Tonight Lime and I stopped in at the DVD-room and watched a movie. I urged her for us to start in on the mammoth Lord of the Rings Extended Edition series, but she didn’t feel like it and ended up asking the woman who words there for a recommendation. The woman, who recommended the excellent Save The Green Planet to us a while back (read about that here), told us that SAW was an excellent film. So we took her word for it, though I had some misgivings. “Isn’t this a serial killer movie?” “No,” the girl replied to the …

Because I’m such an SF fan, people expect me to have something to say about Star Wars. I mean, it’s the final episode, the series is over (let’s hope Lucas really means it), and a chapter on SF movie history is closed, right? Bullshit. Star Wars was fine and all, at first. It was a noble, heroic, knightly story with some Zen shit thrown in. Cool, weird little aliens and a mechanized monster of a villain. And yeah, a filial connection between the villain and the hero. You have your noble savage (the wookie), your WWII fighter pilot, your Sir …

I don’t know if the 13-episode miniseries ReGenesis got much airplay outside of Canada, but I just finished watching it (downloaded, which is the only format in which it’s accessible to me) and I have to say it was absolutely worthwhile. It was so riveting that one evening I watched three, or was it four, episodes in a row, just to finish the series. I am not sure exactly how believable some of it was, but on the other hand, I nonetheless found the story fascinating. The idea that engineered diseases, planted by some very unusual terrorists and spreading like …

Marvin linked to the Kingdom Of Heaven movie trailer and this is what I have to say: How unsurprising, a movie about the Crusades. How completely predictable. You know, it’s interesting seeing this show up on the big screen while reading Edward Said’s Orientalism for the first time. Say what you will about the guy, but he did kind of have a point about how entertainment, scholarship, and imperial interests intersect. It sure goes a long way to confirming arguments that America on some level sees its relationship with the Middle East through the lens of the Crusades—a lens constructed …

I found a link to AtomFilms on a site called Phil-osophy 101 which doesn’t seem to be loading now. Anyway, some of the films there were actually worth watching, and pretty funny: Lady Lovelace Deception System: very cyberpunk, very cryptic Solid Action Love Partner: odd, funny, retro robot fun Star Wars TV: if it were five seconds longer, I’d say it’s not worth it, but I did chuckle. They Came to Attack Us: be careful who you trust with the fate of the world Abducted: a funny take on the stupid alien rectal probe myth. As if aliens with the …

My friend John Wendel really ought to have a media blog. He emailed me a link to an article in the New York Times about

Little question: Why does mainstream American TV refuse to run English-language comedy from England? I’m not going to say British comedy is the best in the world, or that no American comedy is good… though, of late, most anything I’ve seen that is funny has come out of Britain, not America. And I really, really have a hard time imagining any

Unlike Tithonius, I am not really into the old Loony Toons. I never enjoyed them that much, rales of the Road Runner aside. Still, I can’t help but be put off by the fact that when Warner Brothers needs to make a few hit shows, it decides to give “a new look” to Bugs Bunny and his friends. I mean, what happened, did everyone creative die in 1972 or something? Really, come on! Does everything have to be a remake, reenvisioning, reimagining… a re-hash? It’s not as if they couldn’t come up with a killer cartoon, with new characters, after …

I’ve watched three movies lately worth mentioning here: 똥개 (“Ddongkae”, which was given the English title “Strayed Doggy”—yes, doggy.) This movie was quite a strange one, chock full of all kinds of acknowledgments of things that you don’t see widely acknowledged in public, like that even a family man and a relatively “good” cop with a conscience can be on the take, or that being a dabang girl is a gateway to be a massage parlor girl (which means being a prostitute). Yet the film isn’t a political one, not really. The politics of it, actually, seems to be “simple …

Last night, I watched a Japanese/Polish-made SFD film directed by Mamoru Oshii called Avalon. A bit dated, the film was made in 2001, but anyway, it was new to me. I don’t know quite what I think of it: it certainly doesn’t live up to anything like The Matrix in terms of SF-action, but then I don’t think it was supposed to be that kind of a film. As some of the commenters on the IMDB message boards have noted, it’s very Tarkovskian, slow and full of empty silences, beautiful mundanities, and a kind of weaving of “mythic” materials with …