Avatar
December 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment
If you haven’t seen Avatar, you’ve probably heard of it and heard a lot about it from every possible media outlet imaginable. However, this is how the Titanic worship started, only to have rising backlash in the next 12 years, so you never know where this current juggernaut will go. Despite all the hype and good and bad press, I went to see it with my wife and was pleasantly surprised. What the hell does that mean? Here’s the skinny…
The plot goes something like this: Paraplegic war veteran, Jake Sully is brought to a distant planet called Pandora in place of his brother with the promise of getting his legs back if he helps the government on a mission. Pandora is inhabited by a primitive race called the Na’vi and Jake is sent in to learn their ways so that he can help relocate them and the humans can take over to rape the planet for it’s rich natural resources.
Avatar takes us to a spectacular, unseen world beyond imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on an epic adventure, ultimately fighting to save the alien world he has learned to call home. James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” first conceived the film 15 years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not exist yet. Now, after four years of production, Avatar, a live action film with a new generation of special effects, delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story. I couldn’t help but think of Apocalypse Now as I watched the very Vietnam-era inspired aircraft of the human invaders and my guess is that the similarities there and in the base story aren’t exactly coincidental.
As many reviews have said, Avatar leans heavily on the Dances with Wolves storyline, but the sheer visual feast James Cameron delivers makes the similarities a non-issue. Seriously, the SFX are impeccable and he uses them well. Instead of just shoving them in your face, he weaves them into the story beautifully, and they come off effortlessly as he moves between live and CG actors. Aside from the obvious CG awesomeness and thinly veiled plot lines, Avatar was truly an original and included some very innovative aspects never before seen in a feature film. I highly doubt that Avatar will ever be lauded as a landmark film, though perhaps it will be the new benchmark for all CG work on all films that follow it. Oh and BTW, if you do go see Avatar in the theater, definitely spend a few extra bucks and see it in IMAX 3D as the 3D effect is nothing short of amazing.
V has Landed
November 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Like many children of the 80s, V is one of those television events that is forever burned into my mind and probably added to some hidden phobia of aliens and perhaps even reptiles. Nonetheless, when I heard that ABC was remaking the original NBC property, you could say I was definitely excited to see how it would shape up. I even took in the original mini-series and the TV series that followed when sci-fi aired them prior to the new episode 1 and while it wasn’t as scary as I thought as a kid, the original was still very cool. Yeah, the effects were marginal, but for 1983 they were pretty good. The concept and the story however was pretty amazing and that was the main thing I hoped would make the trip into the new imagining and after seeing the pilot and the first episode, I’ve got high hopes for the series.
Of course people are already making the Nazi, Obama and immigration references, and in all reality, how could they not? The story is ripe for creative misinterpretation and the blogosphere is having at it. All politics aside, episode 1 really should have been two hours as it moved way too fast – it was like the aliens had just arrived and before the first commercial we were all ready breeding with them. Spoiler alert! Just kidding. Episode 2 slowed up a bit, so perhaps they were a little too eager to get things moving. While the original storyline was tossed out, the key elements are all still there and the characters are interesting and diverse. Long gone are those turbo shield sunglasses, but the visitors are very easy on the eyes and quite stylish. The CG work is pretty solid, but that was to be expected, so I’ll keep watching and from the numbers so far, it sounds like many others will be as well.
Haven’t seen it? Learn more and watch full episodes on ABC’s official V site»
Stargate Universe
October 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Screen cap showing the opening sequence of the new SG•U series
So who watched Stargate Universe last night? My guess is that anyone reading this had it on their calendar and made the 2-hour premier the focus of their Friday night. Despite all the naysayers disparaging the new series, calling it Stargate Voyager and a slew of other creative names, I went into the latest extension of the Stargate franchise with an open mind and have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. While the show’s universe feels very familiar, the flavor of the series is noticeably different in that it’s much grittier and with a definite adult vibe – I mean there’s a a full on sex scene before the first commercial airs that would have been right at home in the reimagined BSG series.
The new series follows a band of soldiers, scientists and civilians, who must fend for themselves as they are forced through a stargate when their off-world base comes under attack. The desperate survivors emerge aboard an ancient ship, which is only partially functional, locked on an unknown course and unable to return to Earth. Faced with meeting the most basic needs of food, water and air, the rag-tag group must unlock the secrets of the ship’s stargate to survive as the ship takes them from galaxy to galaxy and possible inhabitable planets.
