komplexify!

The movie Next has been on TV a lot lately.  To say it’s a bit repetitive might be an understatement.  Here’s the movie summarized in psuedocode.

movie NEXT ()
{
  set audience-satisfaction = 0;
  set plot-points-resolved = 0;
  set creepy_factor = 0;

  do while (creepy_factor < 2) {
    for (i = 1 to 100) {
       show << the mall-escape sequence from
               the movie "Minority Report";
    }
    audience_satisfaction ++;
    plot_points_resolved ++;
    show << creepy scene with 40-something Nic Cage in bed
            with 20-something Jessica Biehl;
    creepy_factor ++;
  }

  show << previous movie events invalidated
          as an extended dream sequence;
  plot_points_resolved --;
  audience_satisfaction = 0;
  return 0;
}

Of course we didn’t watch Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 last week. We instead made it through some of our Netflix queue instead.

Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity is about a haunting in a typical suburban home, whose paranormal activities seemed to be targeted towards a girl; in an effort to document it, they decide to record the increasingly spooky supernatural circumstances themselves with video. So, essentially,

I don’t know how spooky this would have been in a ginormous, state-of-the-art stadium-seating uber-theater, but this movie about the ghostly goings-on in a suburban home is perfectly suited for viewing at midnight in the basement of your own suburban home.  In many ways Paranormal Activity is what the Blair Witch Project was shooting for — an uncomfortably first-person narrative with its scares grounded in “reality,” fueled not by the horrible things you do see but by the horrible things you imagine happening in the places you can’t see — without all the nauseas-inducing jerky camera work.

The Queen B and I found ourselves hooked after the first “event,” and jumped appropriately as the haunting became progressively worse, all the way up through the movie’s scary and unexpectedly violent climax.  In fact, my only gripe with the movie is its very last second.  (Spoiler alert!)  Why did they feel the need to cheapen the movie at the very last moment with Katie’s crappy CGI spooky face?  Wouldn’t it have been just better to let her crawl back in bed as if nothing happened, after which having the camera mysteriously cuts out?  Ah well.

Knowing

A distressed widower discovers a supernatural means to predict upcoming disasters, although this doesn’t necessarily mean an ability to stop them; however, as the situation becomes more dire and his family becomes more threatened by a shadowy collection of other-worldy figures, the supernatural events lead him to regain is lost faith in a higher meaning of the universe.  So, in a nutshell,

I always like the movie’s directed by Alex Proya (think The Crow, or Dark City), and Knowing is no different.  It’s certainly not as moody or cerebral as those other two movies, but it moves at a good pace and maintains a moody of general uneasiness, occasionally punctuated by top-notch action sequences.  (The crash landing of the plane is an excellent example — it’s possibly my second favorite single-take cluster-f*ck action sequence, trailing the forest-ambush-sequence in Children of Men.)  And you’ve got to be impressed with a movie that ends with the hero complete unable to prevent the cataclysmic, fiery death of every living person on the entire planet, save two.  Spoiler alert, by the way.

As a side note, it also features what might be the funniest bit of dialogue concerning the modern scientific method, which goes something like this.

Scientist 1: Hey, you remember that girl I tried to hook you up with?  Ph double-Ds?

Scientist 2: Is it even ethical to talk about your sister-in-law like that?

Scientist 1: What?  It’s been independently verified and peer reviewed.

Star Trek

In the new Star Trek reboot, a ragtag team of rebels (including the disreputable hunky one, the young one verses in an ancient alien tradition, and a hot chick) team up to stop a group of intergalactic baddies who, armed with a massive spacecraft capable of blowing up entire planets… particularly those populated by peaceful peoples. That is,

It’s clearly not your father’s Star Trek: Kirk and Spock hate each others’ guts, the planet Vulcan gets obliterated halfway through it, Starfleet officers are trained to shoot first and pontificate on the issues of freedom and equality later, Spock’s mom is Winona Ryder, and so forth.  That being said it’s still a fun popcorn flick, and it’s peppered with a couple of nods to old-school Trek fans, including a  gleefully nasty fate for the red-uniformed dude on the away team, or the fact that Leonard Nimoy actually appears as the Spock from the original — i.e. your father’s! — Star Trek universe.

Fermat’s Room

In the Spanish movie Fermat’s Room, four mathematicians (well, three mathematicians and an engineer) are invited to a secret meeting to discuss the “greatest enigma of all time.” Instead, they find themselves stuck taking an IQ test in a room tht starts to shrink when the questions aren’t answered quickly enough.  That is,

The movie does a decent job generating tension by combining the twin fears of claustrophobia and word problems, although it’s primary mystery — who arranged for the four to meet in the slow death trap, and why — is a little hokey.  That being said, any movie in which a proposed proof of the Goldbach Conjecture plays a fundamental plot point is definitely worth taking a look at.

It also offers this final bit of advice, which coming from a foreign movie I found altogether more amusing:

Engineer: Pressure is unpredicatble.  It can turn coal into dust or a diamond.

Mathematician: Was that Archimedes?

Engineer: No.  MacGuyver.