haiku movie review: Europa Report
¶ by Rob Frieselthe obvious nods to 2001, also The Blair Witch Project
Reviews, Top N lists, and other sundry cinematic stuff.
the obvious nods to 2001, also The Blair Witch Project
Today, The Boy saw Return of the Jedi for the first time at an otherwise rained-out birthday party. 1 Now it has probably been… 10+ years? Since I’ve seen RotJ, but a few things jumped out at me today: You could tell that most kids in the room had seen the films in episodic order. […]
Every so often, I get into a friendly disagreement (usually with this guy) about whether Alien or Aliens is the superior film. Now to a certain extent, this must be simply a question of taste. But as science fiction usually attracts pedantic nerds with a strong urge to be “right”, I felt compelled to defend […]
Inevitable (compare it to The Matrix) but so much better Seriously: the comparisons are inevitable 1, but Inception is hands-down the stronger film. And every time someone questions whether they were “awake or still dreaming,” I half expected Laurence Fishburne to walk out in those pinch-bridge sunglasses.[↩]
desperate times call for violating all laws. so much for heroes. I enjoyed the The Dark Knight, but man what a fucked-up story. I feel like it gets the spirit of Batman pitch-perfect, but that just leaves me worked-up and angry. If you think of it as a film that attempts to capture our national […]
Documentary! No, wait! It’s an action flick! Vaporized blood? Ick! Still unpacking District 9. I was a little jarred by the fact that they start it out as a faux documentary (which I loved immediately) and then cut to scenes that were more a bit more “traditional action film”; but I can’t say that I […]
With 3D turning into a big draw for box office films now 1, and with Sony claiming they’ll put in our living rooms by the end of the year, I’ve had a few conversations now about the 3D effects and whether/not they “feel right”. Most folks seem to agree that if you let go and […]
When you walk away from Robocop, there is a temptation to describe it as a Dickian film. Certainly the elements seem to be there: a man with a subsumed identity and a concealed past, struggling against forces larger than him–perhaps even controlling him–in a bleak dystopian future setting. The looming megacorporation that wipes out his […]
Coming to Deadwood‘s anti-climactic finale last night, I decided to append a few follow-up notes and thought questions to my earlier assertion that the show was David Milch’s attempt at a purely American creation myth: Upon further reflection, Milch is attempting some important inversions on the creation myth paradigm. We’ve already discussed how his women […]
Work with me here: When David Milch hallucinated the opening scene to what would become Deadwood, when he gathered up his personal assistant(s) into a darkened room and reclined on the couch to spill forth from his amygdala exactly what he was seeing beyond his third eye, he was leaking his fever-dream vision of a […]