Tag: spaceship

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Everything, Everywhere

Director – Lim Kah Wai – 2023 – Japan – Cert. none – 88m

**

A woman meets, loses then searches for a film director who makes films by travelling around finding places and people around which and whom to make films – premieres in the Rebels With A Cause Competition in the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Backpacking hosteller Eva returns from Japan to Belgrade, where Jay has a package waiting for her. On collecting it, she is surprised at how little it contains (he’s a film director, and it includes a hard drive containing one of his films). She wanders around the Balkans, where Jay (Shogen) shoots her with his camera before introducing himself as an independent film director currently scouting interesting places and people. He persuades her to star in his upcoming film, but when she nearly drowns in a shot where he’s telling her to go further out in a lake, she refuses to complete the shoot, saying he’s self-obsessed.

Later, she meets other people with whom he’s friends who speak of him in glowing terms, and goes in search of him. Unfortunately, he’s nowhere to be found. He has however hooked up with another woman and lived with her for some period of time.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Monty Python’s
Life Of Brian

Director – Terry Jones – 1979 – UK – Cert. 12a – 93m

****

An absurdist comedy about of Brian, Jesus Christ’s next-door neighbour, who falls in with left-wing activists, develops a religious following and ends up crucified – back out in UK cinemas in Glorious Standard Definition on Friday, April 7th

Like The Last Temptation Of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), a Biblical epic made by a New Yorker who tries to bring first century Palestine to life on the screen by filling it with actors who speak as if they’re on the streets he knows, so too Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, made by the Monty Python team, nurtured first by Oxbridge student drama society culture then by British radio and television, attempts a comic equivalent of the Christian Gospel narrative by filling it with characters possessing such quintessentially English names as Brian and Reg and sporting English accents. For the Pythons and their audience, this strategy works because of its familiarity from Britain’s hugely popular Monty Python’s Flying Circus television show, made for the BBC. It’s what everyone attending the film in the UK expected.

The Monty Python team (Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle & Michael Palin) all wrote the film between them and take on multiple acting roles, with Jones also directing, animator Gilliam also taking on production design, and Chapman, who had studied medicine, also taking on the role of set medic.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Alienoid
(Oegye+in 1bu,
외계+인)

Director – Choi Dong-hoon – 2022 – South Korea – Cert. 12 – 142m

*****

In Part One of a proposed double feature, aliens incarcerate prisoners in human brains and time travel between present day and fourteenth century Korea and mayhem ensures – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 3rd to Thursday, November 17th

The first film of a two part adventure, which would be more sensibly released as Alienoid – Part One (which may already be the case in some territories), this revolves around multiple protagonists in two separate timelines divided by six or seven centuries. In the fourteenth century, Guard, who morphs between true robot and fake human appearances not unlike the T-1000 of Terminator 2 Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991), and his even more confusing companion Thunder, who is sometimes a car, sometimes a flying pod and sometimes any number of human manifestations (both / all played by Kim Woo-bin), fail to save a woman from dying after an alien escapes incarceration within her brain, however Thunder rescues the woman’s baby.

The pair travel forward in time to raise Lee Ahn (Choi Yu-ri) in the twenty-first century where she sees what she’s not supposed to: the impregnation process whereby alien prisoners are incarcerated in human brains, a memory wiped immediately afterwards from the humans used for this purpose, meaning people wander around not knowing there are aliens trapped inside their heads.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Lightyear

Director – Angus MacLane – 2022 – US – Cert. PG – 107m

**1/2

Stranded on a hostile planet, Buzz Lightyear sets out on a series of missions which eventually lead to his first confrontation with the evil Emperor Zurg – plays in the Annecy Animation Festival 2022 which is taking place in a 100% on-site edition this year right now as a Screening Event on Friday, June 17th, and opens in UK cinemas the same day.

A caption at the start explains that this was the favourite film of child protagonist Andy (from Pixar’s Toy Story franchise) and the reason he got a Buzz Lightyear toy in the first place. Other than that, though, this is a completely separate and self-enclosed film.

As the literal meaning of its title implies, Lightyear delivers a narrative that races through vast periods of time at a stretch, so that we and ace space pilot Buzz Lightyear (voice: Chris Evans) and his colleague Alisha Hawthorne (voice: Uzo Aduba) land their spaceship on an unexplored planet which turns out to be populated with hostile life-forms, specifically (1) plant tendrils which burst out of the planet’s surface and try to drag anything they can back under the ground and (2) giant, flying bugs.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Boonie Bears
Back To Earth
(Xiong Chu Mo
Chong Fan
Di Qiu,
熊出沒·重返地球)

Director – Lin Huida – 2022 – China – Cert. PG – 100m

****

The latest movie in this long-running, animated Chinese franchise, hugely successful at the Chinese (and therefore global) box office, is the first to get a UK cinema release – in a dubbed format for family audiences – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 27th

Urban bear superhero Bramble (voiced in the English language version by Joseph S. Lambert) successfully battles and defeats a monster formed from the garbage that people in the city have failed to properly throw away, lapping up the ensuing admiration from local child and cute animal residents until rudely awakened from his urban daydream by the human Vick (voice: Paul ‘Maxx’ Rinehart), who wants him to clean up the litter in the rest area of the Pine Tree Mountain forest / national park where they live.

