Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  100 Best Science Fiction Films, Slant Magazine List   #71. The Host (2006)   "Have you ever smelled it? The stomach of a parent who's lost a child... Once it goes rotten, the smell can travel for miles..." --- Park Hee-bong (played by Byun Hee-Bong)     This is a perfectly straight-forward Monster Movie in the Kaiju tradition (the word translates from Japanese as “Strange Beast” and is now internationally applied to Giant Monsters) that manages to be a multi-layered Drama as well. The threat of the Monster is the springboard for the examination of a dysfunctional family, because a child is missing, and that family must reunite to rescue her since no one else will.   The Family Drama then becomes a lever to lift up a slab of pavement and expose a Political rot beneath, the toxicity in the relationship between the USA and South Korea. Co-Writer/Director Bong Joon-ho passionately vents his resentments about S Korea’s dependance on a For...

  100 Best Science Fiction Movies, Slant Magazine List   #72. Space Is the Place (1974)   “Afrofuturism” is one of those very useful words in Cultural Criticism that is a bit clumsy because it was coined in a singular work, sorta filled a gap, and its meaning kept expanding beyond its original intent.   Critic Mark Dery coined it for his article "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose" (1993) which celebrated forward-looking Artistic expressions by Afro-American Creators that were influenced by the cultural memory of the African diaspora. Though “Futurism” suggests SF, most Literary Practitioners seem more drawn to the genres of Fantasy and Magic Realism, and among the original interviewees, only one wrote narrative fiction, Delany, while Tate and Rose were a Musician and Professor of Africana Studies, respectively. Delany was far from the first Black Writer of SF, but the first who built his name as a member of t...

  100 Best Science Fiction Movies from Slant Magazine   #73. War of the Worlds (2005)   “No one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century that our world was being watched by intelligences greater than our own. That as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they observed - and studied. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the globe, confident of their empire over this world. Yet, across the gulf of space, intellects vast, and cool, and unsympathetic regarded our planet with envious eyes and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us.” n Opening narration, spoken by Actor Morgan Freeman, largely quoting the original novel by H.G. Wells   H. G. Wells’ SF novel, “The War of the Worlds” (1897) is a landmark of the Genre. Published in the earliest days of cinema, it was the subject of numerous failed attempts at adaptation for the simple reason that the tale, so full of vivid imagery, was beyond the ...