Best Sci-Fi Tournament - Round 1, Group P

[Mattrick]

One of the funniest bits in all of film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjLO_CrZRmM

[mae]

Sphere is the only one here to get a vote from me.

You won't venture and give Kin-Dza-Dza a try?

Is this based on the film you guys are talking about? It's directed by the same guy who directed Kin-Dza-Dza. Also, does the film have an American name, sometimes I think that's why some of the Russian films don't catch on. Most people don't recognize the film Dip huet seung hung, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people know it's English name, The Killer, one of the best gangster films of all time.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2659374/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Yeah that's the recent animated remake.

[mae]

Rather surprised that Sphere is doing so well.

[fernandito]

It's doing well here but I have a gut feeling it'll be decimated in the next phase. :/

[pathoftheturtle]

Maybe it's because the competition is equally pitiful.

[mae]

Haven't voted because I want to try and watch Kin-Dza-Dza first.

Let us know if you did.

[WeDealInLead]

Maybe it's because the competition is equally pitiful.

Agreed. I just watched Escape from New York (all while wearing a kick-ass bootleg shirt of the movie) and it's one of those "classics" I'm fond of that aren't really that great.

[pathoftheturtle]

Escape From New York is a guilty pleasure for me, too, but it seems positively respectable next to The Fifth Element. How do you build big ray guns anyway if your periodic table comes out of the dark ages? Four elements? Really?!

[Merlin1958]

Maybe it's because the competition is equally pitiful.

Agreed. I just watched Escape from New York (all while wearing a kick-ass bootleg shirt of the movie) and it's one of those "classics" I'm fond of that aren't really that great.

Any movie that has a character named "Snake Plissken" wearing an eye patch is a good one in my book!! LOL

[Mattrick]

Escape From New York is a guilty pleasure for me, too, but it seems positively respectable next to The Fifth Element. How do you build big ray guns anyway if your periodic table comes out of the dark ages? Four elements? Really?!

You don't like the movie because their periodic table is based off four elements, which it isn't?

[Still Servant]

Maybe it's because the competition is equally pitiful.

Agreed. I just watched Escape from New York (all while wearing a kick-ass bootleg shirt of the movie) and it's one of those "classics" I'm fond of that aren't really that great.

Any movie that has a character named "Snake Plissken" wearing an eye patch is a good one in my book!! LOL

Or video game for that matter.

[Merlin1958]

Fifth Element was probably one of the most original mainstream SYFY made to date. It was such a rich universe and extremely imaginative.

[Merlin1958]

Maybe it's because the competition is equally pitiful.

Agreed. I just watched Escape from New York (all while wearing a kick-ass bootleg shirt of the movie) and it's one of those "classics" I'm fond of that aren't really that great.

Any movie that has a character named "Snake Plissken" wearing an eye patch is a good one in my book!! LOL

Or video game for that matter.

Yeah, or video game!! LOL

[pathoftheturtle]

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the magic ceremony posing as science, or the moral of making love to save the world. Convenient, but hardly great writing.

And BTW, "SYFY" does not mean science fiction. It's the name of a cable channel that actually plays all kind of stuff, and copyrighted. If "Sci-Fi" is too hard, you know you could just write SF.

[Jean]

Sphere is the only one here to get a vote from me.

You won't venture and give Kin-Dza-Dza a try?

Is this based on the film you guys are talking about? It's directed by the same guy who directed Kin-Dza-Dza. Also, does the film have an American name, sometimes I think that's why some of the Russian films don't catch on. Most people don't recognize the film Dip huet seung hung, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people know it's English name, The Killer, one of the best gangster films of all time.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2659374/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Yeah that's the recent animated remake.

I didn't even know it existed. I don't think I'll watch it. The film was too good.

As far as the 5th Element is concerned, the only two times I remember being as insanely bored were when I tried to watch Inception and Matrix.

[pathoftheturtle]

As far as the 5th Element is concerned, the only two times I remember being as insanely bored were when I tried to watch Inception and Matrix.

Jeez, those aren't even in the same league! At least the latter two each have a meaningful premise. Fifth Element is a concept film with no concept.

[pathoftheturtle]

Oh hey, to be clear, I didn't mean to insult anyone when I suggested that Sci-Fi might be too difficult to spell. Sometimes I get tired of writing things out myself. That is what the point of abbreviations is supposed to be, after all. I just like to see ones that still communicate correctly.

[Mattrick]

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the magic ceremony posing as science, or the moral of making love to save the world. Convenient, but hardly great writing.

And BTW, "SYFY" does not mean science fiction. It's the name of a cable channel that actually plays all kind of stuff, and copyrighted. If "Sci-Fi" is too hard, you know you could just write SF.

