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The Outer Limits: Think Like a Dinosaur (2001)
Great ethical question, terrible narrative execution.
The question they considered, about whether or not a human being deserves to live when an exact copy exists, is a great thought experiment. Unfortunately, @Enrico Colantoni couldn't sell the emotional stakes like he needed to, and writing was horribly stilted and artificial. Would anyone really describe a living cubicle on a lunar base as someone's "chanbers?" Really?
Syriana (2005)
Well, that was a nice simplification of the Middle East.
So many threads in this movie! Who's the good guy? Who's the bad guy? Who's in charge? Who has the power? Who's right?
* Did you notice that the older son of the Emir, the one who was looking to the long term life of his country, was setting up for a coup? And that the United States took him out? And, if we speculate, the US would have likely painted him as a tyrant dictator if he had succeeded. So, he gets assassinated, the US gets the younger son, and the Middle Eastern goes back to killing each other for food in a hundred years, like Matt Damon's character predicted.
* We never saw the mastermind behind the terrorist mullah in the work camp. But, we didn't really need to, did we? We saw lots of other power players.
* Is US policy really the best policy?
* You did see that the missile launcher used at the end of the movie was the one sold by the US at the start of the movie, didn't you?
* The aphorism about a story having three sides, his, hers, and the truth, assumes only two players in the story. The story in the movie had at least 10 players. The stories in the Middle East have at least 30. What is the truth there, really? Does the US know? Iraq? Iran? Israel? Kuwait? How many oil companies are fighting for a piece, world wide?
* So, my take on the movie's message, is that the situation in the Middle East is not nearly as clear as many people, including many people in the US government, would like us to believe.
The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
Did the movie change production staff half way through, or what?
This very much two movies. For the first hour-and-a-half or so, the production sucked. Then, about when Raoul and Christine sing their love song on the roof of the Opera, the production team realized that the actors really need to sing their songs if they are going to look believable. They realized, somewhat at least, that great stage lighting left the actors in the dark and left really distracting lens flares on the film. (Those problems existed throughout the movie. The first three-fifths of the movie looked like a graduate production from USC or UCLA.)
Then, Raoul and Christine actually start breathing into their songs. Then the Phantom does. And the film finally starts drawing me in.
Lead actors: Who the hell told Emmy Rossum to stand frozen for Think of me? Between her stance and the editing, the sense one gets is that she hasn't the slightest clue what the lyrics are and the director and editor are trying to "fix it in editing." Patrick Wilson, made up to look old, reminding me strongly of Tom Skerritt. He also seemed to suffer from cinematography that suggested at the beginning that he had no idea what his lyrics were.
Supporting actors: Cieran Hinds and Simon Callow both sang like they meant it throughout the movie. Minnie Driver obviously wasn't doing her own singing. But, it didn't matter. Carlotta is an over-the-top character, and Ms. Driver clearly had fun playing her.
CGI: The first transition, where the chandelier comes to life, was okay, but looked like it was done with CGI animation software that was a generation or two out of date. The frames and textures were flat. If the folks who did the hair in The Incredibles had done this sequence, it would have been much more lifelike. The extra CGI bits of smashed mirror at the end were obvious and distracting
Music: The music recording suffered the same problems as everything else. In the first hour, or so, the mix was terrible. The opening chandelier sequence was muddy and hard to follow. Music editing managed to sort itself out for the most part until the climatic end. Three people singing at once is hard enough to follow on stage. Christine, Raoul, and the Phantom here were entirely unintelligible.
Set building and decoration: The most consistently excellent piece of this movie. The details were amazing, when the camera stayed still long enough for me to note them.
Cinematography and editing: Generally, this was the suckiest area of the movie. The movie had several scenes where the lighting was designed to bring out the details of the set, and not the actors. When the actors are black silhouettes for upward of six seconds (when Raoul and Christine first meet in the chapel), someone's priorities need to change. Also, several underground scenes had very bright backlighting that threw lens artifacts on the film. If you're filming a stage production, that's okay. In a movie movie, you don't want to draw attention to how the thing was made. That blows suspension of disbelief. Finally, what the hell was up with the ethereal closeups of Christine during "Think of me?" All I was shown was a wax mask. If you're going to show a tight close-up like that, at least have the actor emote something. The editing was similar. This was so not the movie for the cut-in, one second fast pan. They were entirely distracting, and, in many cases, led to the impression that they were trying to use the editors room to fix problems in staging or singing.
Overall, this gets two out of five stars. It could have been so much more if the production had been more consistent.
I Heart Huckabees (2004)
What a delightfully quirky film. (Semi SPOILERS)
This is not a "There's Something About Mary" slapstick movie. This is not a Mel Brooks farce. This is an absurd comedy/satire about existentialism, and how far people will go to believe in it. It was worth countless chuckles, and a bemused "What an absurd film!" at the end. It suited my sense of humor very well.
Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and Isabel Huppert are all very cute playing their characters. They follow the main characters around being ridiculously unsubtle and using their existential beliefs to support their lack of subtlety. Mark Wahlberg actually does a better job as the sidekick than Jason Schwartzman does as the lead character. And, this being an existential movie, everyone comes to peace with themselves at the end.
Stargate SG-1 (1997)
Creators of worlds...
I just want to add a quick thought that Stargate, the movie and series, would be a good candidate for the top 5 list of "How to do an Internally Consistent Ficton." The bible for the show must be an inch thick, and every writer have it mostly memorized.