Lowering the (Amena)bar

And hence my streak of including director names in the titles of my posts this week continues.

Alejandro Amenabar has presided over some of my favorite movies of the last 20 years, but what's been most impressive is the variety of the Spanish director's output. Working in reverse order, his 2009 film Agora was a thinking person's sword-and-sandal epic that tackled no less than all the complexities of science and religion. It was my fourth favorite film of 2010 (the year it was released in the U.S.), and it's a film I've already seen three times. The Sea Inside, a drama about paralysis, knocked my socks off in 2004 (I didn't see it that year, but that's the year it came out). I didn't like 2001's The Others, a ghost story period piece, all that much when I first saw it, but access to a DVD copy of it compelled me to revisit it, and I kind of loved it the second time -- as discussed in this post. Probably my least favorite film of his is his 1997 debut, Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), but it's still quite a good film, and it holds an especially dear place to me as it inspired Cameron Crowe to remake it as Vanilla Sky, one of my favorite films. (Checking wikipedia, I see that Amenabar had a film in 1996 called Thesis, but I'd never heard of that, so I will stubbornly and inexplicably continue to refer to Open Your Eyes as his debut.)

Well, I guess everyone is eventually due for a little regression.

Or a lot.

For Amenabar, that comes in the form of Regression, which I guess you could call a psychological thriller about satanic cults. So it's yet another distinct area of focus for the director, probably closest genre-wise to The Others -- but really, not very close. Alas, it's also a distinct level of quality, in that it is distinctly bad.

The fact that it was available for 99-cent rental on iTunes such a short time after its nominal theatrical release should have been a dead giveaway. But Amenabar has never steered me wrong, so I decided to invest that buck even though I knew nothing about the movie other than the director and its stars (Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson, each promising in their own right).

But when a director loses it, he really loses it. Though some would argue the decline has been more steady. It's been more than six years since Agora, a film that was terrifically directed by never got much traction with audiences and remains under the radar to this day. Those who didn't like it did have some issues with the direction, as I recall. It's been twice that long since The Sea Inside, which won best foreign language film at the Oscars (and which I was quite certain yielded an Oscar nomination for Javier Bardem until I looked it up and found it not to be so). So I guess for most people, Amenabar hasn't done much since 2004, struggling to get movies made and losing small bits of his ability along the way.

His ability to direct actors seems to have vanished almost entirely. Hawke and Watson have both been good plenty of times, but they are stiff and turgid here. Genre material is somewhat familiar for Hawke, but I tend to think of Watson as a person who makes good choices. Maybe they both saw Agora and liked it as much as I did. But if so, they couldn't bring a lot to help Amenabar's dull and hammy script.

I won't tell you a lot about the story, because I'm not trying to sell you on it (obviously) or even really give it a proper review. It basically involves a girl (Watson) who has been abused by her father and possibly also a cult of satanic worshippers practicing ritual sacrifice. Hawke is the detective who seeks justice and likes to grab people by their lapels. The movie has what I think is supposed to be a surprise turn in the third act, but it's a surprise turn for the boring, and leads to an incredibly unsatisfying payoff that I think the movie thinks is supposed to be profound.

What I'm really here to do today is to mourn the profound dropoff in quality from Amenabar. But instead of just piling on this movie, I'd rather take a look at the factors outside his control that may have led to it. Looking at what seems to have happened (without delving into the particulars that are probably available on the web), Amenabar spent a long time trying to get a very ambitious, expensive pet project -- Agora -- off the ground. When that film was not a hit outside of Spain (where it was one of the highest grossing films of all time and swept the Goyas), it left Amenabar in no position to take another risk. So he was left (I imagine) scraping together funding for something with no ambition or aesthetic distinction of any kind, a weak idea weakened further by the fact that Amenabar's lack of enthusiasm for it oozes from every pore. It's not shot well, it's not acted well, it's not edited well, and it doesn't even look particularly polished. In short, it's an anonymous thriller that any hack could make, and it got essentially the equivalent of a straight-to-video release.

What can you do to help restore Amenabar to his former glory? To raise the (Amena)bar?

