Suspect Zero is a fairly engaging serial killer movie with a supernatural streak that is introduced subtly and grows and grows until it makes a dominant dent in the plot. It’s a dark and rainy night. A jittery salesman (we suppose) is having coffee in a diner. Ben Kinglsey sidles up to him and strikes… Read More Suspect Zero – Eckhart, Kingsley, Moss (2004)
Once they tried to make video games like movies. Now they try to make movies like video games. Sometimes, they give up and make a movie about a video game. As an experiment, I watched this movie in German. I don’t really speak much German. As a truer test I should have watched it in… Read More Ready Player One (2018)
If I had known John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum and Christopher Lloyd were in this movie I would have watched it 30 years earlier. Buckaroo starts out strong then kind of devolves into cliches. Or maybe every movie I’ve seen since this came out has been a cliche. It’s one or the other. On the whole Buckaroo… Read More The adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984)
I came to this book via an internet forum. Someone was raving about it and I read it. It’s a rapid fire survey of some of the personalities behind the telegraph and a peek at the technology that powered it. It draws our attention to how similar the sociological effect of the telegraph on victorian… Read More The Victorian Internet – Tom Standage (1998)
On the streaming service I use, 50/50 was billed as “honest yet hysterically funny”. Both are mostly true. Gordon-Levitt is a perfect fit for 50/50 and Rogen some how toned himself down to also be a good fit for this well paced, measured, somewhat understated and yes, in parts hysterically funny, movie. Gordon-Levitt has cancer… Read More 50/50 – Gordon-Levitt/Rogen (2011)
In “The Titan” I was kind of hoping to see spaceships. A journey to Titan, nice CGI of the outer planets, perhaps some alien life form, some kind of undersea battle in the methane seas of Titan. What I got was a long, slow, predictable and eventually annoying drama, some kind of mix between “Splice”… Read More The Titan
Chances are you will not like Downsizing. It’s a well acted, well directed movie, perhaps a little too maudlin in parts. It is science-fiction in a traditional sense in that it makes up a scientific discovery and then explores the social ramifications of that discovery. It’s also one of Matt Daemon’s “social” projects, in that… Read More Downsizing
