Soylent Screen: Timecrimes (Los cronocrímenes, 2007)

Filed Under BBT Magazine, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, Time travel | Leave a Comment

BBT critic Jef Taylor takes on yet another low-budget time travel movie!

 

It may be time to accept that the low budget time travel movie is its own subgenre.  Primer, The Sticky Fingers of Time, La Jette, and now the terribly titled Timecrimes, all explore the possibilities and paradoxes of time travel without benefit of Swartzeneggers or DeLoreans.  Timecrimes, (Los cronocrímenes)  from an award-winning young Spanish filmmaker whose first name is really "Nacho," is one of the best of this subgenre I have seen.  It manages to weave the tangled threads of a character’s movement through overlapping timelines most succinctly, and without requiring the viewer to refer to a written record of who’s who and when’s when.  In large part this is due to the script restricting itself to the motions of four characters, over the course of about an hour and a half of linear time.

Hector was relaxing in the big back yard of his new house when he trained his binoculars on a shocking and bizarre image in the woods beyond.  "Don’t go in there, Hector!" the horror fan screams, but if protagonists didn’t make bad decisions, most scary movies would end before the opening credits.  And, as my wife remarked during our viewing: "If you want to trap a man, use boobs as bait."  Chasing the boobs into the woods, Hector becomes firmly ensnared in a temporal loop.  His next few experiences are terrifying and baffling.  His actions become violent and arbitrary, as he sets into motion a cascade of events in which he is a multiple player.


"Why am I doing this?  Because it’s SCARY!"

Hector’s odd actions are first seemingly motivated by fear and confusion, then through a kind of rash acting out.  He transforms from Victim to Monster, mysteriously following the design of fate, and becoming his own tormentor.  Finally, resigned to his role in the unfolding of predetermined events, he takes hold of them without changing what he has already seen.  Unlike in Groundhog Day, in which an unhappy man must find himself in order to escape the time trap, the hero/villain/antihero of Timecrimes must commit crimes in the hope of fixing the awful events he already has seen happen.   He never should have followed those boobs into the woods.

Special thanks to my wife, who gave me flimsy justification to use the word "boobs" three times in a short movie review.

WALL-E (2008)

Filed Under BBT Magazine, The Future, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, Robots, futuristic dystopias, Humankind, Pixar | 3 Comments

BBT’s film critic is back!  If the magazine isn’t going anywhere, neither is he (chained to the BBT radiator as he is).  This time Jef takes a look at WALL-E, an anti-consumerist parable produced by the notable anti-consumerists at The Disney Corporation.

 

I love a good dystopia, and WALL-E is one of the best.  Less than a thousand years hence, the last robot on earth toils alone, making orderly cubes out of a landscape covered in trash.  Humans, having used up the planet’s resources indulging themselves with comforts and conveniences, abandoned the globe 700 years ago, and live out meaningless pampered existences on a space ship to nowhere, like retirees on a Caribbean cruise.   WALL-E dutifully collects, compresses and defecates every object he encounters, except for a few artifacts which he mysteriously finds significant.  He also has the good sense to ravage the mechanical corpses of compatible robots, so that he can repair himself as his parts wear down.


You mean all that survived are showtunes and cockroaches? Let’s burn it down!

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Soylent Screen: Of Unknown Origin (1983)

Filed Under BBT, New York, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, rats, peter weller, troglodytic weirdoes | Leave a Comment

 

It’s hard to imagine Buckaroo Banzai or Robocop losing their mind over a minor pest problem.  But in the thriller Of Unknown Origin, Peter Weller plays Businessman Bart, an anal retentive New York exec just ripe for a crazy-making at the hands of a rat in the walls. 

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Soylent Screen: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Filed Under BBT, X'tapalapaquetl, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, Religion, Cold war, Russia, Lord of the Rings, Nazis, Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford, Chariots of the Gods, Eric Stoltz in Anaconda award, Deities and Demigods, Steven Spielberg | 4 Comments

It’s a spoiler-filled blockbuster, in this installment of Jef Taylor’s incendiary movie review column!

The Indiana Jones series, based on cliffhanging movie serials, pits our hero against enemy armies as he tries to save sacred artifacts from dire misuse.  In the first three movies, Jones rescues unique magic items from the Old Testament, Hindu, and New Testament mythos (these are in the most recent Dungeons and Dragons expansion set, I believe).  As daring as Indiana Jones is, how much more daring is it for the filmmakers to grant otherworldly face-melting, heart-ripping power to inanimate objects from three living religions?  The crafters of the newest installment, too shy to make it a quest for Muhammad’s beard one supposes, went right off the deep end and plundered the wacko pseudoscience of Chariots of the Gods? for their material.

There’s no way this was made by dark-skinned people!

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Horrors of War (2006)

Filed Under BBT Magazine, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, Cheap Zombie Labor, Nazis, horror, Roger Corman, Mad Scientists | 5 Comments

 

BBT’s critic Jef Taylor imagines the pitch for this low-budget WWII monster flick

 

Dude!  I just thought of a great, original idea for a horror movie!

Cool!  Let’s hear it!

Brace yourself  Ready?  "Army Roughnecks Versus Hitler’s Werewolves!"

Cool!–Wait, hasn’t this been done already?  Isn’t that what Dog Soldiers was?

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Cloverfield (2008)

Filed Under BBT, New York, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, hideous amphibians | 3 Comments

 

 

BBT critic Jef Taylor braves the shakycam for your pleasure!

 

Imagine, if you will,  a televised major league baseball game, but instead of a director and dozens of cameras catching the most important and exciting parts of the game, there’s a single camera mounted on the pitcher’s head.  Now that would create a feeling of immediacy and drama like no other televised major league baseball game!  That appears to be the logic at work in Cloverfield, a giant-monster-on-the-rampage movie, shot with one camera, held by one character for almost the entire movie.

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