More movies!
Aug. 10th, 2003 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinThis is rapidly turning into an arts/entertainment blog. Well, I suppose I'm as qualified as the next random consumer of entertainment.
Last night Kibo came over, as is his wont, and we saw Star Trek: Nemesis, the George Clooney movie of Solaris, and the brain-damaged quasi-satire S1m0ne.
I felt obligated to see Solaris since my fellow Stanislaw Lem fans keep asking me how I liked it. It was OK, better than the vanity disaster I expected, though not great. My review is now online here.
Star Trek: Nemesis is something unique: the first Star Trek movie to be burdened by excessive fan-wank. Every damn scene trots out some reference to obscure Star Trek backstory or some Next Generation, Voyager or Deep Space Nine episode or other. A character even mentions the Borg pointedly even though they have nothing to do with the movie. It just gets silly after a while. I can imagine a certain type of fanboy/fangirl going ape over it.
And, yes, I realize that it's kind of sad that I got all those references.
The story surrounding all this stuff is not that interesting. Nemesis is also a very cheap-looking movie for something that's supposed to be so ambitious and action-oriented. And every time the Remans showed up on screen I expected Sarah Michelle Gellar to come somersaulting in and stick a wooden stake in them.
As for S1m0ne, it has the purest Idiot Plot (to use Roger Ebert's inspired term) that I've seen in a long time. The story, about a director (Al Pacino) who successfully passes off a virtual actor as a real woman, could not possibly work unless everyone in the entire world has suffered some sort of head injury. It also contains depictions of computers that are so ridiculous that it feels like a movie from the era when personal computers were shiny and new and most people had not dealt with them on a daily basis; surely we can do better than the computers in WarGames now. Catherine Keener plays The Catherine Keener Character, and Rachel Roberts gets a special Good Sport Award for putting up with the role of S1m0ne (especially considering that the early publicity for the movie tried to pretend she didn't exist). I'll give it one thing: the little bits of the director's work that we see are nice, goofy parodies of pretentious art-house filmmaking. The DVD has uncut versions of those scenes as extras.
Last night Kibo came over, as is his wont, and we saw Star Trek: Nemesis, the George Clooney movie of Solaris, and the brain-damaged quasi-satire S1m0ne.
I felt obligated to see Solaris since my fellow Stanislaw Lem fans keep asking me how I liked it. It was OK, better than the vanity disaster I expected, though not great. My review is now online here.
Star Trek: Nemesis is something unique: the first Star Trek movie to be burdened by excessive fan-wank. Every damn scene trots out some reference to obscure Star Trek backstory or some Next Generation, Voyager or Deep Space Nine episode or other. A character even mentions the Borg pointedly even though they have nothing to do with the movie. It just gets silly after a while. I can imagine a certain type of fanboy/fangirl going ape over it.
And, yes, I realize that it's kind of sad that I got all those references.
The story surrounding all this stuff is not that interesting. Nemesis is also a very cheap-looking movie for something that's supposed to be so ambitious and action-oriented. And every time the Remans showed up on screen I expected Sarah Michelle Gellar to come somersaulting in and stick a wooden stake in them.
As for S1m0ne, it has the purest Idiot Plot (to use Roger Ebert's inspired term) that I've seen in a long time. The story, about a director (Al Pacino) who successfully passes off a virtual actor as a real woman, could not possibly work unless everyone in the entire world has suffered some sort of head injury. It also contains depictions of computers that are so ridiculous that it feels like a movie from the era when personal computers were shiny and new and most people had not dealt with them on a daily basis; surely we can do better than the computers in WarGames now. Catherine Keener plays The Catherine Keener Character, and Rachel Roberts gets a special Good Sport Award for putting up with the role of S1m0ne (especially considering that the early publicity for the movie tried to pretend she didn't exist). I'll give it one thing: the little bits of the director's work that we see are nice, goofy parodies of pretentious art-house filmmaking. The DVD has uncut versions of those scenes as extras.