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.
I haven’t seen the movie or read the comics, but I’m still impressed by this:
Some time ago I wrote a feature film with Graham Jones: How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate, a heist movie about the Irish education system. It is now available on YouTube.
I’m leery of YouTube as a venue for feature films, since it’s geared much more towards short clips. On the other hand, if the film is insufficiently gripping, that’s down to mistakes we made.
The film has been in the news again recently, mentioned in stories concerning allegedly widespread cheating.
I’m amused that one of the primary funding sources for the film was the now-nationalized Anglo Irish Bank.
Apparently the recent Hollywood trend is to shade everything teal and orange. I hope it doesn’t now drive me nuts whenever I watch a movie.
