Fun Friday: “Honest” Movie Trailers

 

An honest trailer for the movie Prometheus, a movie many sci fi fans eagerly anticipated and significantly let us down  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBaKqOMGPWc

The honest trailer for Paranormal Activity, a fabulous marketing gimmick, not much of a movie  http://laughingsquid.com/honest-movie-trailers-paranormal-activity-by-screen-junkies/

This one kind of hurts, I liked The Avengers  http://laughingsquid.com/honest-movie-trailers-the-avengers-by-screen-junkies/

Gotta love this one, Transformers  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzJuDo5ots0

Avatar, nuff said  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUTtt14G31c

Gotta know where this one is going, The Dark Knight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u843KNE-exo

Six movies you’ve never heard…

We all hear about the blockbusters and happily now that indie films have become popular we also get to hear about the indie films that win awards or get picked up for wider distribution.  However every year there are films that come out that we don’t hear about that are actually quite good.  Typically we stumble across these films on the odd rainy Sunday afternoon or a late night when we can’t sleep.  So hear are five films, most you will not have heard of or seen, but give them a look sometime.  I think you’ll like them particularly if you liked films like Memento or The Usual Suspects, so here are six I can vouch for and one that is out right now that looks absolutely magnificent.

Cube (1997)  – A little bit science fiction, a little bit horror film, a lot bit fantastic.  And even though she annoyed the hell at of me in the Star Trek series Nicole De Boer is amazing in this film.  They did a sequel to this one called Hypercube, and it was almost as good but has to lose points since the idea was no longer original.

Persepolis (2007) - I just recently saw this film and it is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.  It touches upon a young girl coming of age, the feelings that we all have about not fitting in, and it’s a solid historical account of the political realities of the country of Iran.  Personally, I think this film should be compulsory for every adult in America given the current realities of the world.

The Possession of David O’Reilly (2010) – The weakest of the films listed here but one that you will cause you to convince yourself you know exactly what’s happening at least 4 different times.  Some typical horror film elements and I started out while watching it thinking I’d probably shut it off at some point, but never did.

Exam (2009) – Eight candidates sit down for an exam that will qualify them to be hired for the corporation.  From then on the film feels a lot like The Cube, but seriously intense and thought-provoking.

Nomads (1986) - The best Pierce Brosnan movie you’ve never heard of, no critical acclaim, no big box office, just a totally freaky, kick-ass, crazy horror movie.

Unknown (2006) - NO, this is NOT, the Liam Neeson big budget mystery that came out two years ago.  This is a Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear and Bridget Moynahan movie, five guys wake up in a warehouse, it’s obvious something horrible has gone down but no one has any memory, killer mystery in the same vein as Memento.

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) - This film hasn’t arrived in my town yet but I can’t wait.  If nothing else this film seems to have one of the greatest performances in history by a 6-year-old.  Seems like a crazy little film with a solid story.

Five Star Trek captains all at once

Five Star Trek captains all at once

At Destination Star Trek in London in October all five captains from the Star Trek series, Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Cisco, and Archer will all be appearing together for the first time.  Tickets go on sale April 30^th and I imagine they will sell out quickly so if you’re a hard-core Trekkie I’m thinking this is not something that you want to miss.  Here’s a link to the official event:

http://www.startreklondon.com/

 

 

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/16/uk-startrek-convention-idUSLNE83F01320120416

 

New form of life on planet Earth, is really duh science!

Ok, I’m really happy for Felisa Wolfe-Simon that she’s made a solid discovery so early in her career.  I completely understand why NASA would make a huge deal out of the announcement, let’s face it, NASA hasn’t had a great decade and they need the positive press.  The discovery itself is cool, an organism is able to use Arsenic instead of Phosphorous as part of the backbone of its DNA.  This is a new discovery and one that does have an implication in the world of Astrobiology, it is the confirmation that life is not limited in the universe to the type of life that evolved on Earth.  DUH! 

We already knew this, we’ve found bacteria living in horrible conditions, tartigrades can survive being shot into space, deep ocean thermal vent communities 30 years ago challenged much about what we knew about what had to be the conditions for life to form.  Don’t get me wrong, confirmation of this idea is a big discovery and very cool but we already knew this.  No Astrobiologist or Biologist is surprised today folks, we already knew and believed what science fiction writers have been telling us for decades, hell maybe centuries, life finds a way and when we find it out there, it will be more diverse and amazing than anything we can imagine.  So now let’s get to the business of finding it, how about a manned flight to Mars for a start.

If you’d like to read more about the discovery you can find it at the link below:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/1202/How-does-an-arsenic-based-life-form-work-exactly

Fun Friday: Time Travelers Among Us?!

