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Reviews
Foe (2023)
Starts well, then falls apart
There are some good things here: the cinematography, the score, the lead performances, the eerie locations. The story also begins well as we learn what the world in 2065 is like - drought, famine, over population. Luckily, Junior has been chosen to live off world in an orbiting space colony where all the problems on Earth are left behind. The problem is he must leave his wife Hen too. What seems to be heading toward a tense character drama (albeit with little apparent claim to be sci fi) loses coherence in the second act. The final third act revelation has already been telegraphed but that doesn't mean it really makes sense. Then the film won't end, with a series of scenes that wants to both explain everything but leave exact details vague. It's a damn shame because, in the hands of a better director, or editor, this film could've been great. Instead it's an incoherent mess.
For All Mankind: Rules of Engagement (2021)
So little time spent in space.
As a number of other reviewers have noted, when the series is not set in space the rest of the time is devoted to the interpersonal relationships of the characters. Well one would expect at least some of this, at least for it to qualify as a drama rather than a pseudo documentary, this episode is where the series finally runs aground in tedious soap opera. The scene in which a family concludes a tense argument by singing a navy song together is simply risible. In what I suspect is a budget cutting exercise, the series has spent very little time in space this season and the drama of the alternate history is now in the background. What a waste of potential.
Walking with Dinosaurs 3D (2013)
Misjudged, misguided and simply terrible movie
You have to wonder that if at some point the makers of this travesty decided that a fake wildlife style documentary about a herd of dinosaurs wasn't going to be successful enough with a broad audience and so decided to add dialogue, a narrator and a framing story? That's how this movie feels - there could have been a better than average story here with a narration delivered by Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones - is he still alive? - and it'd could have been great. But no. They tarted up this film with a terrible script, atrocious voice acting and a non stop, infantile sense of humour that is simply NOT FUNNY.
By the way, my 8 year old daughter loved this movie but I she's got terrible taste. She's 8. She doesn't know what she's talking about.
Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
Fascinating
You may have noticed other comments here saying that the film is long, boring and has a droning voice over. While it is 3 hours long and has a narrator with a voice like a sedated Billy Bob Thornton, Los Angeles Plays Itself is one of the most fascinating film-crit documentaries ever made.
The director assumes that the viewer has a certain level of understanding of film theory, and that would probably help when the narrator starts citing David Thomson, Pauline Kael, Dziga Veryov and Ozu, but it's not entirely necessary to enoy the film either. All you really need is an understanding that a real place - the city of Los Angeles - is also a fictional place - the LA of the movies. The documentary is like an extended home movie made up of clips from films and interspersed with sections created by the director.
What holds it all together is an examination of Los Angeles as a place in films (locations, buildings), as a stand in for other places (Africa, Switzerland), as a record of places lost (buildings, neighborhoods, people, cultures), as focus for nightmares and dreams (SF like Blade Runner and Independence Day) and more.
While the voice over could have been paced a little better and be bit more "up", this film really rewards viewers who are willing to accept the documentary on its own terms. I found I just couldn't stop thinking about it and now, when watching movies shot in LA, I keep remembering moments from Los Angeles Plays Itself.
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Flawless Old School SF Masterpiece
You would have to be a deeply cynical SF fan not to rate this as one of the best films of the genre. In a field with only a few unqualified masterpieces - Blade Runner, 2001, Planet of the Apes (1968), Stalker and La Jete among them, Forbidden Planet is, as one other IMDB critic has noted, the source for everything that followed. Star Trek's debt to this film is enormous, and you can see the culmination of high 50's SF literature making a rare appearance in a Hollywood film.
Whereas most other SF films of the period were monster movies with a literal rather than metaphorical alien beast, Forbidden Planet makes the claim that we take the beast with us. Courtesy of a script that "borrows" from Shakespear's The Tempest, Forbidden Planet is a hokey yet sincere amalgam of dime-store Freudian psychobabble and Asimov/Clarke/Bester with a touch of Philip K Dick SF lit thrown in for good measure.
The film's other great strengths is its design, sets and art direction. From the shiny silver space saucer that takes the crew to Altair 4 and the "Frank Lloyd Wright on Venus" design of Morbius's house to Robby The Robot and the Krell underground city , Forbidden Planet is a visually gorgeous treat. With back drops and paintings by Chesley Bonestell and music by Bebe and Louis Baron, this is a magnificent B movie on an A movie budget.
The film also has what is perhaps one of the best lines ever delivered in an SF film: "A green sky? A man could get used to that."
And indeed you can.