While some women just can not get enough of romantic comedies, I have that with movies about time travel. I still have a list of movies I haven’t seen which have some sort of time in them. When I heard about this movie, I could not restrain my curiosity. Not every time travel movie is good of course, but because I’m a big fan of the concept in movies, I can easily forgive some rough edges in them. Continue reading
Earlier this year, the hilarious Kung Fury already showed that police officers don’t like to work with dinosaurs. It was, like the rest of the film, a bizarre moment. However, there is a feature-length film which has used that concept fully. I recently read about the existence of this film and the incredible story behind it. This is actually the most expensive “straight to video” movie ever made, with a price tag of $ 33.5 million. The film was planned to be released in cinemas, but because of various production problems (read this article ) the distributor didn’t want to do that anymore. It is a film that everyone involved, including lead actress Whoopie Goldberg, would rather forget. I would also like to add myself itself to that list. Continue reading
The inventiveness of the human mind has brought us far in different areas in life. Some of those are things you don’t even think about anymore, like how efficiently the food on your plate was transported there or how certain diseases which killed millions of people centuries ago can now be easily prevented or cured. Despite all those developments there still is a lot left to explore and when it comes to space we have only just started. The last time we were on another celestial body is already 43 years ago and although Dutch businessman Bas Lansdorp has big plans with his Mars One project (which has been receiving a lot of critique), it is something which probably won’t be realised anytime soon.
Fortunately the movies gives us an opportunity to dream about that and in The Martian the human race has come that far and the first people have landed there. Directed by science fiction specialist Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña and Chiwetel Ejiofor the question is whether that dream has been successfully brought to life with this film. Continue reading
Does every kid go through a dinosaur phase? It was something I was thinking about when watching the new movie in the Jurassic Park franchise. Initially I could not remember ever having a collection of plastic dinosaurs, but after further reflection, I remembered that I did make a report about it in elementary school. This was in the eighties, so it was still a time when you had to go to the library for information, write everything by hand and go to the supermarket to make copies of pictures to paste in your report. The reason that I still remember it wasn’t so much the report itself, but the way it was checked. Because I went to a Christian school (even though I’m not religious) the teacher held tightly to the story of the bible and its timeline. That meant he had put question marks when it said that the dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. That did not fit into his conviction.
So there was a brief period in which I was interested in them, but it did not last long. The first Jurassic Park I do remember though, especially because (just like today) there was a lot of marketing for the film. There were TV specials (which showed how they made the water vibrate in the glass when the Tyrannosaurus Rex arrives), and the effects in the film were breathtaking then. Those effects might not wow us anymore and a movie really needed to do something special in order to excite us. Does Jurassic Wold manage to do that? Continue reading
Ever since I saw the hilarious/absurd/shocking, Oscar-nominated Rejected (you can check it out on Youtube) by Don Hertzfeldt, I was a fan of both his animation style and his humour. When I heard earlier this year that he had made a new short I was curious about it. His drawings might be considered simple, but he always succeeds in getting his intention across. For this short, it’s 17 minutes, he recorded conversations he had with his 4-year-old niece, Winona Mae and used these for a story about an impressive journey to the future. Continue reading
During one of my blogathons I read on Rodney’s Fernby Films, that this movie had a lot of impact on him, which made me curious about it. For him growing up it was a movie (besides The Neverending Story) which gave him the idea he could be more than he was. It was the main reason for me to add this movie to my Blindspot series this year. Of course it also helped that this is a science fiction movie from the eighties, which also comes with a lot of nostalgia. Continue reading
Ant-man. It isn’t immediately a title which sounds like something worth watching and had this movie been made about two decades ago, chances would be that it would have been a pretty terrible film. The times have changed though and every year various superhero movies are released. The Marvel Studios managed to have a lot of success with the Avengers movies (and the standalone movies leading up to it). Last year their Guardians of the Galaxy, with a group of completely unknown heroes, was an unexpected success. And now there is a movie about a person who can become as small as an ant. Does Marvel succeed in bringing this concept convincingly to the big screen Continue reading
Why do audiences keep visiting new Terminator movies? Since the second movie there really haven’t been any great films in this series, but still new installments are being made. I do keep having hope that the new one will be good, but I have been disappointed time after time. My feeling about this movie in advance wasn’t positive at all. But Arnold Schwarzenegger is back and even James Cameron had positive things to say about this new part. Two important reason for me to still head to the cinema to see how good/bad Terminator Genisys is. Continue reading
Earlier this year an open letter appeared online, which was signed by many important scientists and business men, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, which called for building in security measures into the artificial intelligence systems which are being developed. There is a good reason for that, because the developments are going quickly, especially when a company like Google is investing in it. The first steps are already being made with self driving cars and personal assistants on your phone like Siri, Cortana and Google Now, but it is not hard to imagine that in our own lifetime we will see ourselves conversing with artificial intelligence which feel like real people. The movie Her managed to show the romantic side of that, in which someone fell in love with such a system. Ex Machina shows another side of it. Continue reading
Whenever director Neill Blomkamp has finished a new movie, I always look forward to it. The South African director had his big breakthrough, partly thanks to Peter Jackson, with his fantastic District 9. Not only the story it told was fascinating, but the effects were extremely convincing (which isn’t a surprise if you know he has a background in 3d effects). He followed it up with Elysium starring Matt Damon, which didn’t exactly receive glowing reviews, but which I personally really enjoyed. Chappie is his third movie. If you look at his first short movie from 2004, Tetra Vall, you immediately see the similarities between the main character from that with this movie, also a police robot in Johannesburg. Has Blomkamp managed to turn that short film into a fascinating feature film? Continue reading