Films The Official bit-tech Movie Thread - What have you seen lately?

+1 for The Mask, absolute 90s comedy perfection. Several jokes just live on in my head 24/7 and recur at the slightest prompting, like the "I think he wants to communicate!" which I parrot all the time when e.g. the cat's shouting his head off next to his food dish, or a white van man is tailgating.

Cameron Diaz was indeed the biz, but curiously I had the earliest of my fairly rare man crushes on the bad guy, played by Peter Greene. I can't have even been pubescent yet but I remember thinking he was hot. Incidentally he died this December just gone, so sorry, child me, you missed the boat on that one.

 

Alto Knights (Sky) - 1/10
A de Niro vanity vehicle that does absolutely nothing new at all. Made doubly worse by him playing two parts in it. Nothing happens. At all. Don't waste your time.

 

Sisu: Road to Revenge https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31844586/

Not as good as the original flick, but still ultra violent with no regards given to the laws of physics, did not disappoint.

 

What's that on, bud?

 

DVD

 

Oh, blimey. I thought it had only just come out...

 

Project Hail Mary

I really liked it. It's a very heart warming buddy movie at it's core, which is not usually something I go for. However, Mark Kermode nailed it when he referenced Silent Running - a film that had a huge impact on me as a child; and maybe that plays into why I liked it.

Straight up for the space fans, there are a number of pretty ****ing big gimmes you just have to set aside if you want to enjoy this film. I haven't read the book and I know the Wier usually roots his work in a fair bit of hard science, or the working theories at least and I don't know if the telling of that was a step too far for this film and they perhaps took a huge chunk of artistic licence instead. Either way, set it aside because dwelling on it will take the shine off.

Easy recommendation.

 

A lot of stuff is definitely… “glossed over” for the film. But there are subtle details there; for example, when you briefly see shots of Grace scribbling on a whiteboard, those calculations are all correct - Andy Weir was insistent on it.

Definitely read the book - or better yet, listen to the audiobook - if you want all the gory details. There are definitely some “liberties” in the book as well, though one of them is at least understandable. It was suspected that Tau Ceti had exoplanets, part of the reason Weir chose that star in the first place, but by the time of the book’s release, newly published studies cast strong doubt on the possibility of exoplanets orbiting Tau Ceti. There’s also some issues with the calculations for the volume of “fuel” that would be required for the journey - it would have actually needed at least an order of magnitude more. But the biggest issue - aside from the existence of extra-terrestrials - was at the level of quantum physics; Weir himself has said that this was the one major “fudge” he had to make in order to make the story work. I won’t spoil that because it is a relatively interesting, if minor, plot point in the book.

But your reaction @David definitely underscores my initial impression that the PHM film adaptation is not really a sci-fi film in the way that The Martian is.

Having said that, there are a couple of major “fudges” in The Martian, too. “Storms” on Mars wouldn’t have had enough force to risk tipping the ascent vehicle. There are storms in which the “winds” can reach really high velocities, but there isn’t that much atmosphere, so the wind wouldn’t actually impart that much force. The biggest risk with “storms” on Mars is the dust they kick up. The other “fudge” is radiation shielding. A Mars habitat would require radiation shielding, as there’s no magnetic field to protect against solar radiation like we have on Earth. We don’t have the technology for a “canvas”-like skin for the Hab that could protect against that radiation. That was another point where Weir’s rationale was basically “I need this to make the story work, so let’s just assume that this technological problem has been solved”.

 

F1 The Movie.
Surprisingly didn't suck / 10

 

Drop (Sky) - ...Dead/10
Utter, utter sheeyite. Just don't. I thought the cute chick might have carried it, but it turns out she was just really annoying, holding up the truth that no matter how good she looks, someone, somewhere will be fed up with her bull$h1ttery..

Like my soon-to-be ex.

EDIT (to add):
Darkest Hour (Sky) - 5/10
Really wanted to like this and Gary the Old Man is good as ever, but it just felt like an introduction. I'm, not sure they even got to the darkest hour itself. Was more about Churchill's election and how his secretary couldn't understand him. No character flaws revealed as such, nothing ground-breaking or new. Mildly interesting if you're into war history, but nothing exciting going on.