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Review: K-PAX
There is at least one new twist at least in this tattered story line. Spacey's Prot, a visitor from the planet K-PAX, is a healing alien. Picked up by the police after a mugging in New York City, Spacey is - of course - not believed when he says he's from outer space and is tossed into a psychiatric hospital for a month. He tells the skeptical Bridges (Dr. Mark Powers) that he's from another planet. He has no mission, he's just traveling, curious about the odd and destructive behavior of humans and the high quality of their produce.
Powers doesn't believe him at first -- all of his fellow patients instantly believe naturally -- but then becomes curious as Prot proves impervious to even the most powerful anti-psychotic drugs, astonishes astrophysicists with his knowledge of far away solar systems, and begins healing deranged patients who've been confined for years.
Powers brings Prot to his house, with curious results that set the shrink off on a not very believable mission to New Mexico that he hopes will tell him who Prot really is. Along the way, the doc has the battle the usual assortment of impatient, cost-conscious and cynical bureaucrats.
Prot isn't worried about what any human thinks. He blithely insists to his captors that he's soon to head home on a beam of light to a planet where family is both unknown and unnecessary, and that he will take one person -- probably a fellow patient -- with him. This has particular resonance for Dr. Powers, who seems not to notice his gorgeous wife or adorable kids. But Prot's utter, unrelenting cool leaves us detached from the movie as well as him.
Spacey is so ironic and low-key it seems he might well be from another solar system. He has played this kind of ironic character a bit too often, and Prot doesn't come close to the blow-out portrayal of Lester Burnham's suburban bust-up in American Beauty.But tension does build as we get curious about whether he is really an alien or not, and whether or not he will go back to K-PAX. (Also whether Powers will notice his wife and what's-really-important-in-life.)
The ending turns out to be the most inventive part of the movie. It's actually quite ingenuous, leaving people wondering about what they really saw and ought to conclude from it. This is one of those very rare endings that a dozen people can see and draw completely different conclusions from.
And K-PAX is a particularly relevant movie this week, since one of its themes is that we ought to appreciate life while we can. It's pleasant and soothing.
The movie is a cute flick, but it is heavy on the dreamy musical scenes and light on a real story.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I'm not buying it; he's the Starman!.
Then again, this is the same director that brought us Angelina Jolie as a l33th4x0r.
I saw this movie last night and absolutely loved it. The imagery was so visually intoxicating that I couldn't peal my eyes from the screne. My take on the ending: Prot used Robert's body to actually walk and talk, etc. IE. the form of the soap bubble. Since Prot could sense UV light and had way too much information about the solar system, he could not have just been a super-savant.
In the end when all the mental patients said that the person on gurney was not Prot was a bit confusing, and the fact that Bess did disapear is interesting.
However, Robert could have just gone crazy. Robert as a child could have spent countless hours staring into a clear new mexico sky observing and calculating etc. The eye test could have been a mistake or after the near drowning, his eyes could have become very sensative to light, although I doubt sensative to UV.
All in all - very interesting. I won't lie tho, I just love Kevin Spacy.
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I thought K-PAX was a great movie. Compared to the crap I saw this summer, I left thoroughly impressed. What this review leaves out is how funny this movie is. I was laughing all throughout the movie and so was the audience.
One comment I had to make was on this quote:
"Spacey's Prot, a visitor from the planet K-PAX, is a healing alien".
Well not really, he can just see what human treatment leaves out. He never intended to end up in some psychiatric board to help the patients out. He doesn't have some special designation that he is a healing alien. He can just see things differently.
The rest of the article is pretty accurate. K-PAX has been getting different reviews, many good, some bad. But go see it your self. I highly suggest seeing the movie, you won't regret it.
I found the secret of life! But forgot to write it down...
I like how in the preview he says that K-Pax is X of *your* light years away. As if light years was some peculiarly human measurement.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I disagree about the ending. It seemed like a ham-handed way to make people think it's ambiguous, but by that point in the movie, I didn't really care any more.
<SPOILER>
I thought this was going to turn into a cool story about a person so traumatized by events in his family that he fantasized about a planet without families.
I thought we had been given clues to this: for instance, if he has to leave at a certain time because of the scheduling of interstellar travel, then why is he leaving exactly five earth years after he arrived? Does everyone in the universe schedule their travel based on earth time?
However, instead of turning and facing this head-on, they took the easy road and left it ambiguous.
They could have used the ambiguity in Spacey's character as a way to explore various themes about human nature; but instead, that ambiguity itself is pretty much all there is to this movie.
Incidentally, Spacey's performance was great. During the hypnosis, he has to portray a wide variety of characters, and he does it very convincingly.
</SPOILER>
In short, K-PAX is nothing but a premise: is he an alien or not? I don't need to sit in a theatre for two hours to grasp that premise.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
During the credits the theater turned up the lights, so I couldn't read them very well. Nor could I really tell what happened after the credits ended and they showed about 15 more seconds of someone (Bridges?) doing something.
What was it?
