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Thursday, May 28, 2015

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

‘Tomorrowland’ 
builds to failure

By JAMIE BIRCOLL

Senior Arts Editor

I can say this for “Tomorrow-

land”: it gets an A for effort.

When a film like this falls short 

of both audience 
expectations and 
its 
own 
goals, 

it’s a small mis-
fortune. 
There 

are so few films 
today, 
family-

friendly or oth-
erwise, that are 
wholly 
original 

and creative and 
carry 
messages 

both inspiring and meaningful. 
“Tomorrowland” wants to be one 
of those films, and for roughly 
two-thirds of its runtime, it very 
nearly gets there. But, plagued by 
a poorly conceived and even more 
poorly executed third act and 30 
minutes of unnecessary runtime, 
what begins as an homage to won-
der and innovation devolves into a 
cross between “An Inconvenient 
Truth” and the worst James Bond 
movie imaginable. 

Our story follows high school 

student Casey Newton (Britt Rob-
ertson, “The Longest Ride”), the 
daughter of a NASA engineer and 
a genius in her own right. Sci-
ence and ingenuity run in Casey’s 
blood; ever the optimist, she 
believes innovation can fix a world 
beset by global warming, the 
threat of nuclear extermination 
and various other dour subjects 
she learns about in school. Chosen 
to join the ranks of Tomorrow-
land, Casey sets off on a journey 
to get there, along the way meet-
ing Frank (George Clooney, “The 
Monuments Men”), a former resi-
dent of Tomorrowland and the 
pessimist to Casey’s optimist.

The bulk of the film consists 

of backstory and the journey to 
Tomorrowland, 
which 
actually 

proves rather entertaining, almost 
like a more kid-friendly (but no less 
dangerous) and futuristic version 
of “Indiana Jones.” Director Brad 
Bird (“Mission Impossible: Ghost 
Protocol”) creates tense action 
without sacrificing clarity, and the 
camera moves freely throughout 
the sets, creating a great sense of 
space and openness. Of particu-

lar note is one breathtaking, long 
tracking shot that follows Casey 
through Tomorrowland. 

But the film breaks the ever-

important “show, don’t tell” rule 
and suffers as a result. “Tomor-
rowland” is hounded by lengthy 
exposition that eventually resorts 
to preachy diatribes about hope 
and belief in a world on the verge of 
darkness. Of course, a monologue 
here or there does no damage, but 
“Tomorrowland” shoots for pro-
found and ends, unfortunately, in 
slog several times over. 

Blame rests in the screenplay — 

co-writers Bird and Damon Lin-
delof (TV’s “Lost”) invest so much 
time in crafting an engaging and 
exciting setup that they end up 
with a half-assed, very forced third 
act and expect us to settle for it. 
Further, something gets lost in the 
fact that the true villain turns out 
to be humanity’s own folly, igno-
rance and pessimism, rather than 
someone or something tangible.

Thus the tragedy of the film: 

Everything so very nearly works. 
Clooney and Robertson have great 
chemistry and play off each other 
nicely. The camerawork is top 
notch, the special effects equally 
so. Everything works except this 
one, very big, very important third 
act.

And “Tomorrowland” ‘s inten-

tions are so admirable; it’s that 
much harder to accept its failure. 
As far as blockbusters go, we live 
in a world of sequels, in which cit-
ies are destroyed, and superhero 
flicks, in which cities are destroyed. 
“Tomorrowland” is the first film 
I’ve seen in a long time about build-
ing rather than breaking. It’s the 
kind of movie Spielberg might’ve 
directed 30 years ago, a film some-
where between “E.T.” and “AI.” It’s 
hard to be mad at that.

But good intentions don’t make 

good endings (or movies in gen-
eral). Maybe that’s to be expected 
from the guy who created “Lost.”

C+

Tomorrow-
land

Walt Disney 
Pictures

Rave 20 & 
Quality 16

MOVIE REVIEW

More than just a journal

On the necessity of 
written, narcissistic 

notebooks

By CATHERINE SULPIZIO

Senior Arts Editor

Notebooks are rarely treated well 

in my care — hoarded away until I 
record a few clusters of airy, beau-
tiful words, then unceremoniously 
discarded far before my scrawl 
reaches their last leaves. Mostly, 
this is because my writing oscillates 
between loose and undisciplined 
workmanship (and penmanship) 
and clenched knots of taut words. 
This rhythm cannot sustain, so I 
abandon the project.

Occasionally I’ll flip through 

an old notebook. But in the day of 
screens, of articles, of epistolary 
communication, of writing (we can 
write an essay, submit it and have it 
returned spider-webbed with edits 
without ever pressing that increas-
ingly un-pressed “print” icon), it’s 
harder to extrapolate what I meant 
from that foreign hand — at least 
compared to the uniform type of 
Cambria, font 12.

An inherited perfectionism grav-

itates to the Word document, which 
contains the pen’s boldness and 
the pencil’s irresolution. The Word 
document’s most attractive feature: 
on a blankly expectant page, that 
blinking cursor that promises to 
efface all trace of uncertainty, all 
mistake. By surgical precision of 
that wand, the polished sentence is 
turned out by the Word machine. 
You see no proof of the 50 back-
spaces per line, the itinerary of side 
trips to the thesaurus, the smudged 
corners of a read, re-read and read 
again paper.

