OPO: Sci-fi movies of the 2000s

Was going to make a poll, but there were just too many movies I hadn't seen + too much stuff I knew to be crap. Lots of licensing in that decade.

Southland Tales, Children of Men, Star Trek, The Host, Sunshine and Battle Royale are contenders, but Paprika gets my #1 vote; it's amazing, Satoshi Kon was amazing, I was genuinely saddened when he died last year, and I loved Paranoia Agent as well.

for reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science-fiction_films_of_the_2000s

sunshine imo. also: idiocracy.

I like Sunshine (and recently actually bought it) but it's got a few flaws. I have yet to see a couple of the ones mentioned already, and feel I must catch up as soon as I can.

gotta be Children of Men. Or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

probably 2046 or walle out of that list. i also like war of the worlds, children of men, primer, the host, code 46 & district 13 (scifi?) a lot. most of these are movies i should probably see again sometime tho

keep in mind i dont really like scifi fwiw

There's science fiction that interweaves technology and our interaction with it into the plot, and there's science fiction that changes a science fact in order to set up the backdrop for a plot. I feel like Children of Men is the latter, as well as Eternal Sunshine

do wish this was on netflix instant or something~

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock-Up_on_Mu

Has anyone seen Beyond the Black Rainbow? Really interested from what I've heard.

Children of Men

or maybe War of the Worlds

Minority Report

Children of Men is a serious contender for OPO movies of the 2000s for me, regardless of genre.

man i might have to go for District 9 i think

Owen: Southland Tales. Really? I guess I can see some kind of cult building up around it, but I found it nonsensical. You have convinced me to check out Paprika, though.

I'm gonna say Children of Men.

yeah it's children of men.

oh man but there is also Timecrimes which is amazing

wtf with slither/28daysweeks later being on that list, all 3 are clearly horror films

I did like Timecrimes, and Paprika was one of the better anime movies I've seen

children of men, star trek, district 9, primer and minority report off top of my head

Like sunshine OTSM but it's an emo movie with some sci-fi added imo

Owen P, I love that Southland Tales leads your list. Marry me today.

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is the 2nd greatest film of the Aughts so that. But please check out Koi...Mil Gaya, an impossible Bollywood fusion between E.T. and Forrest Gump starring the elastic Hrithik Roshan.

Soderbergh's Solaris was apparently so good it made that Wiki list twice.

Also great: A Scanner Darkly

Children of Men and Eternal Sunshine are all time for me. But Sunshine has stuck with me in an odd way ...

Think AI and Minority Report have aged pretty well. The former remains an almost "Tree of Life" level Rorschach.

Southland Tales is exactly the movie any 16-year-old ever dreamed of making. The casting is perfect, I mean, The Rock + Buffy + the cast of Mad TV + the cast of SNL + Justin Timberlake + Stifler + Christopher Lambert + Mandy Moore + Wallace Shawn?

JT pouring champagne all over himself, flanked with pin-up girls on pinball machines w/The Killers playing + a single called "Teen Horniness is not a Crime" + the most visibly CGI sequence in the movie is a Lawnmower Man-era-CGI SUV mounting another SUV and copulating?

Paprika is such a crazy freakin movie. I was so into it like inside its world that I couldn't tell you what it's about but can still recount entire scenes even now.

^ Have you seen Paranoia Agent; watch Paranoia Agent; watch it now.

just want to note it's a shame that Moon hasn't even been mentioned yet

I will watch that! And this Southland Tales movie. I agree with Idiocracy mention - underrated/little-known.
I feel like if I'd had Netflix before this year i would've seen way more bad sic-fi of the 2000s.

I recently watched a German (?) movie called Cargo, about a ship in outer space with 'mystery cargo'. It was pretty good!

watched Paranoia Agent recently, you really have no idea what angle the story will take from episode to episode, the gossiping neighbours one was hilarious!

Really enjoyed Korean scifi/comedy film Cyborg Girl (2008) - fun big budget romp about a time travelling robot girl, lots of references to other films (Terminator, Star Wars etc)

other asian scifi/comedy films worth checking out - The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) - ESP Couple (2008) - Go Find a Psychic (2009) - Summer Time Machine Blues (2005)

Primer is another one I never got. Just seemed so...flat.

Also, not to keep slagging yr choice Owen, but it seems to me that Donnie Darko is exactly the film any 16 year old would want to make, whereas Southland Tales is the film that said 16 year old would end up making.

