Movie Details
| Title: | A Brief History of Time | |
| Director: | Errol Morris | |
| Year: | 1991 | |
| Genre: | Documentary | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.28.21 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (5)
- The Dark Wind
- Standard Operating Procedure
- Tabloid
- The Thin Blue Line
- The Unknown Known
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.28.21 | Blu-ray | This Screening is part of event: DVRfest 2021 Criterion movie 5. Switching to a d12 since the pool is down to that many: 11. The dice rolled incredibly high all day!. Spine #699. In a way, this is a great late night movie. The Philip Glass score and Hawking's "voice" combined with Morris' unique documentary style makes for this meditative almost hypnotic vibe. I definitely fell asleep. You know, in a way... this is a great matinee movie. A bunch of very intelligent British academics talking in polite tones about Hawking's life, black holes, the nature of time, and a unified theory of the universe make for a very pleasant daytime experience. I very much like Errol Morris' "early" work and this was the one that always slipped through the cracks. I kinda thought it would be a dense head-scratcher with a bunch of close-ups of Hawking's face and voice-over. While it does have that visual style (along with trademark Morris beautiful abstract photography of things like teacups and clocks and whatnot), there's a surprising amount of interview footage from all manner of other people (none of which are identified on screen) to portray both the biographical stuff and the astrophysics stuff in a much more understandable and relatable way. So really this is just prime Morris which is a treat to get to see for the first time. An early statement stuck with me: that Hawking chose to study theoretical stuff because he had slacked off and didn't know many facts. Pretty funny, even in computer synthesizer voice. This really works on two levels. For one, there's the heady stuff that Hawking's book is about which is supremely ponderable and fun to think about, but then there's also the concept of Hawking himself, a genius brain perhaps trapped or perhaps formed by his ALS. How that limitation might unlock other areas, further limits of what the human body and brain are capable of... is also very interesting to think about. So any time whenever these Cambridge eggheads lose you, you can always fall back to "geez! Can you imagine doing all of this without being able to write anything down!?" Overall I liked this very much. I should look for Morris' later work... give his Netflix show another chance. |
