it must be said, embarrassing. There is simply no other description that feels honest.)

There are liberties taken with the voice-over, in that it reads only tiny portions of the novel and both adds and subtracts in ways that are sometimes perplexing, and particularly because of the gaudy and inessential 3D, seeing words float off the screen as they are spoken aloud often places such emphasis on them that they instantly feel painfully distant.

That's what happens when Nick explains Gatsby's feelings as he hesitated to kiss Daisy and cement his bond with her. The words making up the assertion that Gatsby knew that after this his mind would never romp again like the mind of God flow naturally in the novel, but when Tobey Maguire reads them aloud and they appear in a studied typewriter font and begin to float off the screen, they feel forced and false and weighted with too much announcement of their own importance. The prose everyone was so determined to preserve is present, but with the blood drained from it.

More important, though, is the fact that the entire moral underpinning of Gatsby is lost because it is given a romantic aspect far beyond what should be there. The bluntest and best explanation I've seen came from Will Leitch at Deadspin, who described the Gatsby-Daisy scenes as "all soft-focused and romantic, like they're Romeo and Juliet rather than a deluded cursed megalomaniacal social climber and a spoiled old-money brat who just wants everything at no cost to her." Indeed.

Gatsby and Daisy in this film are doomed and tragic, and when he eventually dies and she doesn't attend his funeral, the sense is that she has given in to her sense of trapped misery, that she wasn't brave enough to leave her terrible husband for the man she really loved. What doesn't come through is the book's clear sense of Daisy's flighty irresponsibility, her entitled emptiness, and her ultimate willingness to walk away from all she's done and keep dancing.

In the film, the only real villain is Tom, Daisy's husband: he's the cheating, spiteful bully who sends his lover's spouse to kill his spouse's lover, not out of grief, but out of expediency. He hovers menacingly over Daisy's exit from the story in a way that drains her of blame and underscores the notion that Gatsby and Daisy are doomed victims of the same cruelties.

Luhrmann bestows upon actress Carey Mulligan such cinematographical adoration — he seems at times to be worshipping her every mole — that Daisy becomes paradoxically too genuine, too alive. At one critical juncture, where the book's Daisy simply says that she's crying because she's never seen such beautiful shirts and the interpretation is left to the reader, the movie's Daisy is allowed to suffer and stammer and extravagantly feel, while Nick explains how she's weighted down by her love of Gatsby, before she makes that rather silly statement about the shirts. Daisy in the book is a figure of vexing remove, which is part of what makes her so hard to get right in a film. And while Mulligan plays some pained, tormented woman quite beautifully at times, it isn't really Daisy Buchanan.

But no character is let off the hook, freed from any indictment, quite like Nick Carraway himself. From the outset, Nick's narration keeps certain things and omits others: you hear Nick explain, as he does in the novel's first paragraphs, that his father told him not to judge people, but you don't hear him explain that as a result of what he considers his profoundly understanding nature, people were constantly boring him with their stories and confessions. In the book, while he acknowledges it's "snobbish" to say so, he believes himself an unusually good man: "A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."

Tobey Maguire's Nick is not a man who only faux-apologetically admits to snobbery. He's a purely naïve, moon-faced innocent, just coming to the big city to make his way in the world and being sucked under by — you guessed it — Tom Buchanan, who introduces him to all things decadent. This does not seem to be a guy who could plausibly have gone to war, given that he seems shocked by jazz music. Part of it is a casting problem, since Maguire never seems older than about 17 and oozes boyhood no matter his age. It's what made him so perfect for Pleasantville long ago and made him such a good Peter Parker even recently. But he is not a very persuasive hard-partying veteran growing grizzled and bitter.

Nick becomes Gatsby's confidante, his only friend, the only person who clearly sees the folly of what Gatsby is doing — and eventually, in a complete abandonment of one of the critical pieces of the novel's ending, Nick becomes the only person Gatsby has in the world.

Gatsby, very nicely played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a role that, for once, steers into rather than away from his gorgeousness, is the only really interesting person here. That means that Nick's extravagant (and exaggerated) devotion to him makes Nick seem far more noble, far more deserving of sympathy, than he should be. In the book, Nick comes off as something of a wealth-intoxicated hanger-on who's far too willing to complain about rich people while eating their food and drinking their booze and eavesdropping on their drama — not that he knows this about himself. But here, he is the one good, kind man left in America.

When this story closes, it takes quite an act of piecing together to remember that as Tom and Daisy exit their East Egg home, they are doing so having directly or indirectly killed three people with their pettiness and fundamentally unserious way of approaching other humans. Two people born into privilege have mercilessly killed three people born into poverty, and somehow, that class commentary is invisible. The love story is all there is, and nothing is left of what is, at best, Fitzgerald's deep ambivalence about the American dream.

