Hiatus
I’ve been blogging regularly since 01 August 2006: every day for that first year, five times per week for four years after that, and at least once per week since 01 August 2011. Now it’s time for a break.
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I’ve been blogging regularly since 01 August 2006: every day for that first year, five times per week for four years after that, and at least once per week since 01 August 2011. Now it’s time for a break.
[more...]
Another light week. Have a mixture of Cornetto flavors:
Tropa de Elite and Tropa de Elite 2 – O Inimigo Agora é Outro[1] are two Brazilian crime/action movies about the drug trade and corruption in Rio de Janeiro. While fictional[2], they clearly draw upon contemporary Brazilian politics. They both follow Roberto Nascimento, who at the start of the first film is a captain in BOPE, an elite unit roughly analogous to the American SWAT squads[3].
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I started keeping track of the films I watched last year, after not having done so since 2005. I think I watched more than usual in 2012, but without numbers from past years it’s hard to tell… As with my book ratings, the ratings reflect how much I enjoyed the film at the time, and not my judgment of the film’s merits.
I rated four films 90%: The Cabin in the Woods, The Guard, Moonrise Kingdom, and the 2003 director’s cut of Alien.
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(Spoilers for Alien and Prometheus, clearly.)
What is an android? The first Wiktionary definition is “a robot that is designed to look and act like a human (usually male)”. Looking like a human is the easier of the two components, particularly when not in motion, despite the potential difficulties in artificially replicating skin in a convincing manner. The real difficulty is acting like a human. Our stories are full of creatures (döppelgangers, aliens, golems[1]) that look like use but are not us, and this familiarity with the concept may mask how difficult accomplishing such a thing would be—an oversight that forms a core weakness in Prometheus.
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I’ll start with the half-review first: I enjoyed The Cabin in the Woods more than any other movie I’ve seen this year. It was clever, well-written, amusing, and delivered a very satisfying combination of genre-tweaking and genre-fulfilling elements.
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Maybe it’s shooting fish in a barrel, but I thought this was well done:
Another fantastic list. I love it, even though I think the very last one is terrible:
A Bourne Identity fairy tale, with the moral, “always wear sensible shoes”.
This week’s gun-related amusing-but-disturbing short is—not, not “Tune for Two”, although in truth that’s probably better—“Wanna See Something Cool?”
I thought this was interesting (I preferred it to part one, perhaps because of my greater interest in film):
Perhaps the ironic loop would have been complete if I had have been paid by filmdrunk.com to write this post… but no such exchange took place.
I could have titled this “Tron: Legacy Review”, but decided on the more honest naming.
I should note that I don’t remember the original Tron very well, and wasn’t coming to this film hoping that it would be “true” to the original. I didn’t really have expectations; I dread to think what my reaction would have been if I had had any.
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In the spirit of the famous Clerks discussion, here’s “Think Tank: What do the Stormtroopers Think of Vader?”. Best excerpts:
Imagine you worked at the Pentagon as a personal attache to Colin Powell or McChrystal, and you hear over the PA “Alert! Alert! There is a Nazi Ninja Master loose in the Pentagon! Your orders are ‘Shoot to kill!’” You get up and walk around the corner, and there’s this 80 year old man with a Hitler moustache in a black outfit, and he and Donald Rumsfeld are circling each other ominously. Both of them have katanas drawn.
Do you shoot?
—John Perich/fenzel. “Think Tank: What do the Stormtroopers Think of Vader?”. Overthinking It, 14 Oct 2010.
and:
I’m not a huge zombie fan, but it is Halloween, so covering the undead seems appropriate. Discover’s Science Not Fiction blog has a pretty good series on a fairly realistic approach to them, including some discussion of ethical concerns: Intro, Biology, Zombie “Death”, and Questions.
Bonus #1: “ 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)”, which I happen to think is accurate in its overall message.
Bonus #2: “The Running of the Dead“, a long but worthwhile political and cultural examination of the difference between “slow zombie” and “fast zombie” movies.
I thought this was hilarious:
Tangentially related, I can’t believe that Roger Ebert actually gave Signs a positive review.
“8BITS” is a strange but pretty fun movie that seems to be about computer game characters fighting over the shift to better technologies. I think I missed a lot of the references, but I enjoyed it anyway. (I’m particularly confused by what’s driving the aesthetic of the main protagonist.)
I like this, although I have to admit that might just be the music.
BLADE RUNNER revisited >3.6 gigapixels from françois vautier on Vimeo.