Posts Tagged scifi
EXIT’s World Premiere
Is there anything more frightening than the words “BUY TICKETS” next to the title of a movie you wrote?
As we announced last week – after keeping quiet about it for far, far too long – EXIT will soon have its world premiere at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal.
And even better, EXIT will be the closing night film of Fantasia’s Camera Lucida spotlight. Programmer Simon Laperrière has said that the first Camera Lucida spotlight was based on a question:
“What is genre cinema today? And to answer it, I said we have to look at genre film in its most iconoclastic form, in all its differences.”
Last year – the first of Camera Lucida – included Quentin Duplex’s killer tire movie Rubber and Hirokazu Koreeda’s poetic, absurd Air Doll. This year, it opens with William Eubank’s avant-garde sci-fi Love and closes with the world premiere of EXIT on August 4.
Their description of EXIT begins like this: “According to legend, there exists at the heart of the city a door that opens upon a parallel universe. No one knows its origin or where it leads.” It calls EXIT “one of the best science fiction films of the year, merging a small budget with big ideas.”
(Is EXIT a science fiction film? I think that’s a very interesting question, actually…)
You can read Fantasia’s full description here, as well as watch our trailer and buy tickets for the premiere. The director Marek Polgar and I will be guests of the festival, too, and we can’t wait.
Repo Men: jmag review
Here’s my review of the odd sci-fi Repo Men, just in time for its DVD release, from this month’s triple j magazine. (It’s our horror-themed issue, which happened to give me the perfect excuse to pester Joe Dante about my favourite ever zombie film, Homecoming. Check it out.) But anyway…
REPO MEN
Directed by: Miguel Sapochnik
Starring: Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Alice Braga
Country: USA
In the near future, you’ll be able to extend your life by buying artificial organs. If you can’t make the massive repayments, a repo man – like Jude Law’s Remy – will break into your home, cut you open, and take them back.
That’s the premise of the sci-fi Repo Men, from first-time feature director Miguel Sapochnik. And while it’s great to see Jude Law embracing his receding hairline, his performance is pretty dull at first. His snarky voiceover is unnecessary, and every scene with his family is dead weight.
As Remy has a crisis of conscience, though, the movie develops its black sense of humour. Remy’s co-worker (Forest Whitaker) leaves a BBQ to “get more meat”, for example, and later there’s a bloody sort-of-sex scene that’ll make your jaw drop.
Repo Men borrows its future noir aesthetics from Blade Runner, and its big fight scene from Old Boy. It’s so indebted to other films that it’s like its own characters: mostly transplanted parts, but still capable of pumping blood.
Other reviews this month: The Girl Who Played With Fire, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and the doco Food, Inc.
Issue #44 on sale now.
Splice: jmag review
Here’s my quick review of the new sci-fi / horror Splice from this month’s jmag. It was the second Adrien Brody movie I’d seen in consecutive days, but thank god here he doesn’t use his hilarious ‘yeah, I once saw an Clint Eastwood movie, so what?’ voice from Predators…
SPLICE
Directed by: Vincenzo Natali
Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac
Country: Canada
Many think Frankenstein was the first science fiction story. It tapped into something so powerful we’re still seeing new twists on the story today. This year it’s Splice, from the director of the 1997 lo-fi sci-fi Cube.
Sarah Polley (always excellent) and Adrien Brody (usually terrible, though pretty okay here) play a pair of gene-splicing scientists. Bored with using animal DNA, they introduce something human into the mix and soon have a gooey ‘daughter’ born with a stinger-tipped tail – and she’s growing fast.
Splice’s weighty ethical issues let it take itself pretty seriously for a movie that’s regularly so ridiculous. I mean, there are two pink lumps of Cronenbergian flesh licking each other with monster tongues in the first five minutes, and later there’s a sex scene that’ll keep fetish websites loaded with screengrabs.
But the best thing about Splice’s science-gone-wrong is how it asks the same question that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein asked back in 1818. What’s worse: children or parents? Splice says there’s enough horror in both.
Other reviews this month: Greenberg and The Ghost Writer in cinemas; Youth In Revolt, Cop Out, and Party Down: Season One on DVD.
Issue #42 on sale now.
Coppélia: Dolls Tired from Dancing
So The Australian Ballet’s latest is the rather bizarre ballet Coppélia, and they were nice enough to ask me to write for their programme about how modern special effects were leaking onto the stage in 1870s Paris. Primitive automatons! Magic shows! Uh… exclamation points!
Coppélia (Leanne Stojmenov) and Dr. Coppelius (Damien Welch). Photography by Branco Gaica.
Mostly, I focused on the ballet’s villain, Doctor Coppelius. He’s depicted as a sad and lonely inventor, surrounded by his odd mechanical creations – some half-finished, some almost human. In the original horror story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though, he’s an alchemist suspected to be ‘The Sandman’, and is much more monstrous. (Like stealing-childrens’-eyes more monstrous.)
Yet he’s not the most horrific thing in the story. That role belongs to his beautiful, artificial faux-daughter, Coppélia. In the ballet’s programme, I write:
“The existence of a lifelike doll in Hoffmann’s original tale is not a charming curiosity. After the truth of his creation is revealed, Hoffmann describes lovers forcing one another to sing and dance off-key and out of time, just to prove they are human. Otherwise how can they be sure?”
Popular culture has provided us with more supposedly scientific ways to test if someone’s human, like the Voight-Kampff machine made famous by Blade Runner. The movie’s production designer described it like this: “Basically it was a lie-detector machine. The lie is, I am not a replicant.”
In fact, as I saw the frail Doctor Coppelius appear on stage, I was reminded of J. F. Sebastian, Blade Runner’s old inventor, living alone except for his toys. The nursery rhyme his toys sing to him – “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig” – still plays in my head with alarming regularity.
Blade Runner – and a gazillion other science fiction stories too, of course – are designed to make us wonder if we’re human after all. How can we really tell? Singing out of tune and moving off the beat? Close analysis of our pupil dilation at embarrassing questions? Maybe it’s just as the theme song ‘Coppélia’s Coffin’ from the anime series Noir says:
“People are dolls tired from dancing / Sheep on the altar / The mechanical dreams / Where are they headed?”
We’re all just dolls, tired from dancing. Coppélia tries to dismiss these question with the light-hearted farce and energetic dancing at its beginning and end – but they remain bubbling under the surface of the stage while we’re in Doctor Coppelius’ lair.
An odd postscript: Coppélia’s choreographer, Arthur Saint-Leon, isn’t only famous for his ballets; he also invented an early form of notation to record these all-important steps. Ironically, he failed to record his work on Coppélia, and it only survived as its popularity kept it in almost constant circulation – even though it was initially interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war. What if it hadn’t been so lucky?
And another: in 2007, Japanese scientists offered a strange solution: a human-sized robot that could mimic the steps of a human dancer. In this way, the specific movements of folk dances could be perfectly captured and replayed, even after its original performers were long dead. “My impression is that there would still be a human element lacking,” one English folk dancer is quoted as saying. “The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.”
We keep telling ourselves that – but I can’t help feeling like it’s just modernity’s equivalent of whistling past a graveyard.