Archive for the ‘Science Fiction and Space Shit’ Category
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Let’s say you are a feedback and distortion fetishist. Fuzz and blips, pixelation, video lines, VHS rolling from bad tracking – these things get you hard. That’s fine. We are all beautiful snowflakes. What you do in that case is you make a video of all that stuff, you hide it under your bed, you get it out when you’re lonely. What you don’t do unless you have no self control is make a feature film needlessly slathered in that shit and release it in theaters and on home video to paying audiences who want to be told a story and not just watch little flickers and shit.
More to the point, let’s say you are also a wiseass camera operator who enjoys running through explosions in a firesuit or rollerblading around holding a camcorder, but have not yet developed an interest in some of the other elements of photography such as framing or holding still. Fine! Great! That is your calling, you should rollerblade all you want. It is probly good aerobic exercise. But I have one caveat: if your plan is to incorporate that footage into an actual movie and not just an episode of JACKASS then you have a responsibility to look at the footage first and ask yourself if somebody could watch it and understand what in God’s holy name is being shown. And if the directational fraternity duo Nevildine/Taylor were being honest with themselves the answer to that question would usually be “No. No, not at all. Oh jesus, no, are you kidding me? Uh uh.” I’m thinking maybe these guys should forget about the cameras and just be stunt men. They seem more interested in carrying the camera through risky situations than actually pointing the lens of it at specific things. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alison Lohman, Gerard Butler, Nevildine/Taylor, Screen Actor's Guild Award Winner Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, what's wrong with America, Zoe Bell
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 54 Comments »
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
When I came out of AVATAR I had a nice free feeling that I wasn’t even gonna write a review of it. I figured what it excels at is self-evident and what it fails at isn’t really worth dwelling on, and every motherfucker with a computer already wrote way too much about this thing anyway so what’s the point? I wouldn’t have much to say.
Then a couple days later I had written this behemoth. Hopefully there are one or two things here that haven’t been said before. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: James Cameron, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 193 Comments »
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
Some movies you hear about for so long that you almost don’t really believe you’ll ever see it. You always think of it as being something far off in the distance somewhere, then next thing you know it’s there and you weren’t even ready. Everybody’s rushing to get their thoughts online, but I’m a little slower than some people because I want time to process it. I know alot of people are curious what I think about this highly anticipated sci-fi release. I’m sure opinions will be all over the place, but I gotta say that no matter whether you are disappointed or blown away it’s really exciting to see an old favorite coming back, trying to give the fans something new. It’s quite a time to be a fan of these types of movies. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Burt Reynolds, Gary Busey, Jeff Wincott
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 33 Comments »
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
A bunch of actual good movies came out this week, and I’ll review a couple of them soon. First I have to catch up with this crap I saw last week…
As you know, and as the TV news in this movie will tell you, the Mayans predicted that the world would end on December 21st, 2012. So in this movie it does. Actually, that must be the fictionalized, eclipse-fearing Mayans of APOCALYPTO that predicted that, because the real Mayans didn’t. They just had a calendar which considered somewhere around that date to be the end of an era. They also predicted things that would happen after 2012, so obviously they didn’t expect the world to end. Let’s not hang all this doom and gloom on them. They invented chocolate. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover, disaster movies, John Cusack, Roland Emmerich, Woody Harrelson
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 89 Comments »
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
Strange days we’re livin in, here in the futuristic year of 1999. Everywhere you go there’s people getting chased, cars on fire. I just saw 2 people beating up Santa Claus on the sidewalk. Can you believe gas has gotten up to three whole dollars a gallon? What a nightmare! And man, I almost miss junkies. They were so much better than these “wireheads” you got now, who plug into recordings of the brain responses to sex and bank robberies and stuff. Those guys make me sick.