(The theater claimed it was a MD state law that they had to turn on the lights when people start leaving. I don't know how long they have been doing it, I hadn't seen new movies in MD for a while...and I may decide never to again!)
The only thing I'm wondering about this movie, after seeing the commercials with Spacey reading an animals mind, is whether or not this is another stupid 'extraordinary human/alien does corny magic tricks for audience' movie. When's the last time a movie with any mention of aliens, portrayed them in any sort of psychological way? If I were to believe hollywood, I would say that most alien lifeforms are pretentious freaks who should be immediately enslaved and forced to serve as interpreters to more interesting species; such as dolphins. What movie bothers to explain how or why most alien life has been given the powers of superman? Or how their superior minds somehow overcame the violent tendencies they charge us with; instincts that would've initially been necessary for the survival of their species (evolution is a dangerous road). Anyway, enough rambling. A good alien movie would be 90% exploration of life and culture on an alien planet, with the final 10% showing the arrival of freakish humans in a roving '4-wheeler'.
Although there is a good deal of ambiguitity some things are quite set.
- Prot can see ultraviolet light. Humans cannot see ultraviolet light. Thus, Prot is not human. While Prot inhabited the body of Robert, he had access to special abilities. These abilties didn't stay with Robert once Prot left.
- Prot had astronomical knowledge that would have been impossible without him being from K-PAX. The suggestions given in the movie were that he looked it up (it hadn't been published), he was a savant (he didn't have access to the necessary equipment), or even that he was a missing astrophysicist (he would have been recognized by his colleagues).
So it is nearly certain than an alien (Prot) was present in Robert's body until he left for K-PAX. It is extremely unlikely that Prot actually was Robert since near the end Prot spoke as if he was not Robert and he showed no signs of ever lying throughout the movie.
So while his motivations for coming in the first place or returning can be debated, it does seem to be a fact that Prot was alien.
carbonite
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
I was looking around on amazon.com and noticed that Gene Brewer, who wrote the K-PAX novel, already has written a sequel named On a Beam of Light . There's an excerpt there also, but if you havent seen or read K-PAX yet, stay away, since it will spoil the ending.
A buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says ``Make me one with everything.''
I hate to beat up a Katz review...(well, no, not really.), but I have to wonder what qualifies him as a movie reviewer? Bad grammar, inaccuracies, and the like seem to say "Hey, don't take this seriously."
...and begins healing deranged patients who've been confined for years.
:)
Spacey's Prot, a visitor from the planet K-PAX, is a healing alien.
No, he's not. He even states that every being in the universe is capable of healing itself.
Picked up by the police after a mugging in New York City
...a mugging in which he did not participate...
He tells the skeptical Bridges (Dr. Mark Powers)
This is probably over-analyzing semantics, but prot doesn't tell Bridges jack shit. The actor's real name belongs in the parenthesis, while the character's name - in this case, Dr. Mark Powell is the person with whom prot is conversing.
Again, he doesn't heal them. He merely shows them the path to heal themselves.
Powers brings Prot to his house, with curious results that set the shrink off on a not very believable mission to New Mexico that he hopes will tell him who Prot really is.
I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean.
This is one of those very rare endings that a dozen people can see and draw completely different conclusions from.
That just proves that the Katz writing style is sophomoric at best.
Anyway, K-PAX is a great movie. prot (Kevin Spacey) is taken to a Psychiatric institute after having told New York police officers how bright the light is on Earth. Early in the movie, prot is introduced to Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges) who takes an immediate interest in his case. Eventually, prot has Powell, the staff of the institute, fellow patients, and top astrologers totally puzzled as to his true identity.
K-PAX is said to lie about a thousand light-years from Earth (within the constellation Lira), and is where prot calls home. This story is obviously met with a certain amount of skepticism from the people of Earth, and the point of the movie is to work through that skepticism. By the end, the audience will draw vastly different conclusions regarding the story's ending, and it is these conclusions that give insight into each person's individuality.
(Oh, and "prot" isn't supposed to be capitalized. That's how it works on K-PAX.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
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It makes sense to me why he would have to leave x number of years to the day and minute. Perhaps his beam of light has to wait until the Earth is realigned with whatever light-path he took? So it must take 5 revolutions around the sun for his lightpath to reconnect to K-Pax. Just a thought :-)
>>Does everyone in the universe schedule their travel based on earth time?
Prot can see ultraviolet light. Humans cannot see ultraviolet light. Thus, Prot is not human.
Actually, it's my understanding that humans can see ultraviolet if they've had their lenses removed, for instance if they've had cataract surgery. The trick is that the lens has a slight yellowish cast to it that filters UV.
It's said that during WWII, OSS parachute drops were made to targets laid out with UV beacons, using post-cataract-surgery spotters.
As far as K-Pax goes, this is another nail in the idea that an alien could take over a human and see in UV; the requisite wavelengths wouldn't even reach the retina.
In the wrong hands, sanity is a dangerous weapon.
I know Kevin Spacey and Robin Williams play different types of personalities, but does Jeff Bridges' character come to the same sort of realizations as he did in The Fisher King.
