Results tagged “Science Fiction”

A few caveats at the outset: Bad Dog Ginger was causing disruptions resulting from her intense interest in a cat at the drive-in, and five-month-old Emily was causing disruptions because her normal sleep schedule was itself disrupted. So I did not have the opportunity to concentrate fully on Pixar’s WALL•E.

But I doubt that my attention would have been rewarded. Once the movie zooms to a bustling cruise (space)ship, WALL•E is fine, but it felt like Monsters, Inc. 2 — manic and bright and silly.

Robert Zemeckis’ Contact is a triumph of short-form —

What’s that?

Yes, I’m aware that Contact isn’t exactly short, but the Screen Actors Guild defines a feature film as a movie of 80 minutes or longer, and Contact’s 53-minute running —

Pardon me?

Yes, I know that Contact was 150 minutes long when it played in movie theaters. I’m not talking about that movie. It was terrible and interminable.

My version uses the same source material but starts at the 33-minute, 25-second mark and ends at one hour, 26 minutes, and five seconds. It’s a marvel of economy and —

Yes, as a matter of fact I do think you can chop off the first half-hour and the last hour of the theatrical version without losing —

What? You liked all that backstory and preface? You thought it was necessary? And you were satisfied with the way the movie dragged on, and ended &mdash and then ended again?

Now shut up and let me explain myself.

(An experiment in theft [or fair use] and editing as part of Lazy Eye Theatre’s Bizarro Blog-a-thon.

In the spirit of the character and the blog-a-thon: Bons Erutluc am so proud that me wrote every word!)

Sunshine and Groundhog Day have a lot in common. In each, we see things we’ve seen before, over and over again. But in Sunshine, this doesn’t describe the plot of the film, but the movie itself.*

I suggested it, jokingly, when I announced the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon:

“Is E.T. really a sophisticated exploration of diaspora?”

In an admiring but fundamentally dismissive review, Matt Zoller Seitz argues that Children of Men’s subject matter necessitates a treatment more rigorous and pointed.

The implication is that movies that recall real-world horrors have some responsibility to them, and I don’t necessarily buy that. A film shouldn’t trivialize suffering, but serious politics (and shameful history) shouldn’t be off-limits for entertainments.

Alfonso Cuarón’s film weaves serious themes into what’s fundamentally a lightweight work. The movie doesn’t lack a coherent vision; it simply has nothing insightful to say.

Plus: Casino Royale and Borat.

The reasons for recording (with Bride of Culture Snob) this commentary track to The Prestige are many and simple:

• Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan didn’t include one on the first DVD release — at least not that I’ve found.
• In my essay, I faulted the movie’s ending, but I now accept it as suitable and even necessary.
• There remains great confusion and debate about what actually happens in the movie, even though the script and presentation seem to me models of clarity and foreshadowing.
• Bride of Culture Snob and I continue to argue about the conclusion, and whether it fits or panders to an audience’s anticipated inability to follow the story.
• While it received generally favorable notices, The Prestige seemed to be dismissed as a mere entertainment, and I think critics and audiences failed to recognize the movie’s depth, density, and elegance.

We address all these areas in the commentary track, come to some resolution about the ending, and explore my theory that viewers tend to understand one of the movie’s “tricks” while watching the first time but get fooled by the other.

The disappointment of Christopher Nolan’s enormously entertaining — and slyly provocative — The Prestige comes in its closing minutes, when it adds a fourth act to its illusion: the final reveal. As any magician will tell you — as the movie itself reminds the audience — knowledge of the secret robs the trick of its power and allure.

The article begins innocuously enough:

“Hollywood’s depiction of the U.S. military is often laughably inaccurate to many Americans who wear their country’s uniform.”

True enough. But then, in reference to Michael Bay’s Transformers:

“The Army has never fought giant robots, but if we did, this is probably how we’d do it.”

(This is the first and, I promise, last reference to Transformers on Culture Snob.)

The no-budget Primer is an austere rumination on something fantastic, rooted so deeply in the mundane that it seems plausible. Beyond that, it exists in a genre usually loaded with effects shots and races against the clock; it’s Back to the Future taken seriously.

The troubles with Revenge of the Sith are large: conception, narrative arc, tone, and pacing, all related to a failure by George Lucas to acknowledge what, exactly, the prequels represent, and to shape the material accordingly. And the raw materials of the movies suggest a startlingly detailed, mature, and nuanced vision, not just a popcorn space opera.

I anticipated finding Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut a lesser film than its forebear; I thought writer-director Richard Kelly would use it mostly as an opportunity to try to explicate his impenetrable plot, and to impose his reading on a text that had been ambiguous to the point of beautiful inscrutability. And that’s exactly what he does. Here’s the funny thing: I liked this version nearly as much as the theatrical cut, but for very different reasons.

No good movie in recent memory has made me feel as perfectly awful and unsettled as David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. The movie is beautifully made, engaging, and sometimes even funny, but it’s also repulsive and disturbing, and not just because of the director’s now-standard disfigurement fetish.

Although a description of Donnie Darko might make it sound like an amalgam of motifs from the mind of Terry Gilliam, the film integrates its strangeness so well into a larger narrative that it feels more realistic than most movies. It’s funny, frightening, and ultimately devastating, a human story told very, very well.

The Matrix was well-made but so expository that it was narratively dead. The Matrix Reloaded is messy but an improvement, because unlike the first part of the trilogy, something actually feels at-stake in The Matrix this time around.