That’s irrelevant in terms of ScarJo’s career / reputation among studio execs. The job of a “star” is to open a movie, putting butts in seats on opening weekend largely just because people want to see that star.
Anything after opening weekend is the job of the movie itself. The star is just there to open.
Well, we won’t hold that against you, that’s for every man to decide for himself
Wow, that was… Certainly something.
Oh well, Ms J. is pretty and fun to watch, and the theatre was pretty damn empty, so we felt free to MST it sotto voce throughout.
A flash drive?
To be fair, it helps a lot of she’s naked.
Which was pretty much my point. Cool.
It used to be available at InfinityPlus (an online magazine) but isn’t any more. I should note that Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” is going to be made into a movie with Amy Adams, at some point.
Oh dude, that’s going to give me nightmares. I haven’t seen Lucy yet, and based on the trailer, I’m not sure I can muster up the masochism, but Her certainly was the most insipid, pandering, manipulative crap I’ve seen this year. In the beginning, mainly due to the main character’s occuptation, I thought it might come round to acknowledging its own fakeness, but no, it actually went and celebrated it.
That one, on the other hand, I liked quite a bit. Finally, some alien aliens, with completely incomprehensible motives and actions, other than giving off the vague feeling that what you’re seeing really is just the outer layer of some hidden machinery, some sort of thing with an inscrutable purpose—really, I’m not sure the aliens were sentient beings so much as just some tiny cogs in a vast design that’s purposefully never made clear. Plus, it’s beautifully shot.
I can see how a similar story can be told on film, but the science is not going to make it through translation.
Having said that, I didn’t think the premise of the story actually worked in the sense of having the implications the story claimed it had, and this made my reading of the story less enjoyable than it could have been. So hand-waving or skipping all that stuff may actually make for a better story.
Aliens? I thought she must be a robot or something. No, okay, I knew in advance she was meant to be an alien because I’d heard it compared to Species, but the film isn’t really clear about that. It’s better than Species.
I’m not sure she had a purpose. I saw it more as a tale of an alien learning humanity, and ultimately turning against death and murder. Sparing the Elephant Man, eating chocolate, having sex, human things. Of course it would be more easily interpreted if she had more lines.
It is beautifully shot. It is not well shot. There’s a shot lasting more than a minute of a misty landscape. Another of ScarJo walking down a hill to a bus stop. And I can’t believe anyone can lift a piece of cake to their mouth as slowly as she can. You could have made a cup of tea in the time it took the fork to get to her mouth. And there’s the five minutes it take to get to the first scene as we extremely slowly zoom out from an alien eye. And about three minutes of a man’s skin drifting about in the submarine void where she keeps her victims. A human pelt whirling under water is more of a twenty-second shot to me. And all that in a movie that’s only about eighty minutes long. It makes 2001 look like Die Hard. More, it makes Star Trek I look like Star Trek II. It is easily, by some distance, the slowest film I have ever seen in my life.
And what was the bloke on the motorbike about?
How about The Core (geologists set off nukes to restart Earth’s magnetic field), Solaris (space psychologist wants to see why loneliness causes people to go crazy) , Sunshine (space geologists set off nuke to restart Sun), and for a little tongue in cheek, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension?
Not that I could say something definite about it, but I’ll spoiler it anyway:
[SPOILER]Well, it’s not clear from the movie—it’s deliberately ambiguous in this and many other places. To me, he seemed to be part of something like an immune system, or a sort of caretaker—in some sense subordinate to the female (and you’re right, by the way, it’s never exactly specified that they are alien), looking after her, cleaning up if some mess happens, but in a sense also controlling her, keeping her on track, whatever track that may be. Also, there seems to be more than one, right? There was this one shot of some kind of motorcycle gang…
By the way, I looked up the synopsis of the novel it’s based on on wikipedia. There, everything seems to be much more concrete: she’s an alien that’s been physiologically altered for the express purpose of harvesting humans, which are a delicacy where she comes from, being treated much like cattle. On the whole, it seemed a much less interesting plot with that interpretation attached—but maybe it’s just me, I have this fascination with things that, in one way or another, imply that our concepts may just be too limited to grasp reality as it is in full.
I do agree though that several of the shots were a little taxing on one’s patience…[/SPOILER]
:mad: TAOBBAT8thD makes PERFECT sense!!!1!!! :mad:
Now, don’t even think about lumping Buckaroo into this ilk - it embraced its stupidity in a wonderful way. And it made more sense - I’d buy Lectroids from Planet 10 a lot sooner than the crap they were dishing in Lucy 
John Ya Ya. John Small Berries - that’s genius right there!
Man, I gotta go watch that movie.
Notice I didn’t point out any problems with it?
I want the truck.
You were replying to a call for sf movies that “make no sense.”
We responded with appropriate indignation. 
Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard, too. People who like it seem to see it as a dumb action film with silly sci-fi (not SF) trappings sprinkled on top. One group compared it to the Hercules movie as far as being big and dumb.
Not unlike a lot of impressions of the new Star Trek movies, albeit I assume much worse.
(I personally don’t like watching movies in theaters, so I tend to read a lot of reviews to see if I’m going to bother watching another way.)
Under the Skin was actually a failed remake of a decent scifi book with the same title. I’m not even sure what’s clear and what isn’t if you haven’t read the book; where you ever made aware of why the men were being submerged in liquid?
I think you were reading a heck of a lot more into the movie than was actually there.
He’s her boss. Collecting humans is her livelihood.
I only saw a couple trailers and brief synopsis. I decided against this movie simply because the character pretty blatantly gets ludicrously overwhelming superpowers. Like, Silver-Age Superman superpowers. Which is, honestly, rather boring. I like to see my superheroes get the crap kicked out of them along the way.
For me, it was that exposition in the trailer.
“At twenty-four percent, she can control the cells of her body; at forty percent, she can control matter; at sixty-two percent, she can control other people.”
“What happens when she reaches one hundred percent?”
She already got control of her cells, people, and, y’know, matter; who cares what else she gets? You think 007 gets a gimmicked wristwatch from Q that can do all of that, at which point (a) there’s still a mission for him to struggle through – such that (b) he’d ask for yet another item, the one that would actually concern his foes?
The idea that Lucy only uses 10% of her brain seems rather more plausible* on reading that her boyfriend handcuffs her to an unknown container and tells her to go to an unknown location… and she goes along with that. Both my first and second guesses for what would happen once she gets there are very, very bad, so not going to the police instead is really stupid.