For starters, go watch Agora. It's streaming on Netflix now and it stars Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella and (perhaps best of all nowadays) Oscar Isaac. It's a feminist epic that looks fantastic and has nothing less than the debate between science and religion at its core. Maybe its attacks on both Christians and, to a slightly lesser extent, Jews made it a hard sell in a country like the U.S. But these should be selling points for someone who feels skeptical about organized religion, and the grand set design, camerawork and sword-and-sandal trappings should be a selling point for everybody else. I think I might watch it again (for the fourth time) myself in the next few days ... even if only to get the taste of Regression out of my mouth.

And Netflix pays attention to its numbers. If enough of you watch it, perhaps Netflix will get Amenabar's career going again by offering him some kind of deal, a deal where he can get back to doing what he wants.

A deal where he can be great again.

A week of judgment comes to a close

This past week I participated in a fun activity organized by Hannah Keefer on her blog Hannah and Her Movies. It was actually more organized on Facebook, with her blog playing a co-sponsorship role.

Hannah decided to do something really ambitious this year: She's watching one movie per day. That in itself is not the part that takes a lot of coordination. She's leaving 71% of the movies she watches (each of the weekday movies) up to her friends. Or in my case, acquaintances she met through the Flickchart discussion group. (You could call us friends, because we have quite a friendly interaction, but I have never met her in person.)

So she put the call out for interested parties to claim a week, and each person would then give her one title for each weeknight of that week. The initial response was overwhelming, so I didn't even have one of the 52 spots at first. However, someone dropped out, so this alternate became a full-fledged curator. I was assigned the week of February 10th to 14th, and had her a list of five within minutes.

(Do I sound like a guy who sits around, just waiting for the opportunity to recommend movies to people? Nah.)

Hannah's been calling this Hannah's Movie Challenge Adventure 2014, and she has a Facebook group set up to join together the people who are participating, and as kind of a home base for the project. That's where we have most of the discussion about the movies she's seeing, but she does also write about each on Hannah and Her Movies. And yes, I do consider it a shame that people seem to be more interested in having lively film discussions through Facebook groups than through the comments sections of blogs. :-)

Here are the movies I chose, and here were her responses to them:

Monday, February 10th: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006, Tom Tykwer)

See what I've written about this movie here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Well, dang. This was a good start to Vance's week. A crazy, almost fantasy-esque serial killer movie with an incredible soundtrack and a great story. I loved it, though I had to think about it for a little while after it ended to decide whether I did or not."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4.5

My comment: I was riding high at this point. Perfume is one of my favorite movies to share with people. No one I've recommended it to hasn't liked it.

Tuesday, February 11th: Agora (2009, Alejandro Amenabar)

See what I've written about this movie here and here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Another movie I knew almost nothing about and ended up really enjoying. It had kind of unusual subject matter, like Perfume did yesterday -- I'm not sure I can think of another movie I've seen about a female philosopher. Nice pick."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4

My comment: Pretty pleased with that, especially since Agora has not been a hit with everyone to whom I recommended it. It does feel a bit more like my movie than Perfume, since it's significantly more obscure. 

Wednesday, February 12th: What Maisie Knew (2013, Scott McGehee & David Siegel)

See what I've written about this movie here and here. 

What Hannah said on Facebook: "The movies this week appear to be losing a half a rating every day... From 4.5 to 4 to 3.5. Hmm. But I still liked this one. The interactions in the movie felt very real, even if it was sometimes difficult to watch because of that."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 3.5

My comment: It didn't occur to me that yeah, not everyone wants to watch warring exes yell at each other about what they want to do -- or not do -- with their daughter. Glad Hannah liked it enough to give it a half-star higher than merely thumbs up.

Thursday, February 13th: Bound (1996, Larry & Andy Wachowski)

See what I've written about this movie here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Unfortunately, this one broke Vance's streak of movies I really enjoyed. It's tough for me to really care about crime movies, though I did enjoy the characters and watching them interact."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 2

My comment: That's a shame. Bound is another personal favorite to recommend, and no one's ever turned their nose up at it to this extent. However, if she doesn't like the genre, she doesn't like the genre. Not a lot a person can do about that.

