Will 2013 be the year for mediocre-to-passable genre cinema based around the post-apocalypse? Maybe not, but in the space of 3 days 2 trailers came out dealing with exactly that! Now, I’m all for romps set around The Collapse, so maybe I might give such films at least a watch. Just… maybe not spend money on them. I dunno.
The first trailer revealed is to Oblivion, which is not actually an adaptation of the Elder Scrolls video game. Instead it looks like a take on Apple vs. Microsoft (wait nowadays Samsung is the bigger Apple rival), since it involves white-clad future people dealing with grungy survivors led by Morgan Freeman?!? No idea here but such speculation amusing, if only to me. It’s directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) so at least it will hopefully look nice but otherwise this is pretty much the trailer to That Science Fiction Film With the Guns and also Explosions.
Following that is the trailer to After Earth, which looks like science fiction with an it was Earth all along! twist. If only said twist was not revealed by a)the trailer b)the very title of the film! Mind, this is an M. Night Shyamalan film, so maybe the planet might not actually be Earth. Who knows! But hey, until further details are revealed here is another a post-apocalyptic Earth, only one taken over by nature. I don’t know who’s doing the special effects (maybe Weta?) but it looks like someone in charge of creature design might have flicked through Dougal Dixon’sAfter Man: A Zoology of the Future, if only for around 5 minutes. Expect Will Smith Jr. getting chased around by mega predators for a couple of hours.
Just got around to watching White Pop Jesus (1980), an unbelievably strange Italian film about the son of God’s second coming. Clad in a shiny white disco suit, he deals with gangsters, incompetent police, and sinners. Being a musical, it also has song and dance numbers, all set to a soundtrack mixing disco, funk and early 80’s synths. Too obscure to even count as “cult,” it’s a fever dream worth hunting down… Someone show it to Quentin Tarantino, quick.
2010’s been an interesting year . And that’s “interesting” as in the Chinese curse sense. September 2010 especially brought about alot of changes of a not particularly positive streak - “April is the cruellest month” my ass, T. S. Eliot.
Amidst retrospective nonsense, things worthy of note from the millennium’s first decade’s last year…
It’s the story of Facebook, of all things, as told in a tightly directed slice of cinema. With an amazing look where natural lighting is used to near-chiaroscuro effect— reflecting the moral murkiness going on in the script. Added to it all is Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ soundtrack, where minimalist beats push the rhythm and tension in the crackling script and performances ever forward. Film of 2010.
A parody has to first and foremost work as a good example of the genre it’s supposed to spoof before it can even consider doing the funny. Black Dynamite has the funny in spades as it affectionately riffs on a genre its makers clearly loves. Plus Michael Jai White getting work is always a Good Thing.
