There are already movie threads, but they are all specialized ones, like which scifi movies you have liked or which ones you’d take to a desert island.
This thread is for whatever you recently saw that you loved or hated.
My downstairs neighbour recently did me the very dubious favour of connecting my TV to his DSTV, so now I too have this highly addictive but often rather empty-headed monster in my house. It means I have been watching more movies lately than is healthy.
Yesterday I finally got to see Agora, the biopic of Hypatia, about whom rather little biographical information is available, so the film makers had some leeway to play around with. As one might expect, they used this leeway in part to turn the whole thing into a love triangle, but I have to admit they did so rather tastefully - Hypatia never gets dragged into actual sex scenes, and the film focuses a lot on the politics and science of the time.
Rather refreshingly, the Christians are for once not portrayed as angels, but it is also by no means an anti-Christian film either. Hypatia herself is indeed not portrayed as a complete angel either, at least not by modern standards. For example, she has no problem with owning slaves, which was of course common at the time. Indeed, one gets an impression that things go bad in Alexandria not so much because of evil Christians as because the Roman government created conditions under which all manner of anti-intellectual cults would flourish, and if there is a lesson to be learned here it is perhaps that there can be no long-term future for science in any society where there is not also justice.
I liked the way in which Hypatia is shown to stumble upon Kepler’s model of the solar system: she does so in the fashion typical of the time, namely through much philosophical speculation and rather little actual observation. It is a good question how close the Greeks ever came to this model. I sometimes get the impression that they came very close indeed, but then the same thing happened to the Roman Empire that is now happening in America: a highly advanced culture somehow voluntarily turned its back on its intellectual culture and swung wildly towards madness.
My other recent DSTV movie of note: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. A somewhat syrupy and sentimental tale, but I liked the fact that the young main character is a total nerd.
So does it contain all the good old expressions of the TV series, like Tonto addressing the Lone Ranger as “kemosabe,” and the ranger calling “Hiyo, Silver!”?
Cloud Atlas
Many tales in different ages rolled into one awe-inspiring “bigger picture” film.
Memento
The protagonist has short-term memory loss, and is trying to hunt down the person who killed his wife. He can’t remember anything past 5 minutes ago and neither can you, since the film is shown in 5 minute increments, in reverse. This way you know exactly what the protagonist knows: Nothing.
Actually it does With a funny twist on each one. Also a silver bullet and a big white hat. It is quite a violent movie with lots of people dying and yet the Lone Ranger ends up killing not one person directly. It ain’t a deep movie by any stretch of the imagination but it is very entertaining. And it does bring back the nostalgia big time while making it current at the same time.
Ex Machina is an exploration of the consequences that actually creating a human-like AI could have. It’s a thriller that neglects the cheap shots and instead uses extremely scary “what ifs” and interesting twists to make a point that had me pondering for a while.
No. The author, Andy Weir, admitted that it was his one ‘gimme.’ He couldn’t figure out a better reason for them to have to leave urgently, leaving poor old washiname behind.