Alejandro Adams‘ second feature, Canary, is a wildly ambitious and not particularly audience-friendly (in fact, you could almost call it audience-hostile) work of indie sci-fi with new-fangled digital aesthetics and old-fashioned Altman-esque dialogue patterns put to the service of an overwhelming and surprisingly fresh-feeling sense of dystopian dread. The film premieres at CineQuest on Sunday. I watched it on my MacBook while flying from New York to Los Angeles last week. Adams thinks it’s important that I mention that. He says, “I’m glad you watched it on an airplane…that is not merely a valid way to watch my film; that IS my film. I reject all other modes of consumption because they unmake what I made. What I made was for Karina Longworth on that flight from New York to Los Angeles.”
In an ongoing email conversation, I started out by asking Alejandro a variation of one of The 5 Questions We Ask Everybody; he took over from there, eventually pushing me to the point where I felt the need to invoke Heidegger, which I usually try really hard not to do. Canary’s screening schedule can be found here; there have also been some interesting conversations on the film’s blog.
…Read more
Set in alternate-universe present day versions of frozen-over Russia and the Manhattan theatrical intelligensia (the latter resembling something Charlie Kaufman might have come up with, minus the self-deprecating suspicion of success that leads him to mock the careerist stars of Needleman in a Haystack), Sophie Barthes‘ very strong first feature Cold Souls stars Paul Giamatti as an actor named Paul Giamatti, a movie star struggling to get into the character of Uncle Vanya on the stage. His agent points him to an article in the New Yorker about an extraction and cold storage facility for souls on Roosevelt Island. At the end of his rope, Paul goes through the procedure, but find that soulless, his performance is even worse — imagine Vanya as interpreted by a handsy William Shatner. It’s when Giamatti attempts to get back his original soul (shaped, in one of the film’s best running jokes, like a chick pea) that he discovers that the pristine New York clinic where he had the procedure is a front for a roiling Russian soul black market, and with the help of an attractive female soul mule (Dina Korzun), embarks on a journey to St. Petersberg.
In an interview at the Sundance Film Festival last week, Barthes discussed reading Jung, dreaming about Woody Allen, and why she hopes Putin doesn’t read film blogs.
So why would Paul Giamatti’s soul look like a chickpea?
…Read more
Free. Totally gratis. No pay. If you’re reluctant to contribute to The Day the Earth Stood Still’s box office gross (or if you already have, and need a cleansing), we’ve unearthed some science fiction classics that you can view online, completely free of charge.
The People That Time Forgot
Made in 1977, this movie didn’t blow cash on the special effects. It seems like they poured everything into the cavegirl’s fake boobs and her fur-bespangled outfit. But, the acting and the story in this is actually pretty darn good. If you can get past the the terrible dinosaur costumes, this is actually pretty decent, and ripe for a remake.
…Read more
The Day The Earth Stood Still managed to pull in $30 million dollars this past weekend, which you can mostly attribute to clever marketing, but it’s not a promising number for the much-loathed movie, which is sitting at 21% on Rotten Tomatoes right now. Beyond the wooden acting and the eviscerating of a beloved sci fi classic that most people are talking about, there are some moments in this movie that just make my teeth clench. Moments that are so poorly written, thought out, filmed, and constructed that I just can’t keep myself from venting. Read on to see all five, and just in case it’s not clear enough from the header: there are spoilers below.
…Read more
Every week Kevin Kelly will look at different writers whose books should be turned into films, films that were much better as books, or books that should never be turned into films upon pain of death. We’ll also talk about book to movie trends and deals if anything interesting happens.
My first introduction to Stephenson came back in the mid 90s when I was working at a bookstore in Austin, Texas. I’d read everything William Gibson had written, and was hungry for more when a coworker suggested Snow Crash. It’s a very Gibson-esque book that is probably one of Stephenson’s most cinematic works, meaning that it would probably require the smallest amount of effort to take it from the page to the screen in terms of putting a screenplay together.
Snow Crash is about a sword-wielding, pizza-delivering hacker who is trying to stop the spread of a computer virus that only affects computer programmers, along with the help of a young female courier who travels around on a high-tech skateboard using a magnetic harpoon to slalom through traffic. Sounds like a movie, right? Hollywood thought so too, since it was optioned by Touchstone Pictures and several drafts were written before it was abandoned due to budget concerns.
Neal Stephenson has been writing books since 1984, on subjects spanning the ecology, cyberpunk, steampunk, cryptography, artificial intelligence, information trafficking, historical fiction, and speculative fiction. However, none of his works has yet been turned into a movie. If you take a glance at Cryptonomicon or any of the three books in The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, or The System of the World, you’ll see why: these are massive tomes that average about about 800 pages in length, and those four titles could take up an entire shelf on their own. Snow Crash, Zodiac, and The Big U are all “normal” sized books, so why haven’t they been smacked onto celluloid?
…Read more
