TV/Movies Megathread

[Ideologue]

I dunno.  I do hope 11B explained to the kid that the 2012 Red Dawn is a work compromised by the ultimate moral cowardice, which is to say any consideration of the People's Republic of China whatsoever that does not involve prioritizing targets, thus making it automatically one of the weakest pieces of art ever produced by humankind.

I just saw Olympus Has Fallen. It was fun for awhile (it is a cross between Air Force One and Die Hard - a Die Force One, if you will), but goes seriously off the rails in the second half - particularly with the introduction of the dumbest nuclear fail safe in history. Seriously, a system that just automatically nuked New York at the start of any war would be better than the one in this movie. 2 "oh, come on, they completely stole this entire scene from Die Hard" out of 5.

Air Force Hard.

[Razgovory]

Heh, Watching Die Hard right now.  I forgot how good this film is, but then, I'm a sucker for 1980's action films.

[jimmy olsen]

Kurosawa movies on Hulu

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/03/22/kurosawa_on_hulu_seven_samurai_rashomon_and_22_more_movies_are_streaming.html

[Josquius]

Just saw the first episode of a show called In the Flesh. Its set in the aftermath of a zombie plague which didn't turn into a zombie apocolpyse. They've discovered a cure for the zombies to give them their memories back and stop them wanting to eat people. But there's stuff going on, some of the zombies don't like the way they're being treated, some humans don't like that the government is trying to reintegrate zombies rather than just killing them all, and all that. Its weird, but pretty good so far.

[garbon]

I'm also a bit baffled how it's always the open atheists who end up playing god in movies.

Alanis played God and she isn't really an atheist.

[HVC]

I'm also a bit baffled how it's always the open atheists who end up playing god in movies.

Alanis played God and she isn't really an atheist.

ya, but she was a women so obviously the devil in disguise. 



Happy Malthus?

[The Brain]

Dredd. Liked it a lot.

[Viking]

I'm also a bit baffled how it's always the open atheists who end up playing god in movies.

Alanis played God and she isn't really an atheist.

Personal life

Morissette was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family, and now practices Buddhism.[citation needed]

So, yeah, her to.

(and if you are going to argue that being a Buddhist means she isn't an atheist you are wrong, If necessary I'll quote the Dali Lama at you)

[Phillip V]

Shiri Appleby gets a pearl necklace on HBO's 'Girls'.

[Ideologue]

In Time (2011).  What if Andrew Niccol remade his early masterpiece Gattaca, and it wasn't very good?

Niccol as a screenwriter--perhaps my favorite screenwriter--is extremely fond of broad science fiction scenarios that serve as edifying left-wing moral allegories, but even when they do stand up to scrutiny, tend to require a world wholly divorced from our own.

Gattaca is an example of the former.  It posits a society where eugenically selected (not genetically engineered, but I forgive you for your profound ignorance) humans are given all the advantages over randomly conceived offspring, but it tells the story of a clear genetic ubermensch whose parents' chaotic back-seat combination clearly gave him a genius level IQ and the body of a young Ethan Hawke, and never really explains how the difference can be told between some overpeople and not others.  It also involves a protagonist with a possible heart condition who lies, cheats, defrauds, steals, and assaults his way into his dream job as an astronaut to Saturn, proceeding on a one-year mission where other people's lives will depend on him not dropping dead at an inopportune moment, and the film is pretty solidly behind this really ethically suspect choice.

The Truman Show is an example of the latter, envisioning a United States where a corporation can adopt a child and raise him as a deluded prisoner slave on reality TV.  The legacy of Citizens United, or total bullshit from an alternate dimension?

The difference between these two great movies and the unfortunately lackluster In Time is that Niccol's previous efforts usually emphasized character as much as the world, and did not keep throwing the indigestible parts of their worlds into your open maw without one second's pause.  In Time proposes a world where time is literally money, and you're eternally young, at least until you run out of time and die.  One enjoyable part of the movie is that while I may be sick the parts are played by young actors and actresses, whether the character being portrayed is 28, 50, or 150.  That's off-putting and weird and neat.

