Word: scifi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...meaning of dreams (even as animation is, in a way, the key to unlocking the feeling of dreams). A police detective hopes to solve a murder by telling his dreams to the sexy Paprika, who is also a staid researcher Atsuko. They're aided or threatened by the usual scifi-noir suspects; but the plot is so complicated, it's best not to worry about parsing it and just go with the somnambulist flow, which is where the movie finds its true life. Paprika alternates dream and reality, or abruptly fuses the two, until the detective, and the viewer...
...Weigel of ReasonOnline.com, in an astute piece about Death of a President piquantly titled "Other Than That, Mrs. Bush, How Was the Film?", mentions Nicholson Baker's 2003 novel Checkpoint as one of many novels about a plan to kill Bush. The novelist Richard Condon never lacked for poli-scifi cojones - in Emperor of America he blew up the White House - but his specialty was death-of-a-president fantasies. In The Manchurian Candidate, published in 1959 and filmed three years later, he postulated the assassination of a presidential nominee by a Joe McCarthy type (the right-wingers...
...sharp performances. The presence of such actors as Christopher Lloyd (Zenned-out on an inner voice that must sound like Daffy Duck's), Ellen Barkin (with her bruised features and street-angel smile) and Jeff Goldblum (heartthrob of the Mensa sorority) clues Buckaroo Banzai as very chic scifi. Lithgow, the movies' Mr. Versatile (transsexual jock in The World According to Garp, bumbling lover in Terms of Endearment, incendiary preacher in Footloose), here does a manic turn as Dr. Lizardo; it is as if old mad Ezra Pound were played by Klaus Kinski. And Weller-his cobalt eyes borrowed...
Attentive viewers will recognize Krull as the 68th variation on medieval scifi, where Camelot meets Middle Earth, and Errol Flynn engages in just enough Star Wars to keep Screenwriter Stanford Sherman and Director Peter Yates out of plagiarism court. Like the cycle's earlier entries, Krull offers battles, special effects and a hero and heroine with all the humanity of furniture on feet. But there are ingenuities of décor and character here. The Beast's fortress contains vaulted corridors that resemble a vulture's rib cage; his lair is a rococo igloo; walls close...
...real pertinence: What aspects of civilization are worth carrying on? One implicit answer: the ability to wring harmony from dissonance, to create a work of the imagination from disparate and unpromising materials. Example: The End of the World News, a trio made from the detritus of history and scifi...