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-- The movie recommendations thread, son
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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN with that said, i think in a general sense speculative fiction benefits more from images and sound than most genres. i've done the opposite to you by eschewing novels in favour of tv novelisation. at the end of 2017 sushipunk got me to read gibson's The Peripheral (which im really enjoying), but since it's not xmas holidays anymore i have no idea when i'll finish the final third. i blame my shitty/lazy imagination.

You know what? I have come to the exact opposite conclusion in the last year or so. The abject shittiness of widely lauded "thoughtful" science fiction films such as Arrival and Bladerunner 2049 has made me think that cinematic sci-fi fans have a seriously low bar for what they consider "thoughtful". All the ideas in these films have been explored in much greater detail and in much more interesting ways by books that are 40 or 50 years old. And when I think about it, there's probably less than 10 truly great science fiction films that have ever been made. It just works so much better as prose fiction. That's where the genre was invented and where the vast majority of content is still born.

as a big cinema guy and a big prose guy, i generally feel like the cinema does realism better and prose does fantasy better. Exact opposite of what gets made though. Almost all cinema today is fantasy and prose is trying to be realistic but for my money its the exact opposite. I prefer watching a new wave film if I want to know what it was like living in paris in the 60s as a cinephile but if i want my mind expanded by good sci fi the prose is the way to go as opposed to the crap sci fi films like arrival.

Speaking non-fantasy, I recently watched Trumbo. Damned fine dialogue-drive movie about the famous Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo who had to deal with the infamous "blacklist" during all the McCarthy brouhaha.

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Originally posted by Zoso I could watch a 3 or 4 hour film of large format film dog fights, only.

Same, I love that shit.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J You know what? I have come to the exact opposite conclusion in the last year or so. The abject shittiness of widely lauded "thoughtful" science fiction films such as Arrival and Bladerunner 2049 has made me think that cinematic sci-fi fans have a seriously low bar for what they consider "thoughtful". All the ideas in these films have been explored in much greater detail and in much more interesting ways by books that are 40 or 50 years old. And when I think about it, there's probably less than 10 truly great science fiction films that have ever been made. It just works so much better as prose fiction. That's where the genre was invented and where the vast majority of content is still born.

i struggled with the old-school scifi literature back in the day but i wonder how much of a role my age played in that. in comparison fantasy was much more palatable to children i think (though i never did finish LOTR).

i agree that most scifi films are shit (even if you set the bar low) and tend to be more flash than substance. but that's part of why i think tv is the second coming; the lazy technique (making tv versions of books) has been working really well with shows like GoT, american gods, the expanse, altered carbon etc. you're less worried now as a viewer that your fave show will jump the shark because it's got a pre-made direction to go in.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J And when I think about it, there's probably less than 10 truly great science fiction films that have ever been made.

I would say there are at least 20, some of which you may not have seen and perhaps not agree with.

I still wonder why nobody has tried to make Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" novel into a sci-fi film - it's a rather short read, and in my opinion better than 1984 and Brave New World, both of which it may have influenced.

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Originally posted by Trance-M I watched Salyut-7 (2017) or in Russian Салют-7, as it's about the rescue mission of a Soviet space station in 1985. I didn't expect a lot, but think it was a surprisingly good movie.

I watched another Russian cold war space movie: Vremya Pervyh (2017) (The Spacewalker).

I think it's even better than Salyut-7.

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Originally posted by AlphaStarred I would say there are at least 20, some of which you may not have seen and perhaps not agree with.

I saw one tonight that for some reason I'd never seen before - Children Of Men. Fuck me, what an incredible film that is. I haven't been knocked sideways by a film like that for a long time.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I saw one tonight that for some reason I'd never seen before - Children Of Men. Fuck me, what an incredible film that is. I haven't been knocked sideways by a film like that for a long time.

I need to watch this one again. It's been a while. I don't remember being blown away by it, but I recall it getting cult-following like reviews, lol.

Children of Men is awesome. Surprised you hadn't seen it before.