MOON otm

pitch black and reign of fire were also much better than they probably had any right to be

Man, I tried watching Reign of Fire again recently. No dice. Dragons and grim and boring and senseless and nonsensical. Great set-up, though.

grim & boring? bald mcconaghey headbutts everything he sees!

pitch black is great!

shot on a budget of 5m or something crazy iirc

Eternal Sunshine would win if I thought it counted as SF, but I don't think so. It's Children of Men or District 9. CoM the better movie, District 9 a better example of SF. Moon and Sunshine both have very great strengths but each one kind of peters out in the end (especially Moon, whose last ten seconds nearly ruin the whole movie)

i can get behind all of that

The Butterfly Effect

just kiddin'

gotta be Children of Men

I did enjoy District 9. Tonally it reminded me of Robocop, though its satire is weaker and more muddled. Both it and Children of Men have a very palpable video game influence (it's quite obvious the filmmakers had played a shitload of Half-Life 2).

Donnie Darko and Southland Tales and the other one are three very different movies, cannot really be compared.
I liked Moon!
I love Children of Men although in retrospect the only thing I remember about it are the single-shot scenes, and I remember three of them?

No mention of Serenity yet? FOR SHAME!

Sunshine, Children of Men, A Scanner Darkly are the other highlights for me.

I'll still vouch for the original cut of Donnie Darko, but the director's cut pretty much retroactively ruins the original.

caught the last half hour of The Box a few weeks ago, after seeing it in the theater a few years ago, and I really enjoyed the look and vibe of it.

I think A.I. is probably far and away the best of these movies though. I can see the Children of Men love, but i dont feel lit myself at all.

Moon, Children of Men, Minority Report, all great. Star Trek was fun. A.I. has grown in my estimation since it came out although I haven't seen it since then (and my immediate reaction was negative) so dunno. I liked Never Let Me Go a lot (it's exactly like the book which I also liked, I know people hate it). I have high hopes for the film version of Cloud Atlas.

don't think Battle Royale shd count really but there's no way this isn't Battle Royale

kung fu hustle?

i got a lot of love for Big Man Japan also

reign of fire is the worst movie i've ever seen. i'm a bit confused whether people itt are just using sunshine as short for eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, but anyway sunshine is great.

I don't have high hopes for Cloud Atlas, but damned if im not curious about it.

if i'd've thought of Cloud Atlas as SF maybe i wouldn't've got bored and stopped reading it

speaking of southland tales, i'm intrigued by the new timberlake sci-fi in time, which i know little about except that it's got the prettiest cast ever and is directed by the guy who did s1m0ne, which has al pacino's last, truly great performance.

POX:
A.I.
Equilibrium
Eternal Sunshine
A Scanner Darkly
Children of Men
The Fountain
WALL-E
Avatar
Moon
Inception

best as SF would go to Moon

xp man his career really went downhill didn't it -- gattaca and truman show were good/great, then s1m0ne looked like yet another killer fembot episode from the new outer limits.

I liked Minority Report better than A.I., also liked Code 46.

Cloverfield deserves an honorable mention.

God, S1m0ne was unadulterated crap.

Avalon, maybe. I'd completely forgotten there was ever a Thunderbirds movie, did anyone see it? Looks terrible!

Batthe Royale -- SF and gd.

I have to say that everything that's come up so far has been pretty disappointing to me. I mean, Children of Men is fine, but the fact that it seems to be the consensus pick for best SF film of an entire decade shows nothing but a paucity of choice.

Battle Royale definitely doesn't count as SF (dystopias do exist in other genres, you know), which is a shame as I love it (despite its many flaws, it's such a great film).

Talk to me about Equilibrium.

I know that however genres are kinda fluid anyway, so it counts. xp

Thunderbirds was on ITV last week. It was never not going to be terrible.

Primer

If it had been Kubrick's ending instead of Spielberg's it would have been A.I. for me

there aren't any SF elements in Battle Royale beyond its dystopian satire as i recall?

the way "there will be blood" hinges on a technological development, and the main character explaining it to his adversary/audience at the end conjures up the spirit of SF more than a lot of these.