It was written by a teenager. It's not really ceremony that does it. Leeloo was an engineered being after all. And they didn't make love to save the world, it was a mere kiss. Kisses have had magical power in film for long before The Fifth Element. The world, the costumes, the goofiness is what I love about The Fifth Element. I admire it for packing all its metaphors into cherry scene too lol

[pathoftheturtle]

Doesn't seem likely we'll move each other. You say that like those are good things, and all I hear is hack, drivel, waste. I'm sick of talking about that movie --bad enough that I bothered to watch the whole thing.

[Mattrick]

Well it is just an entertainment action comedy sci-fi romp and it doesn't try to be anything more than that. For what the movie intentions are its close to perfect. I can see if you were expecting a serious movie your being disappointed but it seems your disappointed it wasn't serious.. It's just fun movie made with passion and verve which is more than I can say about recent fun movies. Fifth Element isnt a concept film (just scrolled up and read that), it's mindless B-movie fun at it's best. Good vs. Evil yadda yadda, rag tag group saves the world yadda, boy gets girl, goofy comedy, implausible action kind of movie

. I'm not trying to change your mind it just seems like you thought you were getting filet mignon when its really just a burger and fries, but delicious. There is a lot of solidfilmaking in it I just think you missed or overlooked because of the plot is all. I rewatched it today for first time in years and there is a lot in it I couldn't appreciate as a kid. I guess if Anything I'm fishing for you to revisit it of it's been a long time.

[pathoftheturtle]

The only thing mindless entertainment could be good for is softening you up between commercials. It's certainly not the Best kind of Science Fiction Movie. I'm going to try to see Kin-Dza-Dza and then instead of rewatch anything, I'll probably read a book.

[pathoftheturtle]

Nevertheless, I'm also here, besides seeing new ideas, to criticize what I have seen. I like that, in the constructive sense: attempting to advance the culture by promoting artworks which are congruent with its values and in others analyzing where the incongruity occurs. So if you happen to scroll up to where I said "...Fifth Element is a concept film..." again, Matt, please note that I said so in response to Jean comparing it to Inception and The Matrix, both of which I have previously defended to him on grounds of metaphysical and sociological themes. I think his issue is that he attends more readily to character driven material. And I think that's a fair complaint about all three examples. That's why I grade Matrix & Inception just somewhere in the range of a C+ to B+ (excluding sequels.) The protagonist in 5th Element really is resistant to growth and hardly changes at all through the picture until the very end. Rather like Neo, actually, although even that slightly truer depiction of the breakthrough of accepting love is not really quite all that. But, like I said in my previous post, at least you do get the proverbial and a bag of chips. Sadly, I did appreciate "a lot" in the details of 5E, particularly in the opening and early sequences, so if it's true that my expectations were too high, that might be the explanation. The languages were fascinating, and the glimpses of setting implied an apparent whole somewhat reminiscent of Blade Runner, which IS on my short A-list to win this whole tournament. Furthermore, right up there with it on that list is Twelve Monkeys, so you know I don't have a problem with Bruce Willis. Yet it is not so easy for some people to enjoy a work for the sake of enjoyment when it just doesn't hold appeal for them. As you pointed out, in place of a high concept this science fiction film simply deploys genre conventions on scant pretext. Not my cup of tea at all.

[Jean]

As far as the 5th Element is concerned, the only two times I remember being as insanely bored were when I tried to watch Inception and Matrix.

Jeez, those aren't even in the same league! At least the latter two each have a meaningful premise. Fifth Element is a concept film with no concept.

I was only talking about their entertainment value. None of those was anything one could entertain a bear with.

Have tried to watch Dark City, by the way, and stopped in the middle. I liked the visuals, but they only got me through the first ten minutes, and then the whole thing seemed somehow so pointless that I never finished it.

[pathoftheturtle]

Hm. Have you ever triedBlade Runner, Jean?

[Mattrick]

Have tried to watch Dark City, by the way, and stopped in the middle. I liked the visuals, but they only got me through the first ten minutes, and then the whole thing seemed somehow so pointless that I never finished it.

You really must try to finish it. There is simply so much in it. What is funny is that Dark City and The Fifth Element intersect in Ebert's 98' review for Dark city (not actual spoiler, just the review):

Spoiler:

Dark City'' by Alex Proyas is a great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like "Metropolis'' and "2001: A Space Odyssey.'' If it is true, as the German director Werner Herzog believes, that we live in an age starved of new images, then "Dark City'' is a film to nourish us. Not a story so much as an experience, it is a triumph of art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects--and imagination.