Friday, February 14th: Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, Nick Stoller)

See what I've written about this movie here and here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "And my final movie of the week, which I found both funny and heartwarming. I'm glad Vance picked this one, as I'd been meaning to get around to it for a really long time. I had a bunch more written here, but then I realized it was pretty much just all the same thing I said in the review, so if you want to know more, you can read that."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4

My comment: I figured this would end the week on a winning note. For the record, I didn't intentionally pick this for Hannah and her husband to watch on Valentine's Day, but I'm glad it worked out that way.

                                    ************************

Note: You may notice that many of my picks are recent. In fact, four of the five came out in the last eight years. Well, Hannah is in her twenties, and I gambled on her liking new things better. That said, I also know she's a fan of musicals, and those had their heyday decades ago. 

It's funny that I ended up dwelling on her dislike of Bound, because really, four out of five is pretty darn good. The five movies had an average of 3.6 stars for her, which means I certainly didn't waste her time this week. And yet we tend to be so sure that the movies we love are great, that it can be an oddly personal kind of blow when someone doesn't like even one of them.

The competitor in me was a tad disappointed, too, since Hannah is keeping track of who has made the best picks for her by computing the average Flickchart position of the new movies she's ranked. One guy (another from the Flickchart Facebook discussion group) already has me beat with a slightly higher average, and it's only February. Oh well, I'll shoot for finishing in the top ten.

Overall, this was incredibly fun. I really looked forward to Hannah's daily posts (which would arrive in my inbox around 4:15 p.m. my time), with her latest assessment of a movie I'd suggested. I guess it felt kind of like when someone asks you to make them a mix. "What? You want me to show you what I think is awesome? Sure!"

And the truth is, Hannah thought most of the things I thought were awesome, were awesome, too.

Cool.

Minghella makes a comeback

No, not Anthony Minghella. He's been deceased since March of 2008. However, I wouldn't be surprised if that's who you thought I was talking about. The guy has had more posthumous producing credits than Tupac Shakur had posthumous albums.

I'm actually talking about his son, Max, pictured here.

Max Minghella got on my shit list a couple years ago by appearing in one of the most loathsome films I have ever seen, Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidental, also pictured here. It doesn't make much sense to blame an actor for being in a movie you hate -- I don't hate Paul Giamatti because he was in Lady in the Water, do I? (Incidentally, Lady in the Water saved Art School Confidential from ranking last of all the films I saw in 2006.)

However, I do understand the logic -- even if it's just to rationalize my own position -- of hating an actor when the bad movie in question is the only thing you know him from. I wrote a post about this last year regarding Joseph Gordon-Levitt, about how he had been cinematically rehabilitated since I hated him so much in Brick (which I no longer hate as much as I once did). Minghella is a better example, because I did know Gordon-Levitt from his estimable role on Third Rock from the Sun. Prior to Art School Confidential, Minghella was a complete stranger to me.

And after I got out of the theater, I wished I'd never met him.

However, I won't go into details today about why I find Zwigoff's movie so repugnant. Because I'm here to talk about Minghella's own rehabilitation. You see, Max Minghella has appeared in two of my favorite movies of 2010. First it was Alejandro Amenabar's Agora, which I've already praised several times on this blog, and which was actually released in 2009 in Spain, but didn't make its stateside debut until this year. Then, most recently, Minghella appears in The Social Network, in the relatively small but fully realized role of one of the guys who wants to sue the pants off of Mark Zuckerberg.

Welcome back into my good graces, Max Minghella.

In Agora, Minghella plays Davus, a slave granted his freedom in 4th century Alexandria, right at a time that a Christian upheaval is changing the whole sociopolitical landscape. At first I wasn't sure how much I cared for his character. He's possibly the most mercurial character in the movie, frequently changing allegiances, as he functions as a symbol of the average Alexandrian's struggle with the new God vs. science debate being thrust upon them. This mercurial quality sometimes comes across as snotty or petulant, and it was here that I was reminded of Art School Confidential. But as the movie moves along, his character's essential role becomes more clear, and it all hits home during the film's denouement. On my second viewing of Agora, I appreciated him from start to finish.

In The Social Network, Minghella plays Mwfmwf Benoofwoof. At least, that's how I heard his name every time it was spoken, given that neither part of his actual name -- Divya Narendra -- was recognizable to me as a name I'd heard before. (Whereas I could easily follow the "Cameron" and "Tyler" parts of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.) Narendra is a member of the Porcellian final club alongside the Winklevai, quite the contrast next to their tall, good-looking, Aryan bodies, toned by hundreds of hours of rowing crew. His character's shrewdness and intelligence is obvious, as he first recognizes the theft of the Facebook idea and pushes the twins to sue Zuckerberg -- something they take quite a long time to do, which eventually damages their prospects. Fresh off Agora, I liked Minghella from the moment he appeared on screen.

I don't have much more to say, except to be reminded of the truism that a first impression can really stick with a person. I'm glad Max Minghella has gotten the chance to give me a couple more impressions.

Agora arrives on DVD on October 19th. The Social Network is, of course, currently available at a theater near you.

All the DVD copies of Art School Confidential should be found at the bottom of a landfill, if there were any justice.

Pimping without the anecdote

One of the great things about being a film critic is that you don't have to pay to see movies.

I'm talking about full-time critics here. Me, I'm a part-time critic who reviews mostly films that are already available on DVD, that weren't reviewed by someone at my site when they were in theaters. But I do get sent to new releases from time to time, and it's then that I relish the simple pleasure of seeing a movie on the big screen without pulling out my wallet.

So a movie has got to be pretty good if I basically nullify that free screening by paying to see it a second time.

Which is what I did this past weekend with Alejandro Amenabar's Agora, a day after it opened in a scant single theater in Los Angeles. I wanted my wife to see it, and I also wanted to see the first 5-7 minutes I missed during my first screening. But more importantly, I just wanted to take in the spectacle again for myself, as this is a film that demands to be seen in a large format.

When I first wrote about Agora ten days ago, I spent nearly 1600 of a whopping 2000 words talking about how I almost missed the screening due to GPS problems. But that was really burying the lead. The lead was that this is a big, bold, idea-filled, scintillating epic, and that without my help -- or even with it -- it will get seen by almost nobody in this country. (Might as well throw some help its way anyway, even if it will only result in a dozen more ticket sales at most.)

Of course, the reason Agora isn't opening in more theaters, or getting any kind of press at all, is that it is highly critical of Christianity. And that's a tough pill for American Christians to swallow. (But apparently, Spanish Christians don't have much of a problem with it -- Agora was the highest grossing film of 2009 in Spain.) However, I think if people see it in the cities where it's open -- currently, only New York and Los Angeles -- then it will at least open in places like Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia, and who knows where else if it does well there. So, that's my goal here.

The film is about the sea change taking place in Alexandra, Egypt, during the 4th century A.D., when Christianity is rapidly gaining the foothold that would eventually criminalize scientific inquiry and pave the way for 1200 years worth of the Dark Ages. So, a pretty important pivot point in human history. The main character is Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), a respected philosopher who, at the film's outset, teaches astronomy to young Alexandrian men. But the intellectual status quo is taken by storm (literally) by the Christians, who are given permission by the Roman Emperor to ransack the Alexandria Library, and destroy whatever they can get their hands on -- including the thousands of scrolls containing all the wisdom of the world, and the statues and other artwork devoted to the pagan gods who preceded Christianity. The film becomes about the uneasy truce that comes to exist between intellectuals, Christians and Jews, with the Christians ultimately become the violent demagogues as the film moves on.

Agora is a perfect blend of sweeping, grand-scale, big budget historical epic and idea movie. Amenabar shoots the huge Malta set from every angle imaginable -- some will simply take your breath away. And there's a good amount of the sword-and-sandal skirmishes you might expect from a film like this. But at heart, this is a movie about philosophy, about intellectual integrity, and about religion. It's an incredible conversation starter, and it's rich with meaning, not to mention relevance to modern society. Check out the website here.

So if you are reading this and are in either New York or Los Angeles, please go see Agora. It's a feast for both the eyes and the mind. It's the best film I've seen this year.

And without our help, it won't even make $100,000 in this country.

GPS, don't fail me now

As a freelancer, I don't like to turn down work. I have this feeling that I need to be available for every project offered me, lest they start to think of me as a secondary option, someone they can't rely on to complete the task at hand.

