Category: Movies
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Ghosts in the Broken Machine
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How does the mind filter what is real from what is unreal? How does it separate events perceived in an unreal environment from a real one? For most of us, fortunately this isn’t an issue. From initial consciousness the mind has been wired with a series of logical codes that…
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Baz Luhrmann’s Gilded Dreams — “The Great Gatsby” Review
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The Great Gatsby unfolds upon the screen like a cross between two of Baz Luhrmann’s earlier films — the sparkly romance of Romeo + Juliet met with the hypnotic bacchanalia of Moulin Rouge. In typical Lurhmann tradition, the stories contain familiar themes: tragic lovers, missed connections, and societal and/or economic…
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Waking from “Oblivion” — A Review
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Oblivion is the result of too much story and not enough canvas. Think of a house with a tiny frame, or a painting wadded up into a crumpled ball. The story — trust me, it’s in there somewhere — is a compelling work of creative fiction that both reveals and…
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Uncanny Visions
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How do writers anticipate future technology? There is no clear cut rule, and like many visionaries we are wrong more often than we are right (hover boards by 2015). However, there are two guiding questions that tend to form the boundaries of creative space in which to develop fictional societies and…
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Repeating History: Why “Argo” Won Best Picture
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When I was little, I used to watch the same movies over and over again. At one point during my eleventh consecutive viewing of The Lion King, I asked myself why. What was the point of watching a story when I already knew the ending? At first I thought that…
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Identity Crisis
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So yes, like most everyone else last week I did see the amazing premiere of The Dark Knight Rises and no, this will not be a post on that movie just yet. Expect one eventually, but not now. I prefer to hold off posting on new films until I can…
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Intelligent Design: Biopunk and the Utopian Body
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Whenever I’m asked about my chosen genre, I tend to say drama and “occasionally” science fiction. But I realize, I find myself only grudgingly admitting to writing sci-fi only because my true genre is speculative fiction. Speculative fiction (another SF, as a friend an I have often discussed) tends toward…
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Planned Obsolescence
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It’s been reported that some kind of remake and/or prequel is in the works for Ridley Scott’s 1982 cyberpunk film Blade Runner. As a fan of both the film and the original novel I find this somewhat troubling but also rather amusing. It seems that no other story has had…
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Science, Magic, and God from a Machine
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I’m having trouble with my ending. Many writers do, and for me it is a sign of having started more scripts than I’ve dared to see through to the end. So much more can depend on a film’s ending than its beginning. Think of M. Night Shyamalan—who would remember The…
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No Time Like the Present: Memory and Self in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento”
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Apologies for the long hiatus without warning. Thesis Crunch. Let’s get back to the movies. I embarrassed myself yesterday in an event that will not be recounted here, but for a while I could not stop thinking about it. Even an hour after the fact I was chiding myself for…