Clarky (@clarky71990), a good friend from college, asked me if I wanted to do an Oscar draft. So it wouldn’t be just the two of us, I roped in my wife Mary. We selected films like you would players in a fantasy football draft. Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel had the most nominations, and therefore could potentially earn the most points. Here is the scoring system we used:
Best Picture = 7 points
All acting, writing and directing categories = 5 points each
Other “best film” categories (animated, foreign, shorts, etc.) = 3 points each
All remaining categories (sound/tech) = 2 points each
Read on to see how the game went and follow our running commentary on Hollywood’s biggest night. Read more…
I liked Jupiter Ascending. On a related note, I knew going in that I really wanted to like Jupiter Ascending. It’s the kind of grand space fantasy that we just don’t see much of anymore – the kind free of preordained franchise aspirations. With only about $32 Million at the box office (against a budget rumored to be in the $200 million range), one has to worry that other filmmakers will be discouraged from trying to realize similar projects in the future.
Two weekends in, and with “bomb” already branded on its neck, Jupiter Ascending is going in the books as a failure. Movies bomb all the time, but what is frustrating about this case is that Jupiter is somehow not a creative failure. It’s messy, but the laudable ambition shines through. In situations like this, I have to wonder if Star Wars would still have been a hit had Rotten Tomatoes existed in 1977. To be fair, Jupiter is no Star Wars, but it still begs the question.
Mila Kunis plays Jupiter Jones. She works with her Russian immigrant mother cleaning bathrooms in Chicago. It’s not a glamorous life and she longs for more. Then Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a human/wolf splice with rocket boots, sweeps her away telling her she is destined for greatness and has a throne waiting for her on the other side of the universe. Only problem is, Jupiter has three pseudo space siblings, all of whom want to lay claim to her title. I guess there’s always a catch.
Poster courtesy imdb.com
That sounds reasonable right? To give any more of a synopsis would just make the movie sound ridiculous. I admit, this movie has problems. While the broad strokes are in place, certain characters are simply not fleshed out at all and their scenes only seem to break up action scenes in which Jupiter and Caine are interminably hurtling through space. Read more…
The home video market makes for an interesting comparison to Hollywood itself. The BD (Blu-ray Disc) and DVD market has much more to offer than just the latest box office smashes. Unlike in cinema, home video routinely sees major tent pole and prestige films being released alongside classic cinema, concerts, documentaries, anime, and other decades-old films you may have completely forgotten about. It’s a lot to keep track of and inevitably, a lot can get lost in the shuffle. That is the purpose of this list; to spread awareness of some of the best home video releases of 2014, whether you’re a burgeoning collector or simply a bargain-bin raider.
Netflix is great, but nothing beats having exactly what you want to watch, exactly when you want to watch it. I’ve mentioned several times in this space that I have a large movie collection, and I’ve been steadily adding BDs to my shelf for five years now. 2014 was a very strong year for the format, with many gems being released from studio back-catalogs and a slew of impressive box sets. This post breaks down into three categories: 2014’s most noteworthy releases; less prestigious releases (that I still appreciated), and finally, my top ten list (culled from titles I have actually collected).
Judging BD and DVD releases is not like handing out an Oscar. While the quality of the film is generally the most salient point of a Blu-ray review, the audio and visual quality presented on the disc, and quality and quantity of bonus features must also be taken into account. The lists below reflect my tastes, not only in the movies themselves, but the effort that appears to have gone into each home video release. Acknowledging that there are literally thousands of releases each year and the impossibility of collecting or even seeing them all, here are the best BD releases from 2014:
12 Great Blu-ray Releases from 2014
La Dolce Vita (The Criterion Collection)
La Dolce Vita, to some degree, is a placeholder for all the great work done by The Criterion Collection this year. Dolce is a treasured piece of world cinema and gets an immaculate release here. It is yet another impressive release from a company that seems to do nothing but impress.
Stereo is David Cronenberg’s debut feature from 1969. It’s a highly experimental (or “low-budget” in layman’s terms), semi-erotic, sci-fi mockumentary. Though very understated, Stereo may not be the most appropriate entry point into Cronenberg’s body of work for those uninitiated. Cronenberg is the Canadian auteur best known for his string of grotesque 1980s spectacles such as Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly and Dead Ringers.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
Set in 1969, Stereo features subjects of a telepathy study by the Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry. One of the premises of the study is that a telepathic connection between two subjects can only be forged following a physical connection with one another. The study begins to progress beyond the scientists’ ability to control it. Hilarity does not ensue. Read more…
“What have you got against ghosts, boss?”
“Nothing at all, some of my best friends are ghosts – but I wouldn’t want my sister to marry one.”
I Will Fear No Evil is another novel from the man who brought us Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), the Dean of Science Fiction, Robert A. Heinlein. It isn’t one of his more widely-beloved novels, though it should be included in any discussion of his best.
Set in the early 21st Century, I Will Fear No Evil is the story of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, an obscenely wealthy old man on his death bed. The country is in a state of chaos, society lacking the sense of safety that comes with order and trust. It is a time when affluent areas are adjacent to violent slums. Gothamesque. Any semblance of police presence seems to have been replaced by private bodyguards for those who can afford them. Everyone else must fend for themselves.
Smith is not bed-ridden for long, as he takes out an ad for a recently-deceased body, with the promise of compensating the deceased’s family. Sure enough, Smith’s dream comes true and he hires a doctor, one excommunicated from academia, to perform a brain transplant, putting his brain into the fresh corpse. The operation is a success, but Smith is forced to grapple with the reality that his new body is that of a young female who once worked for him. Read more…
A Look Back at the Y2K Freakout Through 3 of 1999’s Most Enduring Films
Possible mild spoilers, but if you haven’t seen these films, well, get on that.
The Internet may be the greatest feather in humanity’s cap, and it belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of inventions right up there with Fire, The Wheel and Sliced Bread (ok, ok, maybe the Printing Press or Electricity over Sliced Bread, but you get the idea). It’s easy to forget now, but there was a brief time when many people thought the techie world would be our undoing. This proud era of human history occurred 15 years ago and is known as Y2K.
In case you happened to not be on Rumspringa in 1999, what Y2K boiled down to was this: In both digital and non-digital file-keeping, four-digit years tended to be abbreviated to two digits (i.e. 1995 = 95). In theory, computers would not be able to differentiate between centuries when dealing with two-digit dates (i.e. “00” could mean 1900 or 2000). According to Consumer Price Index, over $300 Billion was spent, worldwide, on preparations for all the world’s digital clocks hitting midnight on the morning of January 1, 2000.
Of course, the fear wasn’t just about files getting a little mixed up. The real fear was that computers would get confused, delete our financial records and fire off all the nukes. Sounds like science fiction, right? While these hyperbolic outcomes would obviously have been terrible, there was a human element that, while not talked about as much, might have been even scarier. How could the “powers that be” really be so shortsighted that they didn’t plan better for this? In hindsight, Y2K was rather well-prepared for, therefore also rather anticlimactic. But that didn’t prevent people from constructing doomsday shelters and filling their bathtubs with drinking water just in case. The very idea that society could be burnt down over something as mundane as choosing to abbreviate years down to two digits makes you ponder likelihood that humanity is meant to destroy itself.
Our Planet Burke 