By the same turn, though, this 

pangs as a loss, probably because we 
have loaded in us a desperate and 
corrective urge to preserve what we 
can in the age of crystalline screens. 
In paperless culture, we ache for the 
mess of paper to remind us, if not of 
something as grand as our human-
ity, at least our rough margins.

If writing on Word represents 

the Hegelian arc of progress, with 
each antithetical deletion molding 
its rhetorical bearings into the qua 
sentence, this means foundational 
changes are harder to muster. With-
out record, each blow to the struc-
ture may prove that the center will 
not hold — and the rubble is irrecov-

erable (hence my neurotic impulse 
to copy and paste sections onto sep-
arate documents until it is scattered 
piecemeal through my computer).

But writing in a notebook is for 

anchoring those flits of brilliance 
firmly onto a page, without care 
of organization. We jot, scribble, 
very rarely compose. To write in 
a notebook is to force yourself to 
abandon the project of Writing with 
a capital W and instead become a 
scribe to your mind, to take down 
all its tyrannical interruptions and 
detours. Where a typed document 
circumscribes the id’s creative 
fancy within a careful line of attack, 
the notebook lets it lope across the 
college-ruled lines. The Word docu-
ment is just that — a document — a 
feat of logical determination that 
demands to be read.

The 
unreadability 
of 
other 

people’s musings — their chicken 
scratch, their questionable syn-
tax, their strange fixations — is the 
notebook’s ultimate defense against 
literary legacy. And concomitant 
with puzzles of the psyche is the 
notebook’s fixation on mundane, 
of which the sentimental value 
belongs only to the writer. We imag-
ine the lurid confessions other peo-
ple’s journals must contain, while 
ours also simply logs, as mine does, 
that last 30th of May I was “sitting 
outside Babo, after I flirted again 
with that cute coffee guy.”

Or the trajectory of prior rela-

tionships, which my journal fol-
lows via a predictable through line 
of preliminary excitement, then 
intimacy-cum-complacency, before 
inevitable spates of verbal violence 
broken up by boredom. Reading 
accounts of my relationships does 
little to rekindle old desire. Rather, 
it is with a detached and anthropo-
logical curiosity that I fall into the 
pages. All that passion feels sterile 
now, like a preserved part of me 
before it was inoculated by time and 
further experience.

But it does remind me that the 

twinges of immediacy aren’t des-
tined to reverberate endlessly into 
the future, or even be folded neatly 
into an essay, but perhaps just be 
filed away in the cluttered archives 
of an old journal. Stresses like an 
unfound internship, triumphs like 
a terrific Bloody Mary finally found 
lose their gleam under an inch of 
dust. If there is a retrospective pay-
off to the journal, it is to show that 
this — yes, that — shall pass.

Mostly, though, the journal’s 

worth is found in its current under-
taking. In a health-centric culture 
where recreation doubles as self-
improvement, journaling is often 
labeled as therapeutic. Yet this 
imposes a wholesome utilitarianism 
onto an act whose definitive trait is 
unapologetic self-indulgence, even 
narcissism. Take lists, which are a 
reccurring feature in my journals. 
What I ate last night: gluten-free 
pizza (heirloom tomatoes, mozza-
rella, basil from our garden), salad 
(shaved zucchini, lemon and olive 
oil, basil, pine nuts), beer (Magic 
Hat). What I wore to the airport: 
leotard (black), white eyelet shirt, 
shorts (vintage, Levis), tan sandals 
(to show off my new pedicure).

All together, these notebook 

lists comport the girl I like to think 
I am. After all, it’s a flattering 
gaze, visualizing ourselves by dis-
crete attributes, which both reveal 
everything and abstract us into 
conglomerates of products. I am 
the type of person who wears pastel 
ballet flats with an oxford cloth but-
ton down and drinks a small black 
coffee. The truth lies somewhere in 
the middle; we are neither a com-
pendium of attributes nor describ-
able by one fluid stroke.

But the notebook invites us to 

imagine our lives are worthy of 
analysis, allows us to transform 
our daily routine into pattern — of 
which presumably some grand and 
imaginary statistician will pore 
over. Taking down the details of my 
day is playing director for my own 
movie: fishhooks of wisdom that 
have latched onto my skin, lines 
of poetry, warm recounts of sunny 
days. I don’t write on the ugly days, 
and if I do it tends to be short and 
ominous (“so-and-so didn’t text 
and I feel February looming”).

What I think is that we jour-

nal in case there is no God’s-eye 
surveillance, in case our closests 
aren’t turning their careful scru-
tiny to us (they aren’t), and so 
that the fascinating trivia of our 
life doesn’t languish unacknowl-
edged. By putting pen to paper, 
we draw ourselves from the slip-
stream of day-to-day life, which 
can churn days into weeks and 
weeks into months of rote rou-
tine. Writing quells those lapses 
in meta-awareness. Like a mirror 
facing a mirror, the mind’s con-
siderations on itself can echo into 
infinity. Eventually, though, your 
hand starts to cramp. 

COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

Blame rests in 
the screenplay