In battle royale, it's implied that kitano was an android.

that is not true. is it?

i've never thought that. might have to go back and check.

but, y'know, that's Takeshi's acting style in everything lol

it takes place in the future, and it would be strange for contemporary kitano to be involved, not having aged, unless he was a replicant modeled on 20th century kitano. it also explains his weird behavior, which is a lot like ash from alien.

forgot inception, that were good, that were. That were right good.

not gonna touch that one

i didn't say it made any sense, or that it worked, but it were good

too much sense, too much sense

a good idea wasted it was

that dude isn't very good at things involving humans and their emotions

i don't know, i had too much fun to agree with 'wasted' tho

xp that's for sure

I ws saying that, well, dystopian elements are part of SF, if you frame SF as speculative fiction (robots or no robots).

i'd probably class br as a horror movie even, before sf, but it's not really either.

i guess this all comes down to whether or not we're using the "speculative" definition or like something they'd publish in analog if it was a print story.

PAPRIKA

there better be a lot of paprika gifs when I type paprika into GIS

http://www.cooking-spices.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/orange-paprika.jpg

http://gifninja.com/animatedgifs/202439/paprika.gif

http://i.imgur.com/FkPiF.gif

i did not understand/get a single thing about the movie paprika.

haha i do sometimes wish kon's movies didnt have those standard madhouse character designs i associate with like old tentacle porn anime and lusty ninja sex scenes.

from what I remember of perfect blue and millenium actress, he likes to put women in compromising positions

it's weird. if you know the kind of anime madhouse was known for in the 80s and 90s it's like seeing david lynch make a movie using the visual vocabulary of a straight to video dolph lundgren flick.

http://i.imgur.com/yxVir.gif

xp would love to see more 80s/90s serious anime!

I hated AI for years because of the ending but then I read some Armond White plus one site that has like 25 pages discussing it that I can't find right now and now it's one of my favorite films. It's funny because I can't fucking stand Steven Spielberg.

Children of Men is good, so many classic scenes. I like daydreaming about having a house like the one where the Ministry of the Arts guy lives, or reaching old age as a hippy guy smoking awesome weed while listening to we/the/f that was, Aphex Twin + Cannibal Corpse wtf?

The best sci-fi movie of the 00s is (lol/cheating) still The Matrix.

1999 surely?

from what I remember of perfect blue and millenium actress, he likes to put women in compromising positions

It's an established trope of anime to put every woman (and some men) in at least one compromising position: i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_service

am I the only one who's seen Mock-Up on Mu? Daft semi-Scientology fable.

But please check out Koi...Mil Gaya, an impossible Bollywood fusion between E.T. and Forrest Gump starring the elastic Hrithik Roshan.

Can cosign, this movie was fucking amazing.

I hated AI for years because of the ending but then I read some Armond White plus one site that has like 25 pages discussing it that I can't find right now and now it's one of my favorite films. It's funny because I can't fucking stand Steven Spielberg.

Shame you can't find it because it sounds very intersting, especially because I can't fucking stand Spielberg and think he way he ended that film is criminal.

i would pick ~race to mars~ which is a canadian hard sci-fi miniseries about mold in zero-g and accidental c.o. poisoning during long-distance space travel, starring pascale bussieres.

but thats not technically a movie so im picking godzilla final wars instead.

man i fuckin' hate anime even the good stuff. i just don't like cartoons, really.

sunshine vs children of men vs district 9 - d9 is the one i'd most readily watch again, so that - i dont think any of them are unambiguously great though

also of note: sleep dealer, avalon, moon

schlock of note: dreamcatcher, universal soldier regeneration, space cowboys

ive always thought AI was a major league snooze, most movies i can at least understand why people like them, but that ones always been a fucking mystery to me. (i havent seen it since it came out though, so maybe its time to give it another chance?)

actually, does the prestige count? that might me by favorite. shit, it definitely counts.

PRIMER

The Prestige should definitely count!

Am I the only person who thought the 6th day was sort of enjoyable in a ridiculous kind of way?

District 9 and Southland Tales tho I know most people hate it. I sort of loved it.

cloverfield?

Southland Tales is a total fucking incoherent disaster but it has a weird charm to it.

I loved the Prestige. Probably Nolan's best movie IMO.

"Schlock of note" is the best description that I have yet heard of Dreamcatcher. Not a good movie in the slightest, but so batshit that its compulsively watchable.

dreamcatcher's a hoot

I first read the Armond White (everyone hates him so it's difficult to recommend his stuff) and then insanely long blogpost on AI's ending but this article is just as good if you are interested in the film. I'm exposing myself here but I don't mind: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/27/steven-spielberg/ai/

Talk to me about Equilibrium.

