Now without further ado, the spotlights for the past 5 years of film.
It is a movie in space about a weaponised psychic girl and a renegade crew on the run from the government as they discover secrets and expose them to the universe. This movie gets pretty much everything right, and it didn't do much wrong. It knows it's characters backwards and forwards, and has just the right amount of exposition to enlighten the viewer, never getting bogged down in historical facts. It expects a smart audience which can figure things out from context, and doesn't fall into any of the obvious tropes that one might expect. You don't get the cheesy re-used lines many movies employ ("You're not in Kansas anymore"? Come on Avatar), every line just feels right without necessarily being expected. The acting was very good all round, although the overprotective brother was a little overdone sometimes. I like that it started off In Media Res (which is a fancy way of saying 'mid story' rather than at the beginning) and how it plays with time in it's initial sequence. The whole thing raps together very nicely, the context, the characters, the story, the effects, the Galaxy Quest reference...wait what? Yeah, you heard me, it may be a stretch, but it's close enough.
2006: Fido
Fido is about a post-apocalyptic world of zombies...where the humans have tamed the zombies. Yes, a world of guarded communities with zombies as servants wearing electric dog collars in case they misbehave. The great thing about this movie is it's style, it really looks like the what you'd expect from the 1950's. The bright colours really pop, the clothing, the cars, the white picket fences, the picnics and kids playing in the park, it all fits. Somehow even the zombies seem to fit. They put a counterbalance on the sweet, everything-is-perfect illusion the people put on while they aren't practicing their aim with a shotgun. But really this movie is about a boy and his zombie, love stories that are creepy but kinda sweet at the same time, and a corrupt anti-zombie-rights society. It's fun stuff, it's got Billy Connolly as the Zombie, what more reason do you need to watch this?
It is very easy to remember this movie for the plot, a boy with a stutter gets recruited by the school hottie for debate. Then she leaves for another school, and he is left to handle the debate team on his own. Recruiting a former finalist who had a revelation at the former New Jersey state-wide debate competition. What really is the highlight of the movie is the character work, the stuttering Hal Hefner, divorced parents, love interest, peculiar brother and friends. He is someone who doesn't know what his place is in life and he's going through it by finding one thing at a time to focus on. Although his stammer stops him from reaching certain heights, in daily life he has other concerns. Almost all of the roles are played to a T, especially the kids, his brother, the former finalist, the flirtatious recruiter. All of these parts come together perfectly with the script and plot to tell a very personal story. Luckily it's also a personal indie movie that you can enjoy multiple times without getting sick of it (Juno anyone?). Also Jonah flippin' Hill as the school philosopher.
2008: City of Ember
This is the freshest children's fantasy scifi movie this side of the millennium. It opens to a little exposition of how the greatest minds created an underground city so that humans could survive whatever was going to happen. They don't name any pending disaster but you can fill in the blank, something that will wipe off anything on the surface. 200 years later the escape plan for the citizen's has been lost for several decades, the generator is failing and two nosy kids start putting their noses where they don't belong. What is truly remarkable about this movie is the world it creates. In Ember everyone is assigned a job, which becomes one of their most defining features, the messengers red capes, the pipeworks overalls and light-up hardhat. Other than the costumes, the set design really sparks as well, the little buildings all patched one on top of the other, the mayor's dignified and musty office and hall, the grandma's disorderly house filled with strings of yarn that lead to an item each, the father's cramped robotics shop, the list goes on and on. Everything fits the degrading nature of a 200 year old city being kept up by people who don't really know how to work them. On top of all, it has Bill Murray, Martin Landau, Mackenzie Crook, and many other familiar faces. Why this movie wasn't a hit, I have no idea.
This is my kind of conman movie, it over-thinks itself. Some might say to a fault. However the story of two brothers Steven and Bloom and their mark Penelope turns into quite a moving story. The movie starts with a little nicely-wrapped-up introduction story of the two young conmen (at this stage still boys), who quickly learn their roles in this wold, for Steven that means coming up with plans, for Bloom it means following them. Flip forward 25 years, and we see a Bloom who is tired of "the written life" and Steven trying to convince him on one last job, to bring the shy (and quite rich) Penelope out of her shell on a fake con, while at the same time conning her. The story quickly spins out of control from there, moving increasingly further away from the neat story we're offered at the beginning. Hopefully "everyone gets everything they want" as Steven says, I know I did.
So let's see I managed a sci-fi movie, a zombie movie, a high school movie, a fantasy movie and a conman movie, that completes the rounds. These are all really good and should be accessible to most.
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