Just saw The Shape of Water.
It’s good; the Amelie meets The Creature from the Black Lagoon premise works, and there’s some serious quality underneath. Somewhat reminiscent of Colossal, but directed at antifascist/resistance themes rather than addiction and domestic abuse.
Sally Hawkins is a treasure.
ETA: And Octavia Spencer had some of the best dialogue.
I figured from the preview that the spark of the idea was from Hellboy, focusing just on a good relationship without comic book plot cluttering up the place. Abe Sapien in a real space.
Just watched Barbarella for the first time. Not half as bad as I thought it would be. Considerably less than half as bad as it could have been, effects and stereotyping aside.
Just wrapped up the 4th season of Peaky Blinders… Gonna miss Tom Hardy as Alfie, honestly.
I have seen only the first two episodes, and kind of like it so far. It is kind of like the inverse of Utopia - instead of a violent ride towards eventually solving a misanthropic deep-ecology mystery, this dumps catastrophe on the table to start, and then mediates upon how unhinged people would really get.
It would be easy to criticize it for being relentlessly bleak, but IMO there is no way to mitigate that with this premise. So far, I think the idea is more interesting than the execution. I don’t know whether it might eventually have anything interesting to say about existential crisis and despair, but I am cautiously optimistic. I tend to like shows that don’t shy away from such difficult themes, but they seem challenging to do well.
Besides Hard Sun, I’ve also watched the first two episodes of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams*, which is… OK so far. For sci-fi anthology, I think it’s not as good as Black Mirror, but better than Metal Hurlant Chronicles. It’s competent, uses a low-budget well, but kind of pedestrian and predictable. Doesn’t live up to the mind-bending potential of Dick’s fiction at its best, as of yet. But it’s a bit deeper than the usual space opera.
Watched the Godzilla Monster Planet anime movie. I am not a huge Godzilla fan, but this is a record for me seeing two “new” Godzilla works within a week of each other, with this and Shin Godzilla. The premise and the animation I think are great. But the characterization and dialogue are not very good. It’s about near-future humanity abandoning Earth after failing to nuke Godzilla, trying to colonize other planets, only to return to Earth which is relativistically 20k years later, and the entire ecosystem has been “godzillafied”.
Eating virtual popcorn over YouTube reactions to the trailer for the upcoming Heathers. It’s a total shitshow with people all over the political and social spectrum having strong reactions to it. So many controversy!
*which I can’t think about with being reminded of:
Re: “The future is still human”
[rant]There is a lot of vaguely cringeworthy sentiment these days about “humans”, but it’s hard for me to parse without interpreting as “respect is a matter of what species one happens to be”. The substance of human is essentially [your stereotype here], but the implications seem disturbingly bigoted in ways that “person” does not. So passing off the chance biology of how one was born as some kind of idealized form leaves as bad a taste in my mouth as saying that a person deserves respect for being born a certain race, or a certain sex.
Yet - hardly a day passes without people telling me how cool it is, and that it isn’t really specist at all. No exploitation nor troubling power dynamic at play there… /s Yuck! [/rant]
ETA: I am not saying that the series itself is necessarily specist, but an ad slogan like that is not helping.
Squee!
I wanted to like that show, but just could not get into it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Before I was just squeeing because PKD. (Dammit, I wish he was still alive. I hope Internet reception is good on whatever plane of existence he inhabits now.)
Now that I’ve had a chance to watch it – it looks very, very promising, and “the future is human” is a tag line that gives me hope.
I shall have to figure out when to shell out for Prime at the optimal time. Still have to watch Man in the High Castle too.
This seems to be my week for seeing major films I haven’t seen before. Right now it’s the original Total Recall, which got skipped the first time because a) violence and b) all the friends I would have seen it with were film snobs who wouldn’t have been caught dead watching something with Schwarzenegger in it, even if it was based on a PK Dick story.
It’s got the Verhoeven violence all right, but it’s definitely Phildickian.
Thanks Netflix!
At one time, I thought it was the most Phildickian of all the Dick adaptations. (I’m not keeping up with them all, so wouldn’t claim that now.) Even the usual Schwarzeneggerisms, you know violence followed by a dopey quip, felt right, the plastic cliched-ness of it seeming like the sort of thing that would be inserted into one of Dick’s artificial realities.
The kids and I watched Total Recall last fall, and it was the first time I had seen it in yonks. I enjoyed it, but it was less satirical than I had hoped, compared to Robocop or Starship Troopers, for instance. It was breezier than I remembered.
Story goes that David Cronenberg was originally in pre-production to adapt Dick’s story. But once Schwarzenegger expressed some interest, the studio contracted him and gave him his pick of director. Being a big fan of both Dick and Cronenberg, I can’t help but wonder what that version would have been like.
BEING: The MENTIONS OF PHILIP DICK [begins to slowly read very long list]
PHIL: Jesus Christ, doesn’t anyone read the books anymore? Oh wait, there was one… Are you sure we can’t get, whaddayacallit, streaming here? Mary and the Giant? No fucking way!
BEING: [reads on]
The Illinois Nazis were real:
I also saw The Shape Of Water, and I highly recommend it.
That’s why I’m a huge Del Toro fan. Lots of fantastical monsters in heavy makeup, but the real monsters are the humans.