Like "Blade Runner,'' it imagines a city of the future. But while "Blade Runner'' extended existing trends, "Dark City'' leaps into the unknown. Its vast noir metropolis seems to exist in an alternate time line, with elements of our present and past combined with visions from a futuristic comic book. Like the first "Batman,'' it presents a city of night and shadows, but it goes far beyond "Batman'' in a richness of ominous, stylized sets, streets, skylines and cityscapes. For once a movie city equals any we could picture in our minds; this is the city "The Fifth Element'' teased us with, without coming through.

The story combines science fiction with film noir--in more ways than we realize and more surprising ways than I will reveal. Its villains, in their homburgs and flapping overcoats, look like a nightmare inspired by the thugs in "M,'' but their pale faces would look more at home in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari''--and, frighteningly, one of them is a child. They are the Strangers, shape-changers from another solar system, and we are told they came to Earth when their own world was dying. (They create, in the process, the first space vessel since "Star Wars'' that is newly conceived--not a clone of that looming mechanical vision.) They inhabit a city of rumbling elevated streamlined trains, dank flophouses, scurrying crowds and store windows that owe something to Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks.'' In this city lives John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who awakens in a strange bathtub beneath a swinging ceiling lamp, to blood, fear and guilt. The telephone rings; it is Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), gasping out two or three words at a time, as if the need to speak is all that gives him breath. He warns Murdoch to flee, and indeed three Strangers are in the corridor, coming for him.
The film will be the story of Murdoch's flight into the mean streets, and his gradual discovery of the nature of the city and the Strangers. Like many science-fiction heroes, he has a memory shattered into pieces that do not fit. But he remembers the woman he loves, or loved--his wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), who is a torch singer with sad eyes and wounded lips. And he remembers ... Shell Beach? Where was that? He sees it on a billboard and old longings stir.

There is a detective after him, Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt). Murdoch is wanted in connection with the murders of six prostitutes. Did he kill them? Like the hero of Franz Kafka's The Trial, Murdoch feels so paranoid he hardly knows. Rufus Sewell plays Murdoch like a man caught in a pinball machine, flipped into danger every time it looks like the game is over.

The story has familiar elements made new. Even the hard-boiled detective, his eyes shaded by the brim of his fedora, seems less like a figure from film noir than like a projection of an alien idea of noir. Proyas and his co-screenwriters, Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer, use dream logic to pursue their hero through the mystery of his own life. Along the way, Murdoch discovers that he alone, among humans, has the power of the Strangers--an ability to use his mind in order to shape the physical universe. (This power is expressed in the film as a sort of transparent shimmering projection, aimed from Murdoch's forehead into the world, and as klutzy as that sounds, I found myself enjoying its very audacity: What else would mind-power look like?) Murdoch's problem is that he has no way of knowing if his memories are real, if his past actually happened, if the women he loves ever existed. Those who offer to help him cannot be trusted. Even his enemies may not be real. The movie teasingly explores the question that babies first ask in peek-a-boo: When I can't see you, are you there? It's through that game that we learn the difference between ourselves and others. But what if we're not there, either? The movie is a glorious marriage of existential dread and slam-bang action. Toward the end, there is a thrilling apocalyptic battle that nearly destroys the city, and I scribbled in my notes: "For once, a sequence where the fire and explosions really work and don't play just as effects.'' Proyas and his cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski, capture the kinetic energy of great comic books; their framing and foreshortening and tilt shots and distorting lenses shake the images and splash them on the screen, and it's not "action'' but more like action painting.

Proyas directed "The Crow'' (1994), the visually inspired film that was almost doomed when its star, Brandon Lee, was killed in an accident. I called that film "the best version of a comic book universe I've seen,'' but "Dark City'' is miles beyond it. Proyas' background was in music videos, usually an ominous sign, but not here: His film shows the obsessive concentration on visual detail that's the hallmark of directors who make films that are short and expensive. There's such a wealth on the screen, such an overflowing of imagination and energy. Often in f/x movies the camera doesn't feel free because it must remain within the confines of what has been created for it to see. Here we feel there's no limit.

Is the film for teenage boys and comic book fans? Not at all, although that's the marketing pitch. It's for anyone who still has a sense of wonder and a feeling for great visual style. This film contains ideas and true poignance, a story that has been thought out and has surprises right to the end. It's romantic and exhilarating. Watching it, I realized the last dozen films I'd seen were about people standing around, talking to one another. "Dark City'' has been created and imagined as a new visual place for us to inhabit. It adds treasure to our notions of what can be imagined.

His Great Movies review for it is one of my favourite reviews of his he's written but, like all his Great Movie reviews, he writes about the film as if the person reading it has not only seen it but has seen it numerous times.