Found a little bit of downtime in my heavy social calender*, so decided to start watching some films with "Moon" in the title. Two down so far.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon
It's only reedeeming quality is that it is a marginal improvement upon the second one. Beyond that, it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Shia TheBeef's character is an angsty, angry shit - no doubt designed to resonate with the target audience of sexually frustrated male teens and manchildren. Most of the other supporting characters also act as if they've got critical mental faculties missing too. The robot/car thingies are alright I guess. I watched maybe half the film before giving up.

Moon
Ah, that's better. A creepy "serious" sci-fi that as brilliant as it is predictable. So, it's pretty damn brilliant.

( * it's actually about as heavy as a paper doily made of gnat farts) 

 

I could do with the company.

Even if it is creepy and avoidant. 

Ok I'll admit that the only reason I'm watching films right now is because I'm away from work with a bad dose of the ol' bum scrunchies, so without further ado:

The Thing (2011)
There's perhaps 3 minutes worth of half-decent tension in this film, with the rest of the running time taken up by bored acting, cliche "boo" moments, and not-really-scary monsters that are too cartoony and poorly CG'd to be comparable to the awesome 1982 version.
The most annoying thing about this film is that it's not quite shit enough for me to hate it completely; which means I might get confused in the future when trying to recall whether I enjoyed it or not.

The Hurt Locker
This film is marred by a couple of ridiculously goofy hollywood moments (the surreal, "Three Stooges"-inspired portrayal of the British SAS springs to mind, as does the protagonist's ludicrous secret solo-mission to avenge the cruel fate of a local boy). But other than that it's cinematic gold. By far and away the best film set in the Irag conflict that I've ever seen (and I've seen two of them now). 

Transformers: Dark of the moon
Yeah I know what you mean about Shia, he was far too hyperactive and angry all the time for my liking. I'm not a transformers fan - never watched it in the 80s. But for a popcorn flick, it's not too bad. The giant robot CGI and the sound effects are all fantastic.

Moon
Yeah that was a good slow paced sci fi. And creepy. A bit like Solaris & Solyaris actually, also good movies.

The Thing
I just watched this about a week ago as well. I thought it was fairly well received and not such a bad remake prior to watching it. But once I got into it and we got the giant spaceship and completely and utterly over the top monsters I realised it wasn't a good remake at all. It was still a pretty good movie in it's own right, but had NONE of the fantastic atmosphere and creepiness of the original. Some good gory stuff though. You just can't go in expecting a proper remake with everything that made the original so good. It's a different movie.

The Hurt Locker
Tried watching this once. Just seemed like a documentary of bomb making scenes. Tried again several months later and got all the way through. I like the lead actor, but I wouldn't watch the movie again. Some tense moments, really good the way it ended, but not really a thought-provoking movie at all with a story that went anywhere. 

I got about as far as the megan fox replacement being introduced with the camera pointing up her skirt (about 3 mins) and turned off :/ 

But yeah, the female element of the film was clearly designed for an audience only really comfortable with women whose surnames end in .jpg 

Should I watch Men in Black 3 or The Eagle (2011) tonight? 

MIB 3 is even dumber than Transformers 3. Hard to believe, I know... 

I'll never forget that in Transformers 1 (ok, when I was a tiny kid I thought Transformers was fun), they claimed that cars, airplanes and etc had been reverse-engineered from Transformers. The fact that I exist in a world where that could be said out loud by an older white gentleman actor who apparently has some degree of credibility, based on a script written and a production created with hundreds of millions of dollars - MAKES ME WISH I DID NOT.

I'm sure many of us here have wondered this, but how can there be such a gap between basic rationality and most of the human race. I don't mean the gap between knowing how best to act and failing to do that, since that entails admitting after the fact that one fucked up (ie, drinking a lot and often, is an illogical behaviour and I know it). I DO mean willful ignorance, ie actively denying common sense (ie evolution etc, or swallowing that 'clever' transformers bullshit).

In conclusion, sorry for the rant, and as long as people are this stupid I'm worried about the future. It's a good reason not to have kids. 

 

MiB 3 was average fun. Nowhere as crap as what I remember about some Transformers movie I once saw.

Also watched The Intouchables. Absolutely fantastic beautiful film I highly recommend. 

Visually good, but disappointing as a prequel. They could have made that topic a movie on its own, but using the Alien universe as a vessel for it sucks, because it devaluates the original theme, at least the way they pulled it off here.

