Movies
drorzel | July 1, 2007Via PZ, a blog on biology and science fiction is griping that biology gets no respect, and links to a Jack Cohen article complaining that authors and filmmakers don't take biology seriously I was particularly struck by this bit:
Authors, film producers and directors, special-effects teams go to physicists, especially astrophysicists, to check that their worlds are workable, credible; they go to astronomers to check how far from their sun a planet should be, and so on. They even go to chemists to check atmospheres, rocket fuels, pheromones (apparently they're not biology....), even the…
drorzel | June 17, 2007Via Jeff "jefitoblog" Giles, who wrote the Editor's Notes, the collaborative review site Rotten Tomatoes has generated a list of the top 100 science fiction films, based on their user ratings. It's split over 100 individual pages, and tarted up with lots of slow-to-load graphics, so here are their top twenty films:
20) Mad Max
19) Frankenstein (the 1931 version)
18) 2001: A Space Odyssey
17) Solaris (the 1972 version)
16) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1956 version)
15) The Terminator
14) Brazil
13) Galaxy Quest
12) Bride of Frankenstein
11) The Road Warrior
(The top 10 are after the cut…
drorzel | May 26, 2007I'm not particularly pining for WisCon, but for those who are, let me throw out a movie topic for discussion:
Three Strikes and You're Out: Why Do Third Movies Suck So Much?
It's a well-known phenomenon in genre film: in a series of movies, the third movie is almost always where the series goes off the rails. Examples abound: X-Men 3, Superman 3, The Matrix Revolutions, Return of the Jedi. What are some of the reasons for this problem? Are tthere examples of film series that avoid it? Can the Star Wars prequel trilogy be thought of as following this trajectory in reverse?
Comments are open.…
drorzel | May 20, 2007For the last several years, Schenectady has been trying to get a movie theater in the downtown area, as part of an ongoing urban renewal project. This week, it finally opened, and one of the first movies on the bill is Hot Fuzz, from the people who did Shaun of the Dead, which I wanted to see anyway, so I caught a matinee show yesterday.
Simon Pegg plays P.C. Nicholas Angel, the very best cop in London, with an arrest record is 400% better than any other officer's. The problem is, he's making everyone else look bad, so they transfer him to a sleepy little village called Sandford, which has…
drorzel | April 17, 2007I'm sick and tired. Not metaphorically, literally. I had two labs today, and the cold I thought I had shaken back when classes started has come back with a vengeance, so I'm all congested and coughing. So here's something silly to pass the time, via Kate among others:
The following are "plot keywords" from IMDB for some movies I really like. Guess the movie based on the keywords.
Small Town, Alcoholism, High School, Redemption
Repressed Homosexual, Small Town, Missouri
Small Town, Quitting Job, Famous Song, Real Time
Eccentric, Widower, Small Town, Garfield Assassination
Eating Contest, Child…
drorzel | March 27, 2007There's a story in the New York Times today about a new movie on the infamous Iowa grad school shootings:
On Nov. 1, 1991, outraged that his doctoral thesis had been passed over for an academic prize, a young physicist at the University of Iowa named Gang Lu opened fire at a physics department meeting. He killed five people and paralyzed another before taking his own life.
The shootings devastated Iowa City and shocked a nation not normally used to thinking of physics as a life-and-death pursuit. Now they have been transformed into a celluloid nightmare for the rest of us.
This case is the…
drorzel | March 7, 2007Dave and Jim Munger are doing their annual male-bonding fest this weekend:
Over the course of the next four days, Jim and I are going to watch, and review, every Rocky and Rambo movie.
[...]Here's our tentative viewing schedule:
Today: Rocky I and II
Tomorrow: Rocky III
Friday: Rocky IV and V
Saturday afternoon: First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part II
Saturday night: Rocky Balboa (in an actual movie theater -- assuming we can find one. It's playing in Statesville tonight, but we want to watch the movies in order!)
Sunday afternoon: Rambo III
This isn't quite as ambitious as Vidsanity!, but…
drorzel | February 25, 2007A few days ago, Inside Higher Ed did an Oscar preview, and asked five academics who study film to predict the Best Picture winner. Three of the five picked The Departed to win, and one of the other two preferred it to his predicted winner (Babel).
Clearly, Scorsese is doomed to lose yet again. Scalzi's half-serious prediction of Letters from Iwo Jima is looking better and better... Or possibly The Queen, which none of the academics even mentioned.
I've seen exactly none of the nominated films, so I really don't have an opinion. If you'd like to offer a prediction, or just call me a cretin for…
drorzel | February 20, 2007As Kate and I are planning to attend the Worldcon this year, we're eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards, which are sort of SF's version of the Oscars, or maybe the Golden Globes (the Nebula Awards being the other). This is only the third time I've had this opportunity, and it's always kind of difficult, given that I end up having basically no opinion in so many of the categories.
I do have a few ideas about works to nominate, but I'd like to hear suggestions from other people. So, what should I be putting on my nominating ballot this year? I'll put the list of categories below, with my…
drorzel | December 4, 2006Another idle thought inspired by the Bond movie (I may or may not post comments about the movie as a whole, but you can check out Kate's spoiler-laden comments. I liked it a little more than she did, but I'm more familiar with the genre, and willing to cut them more slack...):
From what I can tell, this movie appears to have gotten about 50% of its budget from product placement. Any time Bond uses his laptop, the shot is carefully set up to put the big "VAIO" logo right in the center of the screen. His magic cell phone gets almost as much screen time as the girl, and there's even a scene…
drorzel | December 3, 2006Kate and I saw the new Bond flick last night (short review: nice re-launch of the franchise, Daniel Craig does a great job with the role), and as the final credits started to roll, they played that signature James Bond riff-- the "dum di-di dum, da-da-da" bass line, the "da-da di dahh, di dah-daaaah" brass thing. You know the song I mean-- it or something like it is in pretty much all of the movies.