In a recent piece for Vulture called "Why I Despise The Great Gatsby," Kathryn Schulz explained that she's always found the book an utter bore, largely because she's so indifferent to Gatsby and Daisy, "the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn." But Gatsby and Daisy in the book are not a great, redemptive romance — Daisy is vacant, and Gatsby is delusional and chasing a fantasy. She also sees Nick as a dully passive "innocent bystander," rather than the fully participating scold he really is. If she's wrong about the book, it's because she's describing the story differently than it strikes most readers (and some discussions of her piece agree).

In a sense, Luhrmann has filmed Schulz's Gatsby: centered on the romance as grand and beautiful, unwilling to hold Nick (or really anyone else) accountable. That's what makes it troubling. The direction, the acting, the soundtrack, the sparkle and majesty — these things are assets and should have made the story work. But they don't, because the screenplay loves the book both too much and too little.

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At The Movies, A Swirl Of Style And Substance

Light It Up: Director Baz Luhrmann (right, with stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan on the set of The Great Gatsby) brought a lush visual sensibility to a tale whose tone not everyone thinks of as epic.

Matt Hart/Warner Bros. Pictures

Here's a movie pitch: A celebrated millionaire, known for public extravagance, lives right on the water in a fabulous mansion. He's smooth but reckless, drives like a maniac, has a powerful enemy and — despite a rep as a playboy — has only one girlfriend, who barely registers on-screen.

You're the producer, so whaddya think? Does his story require lavish digital effects, swooping cameras, a rap soundtrack and the full-on 3-D treatment?

If I tell you his name is Tony Stark, otherwise known as Iron Man, probably yes, right?

What if his name is Jay Gatsby?

Baz Luhrmann's new film version of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's wistful novel about love and longing on Long Island, really unleashes the roar in the Roaring '20s. It has songs by Beyonce and Jay-Z (who's also a producer); was filmed in 3-D, which renders its cocktail-party confetti pretty spectacular; and features soaring shots of a digitized 1920s New York, digitized mansions, even digitized mountains of coal-furnace refuse in a dump that Fitzgerald called the Valley of Ashes.

Everything about the film is overstuffed, overdecorated and constantly in motion, including passages from the novel's text that materialize on-screen. It's the Great American Novel as fever dream, and if emotions and character get lost in all the disco-ball glitz, well, how could they not?

Now, if we want movies to be surprising, and not look and sound like the cookie-cutter clones we're always complaining blockbusters are, we have to allow directors lots of latitude. And Luhrmann is hardly alone in bringing a distinctive personal style to material that doesn't seem a natural fit.

Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) recently turned the great Russian novel Anna Karenina into an oddly stagey extravaganza — meaning he placed much of it literally onstage, sometimes behind velvet curtains. Wright's driving idea was that Russian aristocrats were mimicking Western European royalty, essentially performing for the Russian public; by making that notion literal, he gave what has been a frequently filmed story a deliriously distinctive feel.

More recently, action director Michael Bay took his first shot at an intimate story after a slew of Transformers sequels, and what he did in Pain & Gain was, um ... also distinctive: He basically took what might have been an amusing three-guys-and-a-scam plot and bludgeoned it into submission with machine-gun editing, smash zooms and every other trick in the blockbuster playbook.

Sometimes, though, a little well-placed gimmickry is exactly what's needed. At the outset of the upcoming documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks — which sounds dry as dust, right? — director Alex Gibney shows us not stolen documents but what looks like the Milky Way: a starry firmament of tiny dots that swirl and coalesce and then swirl away again. It's a visual motif he uses throughout the film, a representation of the flow of information on the Internet, and though it's completely made up, it's tremendously effective in suggesting how impossible to control that information is once it's out there on the Web.

The Bang-Bang Club: Pain & Gain, with Anthony Mackie, Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson as three guys on a heist, is a coulda-been-nimble caper that got Michael Bay-ified on the way to the multiplex.

Jaimie Trueblood/Paramount Pictures The Bang-Bang Club: Pain & Gain, with Anthony Mackie, Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson as three guys on a heist, is a coulda-been-nimble caper that got Michael Bay-ified on the way to the multiplex.

Jaimie Trueblood/Paramount Pictures

So you won't hear me argue for reining directors in. Well, maybe Michael Bay, a little. But not someone like Luhrmann, who in Gatsby employs a lot of the same tricks he used successfully in Moulin Rouge. As he told NPR's Scott Simon quite persuasively this past weekend, everything he did was a deliberate, thought-through choice, from the 3-D to the rap songs.

For some people, it will doubtless work swimmingly. And even though I'm less enthusiastic about it, I also know this won't be the last screen word on Fitzgerald's words. There've been five film Gatsbys already — the first of them silent and in black and white.

And with film techniques forever changing, maybe someday — maybe with holograms — someone will figure out how to make this great (and supposedly unfilmable) American novel into the great American film.

