This movie's really fun. It's got good twists, all the characters are genre-savvy ("This isn't Dog Day Afternoon"), and the tension to violence ratio is very very high. It's also full of classic New York set pieces like the cops suddenly falling into a big argument about MTA trains versus Metro North. Good stuff.
Fictional video game watch: the kid in this movie is playing a PSP game that's a parody of 50 Cent: Bulletproof.
My least favorite thing about The Martian: Jeff Daniels's incompetent NASA administrator. I don't object to portraying NASA brass as incompetent, but when something like this happens, and your reaction is sustained incompetence, you can't keep your job. Yet there he is in the epilogue, still running NASA, happy as a clam. I hate clams. Always so damn happy. Who do they think they are?
This film takes an Alphaville strategy where, logically, the film must be set in the future, but the Earth scenes are effectively set in 2015. All the gee-whiz technology is in the space or Mars scenes. It's a good choice, and something you don't notice watching the movie in 2015, but I don't think it will hold up well. But maybe it's better than having some token future changes. Also they did a lot of smaller-scale time skipping, where events on Mars are interspersed with what happens on Earth twelve minutes later, when Earthlings become aware of what happened in the previous shot. I think that decision will probably age well.
Fictional video game watch: this movie mentions real video games. No credit.
This is an Indian movie for people who love American movies, which may explain why its IMDB rating is a measly 5.8 compared to Baahubali's bestounding 8.8. The Scorsese influence (via Scorsese's editor Thelma Schoonmaker) is really strong. In addition to the violence and the lavish spectacle you get riffs on other Scorsese films: Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy; maybe Shutter Island, I dunno, didn't see that one. The political corruption was top-notch.
Overall it's kind of a borderline recommendation for me, but I thought it was a better take on the "rags to blood-soaked riches" story than Scarface, so if you love that kind of movie, I think you'd really like Bombay Velvet.
Also, Bombay Velvet probably has the best soundtrack of any movie I've seen since the invention of Film Roundup. Hot nightclub jazz + all-out Bollywood singing. It's great.
The only visuals I enjoyed were the animated appearance of the nightclub singer Blob-U-Lo(?), a sort of incomprehensible phenomenon that can only be perceived as a hole in space. Super creative. He/it sings a song about being obsessed with butts, in case you were doubting the Pynchon comparison. Here's the music video.
For the first time ever, I was annoyed that a science fiction film included too much science. You could take the title literally: it's a dramatization of Cosmos (1980). Unfortunately this makes it unclear which of the movie's ideas you're supposed to take seriously once you leave the theater.
If you're already up on dark energy you don't need to see people explaining it; if you're not, this film makes it feel like a plot device instead of a real-world scientific mystery. I really liked the use of Lee Smolin's hypothesis about universes being created inside black holes (this is the official multiverse cosmology in Constellation Games, BTW), but it's just a hypothesis at this point. In the movie it's presented as a discovery and it's likely to read as technobabble. Especially since it's accompanied by real technobabble that has no factual basis.
In a Lem-esque twist, the astronauts are never named and are identified in the credits only by their specialties. One of them is "the semiotician" (Lem would have written "the cyberneticist"). In another Lem-esque twist, this movie wants to be Solaris but isn't nearly as deep. It looks great though. A classic 1970s spaceship in glorious digital high definition.
There's a fashion show in this movie, and although the outfits everyone wears for the rest of the movie still look cool and glamorous, nearly everything in the fashion show is tacky and ugly. And I gotta ask: did that stuff ever look good or is it a joke?
And now, the continuation of Television Roundup. We actually finished a show this month!
Random character notes that I enjoyed: Every season Korra figures out she's being manipulated a little earlier, until in the final season she's too smart for that plot twist to work at all and they have to give that job to Bolin. Bolin, whose job throughout the series is to be Phillip J. Fry. Seriously, he never makes a decision or says a line that Fry wouldn't make or say in the same situation. It could get tiresome, but Bolin gets less time after season two. And Varrick has a cool arc that reminds me of Londo from Babylon 5. Londo starts off as a buffoon, then becomes a monster and ends up a tragic figure. Varrick starts out as a buffoon, then becomes a villain and ends up a hero—but he never stops being a buffoon! Also, he's Dr. NakaMats. Great stuff.
Sun Nov 01 2015 16:17 October Film Roundup:
This month starts very mainstream, with lots of gunplay and explosions, but—plot twist!—takes a right turn into the avant-garde. And then ends with some random stuff. Just the way I, and, hopefully, you, like it.