I get it there's a lot of mythological and symbolic stuff, who created who (or what) and how the circle closes etc, but ultimately it seems incompatible to the Alien theme in the sense that the old ideas and mysteries are being sacrificed in favor of the new ones. Turning the engineer into 'just another' type of human-like creature that designed the aliens (as well as humans presumably) as a weapon which turns on him seems somewhat lame - despite all parallels and implications that arise. It's not the kind of twist I was hoping for, or that made go woo, not least because it has been done many times before. Plus the engineers looked like that Dr. Whatshisname from X-Men. I prefer to regard the aliens as the ultimate parasite that not even advanced life forms from space are unthreatened by.

So in retrospect, I guess the ridicuously large squid must represent the overall fishiness of the movie and its story, re symbolism!
I can't believe they didn't even get the tie-in right, deliberately or not, even though it wouldn't have been a plot-problem at all to have the engineer died on his chair. If this was a movie by Lucas, we could expect the scene in Alien to be editited afterwards... 

Splice (2009)

Adrien Brody and whatsherface do a brilliant job of making me forget that I'm watching a very mediocre movie. It's a film about a secret human hybrid experiment gone terribly wrong, although a scene late in the film makes me think that the experiment actually went terribly right, judging by the amount of fun one of the protagonists seems to be having with it.

According to the internet, I'm supposed to find this film disturbing, but it seems that the very same internet has desensitised me to freakish monster sex, because I just found the whole thing merely a bit silly and dumb. 

I feel about the same way. I doubt I'll watch it again, but I found it a great, dumb, strange guilty pleasure that first time. 

Moon
Yeah that was a good slow paced sci fi. And creepy.

I was worried Sam Rockwell would be very kooky and the HAL with smilies thing wouldn't sit well with the atmosphere but I thought it enhanced the creepiness as the story unfolds. Great little film :) 

Haha the Splice sexscene where he roots the weird monster girl was hot. I'd do the same thing. I quite liked that movie, it was different. 

You dicks are going to hate this view point because OMGZOR NOT QUITE AS GOOD REMAKE OF A CLASSY ORIGINAL SO IT MUST TOTALLY SUCK ASS.

Wrong. It's actually a cool film. Somewhere between pretty cool and really cool - it does exactly what it promises, slick, stylish, sci-fi action film. As a remake of the original, it's not that bad - the new setting has a good hook to it, aspects of the original are translated fairly well but it has enough of it's own character going on. As a film in it's own right, it's great, despite getting a bit silly towards the end, the action (car chase), pace and many of the scenes (UFB vs Colony styles) are well done, as are a lot of the little future touches (blend of current architecture with fancy technology). BUT it suffers from the story being in the shadow of the original - if the original had never been made, this could be one of the best current sci-fi films, but since everyone is familiar with the concept, the plot and twists lose their impact. But that doesn't spoil the entertainment much. 

Yeah, it's pretty good. Geared more towards the action compared to the original one. Blade Runner-esque cyber-punk setting is really well done, though it could be used in a deeper context (I'm normally against CGI effects but I have to admit that the city scenes look fairly organic). The new plot elements are integrated cleverly too. What I missed though was the little comical touches of Arnold. Still, worth seeing.

However, this is the second time another new sci-fi completely abandons the plot woven through the first half for the sake of action (the first was Prometheus) - and I remember feeling slightly irritated (even though it was well though-out and eye-catching). I miss the deeper and subtler sci-fi of '70s. Here's hoping that more will come in this decade in the vein of Moon. 

hate!
hate
but you already know what is resented: the ambition to make money off of previous money, as opposed to, you know, make money by adopting a PKD story.
PKD was a genius and there's an endless ton of his shit around waiting to be adapted. Fuck you hollywood, and et cetera and so forth. 

ok that was obviously extreme, I am just pissed off. There's so much out there, in terms of thought, including PKD. Yet what we get, is what we actually fucking get. 

alright, alright now I'm calm
I just wish someone would adopt "A Little Something For Us Tempunauts" and fuck with all our heads FINALLY. lol. alright. damn. 

why don't you tell us how you really feel tronyn? lol

i don't mind remakes or reboots. gives us the chance to see a great movie in a different light. it's like a song remix. it's just that a lot of the time they fuck them up.

i watched rise of the planet of the apes a couple weeks ago, that was a worthy reboot. 

sorry to keep being an ass, but like.. dude in the 70's everything wasn't a remake indeed corporations had less of a stranglehold on our lives than they have now and also indeed the output was correspondingly different. Name me a STAR WARS 51.2.formulaic. THE PREQUEL from the 70s. At least in the 80s they had to keep to straight sequels. I love the Nolan Batman trilogy, but he legitimized the attitude, "fuck however much we fuced this up in the past, we can now just ignore that!"

Hate.

Hate!