And so it was with great difficulty that I turned down the chance to attend a screening of Loss of a Teardrop Diamond last December in order to review it. It was about the seventh screening my employers had asked me to attend (I usually review films available on video), and I'd reworked my schedule (if necessary) to attend the previous six. But this case was different. I was leaving for Australia the next night, which meant packing to do and Christmas presents to wrap and ship. Plus, I'd have to either write the review after I got home that night, or squeeze it into my last workday for two weeks, when I was trying to wrap up a ton of other things.

When I told them I couldn't make it, I got a standard "no problem" as a response, and I really believed it was no problem. But as the months rolled along and I didn't get invited to a single other screening, I started to wonder if maybe I had burned a bridge, at least on that one small aspect of my professional relationship with them.

Until last week, when I was invited to a Monday night screening of Agora, Alejandro Amenabar's new epic about the rise of Christianity in 4th century Egypt, and how it impacted the pursuit of scientific knowledge. I did a small mental fist pump and quickly responded that I could make it. Needless to say, I didn't worry about potential conflicts, like Game 4 of the Celtics-Magic series -- I would just record whatever part I didn't see, and watch it on the DVR when I got home. I considered this to be a test of sorts, even though I doubt they consciously considered it that. If I missed two in a row, that would really undermine my credibility.

I left my house with about an hour to go before the 7:30 showtime, during which I also planned to pick up something at McDonald's. It was plenty of time, really -- the theater was only about seven miles from my house, and rush-hour traffic was already starting to dissipate. I got my dinner, ate it quickly enough, and was back on the road with a full half-hour to travel about four miles. No problem.

Until my GPS started acting up.

Now, I know it's unwise to rely exclusively on GPS when you simply have to be somewhere on time. You're just asking for trouble. The things are notoriously quirky, and there are times when they'll try to get you to drive across a lake or through a building. I guess I was just hoping this wasn't one of those times. But I wasn't worried enough to print out a backup copy of the directions. I feel like if you have to go to the trouble of making a backup, what value is there in having the GPS in the first place?

I have myself to blame for the opening act of defiance, in which I refused to get on the freeway as the GPS instructed. It's easy enough to get to Wilshire Blvd. by surface streets, and that's what I intended to do. And the GPS seemed to correctly recalculate for my intentions.

When I got to Wilshire, though, it asked me to do something screwy that I couldn't interpret properly. It said (in its nice Australian accent) to "Turn left on Wilshire, then drive on ramp." Ramp? The only ramp I was aware of was the ramp leading onto the northbound 405 freeway. If I'd avoided that freeway earlier, why would I choose it now, when I was basically at my destination?

So I proceeded onto the part of Wilshire that curves a bit upward, toward the straight commercial stretch that takes you into Santa Monica. (I later decided that this portion of the road was probably considered to be a "ramp" by the GPS, or else it was an actual ramp that was leading off of this area -- it's a confusing area.) However, now that I figured something was wrong with the directions, I tried to back out a couple steps to make it recalculate.

And this is where I made a fatal flaw. I've only had the GPS for about six months, and I'm kind of a dumb user of it -- sometimes I just press the screen until it gets back out to an area I'm familiar with. And in doing that this time, I appear to have chosen a different address as my new destination. Because after I turned around, it led me to an address on Sepulveda Blvd. that looked like a sorting center for the U.S. postal service. It was coming up on 7:20 now, and I felt my first twinges of panic.

So I tried to follow the same route again, in hopes that it would give me the same directions about the ramp, now that I felt I knew what it meant. But it didn't pipe up with anything. I realized it thought I had already reached my destination (the sorting center), and was no longer chirping me directions of any kind. So I did basically the same thing again, and again accidentally picked out a new destination through an errant screen poke on the map. But of course didn't realize it at the time.

Suffice it to say that for the next frenzied three minutes or so, I found myself driving around the private grounds of some old building owned by some old institution. You know, the kind of place where the roads are only wide enough for one car -- they're really more like glorified walking paths -- and the GPS goes nuts because it doesn't understand what's happening. I felt the scream of panic rising up inside me as it got closer to 7:25. I mean, once I got there, I didn't know if I'd have trouble parking, etc. But that was hardly the most pressing concern.

