White Chamber
Closed this one out after twenty minutes or so. I didn’t want to endure a full movie of a half-naked woman trapped in a hi-tech cube. Torture sci-fi is the worst.
Coherence
A dinner party goes awry when a comet passes by and they start meeting replicas of themselves down the street. So discombobulating, trying to keep track of which version of the party you were watching, but that’s the point. I’d consider this more sci-fi than a lot of sci-fi that ends up being an action movie, because it treats an idea as opposed to a physical struggle. Most of the budget was spent on glowsticks and getting the ending just right.
Alien Vs Predator
The beginning of the end for this franchise. Well, either this movie or Predator 2, which I heard wasn’t that good. I don’t want to risk the time to find out.
Knights of the Damned
Another one I didn’t finish. I stopped at the “tavern” scene where the “minstrel’s” “lute” was an acoustic guitar of a workmanship impossible in pre-industrial economies. It even had a logo on its headstock. There’s a trick to set and costume design for period and high-fantasy films. The trick is to not suck at is.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Probably up there with They Live as far as “hidden horror” type of stories go. Fairly faithful to the book, except for one point. Wilma struggles to explain how she knows her uncle really isn’t her uncle. She says he’s behaving completely normal but she can sense that something is very different about him, nothing that she can quantify. The frustration with that kind of crises would’ve added another dimension to the film horror.
Big Fish
A man tries to find the truth of his dying father’s tall tales. It’s a Tim Burton film, and he’s good at what I call “earthbound fantasy,” where a high-fantasy story takes place on a version of the earth we know, maybe a few notches more fantastical than Forrest Gump.
Unbreakable
You have “magical realism” as a genre, so this would be “superhero realism,” with a side-order of comic book meta-deconstruction…or whatever. Slow paced and not action-oriented, the characters get to breathe. The scene where David reveals to his son that he was right about David having super powers is a touching father-son moment, no dialogue needed.
Universal Soldier
Discount bin Terminator, with a corny revived super-soldier “hypnotized to kill” premise. I don’t know how this got so popular, but I want to believe people thought it was so bad that it eventually developed camp value. However, there are six sequels and a pending reboot that contradict this idea, so what do I know?
Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars
The original Starship Troppers was campy and utterly ridiculous in its own right, but it was supposed to be (see Rob Ager’s analysis of Starship Troopers here). It was partially a commentary on its source material novel, which took itself seriously as a sci-fi military book; one that was quite good. The franchise’s sequels, including this one, dropped all of that. I think this was another Vicodin movie, so I don’t remember much except that it was all CGI and the scientist did some ridiculous “mental projection” thing to convince the protagonist to accept the inciting action, but he projected himself as the protag’s dead ex-lover, and ended up kissing him. So I don’t know if that was the movie or the drug.
The Book of Eli
A post-apocalyptic movie worth it’s weight in iPods (that idiom makes sense if you’ve seen it). There’s a lot of stupid male protagonist characterizations in post-apoc films, but Denzel Washington’s titular dude holds fast to the conviction that his mission of shepherding his Macguffin is worth seeing to the end, though he can’t quite articulate why it’s so important, is a refreshing take. The twist at the end makes sense if you pay attention to the small things throughout.
2 Comments
I thought you covered Eli previously in some fashion. I was able to catch bits of it here and there and was satisfied that I knew the story. Coherence has too many twists and turns with too little explanation, but I can see how it would intrigue some folks. Unbreakable is actually quite an interesting story; I didn’t see it, but I saw a video explaining the story. Big Fish sounds interesting. The rest would be waste of time for me. Oh, and I saw both versions of Body Snatchers, and really don’t remember too much of either, except how the story ends.
I think I had emailed you about Eli some time ago, after I had watched it.
Big Fish is worth a watch. Burton’s movies aren’t child-friendly but have an innocent fairy tale quality about them.