Tag Archives: Future

Snowpiercer

13 Saturday Sep 2014

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I am a hat, you are a shoe. I belong on the head, you belong on the foot. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.

by Thom Yee

Snowpiercer images courtesy of RADiUS-TWC

Snowpiercer images courtesy of RADiUS-TWC

One summer movie you probably didn’t see or even contemplate over the last few months is Snowpiercer. For its North American theatrical release, the film opened in a grand total of eight locations, followed by a slightly wider release to 150 mostly art house theatres the next week, and straight to video-on-demand services the week after that. All of which suggests a real piece of crap, but It’s also a piece that broke box office records in South Korea during its initial release in the summer of 2013, and has gone on to earn $100 million worldwide. A sci-fi actioner starring Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton and John Hurt — in what’s kind of an odd mirroring of Only Lovers Left Alive, another art house movie I reviewed recently, only swap out Captain America for Loki — you might ask what happened given its overseas pedigree and potential mainstream appeal. Surely if there had been any concerted effort at all to market the movie, some people would have seen it. Perhaps so, but as with all things that sound stupid in show business, the answer comes down to yet more Hollywood Upstairs Accounting. Continue reading →

her

01 Saturday Feb 2014

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by Thom Yee

Her poster

her images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

her is one of those movies most people will go into very consciously.  You won’t just be giving it a try on a “larf”, you won’t be buying your ticket, sight unseen, and you won’t be settling down into your seat not knowing what to expect.  If you see it, you’ll be seeing it very deliberately.  You’ll know exactly what you’re getting into.  You’ll know you’ll be seeing a quirky, Oscar-nominated film and you’ll know there’ll be at least a degree of self-questioning.  Perhaps the only thing you won’t know is how it could possibly end in anything other than complete and utter heartache that will leave you shattered… gutted.  And in some ways, you’ll know that that’s the main reason you’re going to see it in the first place.

It’s a funny little movie.  It explores the extraordinary questions of our collective, modern zeitgeist — the nature of existence, the nature of reality, the progress of technology, programming, memory and the singularity — but only on the surface.  The deep thoughts that question existence itself are mere table stakes, the empty, insubstantial detritus of a film that’s aiming far higher.

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