Tedious, cheap-looking sub-B-movie, the kind of pseudo Brave New World dystopia that a 16-year-old would write, and ludicrous, convoluted action sequences. I have no idea what Emily Watson is doing in it.

getting paid, presumably

It's on the level of Ben Kingsley in Bloodrayne as far as wtf casting goes.

xpost

you're not a real actor unless you've slummed in some real garbage imo

http://www.movie-pix.com/Chronicle-Riddick-Geezer.jpg

"Hi dere."

I love the end of AI. I think it's massively tragic and weirdly profound. Again, I find it akin to "Tree of Life," in a way.

Only ten bazillion megatons better.

Wow, that Sense of Cinema essay is something. Thanks for that.

bypassing equilibrium's action scenes in order to focus on the plot is some real 'can't act, can't sing, can dance a little' reviewing imo

prestige was.......hokey. very expensive and lush, but hokey.

Star Trek: Nemesis.

I love the end of AI. I think it's massively tragic and weirdly profound.

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, October 9, 2011 2:54 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

otm, but I haven't seen AI since it came out.

still never seen The Prestige but there's no way it's as hokey as that other magician film from the same year with Edward Norton in it.

you.....you would think so

have you seen the Edward Norton one? i quite like the fake silent film fuckery but everything else about it is stupid beyond reason

prestige is a good melodrama grand guignol thing i think. almost as old-fashioned as the period it's set in.

tam tam's list is prob very good. props for the avalon mention, saw that in a theater. what a strange film that was.

i remember really liking code 46 but all that stays with me now are all these locations that are just in-between zones, refugee-created. modern as dystopia like san soleil or alphaville.

yeah, i think that's fair about prestige. For a director that doesn't really 'get' people, nolan really adores the melodramatic. I enjoyed it, that said.

Have seen brief snippets of the norton one, but as it happened i'd only just seen the prestige and it was too much.

I think the strength of "The Prestige" is that the whole film works as a surreal sort of slight of hand trick. Like, Christian Bale's trick turns out to be rooted in the real, and then they top it with Jackman's trick, which is of course science fiction. But the movie just goes with it.

Plus, good Bowie.

The Edward Norton one (The Illusionist) is pretty bad, but has a great Philip Glass score.

^ for real. Glass' best film score in ages.

Prestige or ESOTSM are probably my favorite.

if we're including 2010, I would probably rank Repo Men over Inception

i don't remember anything about the score for The Illusionist, i remember the first bit all desaturated and iris dissolves and stuff and thinking "this will be nice" and then gradually realising it was gonna be far from nice. might have to check the score separately.

I ws saying that, well, dystopian elements are part of SF, if you frame SF as speculative fiction (robots or no robots).

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, October 8, 2011 8:17 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

All sci-fi is speculative fiction, not all speculative fiction is sci-fi.

Star Wars took place a long, long time ago, so it can't be speculative, can it?

xpost yeah I rarely get a sense of what I think of a film score from watching the movie (at least for most current films where it's dialled way down and assailed by sound fx).

speculative != future

Conjecture about histories is still conjecture

there's a good argument that star wars isn't SF, but y'know... robots.

There isn't a good argument that Star Wars isn't SF. Especially if it's the "it's a Western in space" argument. Yeah yeah, and Forbidden Planet is just The Tempest in space... it's still cocking sci-fi.

the argument rests on the basis that SF is more than just its trappings, but I agree that nowadays this is less and less the case.
you have a robot, you're SF.

You could argue that Star Wars is fantasy with some semi-SF elements mixed in.

bypassing equilibrium's action scenes in order to focus on the plot is some real 'can't act, can't sing, can dance a little' reviewing imo

Fine, but the action scenes aren't all that, either -- kung-fu with guns might sound good to some people on paper, but in execution it's a little silly.

Hey Star Wars is just Kurosawa with light sabers, it's not SF.

LIGHT SABERS ARE A SCIENTIFIC FICTION

"Hey, it's just Kurosawa with lightspeed transportation"

"Hey, it's just Kurosawa with terraformed planets"

T/S: "science fiction" more or less of an empty signifier than "hipster"

Uh guys, I think we're all talking around the obvious winner here, how did I not know of its existence till now.

am I the only one who's seen Mock-Up on Mu? Daft semi-Scientology fable.

― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius), Saturday, October 8, 2011 4:10 PM (Yesterday)

I saw it. It was kinda incoherent and a bit too long.

I do know it's been a big bugaboo of Ray Bradbury's (among many of his bugaboos) that much of his work be deemed fantasy rather than sci-fi.

moneyball is very flowers for algernon-ish.

hahaha

I really don't remember that much about Children of Men except disappointment after everyone said it was the best movie ever etc. I remember it was a bit 'we need to go here, then we need to go here and then we go here and then it ends'. Looked/felt amazing though.

