Back to the Future Hoax Strikes Again

The future is now...or is it?

Apologies for the lack of original posts this week (and in general, recently!) - I've just started a new job, which is exciting, but busy (more details about that in a few days). Did you get caught out by the Back to the Future mix-up? I didn't even know it was happening at the time, but I wrote a little something about it for Movie Farm:

Legions of Twitter and Facebook users are a little red-faced this week after falling for a web hoax based on the classic eighties film Back to the Future. An image of the dashboard of the time-travelling DeLorean was widely retweeted and shared across the internet on Wednesday, as it showed the future date chosen by Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) as June 27th, 2012. In fact, the date shown in the film is 21st October, 2015.

Eagle-eyed fans of the endearing sci-fi were quick to spot the prank, but plenty of other web users were not so observant; the image swiftly went viral, being shared and re-shared thousands of times in just a few hours.

For the rest of the article, click here...

Malevolent Machinery: The 5 Scariest Movie Robots



A young Bilbo Baggins at Space Camp



There’s nothing worse than a piece of evil or malfunctioning machinery. What could be scarier than a machine that is not only crazy enough to turn against humans, but also has superhuman strength and no moral qualms about randomly murdering you and your friends just because it needs a serious virus scan and restart? Especially if said piece of machinery happens to look uncannily like a normal human being? Not much.

The movie Gods worked this one out quite some time ago; almost since the earliest days of cinema, evil androids have been enthralling film fans the world over, thrilling and terrifying by turns. Here are five of the scariest, deadliest robots you will ever find on your screen. Which one terrifies you the most?

To read the top five, head over to Movie Farm...

The Dark Knight Rises Viral Campaign Continues

The Dark Knight Rises, expected to be this summer’s biggest scoring blockbuster, turned its viral marketing campaign up a notch this week with the release of three pages from the Gotham Observer, Gotham City’s daily newspaper (priced at a very reasonable one dollar). Fans of Christopher Nolan’s iconic Batman films have been avidly scanning the pages for any and all clues to the plot of the movie, in which Christian Bale will return as the disgraced superhero vigilante tasked with facing down new arch-enemy Bane (Tom Hardy).

To read my breakdown of the Gotham Observer (and find out what Batman's star sign might be) head over to Movie Farm...

Sex, Lies and Censorship: Last Tango in Paris

Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, Last Tango in Paris, 1972

Bernardo Bertolucci’s most infamous film, Last Tango In Paris, was premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 14^th, 1972. With its explicit portrayals of violent sex and emotional turbulence, the film instigated a critical uproar. Beginning with walkouts and denunciations, escalating into boycotts and bans, and climaxing in an obscenity trial, the backlash seemed to know no bounds. And yet, even in its earliest reviews, Last Tango In Paris was recognised and commended as a work of cinematic genius. Forty years later, questions are still being asked about the film’s true nature; is it a brilliant psychosexual exploration, or simply a glorified piece of pornography?

You can find the rest of this article at Subtitled Online...

30th Anniversary: Blade Runner

Long before Ridley Scott was making confusing and badly scripted prequels, he was conjuring up one of my favourite films of all time; Blade Runner. Based on the Philip K Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner was first released in the USA exactly thirty years ago today on the 25th of June, 1982 (in the UK, it was released on the 9th of September, 1982). In honour of this auspicious occasion, I'm going to take a quick look at a few of the things that make it so good.

Neo-Noir

Blade Runner is set in 2019, a mere seven years into our own future. Billed as both a science fiction and an action film, it is in fact (like Scott's Alien) a chilling combination of the two. However, what made the film so unique was the added genre ingredient of neo-noir. Neo-noir draws inspiration from the classic 40s/50s film noir genre, famous for hardboiled detectives, femme fatales, chiaroscuro lighting and lots of booze, sex and cigarette smoke. Blade Runner has all of these and more, adding a glossy yet gritty layer of cinematic goodness to what would otherwise have been a rather different style of sci-fi.



Swirling cigarette smoke and shadowy Venetians are just a
couple of the neo-noir touches to be found in Blade Runner



More Human than Human

Androids are robots that look like humans. Whole books have been written about why we are fixated on building exact machine replicas of ourselves, and they are full of intriguing and complex psychological concepts - but we don't have the time to go into all that here. Cinema is replete with 'human-looking robots' - mostly because they are very easy to construct and film, what with them looking exactly like normal humans and all. Ridley Scott explored the idea of the indistinguishable android in 1979's Alien; in Blade Runner he takes it to the next level. Replicants, as they are known, are so close to being human that it is impossible to tell the difference without strenuous testing. The Nexus 6 Replicants, which our anti-hero Deckard (Harrison Ford) is hired to 'retire', have begun to think for themselves. On a mission to extend their four year life spans, they team up to kill their way to the answer using their enviable strength and fighting skills. Forget the Terminator; never have androids been so cool, or so deadly.

Pris, 'your basic pleasure model'

Roy Batty

"If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes."

"Quite an experience to live in fear isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die."

Roy Batty - machine, murderer, madman and philosopher

Played by Rutger Hauer, Roy Batty is the leader of the Nexus 6 Replicants. Technically, he's the bad guy - but even though he's a machine, a murderer, and deranged, we find ourselves starting to sympathise with his cause; all Roy wants to do is to keep himself and his friends alive. Rather than blaming Roy for his crimes, we start to blame ourselves - after all, we were the ones who created Roy; we gave him the ability to think and feel (or at least, to 'think' that he is 'feeling'), and then slapped him with a four year year life span. That's why he goes around breaking fingers, crushing skulls, and philosophising while he's at it.

Review: Daughters of Darkness

Daughters Of Darkness is a classic of 1970s horror, fusing together vampires, lesbianism and gender issues. It is strongly reminiscent of other vivid horror from the same era, such as Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. The film stars Delphine Seyrig, an actress best known for her role in Alan Resnais’ surreal Last Year In Marienbad.

Stefan (John Karlen) and Valerie (Daniel Ouimet) are a young, attractive, newly-married couple on their way to a seaside resort in Belgium. They stay at a deserted luxury hotel in the off-season. Reading the newspaper, they discover that a series of murders have taken place nearby – three young women have been found with their throats slashed...

...The film opens on a train speeding through the night. The couple’s carriage is drenched with an eerie purple light, and the screeching electronic soundtrack mirrors the screeching of the train. The stage is set for the almost invasively lurid colour scheme and unusual music which saturate the entirety of the film. Accompanied by cleverly timed synthesized sounds, almost every scene is awash with vibrant colours...

For the whole review, head over to Subtitled Online...

Review: Titanic (Blu-Ray)

Apologies for the lack of posts this week; I've been a bit preoccupied with other projects (more news on this later). However, here is a review I wrote for Movie Farm of Titanic, which is to receive a rather grand Blu-Ray/Special Edition DVD release later on this year (I'm pretty proud of the intentionally awful pun in the third paragraph).

If, after fifteen years, eleven academy awards, a worldwide gross of over $2 billion, multiple DVD editions and one 3D re-release, you still haven’t had enough of James Cameron’s epic disaster film Titanic, then consider yourself lucky – the Blu-ray release of the watery romance is set for September 14th, 2012. Taking this auspicious occasion into account, here is our review of a movie that was, for twelve years (until Cameron’s other epic romance Avatar knocked it off its pedestal), the highest grossing film in the history of cinema.

For the rest of the review, head over to Movie Farm...