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Mom's X-Ray Vision Also Sees The Best In Us

Mothers somehow know when we've been bad, but when times are tough, they also have our back.

iStockphoto.com Mothers somehow know when we've been bad, but when times are tough, they also have our back.

iStockphoto.com

Mothers have eyes in the back of their heads. They may not show up on X-rays, but they're there.

Like a lot of youngsters, I used to get my mother to turn her head so I could search through her hair for the eyeballs she claimed to have back there, telling her, "No you don't! No you don't!" But when I'd scamper off to another part of the apartment and pick up an ashtray or fiddle with the window blinds, I'd hear my mother's voice ring out, "I can see you! I know what you're up to!"

Mothers seem to see not only what we're up to, but also what a pediatrician may have missed, or what a teacher doesn't understand. I'm not sure that I believe in intuition, but I devoutly believe that mothers have eyes in the back of their heads.

Mothers possess singular vision. They can look at what the rest of the world may see as a sullen, snarling teenager and view them, through some other set of eyes, as the infant they used to carry and cuddle, the child who babbled on their lap and laughed, and the person they're sure we're struggling to become.

Mothers don't always think we're right. In fact, they know better — better than anyone. No one has heard more of our cunning excuses. But mothers are the ones who remember our tears and nightmares. Mothers can always see through to our innocence.

Lots of us look at a child's finger painting and profess to recognize a burgeoning Picasso in the smears and thumbprints (maybe Picasso's mother saw Renoir in young Pablo's pictures). But mothers never stop seeing the Picasso in us — the promise of potential — even if we've disappointed or squandered it. Seeing that promise in their eyes can fortify us when we're disheartened.

To be sure, mothers also see just where they can sting us when they want to. My hair is now more gray — excuse me, silver — than my mother's. I'm not sure how she's managed that. But when I told her not long ago that I was proud of my silvering hair, she asked, "Is it supposed to make me proud, too?" Yeow.

The eyes that mothers have in the back of their head see their children at all ages, all at once. It is the special vision of mothers, and I've never gotten a better bit of advice — about the news business, art or life — then when my mother would see someone panhandling on the street, or unshaven and mumbling on the subway, and tell me, "Remember: They were once a baby that a mother loved."

That special vision makes mothers our advocates for life. Everyone should have one.

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'Venus And Serena': Champs Atop Their Game

Serena Williams (left) and her sister Venus Williams in action during their first-round doubles match on Day 2 at Wimbledon in 2010.

Hamish Blair/Getty Images via Magnolia Pictures

Venus and Serena

Rated PG-13 for some strong language

With: Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Oracene Price, Richard Williams, Anna Wintour, Chris Rock, Billie Jean King, John McEnroe

What's left to know about Venus and Serena Williams? Probably not much that the tennis titans would be willing to share, given how heavily exposed they've been already, and how eager the press has been to wedge the sisters into ready-made narratives about race, celebrity and the daughters of a Svengali.

The lively if slightly worshipful new documentary Venus and Serena breaks little new ground in this regard. And maybe it doesn't matter, given the size of the personalities who leap out of the well-rehearsed, up-from-Compton tale of two sisters who took a white, upper-middle-class sport by the ears and shook it hard on their own terms.

For that part, producer-directors Maiken Baird and Michelle Major rely heavily on well-known news footage, sprinkled with commentary from celebrities like Bill Clinton, John McEnroe and Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who say pretty much what you'd expect them to say about the sisters' agile grace and disciplined professionalism under pressure.

Comedian Chris Rock nails the sisters' boisterously uncompromising personal style and pride in their race: "Their braids are not country-club black," he says. "They are black-black."

In part that sense of self and heritage, so evident when the Williams women exploded onto the tennis scene in their early teens, comes from the flamboyant father who, for better and worse, shaped their careers. Born into abject poverty in Louisiana, Richard Williams moved to Los Angeles and built his own security company before devoting himself to shaping a gold-plated career for his daughters. We see him admit in a television interview to not being terribly interested in tennis for its own sake.

"I wanted for both of them to become No. 1 in the world," he says, grinning. That worked out pretty well, but Venus and Serena is also long on the details of how Williams supported, protected, bullied and prodded his two girls into becoming champions.

Barely into adolescence in footage dating back to the early '90s, the girls seem none the worse for the intense, unorthodox training regimen their father put them through, which included ballet, jazz and throwing rackets (and, later, pole-dancing), in addition to the rigors imposed by a fleet of top-tier coaches, none more demanding than Richard himself.

A serial womanizer who fathered so many kids that one sister can't remember all their names on camera, Richard makes for great copy. But Baird and Major also scored interviews with the Williams sisters and other family members, and Venus and Serena is most compelling as a portrait of domestic solidarity. Given the possibilities for friction in a clan divided by parentage, talent, wealth distribution, and the loss of one sister in a Compton shooting, that's either pretty astonishing or a diplomatic gloss on the Williams family's internal politics.