Okay, you got me, this is actually late 2009 when I’m writing this, and that was a made up science fiction scenario that did not end up happening in ’99. I would remember if it had. Isn’t that weird? In less then two months we’ll be at the 10th anniversary not of this movie, but of the future it takes place in. So it’s ironic that it’s about people stuck on re-living old experiences, and meanwhile we’re watching it comparing it to the actual New Year’s Eve 1999 we experienced. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Angela Bassett, cyberpunk, James Cameron, Juliette Lewis, Kathryn Bigelow, Michael Wincott, Tom Sizemore
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 61 Comments »
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
THE ABYSS is probly James Cameron’s most original movie. It’s not primarily based around people getting killed by a monster or a bad guy. It’s more like man vs. scientific challenge, trying to fix things, to not run out of air, to survive the pressure (both literally and figuratively) of being deep underwater. Okay, so Michael Biehn snaps from a bad case of the Underwater Blues, and they gotta fight him, but most of it is more problem solving and scientific analysis like APOLLO 13 or QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. And then it turns into CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. And a little 2001. But underwater, so it’s completely different. Water is different from space. You can’t drink space. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ed Harris, James Cameron, Michael Biehn
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 132 Comments »
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
There once was a director named Chuck Russell, who did movies like THE MASK and ERASER. Not very good movies as I remember it, but he seemed like his heart was in the right place. He was trying to have some fun. He also did THE SCORPION KING, which I enjoyed, and then disappeared for the last couple years. But before he became The Occasional Director of Studio B-Movies he was a promising name on the ’80s horror scene. His debut was A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS, the ridiculous but fun one that reinvented the series and gave Freddy his obsession with the word “bitch.” He wrote that one along with future THE MIST director Frank Darabont, who also helped him write movie #2, his remake of THE BLOB. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chuck Russell, Frank Darabont, good remakes, Kevin Dillon, remakes, Shawnee Smith
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 43 Comments »
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
In THE BLOB Steve McQueen plays “Steve” and he’s supposed to be a teen. But he was actually 28 and looked about the same age as he did in THE GREAT ESCAPE. Therefore I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable about leaping to the conclusion that he was re-enacting true events that had happened to him for real. The Young Steve McQueen Chronicles. None of this is included in his biography and some of what happens here (like his father being a store owner) don’t jibe with the established facts. But what importance do the details have when there is an essential truth at work here, the truth that a teenaged Steve McQueen sighted, tracked, battled and helped defeat The Blob? In a sense, this is BATMAN BEGINS to Steve McQueen’s life. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Steve McQueen
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 50 Comments »
Friday, September 25th, 2009
SURROGATES is TERMINATOR 3 director Jon Mostow (plus the writers of TERMINATOR 3-4) doing another robot movie, this time free of the expectations and mythology (and budget, from the looks of it) of the TERMINATOR series. The only thing they’re chained to is the “graphic novel” the ads say it’s based on, which means a comic book. Luckily they don’t have to be too careful about adapting it because nobody ever heard of it until it was being made into a movie. You show me someone who has read it and I’ll show you the guy that did the copy editing. I was gonna say the mom of the guy who wrote it but I doubt she read it either. This is not some iconic one everybody knows like Alan Moore’s Watchmen or Garfield’s Big Fat Hairy Deal. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, Jonathan Mostow, robots, Ving Rhames
Posted in Bruce, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 68 Comments »
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
You know how there’s that endangered sub
genre of “intelligent sci-fi”? Like the recent MOON and SUNSHINE and I guess people would say that movie PRIMER although I haven’t seen it. Coming out on DVD today is another small, low budget, independent sci-fi full of smart ideas about the modern world and what could happen with our technology. This one’s not an action movie at all though, it’s a small drama, and from a Mexican perspective. So if you never heard of it that’s why. Subtitles, and no exploding heads.
(There are robots and lasers, but not in a cool way. They’re just tools. Maybe about as cool as a city employee riding a Segway. Exactly that cool or less, no cooler.)
The story is about Memo (Luis Fernando Peña) who grew up in a tiny Mexican village screwed over by the building of a dam. He’s spent his whole life dreaming of getting away, but just like people in the not-future his way of getting away is just secluding himself in a little room and using technology to connect with the outside world. He builds a radio that he uses to tap different frequencies and listen to people’s conversations, but this gets him into trouble. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: smart sci-fi
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 21 Comments »
