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High-Life (2018)

  High-Life (2018)   Here’s a question, is Writer/Director Claire Denis more brilliant, or more frustrating?   She is probably France’s most admired current Director, but I must I admit of only seen her SF,F&H (so only two of her eighteen features, “Trouble Every Day (2001) and this film). She goes beyond subverting Genre Expectations, she achieves wholly new narratives when exploring the familiar Tropes. But she can also fail at the intimacy she seeks because she’s most comfortable with an Art-House archness. I say, “Trouble Every Day” is merely frustrating, but “High Life” is both frustrating and brilliant.   “High Life” addresses one of those questions SF prose Authors let bang around in their heads while looking for the next story, but I can’t think of another serious attempt to address it in cinema. It has to do with the Speed of Light (SoL), that speed limit that apparently is unbreakable, the Physical Law that denies us the Stars (the very clos...
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Okja (2017)

  Okja (2017)   South Korea (SK) has a weird relationship with the USA. The USA seems to think SK owes us something, after all, we saved them, at great cost, from the worse-than-merely Communist Lunacy of the Kim Dynasty in North Korea (NK) in the first significant Hot War of the Cold War (the Korean War dragged on from 1950-1953) and we have secured the border between the two Nations ever since (the Korean War, long-over, didn’t have a Peace Treaty till 2018 and things still remain less-than-honkey-dory). This is true, but the USA also propped up the brutal Authoritarian and/or Military Dictatorships in SK starting with Syngman Rhee, then his ideological descendants, from 1950 through 1987 (or maybe 1997, the emergence of an actual Democracy in SK is a dizzyingly complex story). True, SK was clearly better off under Syngman Rhee and his ilk than the Kims, both in terms of Human Rights and Economic Improvements (note: the Economic Improvements would have to wait till the 1...
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The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)

  The Chronicles of Riddick  (2004)   To really understand why this film is bad, all you have to do is look at the first film in the Franchise. “Pitch Black” (2000) had a lean, single-minded, focus, but still encouraged a sequel. It was modestly budgeted ($23 million) and showed only one Planet but in the context of a Civilization where there were hundreds, if not thousands, and enough Characters survived at the end to explore them. In this, it was much akin to “Forbidden Planet” (1956, its budget, under $2 million, was probably roughly the same, given the decades that elapsed between the two movies), and even more like the TV series “Forbidden Planet” inspired, “Star Trek” (the original TV series, first aired 1966), and specifically echoes one “Star Trek” episode, "The Galileo Seven." Though “Pitch Black” was a theatrical flop, it went on to great success when moving to other platforms (much as “Forbidden Planet” achieved greater success on TV, and “Star Tr...
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The Truman Show (1998)

  The Truman Show (1998)   “Nothing you see on this show is fake. It's merely controlled," says Marlon, but who is actually Louis Coltrane, who spends most of his life pretending to be Marlon, and who is, in turn, played by Actor Noah Nicholas Emmerich, pretending to be Louis.   This movie, about a guy who doesn’t know his life is actually a TV show, embraces a certain Paranoid delusion like no TV or film drama that I can think of, not even “ A World of Difference ” (1960) and “ Special Service” (1989) from the original and rebooted “The Twilight Zone” TV series, which it clearly borrows from. In the Real World this is recognized and diagnosed as a Mental Disorder, one of the variants of Schizophrenia, and in the wake of this film, that Disorder was nick-named "The Truman Show Delusion." A perverse element of this delusion is that at least some of those afflicted seemed happier than the other Schizophrenics under the care of Doctor Joel Gold of Bellevue Hos...
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