Firestarter as a romantic comedy? Well, yes, more or less. Although it is as much about the relationship between two feuding brothers as it is about the romantic triangle that kindles (sorry, you can’t help it with this sort of film) their long-smoldering (see what I mean?) resentment against each other. And I suppose it does […]
Read more "Wilder Napalm (1993)"I like this one, even if it isn’t a great film. Like a lot of recent Anime films, I would describe this one as Miyazaki-lite: not only does it have a decidedly familiar color palette, and character designs which would easily fit into most of Miyazaki’s films, but it also features such trademark elements as […]
Read more "To aru hikuushi e no tsuioku [The Princess and the Pilot] (2011)"“I’d still like to grab coffee or something, sometime. Because I think you’re the most attractive person I’ve ever seen. But that doesn’t outweigh that you might be a mental patient and I gotta make sure that you’re the kind of crazy I can deal with. “ This is a truly remarkable film. But then, […]
Read more "Spring (2014)"I remember some film critic ages ago talking about how rare it was to find an adventure film without a woman in it. I suspect, in our current politically motivated age, that might seem an appalling sentiment, but it actually reflected the awful reality of Hollywood at the time. We kept seeing the love interest […]
Read more "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997)"This is an absolutely amazing film. We’re talking about a film which takes us to an incredible place, a luxury spaceship enroute to a distant star, with its crew and passengers in suspended animation. And “place” is the right word, as we are talking about a film that created this world not in some digitally […]
Read more "Passengers (2016)"This interesting and creative film came out of Amazon’s direct-to-Amazon Amazon Studios, although it does seem to have had at least a minimal box-office release. Somehow, I suspect they had the French Nouvelle Vague movies of the 60s in mind when they made this, with its rich, smoky black and white cinematography. It has a very definite […]
Read more "Creative Control (2015)"Back in 2004, BBC 4 was so impressed by the success of the new Doctor Who that they commissioned a live remake of The Quatermass Experiment. Its modest success led them to remake the classic BBC serial, A for Andromeda, the next year and this film in 2006. I’m not sure what the first two films […]
Read more "Random Quest (2006)"It took several hours after I saw this one before it finally dawned on me that it resembled Martin Gooch’s 2013 comedy, The Search for Simon . After all, both deal with a young man obsessed with events from his childhood that connect him to aliens from outer space. And yet there is surprisingly little in common between these […]
Read more "Earthbound (2012)"The general complaint about this one has been that it resembles a “Hallmark Channel” movie. This is both unfair and at the same time, mostly true. Mind you, I’m sure you would’t find a film with such a clear, carefully thought-out, science fictional premise on The Hallmark Channel. A disgraced professor of Quantum Mechanics from a major university, […]
Read more "Love & Teleportation(2013)"Just when you think you’ve seen it all, something truly strange turns up. Soviet SF has a tendency to be a little dry, more intelligent than similar US efforts, with a fondness for hardware-heavy portrayals of space travel, vague socialist futures where everyone is happy together (and therefore politics don’t matter) and sometimes, a turgid […]
Read more "Amphibian Man [Chelovek-Amfibiya] (1962)"