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...

For those who haven't heard of it, there's a personality test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator , based on Jung's exploration into personality types. Long story short: there are 4 binary categories, and everyone can be roughly classified into one of the 16 combinations. The categories are: Extroversion (E) – Introversion (I) Sensing (S) – Intuition (N) Thinking (T) –  Feeling (F) Judging (J) – Perception (P) Understanding exactly what each option means is kind of a pain and not really important - the main thing is that the 16 resulting combinations are all quite unique and easy to understand. You can probably name at least one friend that fits into each category quite nicely. It's at this point that in order to maintain my academic integrity, I should point out that criticism exists against the Myers-Briggs test, with some claiming that it's vague enough to border on horoscopes. This may be true for a couple of the categories, but the majority of th...

A few weeks ago I made the journey back to my home town for the chance to catch up with old school friends. After 5 years, I had no idea what to expect, and I can say now that two things struck me: how pleasant it was, and how surreal it was. The initial hit of surrealism came from equal doses of changed appearances, and a complete lack of changed appearances. Some people looked like they’d just gotten out of cryogenic pods, and others I physically bumped into after not recognising them in the slightest. Meanwhile, some hadn't been entirely successful in adapting to the slowed metabolisms of living in your twenties... The next wave of surrealism was more slow-burning, with the realisation that yes, everyone was now inexplicably extraordinarily nice. And not even just polite – they were genuinely proactively friendly. People I had literally never said a full sentence to in six years of high school would come up to me to hear how life was treating me, while I’d just been content ...

A popcorn movie through and through. When you’re released at the same time as another movie in the same genre, you’re bound to be compared, and this movie definitely loses to Ironman 3. Nothing is particularly wrong with it – it’s just nothing special. The script made sure to spell out even the most simple plot points to the audience multiple times, the music was overly dramatic, and some pretty damn corny lines were scattered throughout. It became painfully obvious that the plot was just there to have excuses for different action sequences. While solid, the action never wowed me like it did in Ironman 3 (except for the short warp-speed battle). Ironman 3 managed to be a far deeper and richer movie, while simultaneously winning on humour and action. If I was to sum up Star Trek 2 in a word, it would be “melodramatic”. Great to waste a few hours and have a bit of easy fun, but honestly I’d rather just re-watch Ironman 3. 7/10 Bonus Rant: The pre-title opening scene was embarras...