I finally extricated myself from the private grounds and back into public traffic, but I saw that the GPS was now pointing me back toward the sorting center again. So I finally shut the GPS off and back on, at which point I was able to scan my list of recent destinations. The theater address was now third on the list, with two others ahead of it. I needed to be heading right, but found myself stuck in a left turning lane. Even though I now knew I could get the best of this situation, the time I'd wasted and the slowness of the light were starting to make me panic more. But I weaved into openings and bended a few traffic laws and finally saw that I was within half a mile of my destination. Whew.

Except, not.

As I got on that curvy, rampy part of Wilshire again, I finally spotted my destination -- set way back off the road, on the other side of the road. And not accessible from either side of the road. Yep, the building had an address for a road that it was not actually on. The Wadsworth Theater was tucked into the rolling grounds of a complex of buildings that were tangential to Wilshire, but had their own entrance point from some other location.

It's 7:29. I'm not going to make it. I'm going to have to tell them that I missed the movie and can't write the review.

Screaming at traffic lights and honking at other motorists, I found myself turning left onto Sepulveda, north of where I'd been previously. It was the direction I needed to be heading. But Sepulveda runs alongside the 405, and I needed to get through the 405 to the other side to get where I was going. And the openings to cut through were not regular.

The next thing the GPS told me to do was take a right onto a road that leads into a military cemetery. I didn't know what this was going to do for me, but I had no choice but to believe the GPS. My turn only allowed me to go 20 feet before a gate stopped me. Making matters more complicated was that another car had also turned right, just before me. So while that woman was staring dumbly at the gate, wondering what to do, I had to make a three-point turn without hitting her car. I wondered if she were going to the same theater, and her GPS had sent her on the same wild goose chase.

I finally decided to ignore the GPS' recommendations and follow this road, but in the other direction, under the freeway. Logically, this would be where I needed to go. But it also looked like it might dead-end. Nonetheless, I had to try.

This finally paid off. I did some more weaving on back roads, this time with increasing confidence, and pulled up in front of the theater, which thankfully had its own parking.

Rushing up to the front, I asked two official-looking people standing outside, "Is this the Agora screening?" They told me that it was, and not to worry -- the movie had only started five minutes earlier. Plus, that everyone else had had GPS problems as well.

I hate missing any part of a movie, but I picked up what was going on pretty quickly.

And am glad I did. I could have given up in those panicked minutes of screaming "Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!", but I persevered. I didn't want to tell my editor that I had blown it, for the second time in a row. And I didn't have to.

But that's not the main reason I'm glad I made it. Rather, it's because Agora blew me away like a movie hasn't blown me away in a long time. It's essentially an intellectual sword-and-sandal epic, taking place on a huge, beautiful set erected in Malta, which doubled for Alexandria, Egypt of the 4th century A.D. The primary conflict is between the emerging Christian movement and the prevailing Greco-Roman pagan way of thinking, which prized scientific inquiry, study of astronomy, etc. The film documents the years of upheaval in which the Christians took over and forced the pagans to convert ... or else. Rachel Weisz plays the philosopher Hypatia, steadfast in her unwillingness to accept God.

The film will probably be considered highly controversial, but I do hope people will see it, especially those people in New York and Los Angeles, where the film will open this week and next. If they come out in droves to see it, it will expand to other cities. Agora was the highest grossing film in Spain in 2009, but most Europeans are much more liberal thinkers when it comes to Christianity under attack. It's hard to know how this country will respond to seeing the early Christians portrayed as villainously as they are here. But I'm sure hoping that it reaches a wide audience, as this is quite simply some of the most vibrant and exciting filmmaking I've seen in a long time. Detail-oriented and meticulous, brash and large-scale ... a $70 million budget for essentially an arthouse film. I think it could easily be considered Amenabar's masterpiece, which is telling, considering that he has such good films as Abre Los Ojos, The Sea Inside and The Others to his credit.

One of the things I really loved about the film was how Amenabar shoots from on high -- sometimes, a hundred feet above the rioting crowds below, and other times, from on really high, when he duplicates the perspective of a satellite looking down on earth. That's simply not something you expect from a movie set in 4 A.D., which is just one of the things that makes it so great.

And as I was watching it, I thought about how it was also the perspective of my GPS satellite, looking down at me on earth, trying to get me to Agora. It did its best, given the less-than-ideal circumstances of an ambiguously addressed destination.

And through a team effort, we made it.