Blast!

I feel like I've been writing too much about films I didn't care for, so I'm happy to get back to the tail end of my Hot Docs experience with a review of a documentary that does everything right. Blast!, directed by Paul Devlin, takes an unlikely topic - an astrophysics research project - and turns it into an adventure tale with twists and turns, lively characters, and some lessons about, um... life, the universe and everything.

The film documents a project to launch a balloon into the upper atmosphere with a telescope powerful enough to see into the far corners of the universe. Why a balloon? It's way cheaper than building another Hubble. It also happens to be fun - a kind of hands-on Popular Mechanics project, but with a lot more money and probably a few academic careers at stake. Why do this? Well, the scientists - the director's brother, Mark Devlin, and a Toronto cosmologist named Barth Netterfield - are looking for answers to a few simple questions: how the universe began, how stars are created, how life came to be... basic things like that.

All this sounds like an episode of Nova, of interest to science geeks only. But unlike the makers of The Singing Revolution, Devlin understands a few things about storytelling: building strong characters, having a solid story arc, and stripping down complex ideas to the bare essentials the audience needs to know. This is not a film about space science, though along the way we actually learn a few things about cosmology; it's a film about the thirst for knowledge, ingenuity, obsessiveness, and humans' attempts to know - and control - nature. And of course nature will not be controlled: if the weather doesn't cooperate, the team's very expensive telescope is just so much twisted metal, and years of work go down the drain.

Devlin's two project leaders and their graduate students are drinking from some kind of mysterious well of enthusiasm and optimism (I want to know where this well is located). In the first ten minutes of the film, a crash in Sweden wrecks the telescope's very expensive lens. But the scientists rebuild and start again, this time in Antarctica. Wisely, Devlin sticks with the character-based story, and keeps bringing in the personal, such as his brother Mark's long months away from home, and the effect of this on his young family. At the same time, he keeps a tight rein on the scientific jargon: most of the interviews end up in voiceover, which suggests there was a lot of editing of abstruse interview clips about the science. We learn why the scientists want to look at the universe and what they hope to learn, but we don't get bogged down in the suble differences between dark matter and dark energy.

Ultimately, Devlin lucks out, and the scientists face obstacle after obstacle on their quest to launch the telescope and catch it when it comes down. But it's the character-driven approach that guarantees that we care whether they succeed.

Here's a problem that's inherent in this kind of film, though: scientific progress is slow and incremental, which is not exactly conducive to a satisfying climax. In the end, Blast! feels kind of anti-climactic -- the result of all this hard work is a small advance for other scientists to build on. For an audience accustomed to the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, this may feel flat. But Blast! is a great window on the world of pure science, where progress is often measured not in light years but in nanometres.

Errol Morris's First Person

I've been out of town; hence no posts for a few days. Because my flights were relatively short, I took along Errol Morris's First Person series, figuring it would be easier to get through a few half-hour episodes than to try to watch a feature-length doc bit-by-bit.

Morris is one of my favourite filmmakers, largely on the strength of The Fog of War, his biographical film about Robert McNamara, the Vietnam-War-era U.S. Secretary of Defense. That film is essentially a 100-minute interview with McNamara, cut with a mix of archival footage and whimsical images created by Morris. The interview is a dance between McNamara and Morris, who is occasionally heard off-camera, asking a question or challenging McNamara's answer. To me, The Fog of War is one of the great examples of the art of the interview.

First Person ran on the U.S. Bravo channel for 17 episodes around 2000-01, presumably while Morris was between Mr. Death and Fog of War. It's a series of interviews, conducted and shot in the signature Morris style, using his Interrotron contraption, a floating camera, and lots of jump cuts, as well as the requisite Morrissian illustrative shots and archival images. Judging by the four episodes I watched, it's a great example of a doc filmmaker parlaying his creative success into a money-making venture that keeps the rent paid and a few people employed. Occasionally, it reaches a level of deep weirdness that encourages second viewing, but as in most series, the formula usually takes precedence over the subject.

Of the episodes I watched, by far the strangest was Sondra London, a serial dater of serial killers. Morris's camera lingers over her creepy face as she talks lovingly of her jailed paramour-du-jour, known elsewhere as the Gainsville Ripper. We don't learn much here, but watching this woman is a deeply voyeuristic experience. She's a profoundly disturbed nutbar, but how can you not put her on TV?

Another episode engages us on a higher plane. Clyde Roper is a marine biologist who's on a lifelong quest to find and study the semi-mythical giant squid. He's a great storyteller and a serious scientist, as well a charming eccentric - the kind of scientist who performs well on CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks. He also sounds like he could have been an alternate for Morris's Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and perhaps he was. He and Morris clearly have a rapport, and you get the feeling he could easily carry a full-length doc.

I don't have much to say about the other two episodes I watched - famed autistic animal-behaviour expert Temple Grandin, and grandstanding lawyer Andrew Cappocia. In both cases, the show feels formulaic - the former because I just don't find Grandin especially compelling (though the shots of Grandin getting into her, um... hug machine certainly add some weirdness), the latter because the guy's a big self-promoter who doesn't back up his claims and delivers nothing but schtick (turns out, he ended up going to jail).

So, in the end, does the series work? Yes and no. It's a diverting way to spend a half-hour, and Morris's schtick is certainly a lot better than most. His well-practiced tricks - both his interviewing style and his use of images - work pretty well. But I can't help but feel that the series doesn't quite rise above radio with pictures.