I've been watching a lot of movies lately, a fact that has started to disturb my normal process of memorizing events. This hasn't happened to me before merely due to the fact that watching lots of movies and having a social life had always been mutually exclusive. This time I adopted distinct orientations of mentally demanding activities, something that has caused my brain to erase some random data like persons, situations and knowledge. I, therefore, call upon the powers of my blog, as a diary, to exercise my memorizing abilities.
Given in a random order below, are the sci-fi films I have watched these couple of months. Some of them are hidden or forgotten gems, and most of them are of medium calibre, only because I had already watched all the very popular ones.
Avalon (2001)
Having nothing to do with British mythology, Avalon is a matrix-like, dystopian movie with a film-noir feeling. It uses the theme of virtual reality versus real (or not?) reality to comment on issues of contemporary society.
Some notes: The Polish accents gave me a feeling of a decadent Soviet Union, which of course was not a hidden political message, and if it were, I completely missed it.
And some brief observations: Being a Cannes-featured film, it tries to follow a slow, subdued tone, which nonetheless captures you. However, what I failed to understand was some really long cuts -excuse my pure terminology- which were badly embedded in the film and disoriented me; some bad juxtapositions; and a very odd long part of a scene that focused on a man eating some disgustingly juicy food with lots of jump cuts. I didn't understand the purpose and it felt completely of-the-tone. However, the odd, if not amateurish, editing didn't manage to affect my overall fondness of the film.
Primer (2004)
Words would do no justice to this film, but if I were to talk about it in a programming language, there is only one language that I'd use: Brainfuck.
TRON: Legacy (2010)
TRON is what you get on an evening of absolute dullness when you have watched every other sci-fi you know off and you are too bored to go look for some new. Sorry to the fans out there. The first one gets points for being retro, but Legacy, just for being retro-inspired. I can't say I didn't enjoy it, but, having identical story with the first one, I kept thinking that it was created just for the sake of looking how "TRON" would look like with the use of modern CGI.Also, who the hell is TRON?? He is like a face-less creature! I remember we had problems identifying him in the 80s version with a friend, but this time he only had a cameo appearance.
23 (1998)
Ok, this is not a sci-fi movie, but it definitely falls within the geeky spirit of this post, namely it's science, and it's fiction (almost).Now, 23 (1998) is what you get when you are lucky enough to accidentally fall onto it while looking for "The Number 23" (2007). Semi-true story centered around a semi-mental hacker.
Scene that makes you smile: The creation of the trojan horse.
Sky captain and the world of tomorrow (2004)
It is my opinion that this movie, with the exceptionally small title, sold only so many tickets, not because of the laughable effects, but because Angelina Jolie's appearance was more of a cameo than Tron's in TRON. You can't have her on the cover and hide her in the film! It's just not fair to the horny male and jealous female fans! But, well, this is not the first time that someone takes advantage of her name to make some extra sales.I only saw this movie now because of my recent addiction to vintage, and dieselpunk is definitely one of my favourite aesthetics. I was convinced, but I wouldn't recommend it to any Hollywood fan that is not deeply into these stuff.
*****
I would like to close this post by stating one infuriating thing that I have noticed: People should stop listing sci-fi movies along with fantasy! We, the fans that concentrate on the "science" aspect of the film, would easily watch physics, maths or hacker-related films, but NOT LOTR! It is just not the same thing!
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