They definitely packed a lot into this first outing, but they had quite a setup to deliver and did a decent job of packing it all in by way of flashback scenes and character back-story’s. And yes, as rumored the cast was all over the place, but that’s very much by design given the storyline and the character’s unique traits have already given us a taste of who’s who in the group. All told I thought the premier was great and definitely caught my interest, but perhaps as a Stargate fanboy I’m a little easier to win over… let’s just hope that SG•U can go the distance like the original series did, but only time will tell.
Push
August 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Simply put, Push is an entertaining sci-fi thriller that has a complex, fast moving story and pretty decent acting. It was much deeper than I had anticipated and while in the vein of Jumper, it’s complex storyline required your full attention or you were lost. Seriously, put down the Blackberry and close your laptop or you will be rewinding in now time – I speak from experience. The story is that of a group of people with special abilities, not unlike NBC’s Heroes, and their attempt to escape the evil government corporation that wants to leverage their abilities for evil. Dakota Fanning was actually pretty good in this movie as were the other key players. The concept and the effects were pretty original and the cinematography was just killer. Those Hong Kong/Kowloon locations were just amazing and a picture perfect vision of high-density living and chaos. We watched this one on Blu-ray and surprisingly, it would have been just as worthy of the ticket price had we seen it in the theater.
District 9
August 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment
So I saw District 9 yesterday and I’ve got to admit, it pretty much blew me away on multiple levels. I went into it assuming the absolute worst, mostly due to Peter Jackson’s involvement, but the ginormous hovering mothership and bug-like aliens from the previews got the best of me. Directed by Neil Blomkampf and produced by Peter Jackson, District 9 is about aliens who end up stranded on Earth when their ship runs out of gas above Johannesburg and are basically rescued, put in internment camps, and prevented from returning home, even though that’s all they want to do. The narrative is told in a documentary/news coverage format that really added to the overall sense of urgency and prevented many from taking a restroom break during this nearly two-hour movie, present company included (yep, I danced with uromysitisis).
Quite simply, this film is a powerful piece of work that is far deeper than anyone anticipated. At its core the film tells the story of how a member of the socially dominant group becomes conscious of the injustices that keep him in his place and the aliens in theirs - not too far from the struggles of modern South Africa. The price he pays for his awakening is severe, given the dreadful contours of the system he has been charged with enabling. The film’s view of the world is bleak, though not entirely nihilistic. It suggests that sometimes the only way to become fully human is to be completely alienated, the ultimate walk in another man’s shoes.
Bottom line: District 9 is a must see. It’s too bad it received an R rating though, as the multitude of topics it covers would benefit teens with it’s gritty social commentary and no-holds barred look at humanity.
Caprica
April 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment
“Battlestar Galactica” has barely ended, and already a spinoff series is being trotted out by the Sci Fi (or Sy Fy as they now call themselves) Channel. Like many BSG fans, I was quick to get my hands on hte pilot via pre-release DVD, clearly released way early to create a little buzz on the coat tail’s of the the mother-ship series coming to an end.
Fortunately “Caprica” (a pilot to the forthcoming spinoff) is no quick cash-in on its parent series’ success. Okay, the fate of humanity doesn’t yet hang in the balance, and there are no space battles at all — but it maintains the same suspense, intelligence and philosophical musings as “Battlestar Galactica” had, even as it shows how Adama and the Cylons came to be.
A pair of secretly monotheistic teens — Zoe Graystone (Alessandra Toreson) and her boyfriend Ben — are running away from Caprica to escape the decadent polytheistic culture. But then Ben turns out to be a suicide bomber, and destroys the lev train.
Two men are left to deal with their grief in the aftermath — prominent cybernetic inventor Daniel (Eric Stoltz), and mob-connected Tauron lawyer Joseph Adams (Esai Morales), who lost his wife and daughter in the explosion. As the Caprican government starts ruthlessly hunting for monotheists, the two men bond. But then Daniel finds that Zoe is not completely gone — in an orgiastic virtual rave, she left behind a virtual “echo” that has all her memories, feelings, and even experienced her death.
Believing that the avatar can bring Zoe back from the dead, Daniel is determined to somehow put her avatar in a robotic body — and offers the same to Adams. At first Adams is desperate enough to agree, even to sacrificing his principles to get a vital piece of machinery for Daniel. But their ethics drive the two men in opposite directions, as Daniel’s obsession drives him to spawn something terrible…
It’s pretty obvious that “Caprica” is meant as the pilot of a TV show, because there are too many plot threads (the monotheists, Lacey’s involvement, the Adama family’s changes) left floating in the air with no resolution. Not to mention that final scene, which will leave you shrieking, “What next? What next? What’s gonna happen next?”
