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Showing posts with the label Science Fiction

Things to Come (1936)

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Let's acknowledge up front that this isn't something I'd call a Christmas movie, though it comes significantly closer than I'd have expected. Things to Come is a 1936 British science-fiction film directed by William Cameron Menzies and scripted by... hold on... got to check my notes here... some guy named H. G. Wells. Anyone heard of him? Things to Come doesn't have a typical narrative. While the movie sort of has a lead actor, his characters (he plays a couple) are really just standing in for an ideology. The real main character is the fictional city of "Everytown" (subtle!) which evolves and changes over the course of a century. The movie is less interested in its human characters than it is in speculating on the arcs of history. This is quite literally Wells's vision of a possible future, augmented with absolutely astonishing sets and visual effects that often left me scrambling to figure out how shots were achieved. That qualifies as a recommendati

A Biltmore Christmas (2023)

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Fairly high concept for a Hallmark movie, this is about a screenwriter scripting a remake of a classic Hollywood Christmas movie getting magically transported back to the production of said movie in 1947 and falling in love with its tragically doomed star. If all that sounds a tad over-ambitious for a studio known for cranking out relatively uniform (but surprisingly high-quality) low-budget television movies... well... that is an issue here. While A Biltmore Christmas is decent, it's clear they're biting off a bit more than they can chew. Watching, you can tell everyone involved is putting in real effort, but you can see where they just didn't have the time to set up complex shots, learn more than surface-level impersonations of characters from classic Hollywood films, or nail the look and feel of the era they were emulating. I don't think any of that is necessarily a dealbreaker, depending on what you want out of this. This is, after all, a TV Christmas movie, and in

Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022)

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Aside from knowing the basic premise, quite literally every expectation and assumption I had going into this movie about an animatronic store Santa malfunctioning and going on a murder spree turned out to be dead wrong. Fortunately, one of those assumptions was that I probably wouldn't like it all that much, and... Okay, let's do the spoiler warning right off the bat, because this is one I'm absolutely recommending to fans of horror, who might want to experience it without realizing what they're getting into. I was about to say that recommendation only  applies to horror fans, as the movie's content is decidedly R-rated (both in terms of sex and violence), but this isn't exactly my go-to genre and I loved it despite... well... it gets pretty gruesome at times, even if the gore has an intentionally anachronistic look.  (Editor's note: this is not a case where we are united in our opinion. I admit that I generally detest slashers, but this is no exception for

Round and Round (2023)

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Last year we made time to review a decent number of Hallmark holiday movies and found the recent entries quite a bit better on average than we expected. The best of the bunch was Hanukkah on Rye , a delightful classic romantic comedy I found funny and sweet. The movie received a bit of backlash due to what some viewers felt were stereotypes  but otherwise seemed to be well received, so it's not too surprising to see a new entry this year. What is surprising is the premise: rather than play it safe with another straightforward romcom, Round and Round is a time loop movie in the vein of Groundhog Day or Palm Springs, both of which are namechecked and discussed by characters in Round and Round as they try to figure out the temporal disturbance at the movie's core. I'll cut to the chase and reveal I don't think Round and Round is in quite the same league as its predecessor, but it's nevertheless a solid TV movie and - largely by default - probably the second-best Hanukk

Night of the Comet (1984)

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Night of the Comet joins I Come in Peace and Trancers  on a list of low-budget cult Christmas science-fiction movies from the '80s and early '90s. All three flew under our radar for years, so I'm left wondering if there are more out there. Night of the Comet is unquestionably the best of those three, incidentally. I'm not sure I'd recommend this to someone who isn't a fan of genre (and perhaps more importantly genre history, as we'll get to in a moment), but any connoisseur of '50s drive-in fare, early zombie movies, or '70s post-apocalyptic films will find this well worth checking out. It's also notable for the impression it left on popular culture: it's been cited as an inspiration for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and while watching I saw ideas I'm fairly certain were borrowed for Cabin in the Woods and Zombieland, among others. All of which is to say this is a neat, clever film. Perhaps a bit too clever in some ways, honestly - its mashu

2046 (2004)

