A Good Game of Chess: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015)
“Ava was a rat in a maze, and I gave her one way out. To escape, she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did.” * *[…]
Category: SF & Fantasy
SF & Fantasy · Thrillers & Action
He’s Back: The Paratextual Life of Terminator: Genisys
The movie makes a half-hearted attempt at chastising contemporary society and its dependence on technology, on machines (ironically, Sarah would not have survived without the help of a machine). Everyone[…]
Into the Deep: Reflections on Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013)
The dominant image from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is that of an opaque pool of black liquid, into which sink a variety of men who have fallen victim[…]
Notes on a Stupid Dinosaur Movie: Jurassic World and the Hollywood Blockbuster
Once a film gives up on originality, it immediately descends into nihilism. Whatever sensory pleasures such a film may offer, the underlying assumption is that the entire experience is empty[…]
Slave Runner: Genetic Engineering, Slavery, and Immortality in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982)
In a dehumanised world it is therefore the replicants who are keener to live, love, and be free. This is another important issue that the film raises: who is actually[…]
Plissken on Parade: Escape from New York (1981) Comes to Blu-ray
So even if you aren’t nostalgic for the heady sense of danger and decadence, do yourself a favor and crash the pod down into Carpenter country – an alternate reality[…]
Essays · New Media · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Spike Jonze vs. the Conspiring Escapist: On Her, Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, and Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure
“What Jonze, Coover, and Švankmajer are all playing with in their distinctive, varying shades of dark humor are the dual perspectives of the Spielbergian audience, absorbed in the protagonists’ fantasies,[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
We Are Not Who We Are: Human Sacrifice, Philosophical Horror, and (Maybe) the End of the World
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part,[…]
Happy Birthday, Ray Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013): An Interview with the Titan of Stop-Motion Animation
This interview with Ray Harryhausen first appeared in Bright Lights in November 2007. We reprint it here as a birthday tribute to the seminal animator. * * * “I wrecked Washington, and[…]
Move Over, Godzilla! Killer Bugs, Babes, and Beasts in 1950s Drive-in Cinema
With the latest version of Godzilla opening on May 16, we were reminded of other 1950s drive-in “classics” featuring everything from irradiated giant bugs to women on other planets who look suspiciously[…]
Activist & Political · SF & Fantasy
Battleground Pandora: The War over James Cameron’s Avatar*
Avatar metaphorically attacks all martial, colonial, and expansionist histories, which have occurred at the expense of the world’s indigenous peoples and Earth’s biocomplexity. Both implicitly, through the film’s narrative, and[…]
Post-Sensory Pong: A Future-Shock Analysis of Virginia Postrel’s “Who Needs Raise When you have TV?”
Now anyone who can scrape together a few hundred dollars can load up on enough movie streams and DV-R and giant LCD screens to never leave the house, so who needs a nice house?
Future-Pissed: THE VISITOR (1979), AKIRA (1988), TANK GIRL (1995)
Though last December’s lack of promised Mayan doomsday never panned out, December 2013 is laden with new DVDs and theatrical revivals that allow us to pretend the world ended as far back as 1979. Oh if only… we might all be rolling with Humongous by now, or Bane, or what’s the difference?
Habitat for Inhumanity: On Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium
“Yes, there are things that disappoint about Elysium. But there is also much to relish about Blomkamp’s still-developing wit and vision, especially his parodic assumptions about future dominant languages and ethnicities.”
Essays · Horror · SF & Fantasy
The Lore of the Running Undead (How World War Z Was Lost and Won)
“The choppy narrative arc of the film ends up matching the new hybrid of fast-running, fast-changing zombie: like its undead, the film moves too fast. The bitten person turns in twelve seconds in World War Z, which feels like about the same amount of time given to a story line before turning to another.”
Cinema du WTF – UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth 2013)
A singular and highly accomplished independent film, Upstream Color is philosophical science fiction in the tradition of the French nouvelle vague, seasoned with a dash of Cronenbergian body horror. Like[…]
Directors · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
The Man Who Shot John Ford — in 3D: Spielberg Retrofits Jurassic Park with Mixed Results
“As cold and insincere as it may be for Spielberg to flush an ‘updated’ version back into theaters as a marketing blitz for the forthcoming 3D sequel, Jurassic Park still[…]
The Man Who Shot John Ford — in 3D: Spielberg Retrofits Jurassic Park with Mixed Results
“As cold and insincere as it may be for Spielberg to flush an ‘updated’ version back into theaters as a marketing blitz for the forthcoming 3D sequel, Jurassic Park still exemplifies, for better and worse, the staying power and effectiveness of Spielbergian theme park ride filmmaking, independent of the fact that it is actually about a theme park, and its success is a testament to how skilled he can be at showing an audience what it wants to see.”
What Else Is Lost with Memory Loss? Memory and Identity in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.— Alexander Pope (As quoted by Mary [Kirsten Dunst])
Noir · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
Technocratic Totalitarianism: One-Dimensional Thought in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville
“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.” — Herbert Marcuse
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