sci fi – Page 2 – The Movie Gourmet

TITANE: demented, excessive and icky

October 6, 2021 by movie gourmet

Photo caption: Agathe Rousselle and Caddy in TITANE. Courtesy of NEON.

I don’t think I’ve ever before described a movie-going experience as “punishing”, but here goes. After being assaulted by the French sci fi horror film Titane, which purports to be two portraits of abnormal psychology, I felt beaten, even tortured.

The headstrong child Alexia causes an auto accident and gets a platinum plate in her skull. She grows into a stripper at car shows (Agathe Rousselle), and has a serious automobile fetish. In Titane’s most notorious scene, Alexia gives a new meaning to auto-eroticism by having sex with, and becoming impregnated by, a Cadillac.

Alexia is also a serial killer, and her second signature fetish is impaling her victims. She keeps a spike in her hair for this purpose, but a bar stool will suffice, too. One victim gets away and indemnified her, so Alexia changed her appearance and goes underground as a young man. Here, she happens on a beefy fire captain (Vincent Lindon), who is grieving for a son who disappeared ten years ago, and adopts Alexia as his long lost, now recovered, son.

Through much of Titane, we are asking WTF is going on? Writer-diretor Julia Ducournau keeps surprising us by piling on segments that are SO twisted and bizarre, that most of us could not imagine them.

Most of Titane is intentionally unpleasant to watch. Characters bleed blood, unless they bleed motor oil. Bones crunch, mouths froth and bellies are picked open. The murders are gory, and Alexia self mutilates as her pregnancy progresses, right up to an excruciating birth scene.

Oh, and let me be very clear about this, Titane is NOT a date movie.

The character of Alexia is just a bad seed, a feral maniac. The character of the troubled fire captain is also bizarre, but he’s more psychologically interesting. He insists that everyone else accept what is clearly a delusion. Does he understand that this is not his son?

Vincent Lindon in TITANE. Courtesy of NEON.

Lindon (who muscled up for the role) is superb in this crazy role, which requires him to exude command authority and also the deepest vulnerability. It’s a very brave performance, and it works, for example, in his solo dance to She’s Not There.

Myriem Akheddiou is also excellent in a brief scene as the mother of the fire captain’s missing child.

I know my share of American firefighters. They would be surprised by Titane’s French firefighters, who let off steam by getting high and holding raves in the firehouse, all hypnotically dancing to electronica.

Notably, Titane won the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. While one of the two most prestigious prizes in cinema (along with the Best Picture Oscar), the Palme d’Or is no guarantee that a movie is great – or even watchable. On the positive side, recent winners have included the superb Parasite, Shoplifters, Amour, Blue Is the Warmest Color and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. On the unfathomably bad side, cinematic excrement like The White Ribbon, The Tree of Life, Dancer in the Dark, and now Titane – has also won.

The critical consensus is far too kind to Titane. Many critics correctly label what had come out of Julia Ducournau’s mind as “demented” and then credit her for the visual excess in telling an unbearably icky story. It’s just demented, excessive and icky.

STRAWBERRY MANSION: a trippy and sweet fable

July 13, 2021April 15, 2021 by movie gourmet

A scene from Kentucker Audley’s and Albert Birney’s film STRAWBERRY MANSION, playing at the 2021 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 9 -18, 2021. Courtesy of SFFILM

The very trippy and ultimately sweet fable Strawberry Mansion is set in a future where people’s dreams are taxed. Preble (Kentucker Audley), a workaday tax auditor, is assigned to audit the dreams of an elderly artist, Bella (Penny Fuller). Preble is soon plunged into an Alice in Wonderland experience with her dreams, and his dreams, and a romance to boot.

Preble puts on a gizmo to watch the dreams pf others (and comes across an even cooler gizmo that filters dreams). He even encounters Bella’s younger self (Grace Glowicki).

Strawberry Mansion is also a sharp and funny critique of insidious commercialism. A fictional brand of fried chicken keeps showing up in the story. Hilariously, Preble becomes entangled in an endless loop of upselling at a fast food drive-thru. And Preble is constantly prodded to consume by his own diabolical dream buddy (Linas Phillips). A sinister marketing plot is revealed.

Kentucker Audley is very good as Preble, who starts out the movie mildly annoyed and evolves into various degrees of bewilderment. Audley is one of those actors who keeps showing up in something interesting (and offbeat) like Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow and Sun Don’t Shine, or in smaller parts in especially fine films like Her Smell and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.

As Bella, Penny Fuller radiates a contentment that ranges from ditzy to sage. Reed Birney is especially good as Bella’s sinister son.