"I see. The fact that you . . . can't explain . . . explains everything."
Actually, human blue photoreceptors can detect into the ultra-violet. The human lens is U.V. opaque (and slowly clouds up over a lifetime of absorbing ionising U.V. radiation). If you replace the human lens with a U.V. transparent artificial one, you can see into the U.V. range.
No, this doesn't explain the U.V. abilities of Prot, but it's interesting anyway.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
"The idea that lunatics in asylums are the only really sane people in this crazy world has become a staple of American movies, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Girl Interrupted to K-PAX , a surreal, at-times-charming and curiously detached psychological drama starring Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges about the complex relationship between a self-proclaimed alien and an alienated psychiatrist."
The idea that the above is a major run on sentence, in which absurd claims are made to support what Katz seems to think is a clever idea, when in fact the idea is ludicrous at best, might tend to go overlooked because one is so busy trying to figure out if this guy ever saw a single film or play in which he didn't see correlations between things that clearly have none, not to mention his tendency to see everything in terms of Technology and Nerds
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
>Hey, if we are gonna speak english with the
...shaking his head because he said "let's be realistic" in this discussion...
>Poontangians, they are going to have something
>other than miles and years to deal with. There
>will be conversion tables, presumably, but if we
>have any intimacy with these people, they won't
>say "your miles" and "your light-years."
>The "your" is redundant.
Not necessarily.
While they may not measure distance in miles, or time in years, "light year" DOES mean "the distance light travels in the time it takes the Earth to make one orbit of the Sun".
Hence, their home planet WILL have an equivalent measurement, it may just not be one measured in a "year" or "miles".
But there WILL be a unit equal to the distance light travels in the time it takes THEIR planet (Poontangia? When's the next flight?) to make one orbit of THEIR sun.
Hence, "your light-year" is correct. "Their light-year" will be more or less (well, there's a CHANCE it's not, but let's be realistic...), but the unit DOES exist.
-l
Well, you DID mention that we would be communicating in English. I'm unaware of any English dialect that uses "narr" and "theqq" for "light" and "year", but IANAL (linguist).
Hence, their narr-theqq would translate to light-year. Your and their would have to be used to designate which concept we're referring to.
Sure, if we use the native terms of narr-theqq and light-year distinctly from each other, the "your" and "their" would be unnecessary, but if we're translating into our own native languages, as you clearly stated, the "your" and "their" would be required.
Get it?
-l
he could see ultra violet, remember? That's pretty unambiguous evidence that he's from K-PAX (or at least SOME other planet). There was the stuff about him being immune to the drugs and disappearing for 3 days to go up north too. But just the ultra violet part should be enough to take any ambiguity out of the movie, right?
>Or we could just stick to parsecs.
Wait, would those be our parsecs or..
Oh, nevermind.
[grin]
-l
>Come to think of it, all units of distance are ``completely artificial''
There's got to be a unit of [ distance / time / mass / volume ] we can devise that's not completely artificial in the sense that it can be used to meaningfully measure something across cultural (even planetary or galactic) boundaries.
Mass would be the trickiest, I would assume, since we base it on the effect local gravity has upon the object being measured.
Our time is based upon local planetary cycles, so becomes largely meaningles to someone with a longer or shorter orbit around their local star. However, on a non-physical communication medium (radio, microwave, laser) we can express a unit of time ("From this beep to this beep...").
Volume is also double-edge, since it relies on units of distance and a way to express them in three dimensions.
It seems distance is the easiest starting point, since on a probe or other physical object another culture might acquire we can illustrate one Foo, and use simple pictograms to express that there are ten Foos to a Bar (more during rush week, but I digress...).
It all comes from finding a common stating point. If we can start with time, we can come up with distance (distance being expressed as how far light travels in x time, back to the light-year concept). If we start with distance, we can express time (how long it takes light to travel x distance). From these we can express volume, then the trick comes down to expressing mass.
All of these constructs are still completely artificial and arbitrary, though.
I don't know enough chemistry or physics to know if we could somehow use expressions involving subatomic particles (which one would EXPECT to be relatively constant, right?) to express a starting point for mass, but then we're back to how to illustrate the other ideas.
I'm glad this isn't MY problem to solve...
-l
?You're confusing mass with weight. Even in zero
>gravity, objects have mass. You can define mass
>independently of the local gravitational field
>using inertia. That is, the harder it is to get
>something moving (or to stop something that's
>moving), the more mass it has.
Well, except that around these here parts, we measure mass by weight, for convenience's sake.
>Time is simpe to define in a standard way that >isn't specific to the motions of the planets in
>our solar system. For example, you can
>define "one second" to be 9,192,631,770
>oscillations of a cesium-133 atom
I figured there was something like that. That's pretty cool. Thou art more chem-literate than I. Way more. But since I never got around to it in school, most people are. Still cool though.
>Heck, even your wristwatch uses a conceptually >similar oscillating quartz crystal to keep time
Actually I use my pager for a timepiece since the battery died in my watch and I never got around to fixing it, but your point is still taken. Heh.
-l