Thought Cypher was a neat little under-rated movie, although not hugely original.
I'd never heard of Southland Tales and then I saw the trailer on some other DVD and can't believe I haven't seen it, looks like all my favourite things rolled into one to make a horrible mess.

you have a robot, you're SF.

fuck the A.I. defenders btw

^

"the future is here, only unevenly distributed" -- wm. gibson about the robot in rocky iii.

i've said this around here many times, A.I.'s brilliance lies in being a critique of the very Spielbergian themes it supposedly demonstrates while at the same avoid the faux-deep "praying to the blue fairy forever" ending. it's a genuinely strange and unnerving film and i dont think the usual Spielberg/Kubrick authorship questions are really all that interesting.

it's like taking Pinnochio into the uncanny valley--and rather than becoming a real boy we all become robots.

And the "Tree of Life" parallels continue: just as I can't understand the sheer vitriol of some "Tree of Life" haters, I've always been struck by home much some people hate "A.I." Even if you didn't like either of them, which is fair enough, I just don't get the total hate, since each is clearly well made, ambitious and trying to get at something bigger than itself, all good qualities.

you could say the same about The Fountain which is quite possibly the worst sci-fi movie made in the 2000s

The Fountain, though, was a famously troubled production - damaged goods - so it had an uphill battle from the start. Unlike the well-credentialled AI and ToL.

my dislike of the fountain knows no bound

s

haaa

Guys I didn't really know the full plot, other than knowing the director and it was a sci fi-ish thing, and I took a girl to it on the anniversary of the day her mom died of cancer

so The Fountain is forever horrible to me

I just don't get the total hate, since each is clearly well made, ambitious and trying to get at something bigger than itself, all good qualities.

Those last two are really not good qualities, at least not on their own. It's like the backhanded compliment of saying someone "means well" and "tries hard". It's no good trying to get at something bigger than yourself if you're heading in completely the wrong direction, with a blindfold on.

yes

Well, yeah. And The Fountain paid a major price for that. But it's not incompetent or anything, and a lot in it is striking. Just surprised me that it proved so divisive, unlike, say, Event:Horizon, which some people like but which is a total POS.

I don't really see the connection?

"It's no good trying to get at something bigger than yourself if you're heading in completely the wrong direction, with a blindfold on."
gotta disagree. would rather suffer through fountain than prince of persia again.

xpost I guess I'm suggesting (dangerously, I know) that a movie like Event Horizon is bad by more objective standards - bad acting, bad FX, bad story - vs "The Fountain," which is a more ... abstract failure. So I can see many people hating Event Horizon for all the obvious reasons, whereas the Fountain surmounts a certain baseline of quality to the extent that I can't understand the degree of ire it earns. Like the dudes who left my screening of "Tree of Life" shouting that it was the worst movie they've ever seen. Really? That one?

yeah but vaunting ambition doesn't in any way preclude those other areas of failure, and in many cases delusions of grandeur only serve to accentuate the mediocrity or worse of the direction, performances, etc

ps not seen the fountain, just disagreeing on 'ambition'

always sad to see people repping for Southland Tales

"vaunting ambition doesn't in any way preclude those other areas of failure"
i have to believe that trying hard will in the long run produce better results than not giving a shit, or at least more interesting ones.

i don't see why. After all, nobody said that the people making less ambitious movies are trying any less hard, they're just not as focused on 'concept', say.

The Fountain is in my good books as being the first movie that director made that I didn't, uh, hate.

delusions of grandeur =/= ambition

can't get a movie made on delusions of grandeur alone... well i guess if you threw piles and piles of money at it.

What is this "delusions of grandeur", we are talking about film, I thought it was a given

Just watched Paprika, wow. There is no longer any need to wonder what Inception would have been like if it had been about people who dreamed actual normal freaky insane things, instead of gunfights and the houses they grew up in. The first time the chief went dream-crazy I thought it was subtitle failure - "They need to fully realize the liver of the triangle rulers!"

OK, I really gotta see Paprika now. Think the thing that annoyed me the most about Inception was how little the dreams in the film resembled actual dreams.

^^^

god I hated Inception. so laughable.

paprika is so good - fuck cancer, btw

i need to see Paprika again
that is actually one of the thing that makes an SF good to me, that i want to watch it again (and again)
like, i didn't hate/dislike AI, but i never want to watch it again

Watched the first few eps of Paranoia Agent, so great.