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Well, I probably shouldn't be reviewing this. First, a little background. Or in this case, lack thereof, because that's sort of the problem. I put this on having no clue what it was after seeing it on a list of science fiction films on Criterion. I'd seen virtually everything else on the list, but I'd never even heard of 2046, so I trusted it would be at least interesting and pressed play. The short version is that it is interesting, it is not  science fiction, but it was (surprisingly) a Christmas movie. Well, sort of a Christmas movie. I'll get to that. Also, it's not entirely not science fiction. I'll get to that, too. But first I want to highlight another aspect I wasn't ready for: it's the third movie in a trilogy. Sort of. I'm... not really going to get around to explaining that, because I'm still a little unclear on the details. Okay, my understanding is the main character of this appears in an earlier movie, and a minor character from

Xian dai hao xia zhuan [Executioners] (1993)

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Executioners is the sequel to The Heroic Trio, a Hong Kong superhero team-up movie built around three superheroines: Wonder Woman (not that  Wonder Woman), the Invisible Woman (not that Invisible Women, either), and Thief-Catcher (not that... no, wait, I think we're good here). I should note that I have no idea whether the monikers of Wonder Woman and The Invisible Woman correspond with the respective names of the Marvel and DC heroes in Cantonese. The characters don't seem at all connected, for what that's worth. It's also worth noting that both films were released in 1993. If you're wondering whether Executioners feels rushed as a result... yes, of course it does. Obviously. But we'll circle back to that. Let's talk a little about the heroines. Wonder Woman, played by Anita Mui, is essentially a masked ninja, more akin to Batman than Diana Prince. Of the three, she's the most unambiguously heroic. Thief-Catcher (Maggie Cheung) starts out more in the ve

A Sesame Street Christmas Carol (2006)

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This is one of those things that both is and is not an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Specifically, it falls within the sub-sub-sub-genre where the idea is used to establish a frame story justifying the use of loosely connected clips to repackage old material as a new special. Only this time it's Sesame Street doing it, so it's kind of good. I assume it goes without saying that the Scrooge analog here is Oscar the Grouch. There's a bit of narration courtesy of Tim Curry (who voiced Scrooge himself in a 1997 animated movie) establishing the setting, though Curry immediately bows out until the very end. We don't get much setup at all: there's no Cratchit, Tiny Tim, or Fred analogs, nor does Oscar actually do anything more aggressive than hanging a sign on his can demanding not to be bothered until after the holidays. But Joe Marley, who works for a ghost-related delivery service, shows up to deliver the first of three ghost-o-grams (an antique can of beans) along wi

Love, Death & Robots: Volume 2: All Through the House (2021)

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Love, Death & Robots is an animated science-fiction anthology series on Netflix that leans towards R-rated fare. Like most anthologies, the quality and style vary from short to short. Some of these are absolutely fantastic, while others are fairly mediocre. None are what I'd call awful - even the worst feature jaw-dropping visuals, almost always of the computer-generated variety. My largest criticism of the series is it's prone to excess: the first volume, in particular, contains so much unnecessary nudity and sexual content I found myself wondering if there was a mandate only lifted for a couple shorts. This short doesn't have that issue. In fact, I'd describe it as impressively restrained and tonally balanced, particularly given the premise. It's also the first of only two stop-motion installments to the series, as is appropriate for the holiday theme. Let's get to the story, though at only five minutes, "scene" might be a better descriptor. The

George and the Christmas Star (1985)

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I heard about this in a Twitter thread about another Canadian science-fiction Christmas special . Someone commented with a link to this with the addendum it was from Gerald Potterton, the director of the 1981 animated film, Heavy Metal. I'm not really a fan of that movie, but damned if it didn't pique my interest. Christmas science fiction is a weird subgenre in general, and this looked even more out there. This special starts with George decorating his Christmas tree. All that's left is to put a star on top, but the idea of using a common paper one depresses him. He decides what he really wants is an actual star, so he builds a working spaceship and heads into the cosmos to bring back the brightest one in the heavens. He crash-lands into an outer space motel, where he meets a friendly robot pianist named Ralph. The motel business isn't thriving in the vacuum of space, so Ralph joins George on his quest. Next, they're picked up by Space Rangers (not the Lightyear ki