I watched the 2011 movie, In Time the other night on TV. I wasn’t expecting anything great, mostly because the movie’s reviews weren’t all that impressive. But, I gotta tell you, reviewers aren’t always right. In Time is pretty damned good.
In Time is a futuristic tale about how capitalism and society’s concept of money, through advances in technology and science, has been replaced by the trading of seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, centuries of immortality, bought and sold as banking transfers from your own life’s time line. When your personal clock reaches 00:00:00, poof! — you fall dead on the street no different than roadkill struck by lightning, a stark reality that epitomizes both the gap and the similarities between the rich and poor, the haves and have nots.
More than a bit disconcerting.
New Zealand Writer/Director, Andrew Niccol, whose movies include, among others, The Host and Gattaca (one of my all-time favorite movies), infused In Time with an unshakable Orwellian darkness in which lurks sparks of hope and flames of despair. Roll over Big Brother; the Timekeepers are much worse.
Watch this movie if you get the chance.
Oh, almost forgot. Amanda Seyfried (Les Misérables) has the most amazing eyes…
Effect # 1
Posted in Commentary, Movies, tagged Movie Review on 07/23/2011| 5 Comments »
Most special effects in many of today’s movies have become so commonplace that they have ceased to be special at all. I mean, seriously—how many explosions with flailing bodies launched into the foreground, how many cars overturning from half-concealed ramps, how many running folks catching fire, how many helicopters crashing into mountain sides, how many gush-popping bullet wounds and bullet holes whose ricochets throw sparks even while striking trees (or other organic matter) can an audience possibly digest?
I suspect that contemporary movie producers, screen writers, directors, and stunt people are so familiar with every canned special effect that they refer to them universally by numbers.
Director: “Okay, listen up. First off we’ll pan down from effect #33 into effect #12. Makeup: go light on the blood until effect #27 has had time to register.”
Producer: “Hang on there for a minute. If we substitute effect #88 and effect #50 for effect #33 instead, we can throw in an extra effect #41 or possibly two back-to-back effect # 6s and save investors a little money.”
Writer: “Yeah, but I was saving those two number 6s for the scene where the jealous boyfriend, having just survived effect #73 (minus his ear, or course) was falling over the cliff right after effect #9 catapulted him right off the edge.”
Sigh. If the Movie Guild would simply publish this Official Special Effects List shorthand and distribute it at the theater, think of the money they could save in production by just plugging the effect number text right into the blank movie scene.
Last week I re-watched the Alfred Hitchcock movie, “Psycho”. It was chillingly refreshing not to have witnessed the famous shower scene the way it most certainly would have been graphically depicted today. More and more I find myself turning to the older cinemas of yesteryear. You remember them — the movies where special effect #1 was a bold pioneering force called CREATIVITY.
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