I never made it through all of AI. Not sure why, love Kubrick, have a love/hate with Spielberg though.

Shakey's hates are things I can enjoy. It just seems like we're on track most of the time, but I have some non-cynical love of things that don't click with him,

Downloaded Paprika, gonna watch tomorrow/this weekend!

no one has mentioned TRON:LEGACY yet! i think it's time

oh hai there

btw this is airing on Starz this very minute

would watch again

I like the main character's totally impractical dockside pseudo-loft shipping container home. Just had a dinner with an architect who had murderous eyes as he spoke about what he'd do the next time he saw a write-up of a novel project involving a shipping container.

Paprika is awesome yeah. i saw it in cinemas when it came out and the insane parade is something that pops up really often in my mind. Paranoia agent I didn't enjoy as much but I think the version I got off the internet had shit subtitles and the episodes in the wrong order.

Think the thing that annoyed me the most about Inception was how little the dreams in the film resembled actual dreams.

plus they are the most boring dreams ever amirite? if I had dreams like those, I'd jump off a cliff and hope I hit the ground before I woke up

They aren't dreams though, are they?

Re: Paranoia Agent. Watch them on Youtube! The subtitler, whoever s/he is, includes all sorts of interesting annotations regarding visual puns, very cool.
Also, there are two episodes of Paranoia Agent that are dreadful.

(Whoops, hit submit before finishing)... two dreadful episodes, but the rest are divine.

my friend gave me paranoia agent on DVD - need to watch that ASAP!

guy, guys

HOLLOW MAN

hollow man is a trip

the opening credits for Paranoia Agent are sooooooooo creepy
(don't remember 2 episodes being bad though?)

Ennh, I didn't like the MPD episode or the one where the detectives do some work in the world of manga.

What is this "delusions of grandeur", we are talking about film, I thought it was a given

Please continue to marry me.

people who dreamed actual normal freaky insane things

Oh god let's not do this again. Beginning to believe ILX is like 85%+ schizophrenics.

the opening credits for Paranoia Agent are sooooooooo creepy
(don't remember 2 episodes being bad though?)

Paranoia Agent's ending almost destroys the entire series

also Phil D OTM

IMHO both The Tree of Life and A.I. are formally flawless but one is a good myth and the other a BAD myth.

Paranoia Agent's ending was the moment that I remembered it was anime: capital in ruins, thousands dead, etc. I'd agree that it wasn't the best possible way to resolve the series. It did seem to progress too quickly into complete batshit territory. Subsequent viewings made me feel more charitable.

Does The Descent count as sci-fi?

one is a good myth and the other a BAD myth

What does this even mean.

Me: "Have you seen Soderbergh's Solaris?"
Him: "I think it's weird that George Clooney would play an astronaut."

Paranoia Agent's ending was the moment that I remembered it was anime: capital in ruins, thousands dead, etc. I'd agree that it wasn't the best possible way to resolve the series. It did seem to progress too quickly into complete batshit territory. Subsequent viewings made me feel more charitable.

I didn't mind the ruins/body count as much as I minded the reveal of why it was happening. Although, I haven't rewatched it; maybe time will have mellowed me to it as well.

oh ffs *washes mind of spoilers*

good myth vs. bad myth
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Peter_Paul_Rubens_032.jpg/517px-Peter_Paul_Rubens_032.jpg
http://www.blog.dannygagne.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/cathedraloflight.png

I've seen A.I. many times on TV but now that you say it I'm going to watch it every christmas thanks.

did you just compare A.I. to Nazis

(laughing) no. prometheus good. nazis bad.

The deepest lingering question about Soderberg's Solaris is whether Jeremy Davies' character liked ICP, or if his Solaris-clone was the one that liked ICP.

It really makes you think about the planet's motivations.

Tron: Legacy was terrible. It started out fine, but quickly turned into The Matrix 2.

http://i.imgur.com/RmEP8.gif

^^^more or less why I never trust anime recommendations from people

ya big wuss

Just to restore the balance on Paprika, the gorgeous credit sequence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMcVwXSvmBg

<3

also Paprika way less rapey than Perfect Blue, the other Kon film I have seen.

also I have listened to that song on repeat for like a couple hours before I think; messes with your head.

Please tell me David M's post is not from Paprika (which currently sits atop my rental queue).

Paprika way less rapey

A good adjective for all movies to avoid.

xp

It is, but it's really *not* indicative of what the film is like!