Ok so this has been a weird sort of synchronous week, last Saturday while watching college football the announcers and graphics were showing a term FBS.  Now I’ve been watching college football for a long time and I had no idea what that meant, yet the announcers were tossing around like they’d been using it their whole life.  Turns out it means football bowl subdivision, but it’s a new term to me, I had an odd thought at the time, “hey this is exactly the kind of little changes we would see if some time traveler went back in time and screwed up the timeline.”  For those of you who are not science fiction nerds like me there is a rule with time travel, never do anything that would impact the future.  But of course, inevitably in every science fiction story some little mistake leads to some minor change at the end with a wink and a nod.

Anyway I probably would have forgotten for this in a week or two but then today a headline caught my attention, “Time Traveler Caught on Film in 1928.”  The story which if you haven’t seen it is linked below, is that in the extra footage at the back of a DVD of Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus there is a woman walking along talking on what looks like a cell phone.  Now of course it’s not a cell phone, lack of towers an all, but it could be a mobile communication device or even a small voice recorder.  In one angle of the slow motion feed, you can clearly see her talking.

http://forgetomori.com/2010/fortean/time-traveller-in-charlie-chaplin-movie/

Now some of the theories are that she’s using an ear-trumpet or scratching her ear but it sure is a tantalizing piece of evidence to talk about.  Now let’s go a little further down the rabbit hole and take a look at another photo from 1905 of someone people refer to as “the punk.”  Of course this picture to me isn’t all that convincing it looks to me like a guy with an unfortunate loss of hair leaving him with a sad mohawk-like hair remainder.  Take a look for yourself.

http://forgetomori.com/2010/fortean/do-you-feel-lucky-time-traveler-punk/

Now the really interesting piece to me is a photograph referred to as the hipster.  In the picture that I’ve linked to below a crowd is looking at the opening of a bridge in 1940.  In the crowd is someone who really seems out-of-place, there is even a woman looking at him kind of funny and a guy to his side sort of sneering down at him.  This is a museum photo, now found as an image in a virtual museum and is really quite intriguing.  Analysis seems to validate this as a photo that has not been digitally altered, so we’ll leave it for you to decide, just a weird guy or a time traveler caught on film?

http://forgetomori.com/2010/fortean/time-traveler-caught-in-museum-photo/

Minor Rant about THE EVENT; but check out Chase

Ok, so I’m a pretty hard-core science fiction fan and given the durth of good science fiction on TV it’s pretty easy to draw me into a new science fiction show.  I bought into Heroes and for the first season it was pretty good but it went south way too fast and I had to give up on it.  The SyFy channel scored massively with Battlestar Gallactica except for possibly the last episode but when hasn’t a good series ended goofy recently?

So it was with some anticipation and excitement that I looked forward to another science fiction series, and although the “What is the Event?” commercials were a bit over the top, I still hoped for something better than network TVs last attempt the reimagined V.  So I settled in and set my DVR and now six or seven episodes I feel free to call THE EVENT a complete NON-EVENT.  After at least six episodes there is not a single character I care about, ok, I care about the hot young blonde, but only because she’s the only eye-candy on the show.  The rest of the characters are either flat, or despicable or unbelievably boring.  THE EVENT, has even stopped talking about the THE EVENT after the second episode and I’m not sure there even is an event anymore.  The plot line of this series is plodding along at a slug’s space and sadly, I will now give up on another science fiction story.

Spoiler Alert

So in the end the series premise is that all-powerful, slow aging aliens have been locked in an Alaskan jail for sixty years.  They apparently can traverse space, walk out of the Alaskan wilderness in winter wearing light clothing, snatch aircraft out of the air and drop it thousands of miles away, and collapse giant buildings.  BUT they couldn’t break out of jail?  Or their compatriots on the outside couldn’t break them out, yes the same guys snatching jets out of the sky can’t snatch another alien out of an Alaskan jail.  And of course there is the government, and shadow government operatives and crazy UFO conspiracy types but in the end all very predictable and boring.  The last straw for me was the alien with a conscience, Simon, as he’s helping a wounded man out of a collapsing building he’s trapped and almost certainly killed in the collapse.  At that moment I told myself ok, if they have the courage to kill of a character, the only character barely worth caring about, there is hope and it looked like they did.  Then in the scenes for next week, there is Simon in a hospital bed, good God, no creativity, no excitement and no courage on the part of the writers, goodbye to THE EVENT, hello more space on my DVR.

And one last thing, check out CHASE it comes on at 10PM on the same channel and it’s a way better show, better writing, characters to care about, good action and a whole lot more eye-candy.