Posts Tagged "science-fiction"
Science Friction: A home-grown Montreal sci-fi
“Science Friction” (2013, Canada) – Director Liam P Kiernan – sciencefrictionthemovie.com
“Science Friction” is a movie I really wanted to like. When I was invited to the first ever screening of a new Montreal-made sci-fi movie I was very excited. The trailer promised tense drama with lots of action and other-worldly happenings – an asteroid slowing as it approaches the earth; a glowing sphere, arcing with energy; a strange figure in a diving suit wandering through a cave; explosions, blood, and fire.
The narrative of the movie concerns reluctant projectionist Jack, who is tricked into chauffeuring three girls on a drug run across the Mexican border. Deep in the Mexican woods (which look suspiciously like Quebec, but that’s forgivable!), they take a wrong turn and find themselves in trouble, stranded by a dilapidated old house. Inside lives a crazed old man, Billy, and an alien presence lurks in the caves below.
The ideas underlying the narrative are clever: the alien compels each character to each face the demons of their past, to conquer the guilt that is, as one beautiful line of dialogue describes it, “tattooed upon their souls”. Flashbacks and smart Tarantino-style time jumps are used to convey backstory with good effect, and I enjoyed being left with a puzzle to piece together.
Unfortunately, the movie
Read MoreMr. Plinkett Takes on Hollywood
From the dawn of civilization to 2003, humans created five billion gigabytes of information. Now, thanks to the Internet’s mainstream adoption, we create that much data every two days. Everyone is a publisher now. But much of the content published is derivative; we’re witnessing the birth of ‘metaculture’ – a cornucopia of mashups, parodies, reviews and remixes of “old media”, encompassing everything from Twilight fan blogs and YouTube movie reviews to labours of love like “The Brick Testament”, a complete Bible re-enactment in Lego.
It is perhaps apt then, that the subject of this review is itself a review, namely Harry S. Plinkett’s video review of the 2009 “Star Trek” reboot. This is no ordinary review, it’s a feature-length film in its own right, skilfully merging insightful critical commentary with the sort of dark, politically incorrect comedy you might find in South Park or Pulp Fiction.
Read More
“Play”
An excellent 20 minutes short film exploring a future of multiple realities. What if you could no longer tell which reality was real?
If you liked Avatar, Total Recall, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, Surrogates, or Strange Days, this is well worth a watch.
And now for something completely different… a bit of science fiction
This month I have started attending a creative writing course at Thomas More Institute.
The second week’s assignment was a 500 word dramatic monologue based on the character we’d developed the week before – in my case, 44-year-old Jack Duffy, who makes a living as a taxi pilot in 2258.
I did post it here but Blogger is playing silly buggers with the formatting, so you can read it on Scribd here. It’s also on my posterous. Feedback is always welcome.
Read More