Audley co-wrote and co-directed Strawberry Mansion with Albert Birney. They make the most of the surreal settings within dreams, and use different color palettes for each dream; the palette for Preble’s real-life bachelor apartment is pretty surreal, too.

Strawberry Mansion played at the Sundance Film Festival and can be streamed through April 18 at SFFILM.

CINEJOY LAST SUNRISE: racing into darkness

October 6, 2020 by movie gourmet

In the gripping Chinese sci-fi thriller Last Sunrise, we’re in a super-hi tech future, powered almost totally by solar energy – which doesn’t look as blissful as it sounds. As befits a dystopian story, there’s a disaster, and this one is just about the worst one conceivable – the death of our Sun.

Wang Sun (Zhang Jue) is very serious astronomy nerd with no apparent non-scientific interests. He doesn’t really know Wu Chen (Zhang Yue), although she lives in a neighboring apartment, and it doesn’t appear that she’s ever thought about anything profound. When the catastrophe happens, the two are forced on the road together in a race for their lives.

Last Sunrise is real science fiction about a plausible (and inevitable) future occurrence, and it’s about real ideas. This isn’t just blowing stuff up in space, which too often passes for sci-fi today.

Losing the sun is pretty bad – it gets dark, the temperature is plunging and humans are running out of oxygen. There may be refuges, but there’s little remaining battery power to fuel people’s escapes. Of course, it doesn’t take long for social order to break down. Last Sunrise becomes a ticking bomb thriller as the couple tries to find a refuge in time.

Of course, with no sun lighting the earth and moon, it is very dark and many more stars are visible. The f/x of the starry skies in Last Sunrise are glorious.

The two leads are appealing, especially Zhang Yue, whose Wu Chen is revealed more and more as film goes on.

The life-and-death thriller is leavened by witty comments on the consumerist, hyper connected culture (pre-disaster). There are very funny ongoing references to instant noodles. And Wang Sun, who is a bit of a hermit, doesn’t appreciate how devoted he is to his digital assistant ILSA (not Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, just ILSA).

This is the first feature, an impressive debut, for director and co-writer Wen Ren. Cinequest hosted the North American premiere of Last Sunrise, the sci-fi highlight of the festival and is streaming Small Time in CINEJOY through October 14.

THE 11TH GREEN: a thinking person’s conspiracy

July 16, 2020 by movie gourmet

Writer-director Christopher Munch notes that it’s difficult to have a serious discussion of extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth; he notes that talk of UFOs brings giggles and that “gatekeepers in the media” avoid the subject, fearing that they won’t seem smart anymore. That’s the territory he plumbs in The 11th Green. There are no lovable ETs or terrifying space monsters or flying saucers in The 11th Green, just a life-and-death conspiracy of secrets.

Suppose there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Now it’s not much of a leap that such intelligent life would have visited Earth. If THAT has happened, then maybe humans have noticed the visitors – or maybe even humans have been contacted by the visitors.

The 11th Green starts with the premise that extraterrestrials visited and made contact in the 1950s, but the leadership of that American generation, having experienced Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, has suppressed the news until the public can be prepared not to panic. The conspiracy of secrecy has survived to this day.

Our protagonist, Jeremy Rudd (Campbell Scott), is a DC-based science journalist. He has been estranged from his father, an Air Force General retired from the national security elite. When his father dies, Jeremy travels to his father’s home in Palm Desert, California, to handle the estate. There, he goes through his father’s stuff and meets his father’s peers, including a fascist general, an oleaginous spook and his dad’s nubile assistant.

As Jeremy unpeels the onion of his father’s career, he uncovers the story of the Millennium. And here’s where Munch launches his trademark Magical Realism. Weird shit starts happening – but all with its own internally consistent logic.

Ike and Mamie Eisenhower show up as characters in The 11th Green, along with a retired President Barack Obama and post-war Defense Secretary James Forrestal. (Jeremy’s father had been living in the former winter retirement home of President Eisenhower on the 11th green). You need to suspend disbelief here – do it.

I loved Christopher Munch’s previous film, Letters from the Big Man, a work of uncommon beauty. Munch’s magical realism worked there because he presented it absolutely straight, as if having a lovelorn Sasquatch in the forest setting was as normal as a squirrel. Sadly, Letters from the Big Man is currently difficult to find.

The cerebral and reserved Campbell Scott is perfectly cast as the offbeat, but always contained, brainiac Jeremy. Religiously scientific, Jeremy always follows the data, even when the data takes him to what others would find unbelievable. More than a little OCD, he makes the emergency trip from DC to Palm Desert – on a train!