Never seen Perfect Blue, but I watched Millenium Actress the other day and really loved it. The theme music for Paprika is so addictive, must've watched those credits 20 times recently.

*Millennium Actress

okay on the rapey anime scale of 1-10 where would you say it falls (Legend of the Demon Womb being oh, a 7)

gotta love how "tentacle rape" is an actual subgenre

so are you saying shakey that anime should never ever be sexually suggestive

I downloaded two different versions of the paprika soundtrack. hit me up if you want em (webmail's fine)

http://consumerist.com/images/31/2009/03/031809-004-tentaclegrapesoda494.jpg

so are you saying shakey that anime should never ever be sexually suggestive

yes because all sex is tentacle rape and we can't be having that now

*rmde*

you should watch paprika, shakey

I was serious about the rapey anime scale question by the way. a 1 or a 2 I can probably tolerate. multiple scenes of ghost-fisting, eh not so much...

I'm not an expert but I'll say that that and the one I posted upthread is probably as bad as it gets

OMG @ tentacle grape soda.

Ok, this decade seriously had a movie called FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions and a movie called Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel?

shakey i feel like you might be protesting too much on the tentacle rape front.

seriously though, kon is an idiosyncratic genius of a sort that is even rarer in a committee and commerce driven form like anime than in live action films (which are expensive but can still made for hella less than even the most basic non-incompetent grade animation), and him playing around with anime conventions (such as in the "ghost fisting" scene above) is really no different than someone like beloved auteur d. lynch fucking around with mystery movie conventions and/or misogyny in blue velvet, though obviously ymmv as to the worth of either man's work.

like i can understand someone being turned-off after one too many anime nerds recommends a GRIPPING ADULT DRAMA that turns out to be another extended montage of giant robots fighting and upskirt shots, but kon is one of the few anime directors who was operating both in the conventions (to an extent) and far, far outside of them.

I am not well versed in anime, mostly because the majority of times someone has sat me down and told me I HAVE to see some anime film I have had to sit through some really unpleasant, indefensible shit. I take it for granted that the entire genre is not riddled with creepy rape fantasies and maybe my friends all just have terrible taste ... but it's a pattern that has made me very wary.

xp

yeah the tentacle shit that is in Paprika is more referencing tentacle shit than actually being it. And the ghost-fisting is a one-off thing. The rest of it is basically rapey-free.

(vv spoilers vv)
As far as I can recall, Perfect Blue has no actual rape either, but the main character is an actress who in one scene of the movie plays a rape victim (so simulated rape), and there is an attempted rape later. So it's not hurr hurr anime loves rape or anything, but if you want to be aware of it, there you go.

also RIP Kon Satoshi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

oh fffffff the mods

>.<

Paprika is also at the top of my rental queue. My only other anime experience has been Ghibli and Akira, suddenly wondering if I'm ready for this...

(and also if I should hide in my room and watch it when nobody else is in)

xps!

Ok, fess up: you clicked the Rick video anyway?

I feel like discussing the preponderance of rape in anime is akin to discussing the preponderance of drug dealing in hip hop - both are referenced in tired (and often racist) strawman critigues but at the same time the prevalence of the subject matter in each sort of demands scrutiny, it's so obvious and blatant and also nearly totally divorced from reality. Like what does it signify and why is it there all the time and is there some reason I should actually engage with it beyond finding it largely repulsive.

xxp

there is nothing more "hide in your room" about paprika than any lynch movie. (sorry to keep making the lynch/kon comparison, because it's both inexact and too easy since they both use "dreamlike imagery" or whatever, but i'm half in the bag and tired and too lazy to think of anything more apt.)

honestly Lynch was the first point of reference I thought of too so no worries

i've watched a lot of anime and none of it was 'rapey', tentacled or otherwise. maybe yr preponderance argument is skewed by limited sample proved by creepy friends? or i'm loving some sort of charmed existence.

ha 'living', though i am loving it!

maybe yr preponderance argument is skewed by limited sample proved by creepy friends

yeah this is entirely possible <<tech geeks w asian fetishes>>

xp

otoh I did not make up the subgenre "tentacle porn", that is a real thing

and subgenres tags only appear when certain elements keep popping up

like, no one coined the term "coke rap" because there were only a handful of albums released about coke dealing

yeah but of c. not all anime is porn so most anime won't contain tentacle sex/tentacle rape

so anyway if you ask "hey guys what are some good animes? p.s. no tentacle rape" you are not really excluding most of the stuff that ppl in the English-speaking world like/watch

and to stay on topic check out the films of Makoto Shinkai, which are slow & sad sci-fi anime, like a more downbeat Ghibli

http://www.zombieinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Urotsukidoji-front.jpg

give in, shakey. give in.

