I can’t believe I’ve overlooked this 1993 Jane Campion masterpiece for so long, though on the other hand I doubt I’d have appreciated it as much as a teenager; its bleak yet sensuous atmosphere, literary vibe and complicated relationships probably resonate better with my older self.
Watched the latest unsettling sci-fi mind-bender from Alex Garland, the writer/director of Ex Machina, that got dumped on Netflix for being “too complicated” for the wider audience. I’m sorry that I never got a chance to see it on the big screen, but good on the creative team for refusing to dumb it down.
Yeah yeah I’m a couple of years behind on this, but I finally caught up with the world’s favourite foul-mouthed, snarky, fourth-wall-breaking superhero.
A tense and disturbing thriller that’s often uncomfortable to watch, but very well-made with two exceptional lead performances. You could regard it as a take on the Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, if the Red Riding Hood was more like Arya Stark.
I finally caught up on the short-lived but much-loved Firefly TV series a couple of months ago, which made me want to visit an alternate universe where the show was allowed to run for as long as its creator Joss Whedon had intended. In the absence of a working interdimensional portal, I had to do with this 2005 feature film, which is a much better farewell than the dizzyingly abrupt ending of the TV series.
I wanted to watch this movie for ages and I finally did it. This love letter to the 70s glam rock, very loosely inspired by David Bowie, is rather scattered and uneven, but at the very least it offers heaps more fun and weirdness than your average musical biopic.
After watching Solaris, last Thursday friend and I were back at the Astor Theatre for more of Andrei Tarkovsky‘s meditative, arty, defiantly slow sci-fi. I love the story I read where, upon hearing from the officials at the State Committee for Cinematography that the film was too slow and dull, Tarkovsky’s reply was that the film “needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts”.
