“Radical” keeps the most challenging material for philosophies inside, such as seeing education as a process that needs resuscitation and inspiration, not the discipline and strict schedule that was put in place before Sergio arrived. And in the scheme of all the movies that make “Radical” think, Zalla cleverly points it out as Sergio compared to the expectations of standardized tests and all the inner values that accompany them.
There’s no inherent problem with trying to be a crowd-pleaser, but that focus becomes more frustrating on “Radical” than it needs to be. Zalla’s film occupies that strange place where something inspired by a true story—and it has a wonderful, true epilogue—is softened and expanded so much that even the inspiring truth that thing feels too good to be true.
Within the next ten years, NASA plans to put people on a ship that will hopefully reach Mars. The great difficulty, faced in “The Longest Goodbye,” does not concern whether the technology can but the human factor. Such a journey would be a monumental feat of “long solitude,” with crew members spending months with each other in cramped quarters and years away from their families. This is not how people are wired, and many different minds are at the cutting edge of finding a solution.
“The Longest Goodbye” by Ido Mizrahy, a wonderful but very dry documentary screened yesterday in the World Cinema Documentary section of the festival, revolves when collecting different options given by scientists. Ideas like talking to loved ones in virtual reality, talking to a floating robot head named CIMON, and hibernation are profiled here as windows into the future, which were originally given in dreams from science fiction. These possibilities are juggled with some curiosity, but the way they are shared here, a la rotating presentations at a conference, it gives a little momentum to the narrative, which is surprising compared to the long ones stake in space exploration.