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.

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"?