That said, it has the promise of being a truly brilliant piece of work — the writers deftly interweave topics of racism, religious oppression and misguidance, sorrow, and the existence of the soul (do our memories alone define us, or do we have something more?). And they spin up a totally believable world in Caprica, which is a wee bit more advanced than our world but essentially the same, with rebellious teens, Mafia-esque mobs, smooth downtown buildings and a seething undercurrent of sex’n'blood decadence.
The first half of “Caprica” is a bit slow, especially since it mainly focuses on how rotten Daniel and Joseph feel. But once Daniel discovers virtual-Zoe, the story blossoms into a beautifully tense tango between the two men, full of quietly poetic dialogue (“Sometimes faith can be a victim of chance”) and some eerie horrific moments (Joseph’s reunion with his dead “daughter”). The last ten minutes truly links “Caprica” to “Battlestar Galactica.”
Both Stoltz and Morales do brilliant jobs here. Neither Daniel nor Joseph is portrayed as a bad guy, but one of them allows his obsessions to carry him into dangerous territory, while the other has lines that he’s determined not to cross. Torresani is also quite good as a fierce young woman who wants to change the world, and her digital avatar, and Polly Walker gives a solid if brief performance as a serene young teacher with a secret.
“Caprica” is a solid start to the proposed spinoff series, although the wide-open ending keeps it from quite working on its own. Still, a little something to tide people over until the series really gets going.
The Secret (2007)
January 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This very adult take on the Freaky Friday phenomena is strange from the start, but like a train wreck, you simply can’t look away. We went into it with low expectations, but the abstract, warped situation the characters are put into has you scratching your head in disbelief and running through all the what-if scenarios as you watch the story unfold. This one is definitely a sleeper that might otherwise get passed by, but when given the chance it will sneak up and surprise you in a big way.
Inspired by the Japanese drama Himitsu (which was in turn based on the novel by author Keigo Higashino), director Vincent Perez’s supernatural drama tells the tale of a mother who discovers some shocking secrets about her teenage daughter after being killed in a tragic car accident and seeing her soul inexplicably transplanted into the body of the troubled young girl. Benjamin (David Duchovny) and Hannah (Lili Taylor) are happily married soul mates, yet neither parent realizes that their adolescent daughter Sam (Olivia Thirlby) is leading a desperate double life. One day, seemingly out of the blue, Benjamin and Sam find their lives changed forever when Hannah is killed in a violent car accident. But at the moment of death, Hannah’s soul is somehow propelled into Sam’s body, giving the mother a chance to know her beautiful daughter more intimately than she ever did in life. Unfortunately the things that Hannah discovers about Sam are deeply disturbing; Sam has been leading a secret life – a life that neither Hannah nor Benjamin ever knew anything about. Meanwhile, back at home, Hannah and her grieving husband receive one last chance to rekindle their romance and say their last goodbyes.
Total Recall (1990)
January 1, 2005 | Leave a Comment
Total Recall is one of my guilty pleasures. It’s not a great movie. It’s not even the one really good science-fiction movie director Paul Verhoeven (Hollow Man, Starship Troopers) has made — that was Robocop. But it’s a helluva lot of fun, and it moves fast enough that you never notice how silly it is till later.
In the distant future man colonizes Mars while virtual reality has become a substitute for vacation. One company “Recall” can implant memories of any event into one’s mind for a price. The memories and experiences implanted seem as real as if they actually occurred. One man as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger decides to go to Recall and have a memory implanted of a vacation on Mars (or what he thinks is a memory implant). In reality he is on the Martian landscape not knowing who he is but having an adventure so unbelievable that he believes it has to be a virtual dream.
As the movie unfolds one discovers that the adventure on Mars is indeed real, but it is the personality of the man which has been altered. To get closer to the leader of the Mars Resistance movement, those in charge of Mars send their best agent to find and assassinate the leader. The man sent is of course Arnold Schwarzenegger who discovers that in reality before being programmed with his new personality that he was quite a mean and vindictive soul. But sometimes people can change and as things are under way to convert Arnold back to his former self, he rebels. Stabbing an attendant with his arm restraint and busting out of his chair he climbs to freedom.
Air generators are turned off on Mars in an attempt to kill off Mars resistance forces. Alien artifacts and a legend of a machine deep in the core that can turn ice to oxygen prompt a trek deep within the planet. As the machine is turned on Arnold’s eyes buldge out in one of the more memorable special effects scenes. Like a cartoon character out of control or Jim Carrey during transformation in the Mask, Arnold’s face contorts in every which way because of lack of air.
Total Recall presents many scene elements that give it an almost classic appeal with “Arnold’s fans.” From the mutated bartender on Mars, to the hooker with three breasts, and the infamous tracking device in Arnold’s nose this movie has much to remember and enjoy.
