Friday, April 13, 2007
Review: Sunshine
Well, we’re not dead yet, not quite, and we do believe The Fake Life can be a home for some fun content, so I’ll be writing a few articles about my adventures in film land over the next week or so and I hope my fellow Fakers will join me. If any of you sexy, enlightened souls reading this have an idea for an article you’d like our message boarders to discuss for five posts before making a joke about MODOK please get in contact with us. Honestly, even if you’re a troll.
In the meantime: here’s a review for Danny Boyle’s latest, Sunshine: it’s good!
The Sun is dying in the future, possibly from watching Solar Crisis on a Friday night in. A crack team of pretty astronauts have been given the mission of flying a very big bomb into the star so as to re-ignite it. Things go wrong. And that’s the plot.
The central concept is daft pseudo-science nonsense, and the narrative set up is hackneyed and predictable but, to be honest, it doesn’t entirely matter. The point of this movie is to create a series of sequences that build up to emotional climaxes, often starting with the tension and fear of a rescue or repair mission and then shifting towards a more transcendent, spiritual space as characters come face to face with their mortality, the infinite, and stuff. Think of that bit in Boyle’s previous film, 28 Days Later, when the main character wanders around a deserted, post apocalyptic London as the music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor rises to a thundering sustained crescendo of intense post-rock awesomeness. It’s like that, but with a few more Spielberg-esque close-ups of people staring beatifically off screen.
And it really works. But only, I feel, if you see it at the cinema. It has the structure of dance music, being entirely devoted to those regular crescendos and, if you are in an immersive atmosphere like a cinema or a club, in the darkness with a massive sound system and part of a crowd sharing the same experience, the effect is overwhelming. This is a sci-fi movie for the rave generation.
Listen to the same tune on your radio the next day, however, and it will be repetitive, predictable and a bit dull.
You’ll notice that same central dinner table around which a crew bickers you’ve seen dozens of times since Alien. You’ll notice that you’ve seen the repair mission outside the ship from 2001 to Star Trek: First Contact. You’ll notice that, for a bunch of highly trained elite astronauts, they all crack up and act like babies at the first sign of stress. You’ll notice that the attempt to introduce a specific antagonist in the third act is a sop to standard Hollywood plotting and never amounts to much more than a distraction from the main action.
And all those things are true, but when you are caught up in the moment, the effect is equally inarguable.
The actors, including Cillian Murphy, the dude that plays The Human Torch and the woman from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon who wasn’t Zhang Ziyi, all acquit themselves well, creating characters and solid screen presences mostly through behaviour while intelligently reciting the mostly techy and expositiony script. Cillian Murphy, who has a face mixing such sharp angularity with such puffy lips he wobbles on the line between utter beauty and terrifying deformity, is particularly suited to staring beatifically off screen.
The script isn’t offensively dumb. The events mostly move quickly. It looks great. Both the threat of space and the ever increasing threat of the Sun’s heat as they approach it are viscerally evoked, and the sense of scale and isolation are only beaten by 2001. And maybe Silent Running.
It’s good then, but very much a film to be experienced rather than coldly observed, which is great for film-lovers, bad for the sorts of sci-fi fans who want to know how light-sabers work.
8 out of 10
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Saturday, March 03, 2007
The Weekend Image Depot: 3/3/07
Nothing but one sheets, one sheets, and one sheets...
Vacancy
U.S. Release: April 20, 2007
U.K. Release: June 1, 2007
Sunshine
U.S. Release: Fall 2007
U.K. Release: April 6, 2007
The Reaping
U.S. Release: April 6, 2007
U.K. Release: April 13, 2007
Year of the Dog
U.S. Release: April 13, 2007
U.K. Release: June 15, 2007
Captivity
U.S. Release: May 18, 2007 (Limited)
U.K. Release: TBA
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
U.S. Release: June 15, 2007
U.K. Release: August 10, 2007
Live Free or Die Hard (Die Hard 4.0)
U.S. Release: June 29, 2007
U.K. Release: July 6, 2007
Source: IMP Awards, IMDb, filmz.ruDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards!
Labels: Captivity, Die Hard, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Sunshine, The Weekend Image Depot, Vacancy, Year of the Dog
Continue reading The Weekend Image Depot: 3/3/07Saturday, February 24, 2007
The Weekend Image Depot: 2/24/07
Sorry for the lack of images this past weekend. Went snowboarding up in Big Bear and got mightily drunk. I feel like I'm only now recuperating from that disgusting Jack Daniel's (though it was delicious at the time).
Anyway, I'm going to start tossing in random one sheets that we come across over the week here at the Depot. Hope you all enjoy!
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters
U.S. Release: April 13, 2007
Sunshine
U.S. Release: March 16, 2007
For more Sunshine images, click here.
The Condemned
U.S. Release: April 27, 2007
Zodiac
U.S. Release: March 2, 2007
For more Zodiac images, click here.
5-25-77
U.S. Release: May 25, 2007
Source: film ick, Twitch, IESB.net, IMP Awards, FirstShowing.net, Fan Cinema TodayDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards!
Labels: 5-25-77, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Grindhouse, Sunshine, The Condemned, The Weekend Image Depot, Zodiac
Continue reading The Weekend Image Depot: 2/24/07Sunday, January 21, 2007
Trailer Park Handjob: 1/21/07
This week: Monsters, Acid trips aimed at children, hot French lesbian psychopaths and Christians.
The Host: Another trailer for the Korean monster movie that has landed on plenty of geek top ten lists but isn't actually out in America yet. I guarantee it's really good, but I also guarantee that it is being way, way over-hyped. A horror geek finds a horror film that isn't actively shit and then praises it as the greatest film of the year? It could never happen. Anyway, the plot: US chemicals are dumped into a river and ten years later a 20ft mutated fish/frog thing leaps out of the water and starts eating people. One family then tries to save their daughter, which the monster has kept alive in its lair to eat later.
