Alien (Director's Cut) - Ridley Scott (1979, in theatre)
Our annual Halloween tradition of Ti Couz dinner plus horror movie continues. This time we went off to the Metreon for the re-release of Alien. I've seen Alien several times, but never on the big screen. The big screen exposes the shakiness of some of the miniature shots of the starship, but it also reveals lots of nice little touches throughout the whole movie - there are tons of examples of "show, don't tell". The science-fictiony detail elements are pushed into the background, but are still visible, even as the human element takes the foreground. The bits added in the director's cut are mostly minor. One scene which, according to Tad, was cut for pacing reasons, should have stayed cut, particularly as it is made redundant by the sequel, but otherwise the additions were beneficial.
| Comments (2) | TrackBack (565) | link me | November 2003

The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers - Peter Jackson (2002, in theatre)
More than a movie, this was for us an Experience; the details of the experience will appear on Un Bon Vin Blanc. Okay, bottom line: it's really good. The Two Towers easily beats the first installment, The Fellowship Of The Ring, in the excitement and action category. On the down side, it stumbles a little bit plotwise in some of its departures from the book (which, to be honest, I haven't yet finished); the Merry/Pippin story thread suffers, with a little too much time given to the Rohan/Helm's Deep arc, and Elijah Wood's Frodo doesn't get to show as much depth and range as in the first film; he just looks a little more goth in each successive scene. The effects are excellent, stunning in spots: I was apprehensive about how the CG Gollum was going to work out; he gets a lot of screen time. His face isn't quite as "right" as, say, that of Yoda in Episode 2 (a bit too "clean", and does every single character in this movie have to have huge blue eyes?), but Yoda's animators didn't even have to face the challenge of showing a scrawny, mostly naked humanoid, crawling and leaping and generally acting like a freak for something like an hour of screen time. Gollum's body — his computer generated skeleton and musculature — is phenomenally real. In some scenes he doesn't seem to interact with his environment correctly (grabbing a tree branch which doesn't flex a millimeter nor shed a speck of dust or bark under his hand, a la the raptors from Jurassic Park) but in others the integration is perfect — one of his scrambles through a shallow creek left my jaw hanging. The Big CG Battle Scenes are impressive as hell; while there are tactical idiocies to be ridiculed, they're huge improvements on those of Verhoeven and Lucas, and the architectural background for the battles is also much more visually exciting. Yeah, sure, the movie has flaws, there's no way around it, but it's exciting and fun, and just like the first one, you're ready to sit through another three hours as soon as it's over. Damn you, Peter Jackson! Damn you to hell!
| Comments (4) | TrackBack (591) | link me | December 2002

Star Wars: Episode II: Attack Of The Clones - George Lucas (2002, in theatre)
It's not quite damning enough to say that this movie is an improvement on Episode I. Some of the worst mistakes of the previous film are avoided. Lucas has somehow managed to find an even worse actor than Jake Lloyd to play teenage Anakin. Lucas is a terrible writer; his best work on the series was Episode IV and everything else has been crap. He's not even trying with the character names any more. "Greedo" was one thing, "Sleazebaggano" is just beyond my comprehension. He's a terrible director: Natalie Portman may not be one of the Great Actresses of our time, but she's done far better than this in other films; she just can't do much with a lame script, lame co-star, and lame director. Ewan McGregor, on the other hand, may well be one of our Great Actors, because he actually manages to pull off Obi-Wan fairly convincingly in spite of the handicaps — this man is a professional. One or two of the action scenes are impressive, though others seem contrived to sell videogames and nothing else ("Well forget it, I'm not doing it, this episode was badly written!" - Galaxy Quest). Just one more episode to go, and maybe we won't have to watch any of this crap again. I mean, you can't not watch it, even though you know it's gonna suck.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (488) | link me | August 2002

Minority Report - Steven Spielberg (2002, in theatre)
Good stuff. Tense, good science fiction, with some clever multi-layered twistage. Since it's Spielberg, of course, it goes off the rails at the end and the conclusion is a slight letdown, but on the whole it's definitely worth a watch.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (193) | link me | August 2002

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - Chris Columbus (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) (2001, DVD)
Pretty good adaptation of a pretty good book. It's a fun fantasy movie, worth a watch. The young actors are on the whole very good — no Haley Joel Osments, but none of them are annoying to watch. And when you see Alan Rickman as Professor Snape, don't forget to think "Trent Reznor in twenty years".
| Comments (1) | TrackBack (90) | link me | May 2002

AI - Steven Spielberg (2001, DVD)
Have we already mentioned that Haley Joel Osment is a great actor? This one is well worth seeing, though as with many Spielberg movies, it sort of goes off the rails towards the end. Jude Law steals a number of scenes as a stylish android gigolo.
| Comments (11) | TrackBack (453) | link me | March 2002

The Andromeda Strain - Robert Wise (1971, DVD)
A decent science fiction story with 1971's Vision Of The Future set design. Remarkably true to Crichton's book, though it can't explain the biotech aspects in nearly the same depth — which may be a good thing; I just re-read the book recently and found all the holes in the science that I hadn't noticed when I read it as a kid.
| Comments (1) | TrackBack (298) | link me | March 2002

Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Peter Jackson (2001, theater)
I think this is as good a movie version of Lord of the Rings as can be made. It's accessible to people who haven't read the books repeatedly; hardcore fans also seem to accept the necessary alterations (though, sometimes, grudgingly). I envy the kids who get to grow up with this as their geek-culture-reference movie; it's easily better than the original Star Wars, let alone Lucas's more recent expressions of creative bankruptcy. Better still, the three movies are coming at one-year intervals instead of three-year. I suspect a lot of people are going to be buying the DVD set after Return of the King comes out, and that there will be more than one all-day trilogy-watching party...
| Comments (1) | TrackBack (106) | link me | December 2001

Neverwhere - Dewi Humphreys (1996, VHS (PAL-conversion bootleg))
Neil Gaiman's first foray into writing for television. It's a whimsical trip through "London Below", a fantasy world overlaid, or rather underlaid, on contemporary London, populated by a bunch of strange characters. As literature, Neverwhere can't compare to Gaiman's best work, but it isn't meant to; it's a romp with a little bit of depth if you're looking for it. The limited budget will stir your Doctor Who nostalgia, if any, and the overacting is just part of the fun.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (242) | link me | November 2001

Videodrome - David Cronenberg (1983, DVD)
Long live the new flesh! A bizarre vision of what happens when media and technology collide. It's hard to believe today that the lowly video cassette once seemed as revolutionary as, oh, say, the internet.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (179) | link me | November 2001

Final Fantasy - Hironobu Sakaguchi and Moto Sakakibara (2001, DVD)
Stunning computer graphics in support of a forgettable (and, frankly, forgotten) storyline. Technically impressive as hell, but unlike Monsters Inc., there's not enough here to draw the audience in.
| Comments (14) | TrackBack (87) | link me | November 2001

The Sticky Fingers of Time - Hilary Brougher (1997, DVD)
An innovative low-budget time-travel story. What science fiction was meant to be. Plus girls kissin'!
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (281) | link me | October 2001

Akira - Katsuhiro Ôtomo (1988, DVD)
Finally watched this classic anime. It's got lots of 'splosions. Worth a watch but probably somewhat overrated.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (217) | link me | September 2001

Unbreakable - M. Night Shyalaman (2000, DVD)
Another good job from the creator of The Sixth Sense. However, Shyalaman's twist endings are gonna get easier to guess the longer he does this kind of thing — fortunately I'm good at not guessing. :)
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (75) | link me | June 2001

Kiki's Delivery Service - Hayao Miyazaki (Majo no takkyubin) (1989, VHS)
Understated story about a young witch leaving home to seek her fortune. Less busy than Totoro or Mononoke; charming and nearly flawless.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (96) | link me | June 2001

Soylent Green - Richard Fleischer (1973, VHS)
A science-fiction classic, though somewhat cheesy and dated. There are some really striking scenes in here (Thorn and Sol's "fancy dinner" and Sol's euthanasia, in particular) which are actually more evocative than the famous, climactic "discovery". Epoch: While released in 1973, it feels as dated to me as Bullitt did, less modern than The Sting.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (98) | link me | March 2001

The Sixth Day - Roger Spottiswoode (2000, DVD)
Better than we expected. While I was prepared to get annoyed at a light, bad-sciency treatment of an important issue (law and ethics of human cloning), it was surprisingly easy to not worry about it. Nicely done near-future touches: the old beat-up New Beetle, ubiquitous holographic billboards, the illicit thrill of smoking tobacco.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (91) | link me | March 2001

City of Lost Children - Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (La Cité des enfants perdus) (1995, DVD)
While house-and-cat-sitting for anne, we took advantage of her DVD collection and big TV and excellent sound system, and finally got around to watching City of Lost Children — this is one we'd been reserving for a bigger screen than ours. We kept hearing that this was beautifully filmed and very very creepy. While we agree on the first point, it didn't really live up to the latter. One friend even commented on pedophilic overtones, which I just didn't see beyond the superficial plot description of "adults kidnapping and exploiting children" — the innocents are allowed to remain innocent. The MPAA rated it R for "disturbing and grotesque images of violence and menace", but that rating seems excessive to me — if anything in this is out of PG-13 territory, it's certainly not far into R. It's a fairy tale, and nothing for an adult to be afraid of, so if you've been resisting seeing it for that reason, resist no longer. Ron Perlman does well in a leading Big Quiet Friendly Giant role, an interesting change from his usual Big Quiet Scary Giant roles.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (311) | link me | March 2001

Titan A.E. - Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, Art Vitello (2000, DVD)
I didn't have very high hopes for this one. It turned out to be a fairly so-so space opera, lots of familiar themes (or ripoffs, if you prefer). I'm not fond of mixed computer and traditional-hand- drawn animation as a general rule, but it came off reasonably well here. Amusing moments here and there, fun for the kids, but not a great movie. However, it's notable for at least one instance of Good Science: when Our Heroes need to get from one ship to another in space without benefit of docking or pressure suits, one of 'em says "exhale!" and they do it the hard way, demonstrating that you actually can survive in vacuum for a few seconds if you're lucky and careful. Sure, they recovered from the jaunt a little too quickly and without so much as a nosebleed, but it's a nice change from "your blood boils and you explode instantly!"
| Comments (1) | TrackBack (21) | link me | January 2001