Like with The Truman Show and Gattaca, I appreciate the conceit--it's a heavy-handed but interesting way of exploring the staggering level of wealth inequality in our modern times.  The way it suggests that poverty is in part designed is actually more than a bit on point; its linking of this enforced impoverishment with death, while the rich live in banal, antiseptic splendor, is fearless.  But it rapidly becomes tiresome.

The inanity of the premise isn't an insuperable problem, but the constant reference to the implausibilities inherent in it are incredibly distracting, like an itch you can't scratch.  Hero Justin Timberlake's mom dies when she runs out of time, ironically because the plot's just kicked in and hero Justin Timberlake, the quintessential Hollywood Poor, has been recently gifted a hundred years (an outrageous sum!) by a suicidal one-percenter.  You see, you have to be in physical contact to exchange time with another person.  So did hero Justin Timberlake's mom die because, you know, society, or did she die because online banking inexplicably stopped existing at some point after they started genetically engineering immortals?

You can be robbed of time as well--have your "clock cleaned," as it were (there are a distressingly large number of temporal puns made in this movie).  While you can capsule your time (you see what I mean) at the bank, a lot of people walk around with their heartbeats on their sleeve, and all it takes is physically contact and some application of will to take it from someone.  So, the only thing that is keeping you from dropping dead is 100% less secure than my debit card.  This becomes important later when hero Justin Timberlake becomes a time-stealing Robin Hood (and when he fights some unaccountably British hipster hoodlums), along with his hostage/love interest, heroine and sexy space alien Rachel Seyfreid.

And since everyone is paid in time, how can you ever be paid less than a day?  Since this is logically necessary, where did the original time surplus come from?  Is there a time central banking system?  Is there a a time Fed?  Is there a time NYSE?  They say there are time taxes.  I guess this pays the time cops, as played by honorable villain Cillian Murphy, who is stiff and odd here, a long way from his outstanding work in his Nolan collaborations or even Red Eye, but not bad per se.  They do have time gambling, which gives us the one really great scene in the whole movie, one of the best cards scenes I've ever seen.  A game of poker breaks out not long after HJT crosses over into Rich Town to see how the other one-hundredth live, and he bets his life against three queens held by dishonorable villain Vincent Kartheiser (the one excellent performance in the movie, too, by the way).  Seconds away from death, he pulls off a straight.  It's good--but may be the only time in a two hour film with billions of literal ticking clocks that there is any real tension.

There is also the problem, endemic to Niccol films but never so robust as here, of just stating the themes and message of the movie over and over.  "Is it stealing if it's already stolen?"  Okay!  Property is theft!  I promise you, I get it.  And if this grates on me, I can't imagine how someone of more rightward politics would have enjoyed this at all.

I can say that Timberlake and Seyfreid (to a lesser extent) do okay jobs, albeit with occasional odd reads that I think were intentional on Niccol's part.  They are no Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman to be sure (and Cillian Murphy is no Jude Law), but there's no point in comparing anybody to Ethan Hawke, so I don't hold this against JT.  Most importantly, however, both are extra-hot, so in that regard you cannot say they failed to do their jobs: making me very ashamed of my own body.

C+

[Admiral Yi]

Watched the The (he he) Thing remake.  I suppose that's a handy formula: remake every hit movie ever made with a female in the lead instead of a man.  Wasn't as awful as i'd been led to believe, but twasn't good either.  Usually a bad sign when the alien has long tentacles that flail around aimlessly like...well, like badly thought-out special effects.

[Syt]

Wasn't the new one a prequel of sorts? I didn't bother watching it, since I didn't want my memories of the 1982 movie to be all shat over.

[Admiral Yi]

Wasn't the new one a prequel of sorts? I didn't bother watching it, since I didn't want my memories of the 1982 movie to be all shat over.

I gave up at the end so not sure.  It was set at a predominantly Norwegian base.

[Syt]

Yeah, I recall reading it was supposed to show what happened at the Norwegian base before the dog escaped to the Yank base.

[Eddie Teach]

In Time (2011).  What if Andrew Niccol remade his early masterpiece Gattaca, and it wasn't very good?

It was alright. Not worth 10 paragraphs thinking about though.