I am resistant to science fiction generally, But I went with the story, and found The 11th Green to be absorbing and satisfying – and another completely original work from Christopher Munch. You can buy a virtual ticket for The 11th Green – and support the Roxie Theater – at Theatrical-At-Home.

Stream of the Week: PROSPECT – a girl’s battle of wits in outer space

April 30, 2019 by movie gourmet

The ingeniously original Prospect is a frontier coming of age movie. It’s just set in space, not in the Old West. The teenage girl Cee (Sophie Thatcher) accompanies her dad (Jay Duplass) as he pilots their tired spaceship from planet to planet, seeking to extract something precious (hence the title Prospect as in prospectors). It’s an enterprise for misfits and hustlers. She has grown into an able assistant. He is a skilled pilot and prospector, but is very erratic in his judgment.

Sure, this is a future version of our world, but these characters live in a bottom-feeding sub-culture; their space travel hardware comes from the surplus store and has the look of NASA’s Mercury program – far less sleekly hi tech than the dashboard of a 2013 Prius. It’s a choice by co-writer and co-directors Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl to reinforce that we’re dealing with folks living on the margins.

Isolated by circumstance on a planet that is only populated by a few other sketchy transients and some disturbing settlers, Cee is thrown into a series of life-and-death situations. She must depend on her wits to survive a sequence of that can only be resolved through negotiation. I saw Prospect before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. In the screening’s Q&A, co-writer filmmakers Caldwell and Earl affirmed that the story is centered on negotiation and that they drew from that under-recognized subgenre, the “loquacious Western”.

Pedro Pascal and Sophie Thatcher in PROSPECT

A key character that Cee must deal with is another rogue prospector Ezra (Pedo Pascal), a man of wit, charm, lethality and devoted self-interest. Pascal (Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) makes Ezra one of the most compelling and funniest movie characters of the year.

Someone has labeled Prospect at “True Grit in space”, which isn’t far off. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is also evoked. A consistently unpredictable plot and superb performances by Pascal and young Ms. Thatcher make Prospect well worth streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play.

LAST SUNRISE: racing into darkness

March 4, 2019March 2, 2019 by movie gourmet

Of course, with no sun lighting the earth and moon, it is very dark and many more stars are visible. The f/x of the starry skies in Last Sunrise are glorious.

The two leads are appealing, especially Zhang Yue, whose Wu Chen is revealed more and more as film goes on.

This is the first feature, an impressive debut, for director and co-writer Wen Ren. Cinequest hosts the North American premiere of Last Sunrise, the sci-fi highlight of the festival.

PROSPECT: a girl’s battle of wits in outer space

November 16, 2018 by movie gourmet

DVD/Stream of the Week: I ORIGINS – a thoughtful romance that muses on the boundaries of science and spirituality

March 27, 2018 by movie gourmet

Michael Pitt and Brit Marling in I ORIGINS

The romance I Origins explores the conflict between science and spirituality. Our scientist protagonist (Michael Pitt) is completely empirical and militantly anti-spiritual. He is obsessed with the study of iris scans and patterns of the eye (the “I” in the title is a pun). He is hoping to prove that eyes can be evolved, which he believes will debunk the Creationist pseudo-science of Intelligent Design. He meets a model (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) – and they don’t meet CUTE, they meet HOT. Through a string of scientifically improbable coincidences, he is able to track her down for a second encounter that is sharply romantic. They fall in love – an attraction of opposites because she is mercurial and vaguely New Agey.

Along the way, he gains a new lab assistant (Brit Marling), who is just as smart and more driven than is he. Together they find the lab breakthrough to prove his theory. The main three characters are affected by a life-altering tragedy. Seven years later, the story resumes with the public release of the discovery. As our hero takes his victory lap over religion, he is faced with new evidence that cannot be explained by science…

Writer-director Mike Cahill (Another Earth, also starring Marling) has constructed a story that sets up a discussion on the limits of empiricism. I give Cahill extra points for raising the issue without ponderosity or pretension. Some critics have harshly judged the movie, but they see it wrongly as a corny religion-beats-science movie instead of a contemplation on the possibilities. And they altogether miss the fact that the film is basically a romance, which Cahill himself sees as one of the two central aspects of I Origins. Cahill explores and compares the intense lust-at-first-sight, opposites-attract type of love with the love relationship based on common values and aspirations.

There are, however, two shots involving pivotal moments in the story (and both involving billboards) that are such self-consciously ostentatious filmmaking that they distracted me, rather than bringing emphasis to each moment.

