“Love of the Machine”
We obviously adore our gadgets. You are most likely gazing into the eyes of one this moment. Some of us adore them a bit too much it seems. The warning the prophet issues here is to forbid machines from ever having the same status as human beings.
“Nocturnal Emission”
If a major goal of democracy is to give everyone a gun, then a major goal of storytelling must be to prevent us from pulling the trigger. The preservation and protection of personal liberties could not be of greater importance in the minds of the great storytellers. The films in this series have that in common.
Better Keep Your Wits About You
Luc Besson’s eleventh movie is an futuristic western adventure comedy with plenty of serious matters addressed. Korbin’s celestial hook-up begins in a cultural melting pot, divisively classed and pressed against the glass of heavy surveillance, suspended between aggressive, armed police and roving, ruthless gangs.
The Machine in My Shadow
These “Prawn,” as they are known, walk on hind legs, like us, but are disgusting to look at and barbaric and kinky besides. Come be a spectator at Alien Relocation Chief Wikus Van de Merwe’s life while it turns to sheer nightmare. His one hope of deliverance comes by looking his enemy in the eye from inside.
“The Mother of All Man and Machine Movies”
With the advent of the personal screen, it’s no longer necessary to think of the audience member furthest back from the action. What becomes the new analogy for sitting in the nosebleed section of a theater is to be the audience member furthest away culturally from the filmmaker’s native orientation.
Before the Deluge
If machines were evil we’d have to condemn the movies as well. And if motion pictures, in the world of automated things, indeed prove to be among the greatest ones ever invented, then we may yet still learn to thrive in a world of machines.
“Resisting Domestication, or the Reclamation of our Wild Nature.”
Most of humankind huddles closely together over the dividing line between poverty and self-sufficiency and Josh Zeitlen’s lens stands squarely over that fulcrum.
Building a Better Venus – Creating Beauty in Our Own Image
Beauty’s story should be interesting to anyone that feels trapped in a man’s world. This should be interesting to all genders when it addresses anxiety generated within our rigidly enforced hierarchy’s dominant sexual codes, and it should be interesting to all humanity in any way it might articulate our frustration when we are confronted with any of life’s polarizing dilemmas.
A Modernist Inversion of a Traditional Theme
…this main character’s goal is not to idealize Venus so much as expose her as–as what? I am not sure. Is she a fraud, a groupie, a mere mortal, or a beast? Though it is obviously clear what has been exposed to all concerned in the story, the audience must decide for itself what the master has laid bare.
Being Venus in a Venus Crazed World
The filmmaker has gradually imposed on his audience a hip cinematic predicament, but it’s not our camera, so we can’t be blamed. We are only watching.Right?