Brazil: Criterion Edition DVD.

I've been meaning to get this. I'm not sure whether the inclusion of "Love Conquers All" is an incentive or a disincentive, though....

NYT article on the re-release of Donnie Darko and the films unusual history (Box-office bomb to cult favorite to theatrical release of director's cut).

I'm hoping it will come to Chicago. (If it does well in NY and LA, it will.) I haven't seen it, and I'm sure I'll like it, since I am all pretentious and stuff.

Thanks for the info, Beej. Doesn't sound like what Sci-Fi was doing with M Night at all, though.

Sci-Fi's thing with The Village was totally a "gotcha!" PJ never dreamed in a million years that anyone would take Forgotten Silver seriously -- there was no disclaimer because he didn't think he needed one. It wasn't a hoax, it was a misunderstood mockumentary. (I mean, part of the "set" that they find in the middle of the "forest" is the steps of a bank (city hall?) in the middle of Wellington that they'd thrown some leaves and branches on top of. They assumed everyone in their audience would recognize it right away.)

Why am I watching St. Elmo's Fire? How long before I can't take it anymore and turn it off?

(I saw it when it came it out and I don't remember much of any of it.)

eta: I forgot what a stalker Emilio Estevez's character is....

meara of epic proportions!

Hmm, I didn't think it mattered that the events that happened at Troy were pre-literate since the story survived via the oral tradition for centuries before anyone bothered to write it down.

Well, but oral tradition has gods and narrative coherence and all events happening in threes. Although oral tradition can be stable over time in some cases, I don't think it can be taken as proof of actual events, especially in the details. For that matter, look at what turning an event into a story does -- the loss of Titanic wasn't sexy enough by itself, so it got a love story to make it more interesting.

Earthsea:

And I'm not sure they'll let Ged make the mistake.

Right. Ultimately, Earthsea isn't a blow-shit-up, goodguys/badguys universe, and trying to make it so would erase it from existence.

Women's roles in movies had just started moving away from the helpless bystander/victim, but only in the non-genre movies. And then, the female characters were mostly portrayed as hysterical, neurotic, incapable. In sci-fi and horror, women were still the ones that screamed a lot and had to be protected.

Especially for horror films, Ripley is a complete departure from the existing methods of the time. Laurie Strode was the queen of the late 70s, early 80s screamers, and she is a young, frightened, hiding creature who grows over the course of the movie -- but the hiding is foregrounded, and what people remember. The Veronica Cartwright character in Alien always struck me as a twit of that type -- she was so irritatingly helpless, and shouting at her just made her more paralyzed. (I was glad when she died.) Ripley, by contrast, is capable, cautious, reads fools the riot act, and survives.

Not before prancing about in futuristic underpants, but it's a kind of progress.

In some ways Aliens is retrograde politics, because it turns Ripley's base reason for living/surviving/fighting into Mother Defending Her Child. I still think that movie could have been more interesting if there had been no child at all, or if it had been one of the other (male) survivors who had been cast into the parent-role.

He tried to explain to her that she was very mistaken, that they never actually show her head in the box (and they don't), but the woman was having none of that -- she knew what she'd seen.

I think this is protesting too much. Showing someone a closed box and saying "There's a woman's head in this box" is narratively different from showing a woman's head in a box how? Unless we're meant to disbelieve the former (IIRC, we're not), they differ only inasmuch as the latter will get you in more trouble with the ratings board. That's the same as Quentin Tarantino's defenders claiming that, because the stabbing of So-and-so doesn't actually show the sword entering the body, only slash! and the guy falling, that means it's not as violent. Fiddlesticks. Did the guy die? Is the woman's head in a box?

I disliked Seven for a lot of reasons (actually also Pulp Fiction ), but whether or not the implied violence was ever made explicit was not one of those reasons.

In re Blade Runner

As for the story itself, I felt rather McGuffined. I lost track of why anything was going on. And I thought the Is He or Isn't He issue would be a bigger deal, but it's never even addressed overtly. It's one of those movies that makes the audience do all the work in making the concept profound.

I think this movie relies a great deal on visuals, and on a good working knowledge of film history. Like, it doesn't say explicitly that height is wealth, only shows you the golden (sunny!) pyramid of Tyrell and Deckard's flat on the 100th floor, and then shows you a shot out the window of the replicants' first apartment, that proves they're only a few meters off the street. Seeing Rachael in Tyrell's home, and then seeing her on the street later -- she looks totally wrong on the street, out of place, and that's the point.

Also, the thing with the eye in the opening credits is just like in the movie Peeping Tom, and the visuals keep referring back to eyes again and again.

Also, the narration is totally bad and wrong and obvious and never helpful for sussing out the subtextual questions anyway.

Why am I watching St. Elmo's Fire?

cos you're a closet Brat Pack groupie? :)

I may be in the minority here, but I liked I, Robot. Not great literature, but then, I don't really want great literature at 10am Saturday morning after a long night... Anyway, I can't imagine Asimov ever writing action sequences like that; it's basically fanfic in Asimov's world, but I didn't see any reason to trash it. I thought it was a good movie. It kept the Three Laws, and carried them to their logical conclusion. I found the ending creepy, but the three folks I saw it with didn't, so maybe I'm wrong and it wasn't intended to be scary.

After Blade Runner came out, people were trashing it because it was nothing like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Now, we consider it a seminal sci-fi movie. Eh. I, Robot won't ever be "seminal," but it might get some young people interested in reading Asimov, and that's not a bad thing. That it might get them thinking about the relationship of logic and emotion, or the nature of consciousness, is also not a bad thing.

Will Smith nearly naked... also, not a bad thing.

When everyone was leaving the theater afterwards, a little boy in the back - he was about eight, I guess - stood up and said loudly "That was even better than Spiderman!!" Everyone laughed, which confused him.

We four had a long conversation about the Three Laws afterwards, and I was reminded of a short story called The Cold Equations. They didn't know it. Does anyone here remember that story?

The Cold Equations is the one with the space ship and the stowaway and the weight/fuel allotment, right?

Yep, that's the one.