Time Travel

5 things I found incredible about Interstellar

Posted on by Late Night

Yes, this is actually a kickass sci-fi movie. And a father-daughter tearjerker too.

Okay, Christopher Nolan is back in my good graces. I’ve been seeing the trailer for Interstellar seemingly all year, and started to get worried that it might be overpromising a good time. Turns out I was worrying in vain, as this movie rocks its socks off. This is the science fiction/space exploration/save the world/time travel action/adventure everyone has been waiting for. Nolan delivers big time with this one.

Even though I’ve been a big fan since Memento, I was seriously ready to cast Nolan into the Closet of Hacks after the deep disappointment of that logical mess of a movie, The Dark Knight Whatever.

First the trailer (and believe me, this trailer barely scratches the surface of what the film actually shows) and then my 5 incredible things after the jump:

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5 things I found extremely enjoyable about Edge of Tomorrow

Posted on by Late Night

Yes, he’s a douchebag here, but a helluva hero later

So this was the one for me. Of all the summer movies, Edge of Tomorrow was the one that did it for me. It had all the key elements of a summer blockbuster: science fiction, end of civilization, aliens, monsters, monster aliens, cool technology, time travel and humor. And of course, lots and lots of explosions. EoT was helped tremendously by the fact that it featured the world’s top action star, Tom Cruise, who plays a smarmy guy who really deserves to have something nasty happen to him… and it pretty much does in the first 10 minutes. Then the film takes off like a rocket.

Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun Times called the film “… a badass, sci-fi take on Groundhog Day, with Tom Cruise in the Bill Murray role as a self-centered and not particularly noble loner who finds himself starring in a continual loop in which he is condemned to repeat the same day over and over — which eventually leads to some life-changing revelations.” Yup. Check out the kickass trailer and then find out what I found so enjoyable about it after the jump:

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Time for Some Time Travel: Rian Johnson Returns with Looper

Posted on by Late Night

Writer/director Rian Johnson with Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz, star of Johnson's 2008 film The Brothers Bloom (photo by Adam Bielawski)

For most new directors, merely getting their first film made and distributed is a significant accomplishment in of itself. Having that debut warmly received with festival awards and critical acclaim takes that achievement up another notch, and is usually a good sign of promising talent. With the September release of his third film, Looper, writer/director Rian Johnson looks to be delivering on his early promise.

Johnson’s debut film, Brick, was a smart film-noir mystery staged in the unlikely setting of a modern-day, sun-washed California high school. Brick was nominated for Grand Jury prizes at Sundance and the Deauville Festival in 2005, and won the Sundance Special Jury award, as well as the San Francisco Film Critics Circle award for Best Original Screenplay. Johnson also went on to win the Most Promising Director award from the Chicago Film Critics Association, and Best First Film from the Austin Film Critics Association, among many other awards. Here’s the trailer:

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“Actionary” presents just about all the action you can handle

Posted on by Late Night

Presented entirely for your cinematic enjoyment, the following is a masterfully-edited selection of the most fantastic action sequences of recent years, set to the wildly shifting time signatures of modern electronic music.   The full title on YouTube is Actionary 720p in Dubstep styles (fix), and it claims to only use footage from official movie trailers.  Consider it the uber-trailer for the entire genre of big-budget action films; it is not concerned with context, it is only about celebrating the moments of kinetic movie magic created by hacks and visionaries alike, perfectly matching the on-screen motions to the ebb and flow of the dubstep track (and on a related note, it is also a perfect example of why dubstep is taking over the world).

Prepare to fall in love with the movies again:

Will “Source Code” prove Duncan Jones to be the real deal?

Posted on by Late Night

"Moon" man on the rise?
“Moon” man on the rise?

Opening this weekend, “Source Code” looks like a promising entry in the time-shifting, crime-solving sci-fi subgenre.   I really enjoyed Duncan Jones‘ first feature, “Moon” (2009), an entertaining riff on the “man alone in space develops space madness” theme, and by the looks of the trailer, we may have another future visionary on our hands.