Protecting The Private Life

There’s a reason there haven’t been many Superman movies – when you have a hero designed with no weaknesses, how the hell do you give him a tough fight? The creators did well to focus on his upbringing and self-discovery: that’s where the real story lies. Unfortunately, it’s a story that required an absolute mountain of explanation, and the creators apparently couldn’t think of a better way to tell it than with monologue after monologue. Exposition aside, the story and themes are interesting and successful, and they display Superman’s internal struggles. That’s not to say the villain doesn’t provide external struggles. As fellow Kryptons, they have all the same advantages he does, and boy does that lead to some entertaining fights. Seeing two invulnerable people punch each other at the speed of sound never really gets old. Easily stealing the show was General Zod’s right-hand woman, who had some of the most badass fight scenes I’ve ever seen. Weirdly, Superman matched the bad guys p...

Stoker aims to be unsettling, and it pulls it off in spades. From the mysterious plot, to the ever-so-slightly odd camera angles and camera movements, it achieves something that is surprisingly difficult: everything feels “off”, but you can’t really put your finger on it. You simultaneously feel uncomfortable but intrigued about what the hell is going on. Thankfully, the ending is extremely satisfying (with some great juxtaposition to the introduction), making it all worth it. While solid, the script occasionally seems pretty average when compared to the excellence of everything else, but this is a tiny complaint. A much larger complaint however, is that what should have been a powerful monologue was ruined by the trailer showing the punchline. I concede that that’s not directly a fault in the movie, but it was extremely annoying nonetheless. Fortunately the acting more than makes up for any dialogue complaints, and Mia Wasikowska impresses me more with every movie I see her in. I...

Shane Carruth shows us that his writing/directing/acting from Primer wasn't just a fluke. Upstream Color is just as impossibly confusing, but it's a different beast altogether. Much more about abstraction than science fiction, it uses gorgeous cinematography and the absolute bare minimum of dialogue to tell enough of the story for the audience’s creativity to really take over. When you metronomically question whether a character is a literal person or a personification of God, you know you've got something special. In fact you could argue the story is completely irrelevant to experiencing the movie, and is just there for the audience to bask in the surrealism of it all. That’s just as well, because the story itself doesn't seem to hold any higher meaning beyond the cyclicality of life. Unlike Primer, I'm not sure it would be as intellectually stimulating to try to piece together the story. Instead, simply experiencing it once is all that it asks or needs. In clos...

Captain’s Log: 15 June 2013 Still no sign of sociable land. After scouring the Bathurst Sea for a social island to call home, our chances are looking grim. What was once a full crew slowly became skeletal, with each port we visit proving appealing to more and more crew members. Perhaps upgrading our ship in these waters was ill-conceived – being the fastest and smartest ship is nice, but all it has achieved is alienation. Why would anyone even try to go near something so foreign? Would it really be worth the risk to slow our ship down to their speed? Whether intentional or otherwise, many seem to be permanently docking their ships, but the islands seem so small. Claustrophobia sets in after just a few days in most ports. Rumours circulate about distant seas with much bigger islands and ports, but the journey would be long and treacherous. Maybe it’s a price worth paying? What about losing our firepower advantage? Recent contact via telescope with ships just like ours proved cath...