Certainly they come across as an intensely loyal gang. Long divorced from Richard, Venus and Serena's mother, Oracene, remains central to their lives and careers, and the source of their faith as Jehovah's Witnesses. We see her patiently seeing off idiotic questions from a reporter about "grunting" on the court, and commenting delightedly on the several women who co-exist within Serena — including a homegirl they call Taquanda, who periodically emerges to yell at recalcitrant umpires.

There's unqualified support from sisters and half-sisters unfazed by an interviewer's attempt to draw them out on the question of bloodlines and conflict. "We're black," says Venus and Serena's older sister Isha, firmly. "We don't do that."

As for Venus and Serena themselves, they seem as tight as two peas in a pod, which is remarkable for siblings compelled by their careers to be partners and rivals all at the same time. Romantic attachments come and go, but Venus and Serena are essentially a couple who live together, work out together, play together and, to judge by this film, would rather spend time in each other's company than be with anyone else. Together they have somehow figured out how to overcome the fact that Serena, a force of nature who has taken her father's competitive aggression more fully onboard than has her older sister — has achieved more success on the court.

Venus and Serena focuses mainly on the 2011 tennis season, when both were recovering from serious illnesses: Serena suffered a pulmonary embolism, while Venus was diagnosed with Sjogren's syndrome. Despite all this, and the fact that the two have hit their early 30s, their astonishing "comebacks" separately and together at Wimbledon and the Olympics make for a triumphalist ending any sports documentarian would pray for.

That's fun, and watching the sisters' beauty and casual physical grace on and off the court is always a trip. Yet some will come away thinking that the Williams family has grown so skilled at managing their public image that perhaps no filmmaker will ever get between the cracks.

Me, I wanted to know what these two remarkable young women will obsess about once the whole world has stopped watching, whether they will always be together — and what it would really feel like to be one of their much less famous siblings. We'll probably never know, except in someone else's future fiction feature.

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The Movie Mark McKinney Has 'Seen A Million Times'

Writer-comedian Mark McKinney's favorite scene from My Neighbor Totoro.

The weekends on All Things Considered series Movies I've Seen A Million Times features filmmakers, actors, writers and directors talking about the movies that they never get tired of watching.

Writer-comedian Mark McKinney's credits include the TV shows Slings and Arrows, Kids In The Hall and Less Than Kind — currently airing on HBO Canada. The movie he could watch a million times is Hayao Miyazaki's anime film, My Neighbor Totoro.

Writer-comedian Mark McKinney.

George Pimentel/Getty Images

On what he thought when he first saw My Neighbor Totoro

"My first impression of the film was that it just took such care with setting up the world."

On why the scene with Totoro at the bus stop is his favorite

"It's a fantastically wonderful wild-mind moment, and you know it doesn't really follow any story, there's no particular reason for it, but it's there to bond the kids to Totoro, and it just works beautifully. And before you know it, that's completely sucked you into the story, and that's what all of Miyazaki's movies do for me."

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Sandwich Monday: Tamale Spaceship

NPR

Chicago's Tamale Spaceship food truck happened to land near our office this Sandwich Monday. We considered it our duty as hungry earthlings to eat as many tamales as it takes to ensure we're never called up for NASA's astronaut program.

The tamale heroes who run Tamale Spaceship wear Mexican wrestling masks. They do this to intimidate you into spending $4 on a single tamale and to protect themselves from flying tamale debris.

Object larger than it appears (Ian has giant hands).

NPR Object larger than it appears (Ian has giant hands).

NPR

Miles: I think an entire fleet of Tamale Spaceships could reignite American interest in the space program.

Robert: Houston, we have a cholesterol problem.

Miles: One small step for man, one giant leap for pant sizes.

Eva: I was a little offended when I went to space after eating one of these and there was still gravity.

NPR

Mike: I hope in space, someone can hear me ask for more.

Robert: Major Tom would have a hard time stepping out of his capsule if he were aboard the Tamale Spaceship.

Mike: Yeah, Hal would totally open the pod bay doors for these guys.

Eva: I think they have to count down from 10,000 to lift this spaceship off the ground.

Tamales are a lot like bananas, except better because they're tamales.

NPR

Miles: This is a clear rip-off of my chain of Schnitzel Submarines.

Eva: The pork one is delicious. I'm not sure how I feel about the one filled with losers from the last big wrestling match.

Robert: If I could surround all my food in masa I'd die happy. And I'd be dead right now.

[The verdict: Four dollars per tamale is steep, but that's about 1/1 millionth of what it costs to go to space as a space tourist. So consider it a good deal. Also, they're enormous.]

Sandwich Monday is a satirical feature from the humorists at Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me.

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