SF and fantasy often uses peculative elements metaphorically. Melancholia reworks When Worlds Collide as an art-house film about depression, with a stunning central performance by Kirsten Dunst. As summer 2017 comes to a close, we continue with our reviews of older films– this one from 2011.
Author Archives: JD DeLuzio
Weekend Review: It (2017)
The second adaptation of Stephen King’s notorious novel takes It to the big screen with a big budget.
It is actually the first of two parts, yet can also function as a self-contained film, and It‘s1 makers clearly hope It will become the movie of Halloween ’17.
Summer Weekend Review: Attack the Block
Sure, September is here, but summer doesn’t end until the 22. So we continue with our late-season Summer Movie Reviews of older films. This one came out in 2011 and its following has only increased since. It features the timely account of people coming together under crisis: not a natural disaster, in this case, but an alien invasion.
It also stars the incoming Doctor.
Summer Weekend Review: The Island of Lost Souls
“The stubborn beast-flesh creeps back!”
–Dr. Moreau
Our Summer-End Weekend Reviews of older films continue with this 1932 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, which significantly influenced later SF– and the recently-concluded Orphan Black. Less well-known that Universal’s horror movies of the period, it actually holds up better.1
Indeed, its horrific content earned it a ban in some countries, while other audiences watched a censored version for many decades.
Summer Review: Wilson
With the summer SF blockbuster season coming to an end, we’re going to deliver some of our Summer Weekend Reviews of older flicks during the final weeks of beaches, sunglasses, and solar eclipse.1. This one isn’t even that old; it hit theaters– fleetingly– in March.
Wilson, based on the Daniel Clowes graphic novel (reviewed here), received a mediocre response from critics and did not find a large audience. It’s not the film of the year, but it’s far better than the popular response suggests.
Novel Review: New York 2140
So we have to nurse the world back to health. We’re not good at it. But we have to do it…
I know my program is only a small part of the process. I now it’s only a silly cloud show. I know that. I even know that my own producers keep stringing me out in these little pseudo-emergencies because they think it adds to our ratings, and I go along with that because I think it might help, even though sometimes it scares me to death, and it’s embarrassing, too. But to the extent that it gets people thinking about these projects, it’s helping the cause. It’s part of the larger thing that we have to do. That’s how I think of it, and I would do anything to make it succeed. I would hang naked upside-down above a bay of hungry sharks if that would help the cause, and you know I would because that was one of my most popular episodes.(259)
Kim Stanley Robinson’s most recent novel follows up on the themes and subjects of Aurora. If earth is, for the foreseeable future, the only place we can live, how will we deal with a world altered significantly by global warming and other potentially disastrous trends? In the New York of the next century, several characters deal with the consequences of raised sea levels, as their lives converge into one story.
Orphan Black Review: “To Right the Wrongs of Many”
Movie Review: “Sandman: 24 Hour Diner”
Sandman: 24 Hour Diner from Morpheus on Vimeo.
This independently-made, unlicensed adaptation of one issue of The Sandman has attracted a good deal of attention, and received praise from Neil Gaiman. Released earlier this summer, it gets a review here. WARNING: the film is NSFW, unsuitable for children, and not for all tastes.
Haruo “Godzilla” Nakajima dies at 88
Haruo Nakajima, the stunt actor who stomped to fame as the original Godzilla, has died from pneumonia at 88. A kind of low-tech predecessor to Anthony Serkis, Nakajima played the Monster King in 12 movies, and also performed a number of other famous Japanese feature creatures.
Movie Review: Atomic Blonde
The superspy stylishly turns in the fight, shoots, splatters red blood onto the glossed lips of a face on a poster.
I’m sitting in a car with friends I’ve known since the 80s, at the Docks Drive-In, a relic of the Cold War era nestled in the Port Lands, the last seedy waterfront section of Toronto, between the gentrified Harbourfront and the Beaches, and I’m watching a film shaped by the Cold War, 1980s videos, noir cinema, and Hollywood’s desire to set up bigger, sexier, more violent thrills.
As Debbie Harry sang with studied vacuousness, “Your hair is beautiful. Atomic.”