Pitt, an actor of sometimes unsettling affect, is very good here, as he was in The Dreamers and Last Days. Berges-Frisbey and Marling deliver fine performances, too. If Marling is in a movie, it aspires to being good – I loved The East, which she co-write and starred in. Archie Panjabi, without the boots and the upfront sexiness she wears on The Good Wife, is solid in a minor part.

I Origins works both as a scientific detective story and as a meditation on romance. I found it to be smart and entertaining. I Origins is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Cinequest: SKULL

May 13, 2018March 11, 2018 by movie gourmet

Skull, an absolutely bizarre film, is intended to be Indonesia’s first sci-fi film. Opening with a beautiful drone shot, Skull lurches forward with bits of mystery, romance, chases and shootouts until its “science unleashes the end of the world” finish.

The discovery of a giant skull threatens the underpinnings of many scientific theories and results in an international secret research project and a coverup by the Indonesian government. Ani ( Eka Nusa Pertiwi), a young woman at the research project is about to become a victim of the coverup when her killer-to-be is whacked by Yos (played by writer-director Yusran Fuadi), and the two escape on a motorcycle roadtrip through the Indonesian hinterlands, ending up with Yos’ mentor in a watchtower high above the jungle.

The frenetic pacing screeches to an abrupt halt while the three banter in front of a static camera for maybe ten minutes – it’s not at all a bad scene, just jarringly different than the pace of the rest of the film. The mentor gets in a couple sniffs of Ani’s hand, then rest of the assassins arrive and there’s a shootout. Afterwards, there’s a visit to a philosopher who might have the key to the mystery.

Along the way, we have a SWAT team wearing skull masks, an exercise in mass voting by text (but is it hacked?) and a character exclaiming, “Dried Shit!”. This paranoid thriller finally concludes with a Pandora’s box ending with odd, but very effective special effects. Skull is also notable for its vivid colors and terrible translation in the English subtitles.

I saw Skull at a Cinequest screening with the cast and crew. Yusran Fuadi made the film in 128 days of shooting over more than three years on 40 different locations in Java. Each time he could save up $180 from his paycheck as a lecturer, he would gather the crew and shoot some more of the movie. He said his major direction to leading lady Eka Nusa Pertiwi was a plea not to get pregnant in the next three years.

Cinequest: 7 SPLINTERS IN TIME (OMPHALOS)

February 25, 2018 by movie gourmet

Edoardo Ballerini in 7 SPLINTERS IN TIME

7 Splinters in Time has to be the trippiest film in this year’s Cinequest. The detective Darius (Edoardo Ballerini – Corky Caporale in The Sopranos) is seriously confused. He can’t remember large chunks of his past. And then he’s confronted by an exact look-alike in a most unlikely place. Soon, even more doppelgängers arrive in the story. Darius is trying to figure out what’s going on- and so is the audience.

We go from place to place and, possibly, from time to time. And Darius and/or his lookalikes keep showing up. It’s as if one’s life were depixelated, digitally compressed and then defectively reassembled. Artifacts from other periods of time – Polaroid camera, rotary phone, microfiche viewer – are clues that time travel may be involved here.

Story threads are braided together, some more vividly nightmarish than others. There’s plenty of eye candy and sometimes there’s the feeling of Fellini on Dexedrine. If you like your movies linear and unambiguous, you will likely be impatient until the explanation in the last 20 minutes. But it’s fun to settle in and try to figure out what is going on.

7 Splinters is the feature film debut for writer-director Gabriel Judet-Weinshel. To depict Darius’ different realities (what he calls the “fractured psyche”), Judet-Weinshel used 8mm, 16mm, 35mm film and analog still film, along with the full range of digital, from low-resolution 30-frame video to the large format digital Red Camera. The effect is very cool.

Greg Bennick is excellent as the hyperkinetic mystery figure Luka. Lynn Cohen is a howl as the salty curmudgeon Babs, Darius’ elderly neighbor. Both are effective counterpoints to Ballerini’s chilly and stony Darius.

The beloved character actor Austin Pendleton plays The Librarian, a much more pivotal character than initially apparent. Pendleton has a zillion screen credits, including Frederick Larrabee in What’s Up, Doc? and Gurgle in Finding Nemo. I think I heard his character say, “You are the lizard warrior”. It’s that kind of movie.

Cinequest hosts the world premiere of 7 Splinters in Time. The film is listed under its alternative title of Omphalos, so you can find its screenings here in the Cinequest program.