Sunday, May 17, 2020
Solaris (1972)
This 2-hour 40-minute Soviet sci-fi art film is one of the slowest movies ever made. I know people say that about 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but Solaris really takes the cake.
Is it better than the George Clooney version? Yes. Is it a fun watch for a modern audience? Well… It’s not until the second act that we go to space, we learn that the protagonist is a psychologist, and the camera starts moving a bit. The first 45 minutes or so are a waste of time, and it never really ramps up. So is it a fun watch? No.
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Strange Days (1995)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron, Strange Days is a mashup of Christopher Walken’s Brainstorm (1983) and the LA riots. It’s not The Matrix (1999), it’s not Escape from New York (1981), it’s a mix of different things that starts strong but fizzles out in the end.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
The Postman (1997)
Mail is a real pain in the ass. Either the local numbnuts deliver your parcel three blocks off the mark, or you try to send electronically, only to find that you need to set up a trusted SMTP relay. In the case of either problem, you likely won’t figure it out until months after the fact. There’s a reason a rampage is called “going postal”.
Poor Kevin Costner. He is tasked with delivering the entire nation’s mail on the old shoeleather express. If any package is misdelivered, he gets the blame. No vehicles, no electricity, no help of any kind. With certain non-trivial problems, all you can give it is your best effort.
As a connoisseur of video games and the artistic goods of Japan, I heard about Kojima Hideo-san’s extravagant foray into the world of Postman, the majestic and not-at-all-pretentious Death Stranding, wherein you play as Kevin Costner’s vision of a parcel carrier. There is also a video game called Postal, wherein you don’t have to deliver a thing (see end of first paragraph).
But this is no game, this is a serious examination of what it means to be an American, through the lens of our mailman and savior.
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Westworld (1973)
This is not an indictment of a franchise but of a particular film. Before Jonathan Nolan, before Beyond Westworld, there was Westworld, a campy little sci-fi western. That’s how these things start. In a case of life imitating art, Westworld (the setting, the film, or the franchise) gets more interesting and dangerous over time until its flimsy foundation collapses under the weight of its own ambition.
The cheese factor is at a critical level. Imagine Tron (1982) on horseback. Double down on the AI-taking-over-the-world trope and you’ve got Westworld. This may have been one of the first films to go so completely overboard with sci-fi cliches. The basic ideas themselves are not absurd, but the story is in the telling.
Thursday, September 5, 2019
Angel Has Fallen (2019)
I saw Olympus Has Fallen (2013) with my father, I skipped London Has Fallen (2016), and I saw Angel Has Fallen with a friend. The third installment is full of references that most people over 40 would get. There were some chuckles in the mostly-empty theater. A bunch of things went boom.
The only thing that impressed me more than the action scenes was how little the film tried to be different or original. Ignoring the latest superhero crossover crap, this is cinema at its most mainstream. Eh, it’s not bad.