The creature is so very cool and kind of cute and is actually given the behaviours of an animal, rather than the motivations of a monster. The daughter is just so great, and no more shall be said of that. The family however, which is described as 'quirky', is often just comically grotesque and one dimensional. If you saw the older sister (who is introduced as an Olympic archer in her first scene, and then given precious little other character attributes) in an American movie you would scoff at the inevitability of her use in the third act. Equally the film is quite happy to leap from mercilessly (and hilariously) mocking the family's grief to asking the audience to care about them. Tonal shifts, bloated second acts and narrative tangents all stop this being as good as the hype suggests, but it is still good juicy stuff. If you don't go and see it you are slapping Godzuki in the face. How could you? Watch the trailer here.
The Situation: Hailing itself as the first fictional movie to deal with the current occupation of Iraq, The Situation goes on to describe itself as a mix of war movie, thriller and romance, making any sensible man quake in his boots. And guess what - here's Connie Neilsen (not her fault, she's great) as the audience surrogate westerner being shown by a plucky native that 'there are people, rather than sides, in the conflict'. The film reeks of wrong-headed worthiness and the sort of Hollywood thinking that really wants to make a serious movie about real events, but still feels the need to add in a romance sub-plot for the ladies.
Actually watching the trailer reveals that the plot ends up reducing down to 'rescue the pretty western woman', and that the film-makers were struggling very hard to make a bang-bang war movie on a very low budget. It looks, honestly, like a tv movie, both in technical ability and complexity of message. As always, I wish small independent movies the best of luck breaking through into the marketplace, but I'd suggest reading plenty of good reviews before trying this one out. Watch it here.
The Last Sin Eater: Here's some fun for you - a trailer for a Foxfaith production. Foxfaith is a sub-studio dedicated to bringing out christian movies. As always, it is an evil conspiracy to undermine the righteous and faithful by only bringing out complete and utter shit. I guess we can mock, but the movie called The Sin Eater ,aimed at us satanic movie geeks, was also shit.
Anyway, this one concerns a bunch of settlers with unlikely accents living in an idyllic rural America a long time ago and a little girl who hears the story of the 'Sin Eater' (who eats the sins of the dead so the dead can get to heaven quicker) and wants to find him so he can eat her sins while she's still alive.
The gag will presumably be that the sin eater is revealed as a lie, as our sins have already been forgiven by the love of our Lord Jesus Christ. Huzzah! Not that I'm criticising the basic tenets of Christianity here, only that making a movie in accordance with a strict ideology makes the twists really easy to predict.
The trailer is definitely worth watching for the disconnect of watching a trailer full of 'uplifting drama' tropes, the 'wise and friendly grandpa' trailer voice, pastoral scenes, gentle editing and lots of heavenly light filtering through trees, and then having the title come up as THE LAST SIN EATER!!!!!!. It tickled me. Also a line near the end that goes 'we've all been living a lie!', which is supposed to be about the foolishness in believing in a fairy story like the sin eater but, well, you know. Watch it here, and go to hell if you laugh.
The Page Turner: A French movie about a young lady musician relegated to turning the pages of musical scores for a famous concert pianist, and plotting terrible things in revenge for her lowly fate. Very French, critically acclaimed and with a very pretty young actress in the lead, it played for all of a week near me and I was too busy to see it. If it plays near you, don't let it pass you by.
The trailer gets extra points for not hiding the fact that it is in a foreign language and for pulling the uniquely French trick of being impeccably classy while happily indulging in violence, revenge, pedophilia and lezzing up. Watch it here
We Are the Strange: An independent animation film that seems to mix Eastern European stop motion with CG assisted Anime with the music from a Commodore 64, that is until it gets really weird. I am not going to explain this one. You just need to watch it. When the names of famous rappers turn up for one frame a piece I wouldn't have been surprised if this was a joke, a sign of the end times, or aliens trying to contact us through YouTube. Is this what kids like? We're all fucked. Watch it here.
Sunshine: A couple of trailers for the now worryingly delayed Danny 'Trainspotting' Boyle sci-fi movie about a space expedition to try and re-ignite our failing sun. This movie still doesn't have a proper release date. Sunshine, you had better be good.
Watch the International Teaser Trailer in stop motion Yahoo streaming mode here, which tries to convince us this is the sequel to Armageddon.
Watch another domestic trailer here, which is heavy on the action with added slightly melancholy voice-over for added class. This trailer does at least tell us the film is created 'R' and this, surely, is a good thing. Sunshine, you had better be good.
Nomad: The Warrior: Being Khazakstan's official entry into the Oscar race. Also being the same faux-historical epic-type movie we've seen plenty of times before telling the quasi-mythical story of some hero or other that, by his great deeds and moral uprightness, created the greatness of modern
Watch it here.
Dead Silence: 'From the team that brought you Saw', which is all you really need to know, but I'll add that the dark secret the main character spends their time trying to uncover involves the the murder of a...ventriloquist. Hopefully the sequel will involve a mime.
Watch the trailer here. There's an adults only trailer, but I couldn't access it.
For completeness' sake, Dead of Night is an old black and white British horror anthology movie which contains a story about a ventriloquist that is absolutely terrifying. Equally, Anthony Hopkins starred as a ventriloquist in Magic, which was rubbish.
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Labels: Dead Silence, Nomad: The Warrior, Sunshine, The Host, The Last Sin Eater, The Page Turner, The Situation, Trailer Park Handjob, We Are the Strange
Continue reading Trailer Park Handjob: 1/21/07