It made me wonder about the guy who wrote it, though. Does he think of it as the crowning work of his career, or is it a cheap bit of hackwork that he banged out over a bottle of muscatel in 1967…
drorzel | November 22, 2006Kate and I have a Netflix subscription that we've mostly been using to obtain various anime series. We're running a little low on Japanese cartoons, though, having recently finished Martian Successor Nadesico, and with only four discs left of Trigun (two of which will probably be polished off while lolling around Friday after hosting Thanksgiving dinner).
I've got other stuff on the Netflix queue-- various movies, season two of The Wire-- but I'm always looking for suggestions. So, recommend some DVD's: what movies, tv shows, or foreign cartoon series should I be adding to the Netflix queue…
drorzel | November 14, 2006Scott Aaronson renders a judgement on the Borat movie (scroll down into the comments), but I think my opinion is best summed up by Kevin Drum:
[T]he lesson of the movie wasn't some razor-sharp subversive point about how we're all racists and xenophobes an inch under the surface, the lesson was that if you act like a complete whack job you can get ordinary people flustered and flummoxed. This doesn't really strike me as any kind of surprise.
This can be sort of amusing in five-minute chunks, but I don't think it would hold up for a full-length movie. As a result, I have no intention of paying…
drorzel | November 13, 2006Christopher Priest's Victorian-magician novel The Prestige would appear to be unfilmable. The book is written as two entirely different texts, one a memoir and the other a diary, plus a framing narrative about descendants of the rival magicians Alfred Borden and Robert Angier trying to figure out the secrets behind their rivalry. It's a very twisty and literary book, relying heavily on unreliable-narrator games, and doesn't seem at all like the sort of thing that would play well on the screen.
I was surprised to hear that it had been adapted as a movie, then, and even more surprised to find…
drorzel | November 3, 2006The Onion AV Club has a review of the Aardman Animation CGI flick Flushed Away that contains a sentence starting with:
Once the film introduces a pack of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno,...
Really, it doesn't much matter what comes after that. I don't really intend to see the movie, but it pleases me to know that there is a movie that introduces a pack of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno.
Really, more movies should feature packs of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno. Or, possibly, I should get more sleep.
drorzel | October 29, 2006The Day the Earth Stood Still was on tv yesterday, and we watched most of it because it's a classic, and because the alternative was bad college football. Kate had never seen it before, and was surprised to find that it wasn't campy.
There is, however, one scene that has become unintentionally hilarious over the past fifty-odd years. Two Army doctors are outside the room where Klaatu (Michael Rennie) is being held, and they have a conversation that goes something like this (paraphrased, from memory):
Doctor 1: How old would you say [Klaatu] is?
Doctor 2: Thirty-five, or thirty-eight.
Doctor 1…
drorzel | August 27, 2006This year's Hugo Awards (either the Oscars of the Golden Globes of the science fiction/ fantasy field, depending on who you ask) were announced last night at the Worldcon in LA. Pleasant surprises abound:
1) Spin by Robert Charles Wilson won the Best Novel Hugo. As I've said before, I think it was far and away the best book in the field, but I didn't think it would win. They've made a lot of bad calls in recent years, but this one, I like.
2) The Best Professional Editor Hugo goes to David Hartwell. This is nice to see not just because David is a nice guy, and does good work, but because…
drorzel | August 26, 2006Kate's out of town for the weekend, leaving me here by myself (well, not counting the Queen of Niskayuna), needing to find something to do to entertain myself. My first thought was "big long bike ride," but it's raining, and I'm just not that committed to bicycling.
Second thought was "Maybe I'll go see a movie. So I punched up the local movie listings for the giant multiplex in the big shopping mall. I'll put them below the fold, to shield people from the soul-sucking horror:Accepted
Barnyard The Original Party Animals
Beerfest
How to Eat Fried Worms
Idlewild
Invincible
Little Miss Sunshine…
drorzel | August 18, 2006For some reason, I've been thoroughly exhausted all week, and being out late last night for a concert hasn't helped any. Thus, you're not going to get much in the way of substantive blogging from me today.
I did want to note a weird example of synchronicity in the physics-related blogosphere, though, as both Clifford Johnson and Jennifer Ouellette have recent posts in praise of B movies. Clifford sings the praises of Jurassic Park, particularly:
The fact that every time I am almost in tears when the scientists -not the annoying one played by Jeff Goldblum- see the dinosaurs for the first time…
drorzel | August 13, 2006Well, it's as good a guess at a collective noun for "kerfuffle" as any other...
There have been three moderately heated bloggy controversies that I've been following over the past week, that I haven't commented on. Mostly because I don't really have that much to add to any of the arguments, or at least, not enough to merit a blog post.
I do want to note their existence, though, and maybe by combining them together, it won't feel so much like a pointless fluff post. So if you're dying to know my opinions on the crimes of fanfic, Oliver Stone's casting decisions, or Hooters, click on through to…