I think it came out the week I started university in 2006, so I was a little distracted at the time. We've subscribed to this DVD postal service where you pick a list of films from the website and they mail out four of them a month for you to watch and return, so I'm finally going back and filling in a lot of gaps in my cinematic knowledge.

In a way, seeing it for the first time now added to the mind-fuckery. For a twelve year old film, there are a lot of details in it that are remarkably prescient in 2018. All the stuff about immigrants being deported, bombs going off in the streets of London, the parade of insurgents chanting "Allahu Akbar" at the end. A lot of issues that weren't really massive social concerns in 2006 are now hugely sensitive in 2018, which makes it feel even more plausible as a near-future scenario. You can tell that a massive amount of intelligent world building went into the production of the film. Top to bottom, with every detail, it's superbly crafted.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J We've subscribed to this DVD postal service where you pick a list of films from the website and they mail out four of them a month for you to watch and return

Isn't that how Netflix started?

Quite possibly. I don't have any kind of TV, subscription or other, because I'm a complete wanker. I'm only really interested in films, and I prefer getting to pick exactly what I watch than sifting through the shower of shite which Netflix offers up in its film section.

Bahahaha, so true. I regularly delete my viewing history because I actually don't like how it personalizes the selections.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I saw one tonight that for some reason I'd never seen before - Children Of Men. Fuck me, what an incredible film that is. I haven't been knocked sideways by a film like that for a long time.

yeah, one of my faves. when you mentioned only 10 good scifi films, i did a quick count and came up with primer and children of men (and 8 others you probably hate ).

a movie that will NOT be making that list though is Mute. seriously, don't watch this. just awful on every level. i hardly ever turn off a film halfway through, but christ. worse than the new bladerunner by a long way.

Finally, anyone else looking forward for this one?

I saw Alex Garland's new film Annihilation last night. It's only been released through Netflix in the UK because the studio got cold feet about its box office lure. Being a Garland fan (he did write Dredd, after all) I was very keen to see what he could do with the source material. I read the book last year while I was bed-bound convalescing, and it absolutely gripped me. I finished it in the space of about a day. One of the creepiest and most atmospheric books I’ve ever read. Unfortunately the two sequels are mostly rubbish.

I mostly enjoyed it, but I didn’t think it was as good as the book. The book is one of the eeriest and most atmospheric things I’ve ever read, and the film abandons almost everything outside the basic set-up and concept. The film feels more conventional for the most part – it’s more “monster-y” than the subtle chills of the novel – but then at the end it goes off the deep end into full 2001-style trippiness. In many ways it’s a different story altogether, and it does have a lot of interesting ideas of its own to unpack. When you like the source material so much, it can be hard to judge an adaptation on its own merits. Anyway, I’m now re-reading the book.

I enjoyed Annihiliation but have never read the book. Loved the "trippiness."

Yeah

3 billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri was very good. Woody Harrison is such a great actor and it’s nice to see him get more than just smaller “character actor” roles.

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Originally posted by ControlFreak18 3 billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri was very good. Woody Harrison is such a great actor and it’s nice to see him get more than just smaller “character actor” roles.

I enjoyed it, but it wasn't what I thought it was going to be going into it. I purposely avoided any spoilers/reviews, so I was expecting a "serious crime drama" rather than a "Cohen Brothers-esque dark comedy".

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Originally posted by Zoso I enjoyed it, but it wasn't what I thought it was going to be going into it. I purposely avoided any spoilers/reviews, so I was expecting a "serious crime drama" rather than a "Cohen Brothers-esque dark comedy".

Well it did star one of the lead characters from their most famous movies

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Originally posted by ControlFreak18 Well it did star one of the lead characters from their most famous movies

That's a good/fair point...

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Originally posted by ControlFreak18 3 billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri was very good. Woody Harrison is such a great actor and it’s nice to see him get more than just smaller “character actor” roles.

Yeah, it was good. Not perfect, but very good. Martin Mcdonagh is a master at shifting from the poignant to the farcical without it ever feeling jarring. I almost cried halfway through.

What part?

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