Motivated by the promise of an ice cream on completion, Bramble speedily undertakes the task by racing around gathering the detritus in his arms only to come a cropper at the very end, spilling all the collected rubbish at its allotted bins. Although he has the best intentions and tries hard, Bramble is not the smartest bear in the woodlands.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

A.I. Rising

Original title: Ederlezi Rising

Director – Ladar Bodroza – 2018 – Serbia – 18 – 86 mins

****

Serbian Sci-Fi shot in the English language in which a male astronaut becomes dissatisfied with the female android programmed to satisfy his every desire on a deep space mission – on Amazon and iTunes

You’ve got to admire the sheer ambition of A.I. Rising, a Serbian sci-fi movie shot in the English language with production values and visual effects on a par – mostly – with anything Hollywood at its most lavish can offer.

I say mostly because there’s an early rocket launch sequence which cries out for exterior shots of the rocket on its launch pad and then taking off, but all we get is an admittedly impressive view from space of the distant ship ascending into the atmosphere. It’s the only time the production misses a trick like this and it doesn’t detract from what follows.

The plot concerns one man and his dealings with women – well, one woman in particular. Milutin (Sebastian Cavazza) is given a new assignment by the Ederlezi corporation. Prior to his flight into deep space, a woman social engineer (Marusa Majer) explains the nature of his mission and that he’ll be required to work in a team of two, the other member being an android modelled after a human woman “but unlike a human woman, she’ll be unable to hurt you.”… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Warning
From Space
(Uchujin
Tokyo
Ni Arawaru,
宇宙
人東京に現わる,
lit. Spacemen
Appear
In Tokyo)

Director – Koji Shima – 1956 – Japan – Cert. PG – 87m

***

Out on Arrow Blu-ray

The first Japanese science fiction film to be made in colour, Warning From Space (1956) features peaceful, star-shaped aliens, one of whom transforms herself into a nightclub singer to make contact with Japanese scientists. Not that the aliens possess any discernible gender themselves, but the human likenesses into which they are transformed most definitely do. If you watch the original Japanese version, the aliens’ transformation into human form doesn’t take place until a third of the way in. When the Americans got hold of the film, they not only dubbed it into English, but also did some deft re-editing to create new opening and closing sequences so that the film now both starts and ends inside the alien ship. The closing sequence is basically the transformation sequence backwards. [read more…]

The full review can be found at All The Anime.

Trailers:

Categories
Animation Features Movies

SCOOB!

Director – Tony Cervone – 2020 – US – Cert. PG – 93m

****

Available on VoD from Friday, July 10th and BD/DVD Monday, September 28th

I grew up watching Hanna-Barbera cartoons which would play in, if I recall, the 5.20 slot on the BBC. Some were better than others. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969-70) was one of the better ones. It had five memorable characters who each week would investigate some mystery suggesting monsters or the paranormal for which there would always turn out to be a rational explanation as the perpetrator was unmasked at the end, usually with the words “and I would have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t have been for you kids.”

The original cartoon TV series (1969-70) has spawned numerous spin-offs over the years including a so-so live action / special effects theatrical feature Scooby-Doo (2002) and a sequel. Which brings us to SCOOB!, an animated theatrical movie once again bringing the franchise to the big screen.

It starts off with a couple of tried and tested big screen adaptation tropes. One, taking one of the characters and having them somehow meet up with the others for their first adventure. Two, an origin story.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Sputnik

Director – Egor Abramenko – 2020 – Russia – Cert. 15 – 113m

***** some of the underlying concepts and all of the special effects

** everything else

Available on VoD from Friday, August 14th. Now on Netflix

In the early 1980s a two-man Russian spacecraft undergoes a mysterious incident during its return to Earth leaving one of the crew dead. He has had half his helmet and half his head ripped off.

Survivor Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov) is confined to a research base in the middle of nowhere for observation. Supervisor Kirill Averchenko (Aleksey Demidov) recruits psychiatrist Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) who is in trouble for taking ethically questionable decisions concerning the life of a patient, believing that she did the right thing and saved a life. Averchenko needs someone who will do whatever it takes and damn the consequences and he would appear to have judged her correctly. Once there, however, she finds herself in conflict with chief scientist Yan Rigel (Anton Vasilev).

She quickly learns that the surviving, isolated cosmonaut is the host to an alien parasite which leaves his body at specific times of night then returns. And Konstantin, who suffered memory blackout during the return to Earth, doesn’t seem to know about the parasite.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Memory:
The Origins Of Alien

Director – Alexandre O. Philippe – 2019 – US – Cert. 15 – 95m

**** 1/2

A detailed examination of the ideas and personalities behind Dan O’Bannon, H.R.Giger and Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 SF shocker Alien – in cinemas on Friday, August 30th 2019, and then on VoD the following Monday, September 2nd 2019

When Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) first came out, no one knew about its most notorious scene. These days it’s been so referenced in films, television and popular culture that everyone, it seems, does so. If you’ve never actually seen Alien, watch it before seeing this documentary or reading this review.

You’d be forgiven, as this new documentary starts, for thinking you’d wandered into a different film. Spiders on sun-drenched stone surfaces. Footage of Greek temples. But then, visuals clearly inspired by Alien show three Furies waking up on the floor of a spaceship interior and advancing towards camera. The voice-over invokes the myth of Clytemnestra and the Furies, although… [Read more…]

Memory: The Origins Of Alien is out in the UK on Friday, August 30th 2019, and then on VoD the following Monday, September 2nd 2019.

Review originally published in DMovies.org.

Trailer: