I’ve always had a big preference for movies which make you think. To make it even more specific, movies which play with what reality is or in which things can’t be explained easily. Movies like Donnie Darko, Primer, Upstream Color or Under the Skin are great examples of that. It is also the reason why Mr.Nobody is still in my all time top 3 movies. Coherence is a movie which starts out normal, but quickly turns into a fascinating mystery. Continue reading
Throught he years the time travel genre has given us quite a lot exciting movies. Most will probably think of Back to the Future series first, but movies like Timecrimes, Primer, Looper, The Time Machine and Donnie Darko are just a few examples which are also worth checking out. It is one of my favorite genres and when director Walker Haynes asked me if I wanted to check out his time travel movie Hamlet’s Ghost I didn’t hesitate for a moment. Continue reading
According to IMDB 2013 has produced a total of 179 animated movies. Included in that number are titles like Frozen, Despicable Me 2, Monsters University, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 and The Croods. These are all movie I’ve seen, but with such a huge number it happens that I’ll miss some. Escape from Planet Earth was one of them and was available on Netflix (and other formats). So an easy way to check it out and see if I missed out on something. Continue reading
Scarlett Johansson has one of the best years of her career with roles in movies like Her, Captain America and Under the Skin. The life she has breathed into the characters in those movies have all been memorable and she currently seems incapable of picking bad roles. For Lucy she teams up with director Luc Besson (5th Element, Léon). Do they succeed in continuing the success of Johansson ? Continue reading
Through the years director Terry Gilliam has managed to make a number of widely loved movies. Films like Brazil, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Twelve Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are just a few examples. He has always been good in creating strange, but at the same time very believable, worlds in which you could lose yourself. With Zero Theorem he tries to do this again, but this time I felt he failed. After watching it I had the feeling I wasn’t watching a recent movie, but something made in the nineties with disappointing CGI and a world which doesn’t feel like it came into becoming a reality in an organic way. The story itself also did not manage to make my heart beat any faster. Continue reading
Movies always have been a product of their time, a reflection of what is going on in the world in which we are living. With programs like Siri and Cortana we can now talk to our phones and they will answer our questions. We are slowly moving to a situation in which computers are getting “smarter”. Of course that also brings the fear that they will eventually see us as a threat and terminate us or simply ignore us. This has been the basis for the Terminator movies, but also recent films like The Machine and even Her. Transcendence gives the concept its own spin and looks at artificial intelligence in the form of Johnny Depp. Continue reading
Whereas the first episode of Black Mirror was set fully in a world known to the viewer, this second episode takes a journey into the future. A world in which society is completely different and people no longer live in houses, but within a small rooms with a bed in a huge building. There’s nothing else in the room except that all four walls are TVs. There are no windows and no one goes outside. The only thing people are doing is cycling on hometrainers to earn virtual money and watch television. Continue reading
When Kanye West release his latest album Yeezus there was a big number of fans who were disappointed by it because the music was very different compared to previous albums. The beats were almost experimental and many didn’t like that. It wasn’t a “standard hip hop album”. Personally I really liked it, simply because it tried to do something different, which made it challenging to listen to. Under the Skin manages to do that as a film. The question though is whether the average movie fan is able to appreciate that challenge. Continue reading
Recently a computer managed to pass the legendary Turing test by fooling quite a lot of people that they were chatting with a thirteen year old boy. A computer passes the test when it shows intelligent behaviour making it impossible to distinguish it from a human.
The development in this field of computing is going fast and it isn’t hard to imagine that within the next 15 years a lot of progress will be made. It might not yet mean that people will become replaceable, but if an intelligent computer is similar to a human there is certainly some competition. Could that eventually lead to situations made popular by movies like The Matrix or The Terminator? The machine is a science fiction movie which gives its own vision on artificial intelligence and asks the viewer what it is that makes us human. Continue reading
Does such a thing as talent exit? Was your favourite artist of director really born that way? Or was it something else? Is it possible that they have become as good as they have simply because they put in enough time to learn their trade? As someone who likes learning new things I really don’t believe in talent. It is all about gaining experience, making new techniques your own and repeating something a lot. If you put in enough time you will become good at it. Of course the speed you learn that skill might differ from person to person. Edge of Tomorrow proves that with enough time you will be able to amaze everyone, but in this case that might take you a couple of lives. Continue reading