Paranoia Agent is the best show ever.

^ The "Suicide Pact" episode is maybe my favourite single episode of television.

i liked the girl who leapt through time a lot, more than paprika really

funnie thread tho

So "In Time" is a real turkey. Kind of though it might be enjoyable in a campy way for the first half an hour or so but it gets real bad real fast. Dunno why they bothered to have Roger Deakins shoot such a shoddily designed future either

Huh, did you know Deakins was the DP on "Nineteen Eighty-Four?" Also, he's done cinematography for several animated films, including "Wall-e" and "How to Train Your Dragon." I wonder how that works, when one of the fabled "painters of light" work in-CPU, as such?

I think he was a "visual consultant" on How To Train Your Dragon. Doesn't really help

Watched Southland Tales after reading this. Real pile of garbage, but the cast were all great and some of the (visual) ideas in it were good. Ideas ideas were either obvies or incoherent.

...but really, it's basically just Mulholland Dr. meets Brazil and not as good as either.

Still disappointed that NO LOVE has been shown towards Serenity. Srsly, if ppl want space opera done properly, this film has the goods.

Serenity's Chiwetel Ejiofor > Children of Men's Chiwetel Ejiofor

...although he essentially plays the same role.

I tried watching Serenity but the encoding on Canadian Netflix made it real ugly. Going to rent it instead.

Serenity is fantastic.

Ejiofor is superb in it, but I'd have to disagree about him playing the same role as in CoM. In CoM he's a pretty generic bad guy, whereas The Operative in Serenity is a much more complex and interesting character. I'd say that it's his best performance (well, 1st equal with his turn in the similarly underrated Redbelt).

I hated Serenity -- the harrowing horror-in-space tone didn't work imo. Then again, I'm as far from being a Firefly stan as you can get around these parts.

Children of Men, Primer, and Paprika are all much better films than Serenity.

Also Moon.

Basically Serenity isn't going to be my OPO in any circumstance.

Also I am so tired of Firefly stans you wouldn't believe.

Moon is way overrated

my whedon-stan friend dragged me to see serenity and i ended up enjoying it, even though i've still to this day haven't seen an ep of the tv show

"is really no different than someone like beloved auteur d. lynch fucking around with mystery movie conventions and/or misogyny in blue velvet"

lynch has sort of rightfully been called out for putting all his female characters through a meat grinder in every single movie. in this promo thing for inland empire, the interviewer asked what the movie was about and he said, "a girl in trouble," and it seems like that describes most of his movies, and maybe perfect blue/paprika, too. there's a book on satoshi kon that convinces me he's a more interesting person than the movies themselves, and it made rewatching them more interesting, but it also reinforces the idea that perfect blue being a cartoon rather than live action was totally incidental (it's not like if you watched a cartoon version of glenngarry glen ross, it would necessarily be bad, but all throughout you'd be wondering why they did this as a cartoon), so if you had to watch one of the two, go for paprika.

I also want to counter the idea that satoshi kon was a singular, unsurpassed talent when there's at least a handful of people cranking out just as weird, and sometimes less aggro product.
This movie was pretty charming:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taste_of_Tea
This one was more aggro (Vinnie Jones is in it):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survive_Style_5%2B

Also, with all the serenity love, why no love for stargate?

yeah but did those two work in anime

I think we just want more anime auteurs than miyazaki

who are the anime auteurs

for a while I thought satoshi kon played himself as the animator character in "taste of tea" or handled the animation duties, but that turned out not to be the case, but whoever did the animation sequences was pretty good I thought, and I suspect the director has ties or worked in anime.
(the movie is about an animator family)

oh okay. I will check it out

now that i think about it though, anime version of glengarry glen ross would be something to see.

http://i.imgur.com/9e2cX.gif

Thing is, that with brief diversions, Lynch has been making the same film in different variations ever since Blue Velvet. The Blue Velvet -> Mulholland Drive -> Inland Empire set make a sort of "women in trouble" collection where the plot becomes more vague, the emotions more upfront and frightening, and the overall movie structure breaks down. Eventually he's just going to project emotional aggregates at you from the screen, if he figures out how. By that point, I hope he *does* count as sci fi.

Should someone introduce Shakey to "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife"?