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Worlds Without End Blog

LeGuin Documentary Starts Kickstarter Campaign Posted at 2:31 PM by Charles Dee Mitchell

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Marian Wood Kolisch (American, 1920-2008), Ursula K. Le Guin, 1988, gelatin silver print, Bequest of Marian Wood Kolisch, © Portland Art Museum, 2009.30.35Documentary filmmaker Arwen Curry has worked seven years assembling footage for Worlds of Ursula K. LeGuin. Curry has produced significant documentaries on Susan Sontag and the California architect and designer Charles Eames, but this is her most personal project. She grew up immersed in LeGuin’s fiction, and for this film she has traveled with the author to the many landscapes that inspired her fantastic worlds. Along the way she learned just “how deeply Le Guin’s otherworldly made-up places are informed by real places in the real world. She’s a very rooted writer, and person.”

This film gives us a chance to hear the LeGuin’s voice recounting her “journey of self-discovery as she comes into her own as a major feminist author, inspiring generations of women and other marginalized writers along the way.” Curry also brings in commentary by such figures as Margaret Atwood, Samuel R. Delany, and Karen Joy Fowler.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Worlds of Ursula K. LeGuin a production grant, but those funds will not be released until the filmmakers raise a remaining $80,000. A Kickstarter campaign began on Februrary 1 and runs through the end of the month. It’s a chance to participate in a project that will help define the central role science fiction and speculative literature plays in American society.

Use this link to access the Kickstarter campaign.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arwencurry/worlds-of-ursula-k-le-guin

 

Godzilla Teaser Trailer Posted at 12:08 PM by Jonathan McDonald

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This is looking surprisingly good. But what else would you expect from the director of Monsters?

New Trailer for “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”! Posted at 8:03 AM by Jonathan McDonald

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Even Bilbo is impressed.

Elysium Review Posted at 5:27 PM by Jonathan McDonald

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Straddling a tense line between entertainment and bland moralizing, District 9 director Neill Blomkamp has taken a huge step backwards with his newest film Elysium. I had high hopes for this one, believe me. The trailers looked visually original with an interesting if unambitious setup. Blomkamp’s first film about alien visitors failing to find a home on Earth was surprisingly original, fun, and even rather intelligent. Blomkamp’s second film about the so-called 99%’s ressentiment against the very rich is an even more cartoonish take on the subject than The Dark Knight Rises.

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“Damn it, Damon, stop shooting the car!”

The setup for this story is sort of a hodge-podge of earlier futuristic dystopias. Our planet in 2154 is overpopulated (never mind the very real impending population implosion), and the very rich have absconded to a paradisaical satellite named Elysium (complete with artificial gravity, never mind that the damn circular thing doesn’t spin), which apparently acts as its own sovereign nation (whose ruling cabinet can be deposed with a simple computer reboot, to hell with democracy), and which also jealously defends its territory against aggressive immigrants (never mind that an on-board missile defense system would make more sense than hiring one “rouge” agent with a really good gun to shoot them down from Earth), who slip in by simply flying into the open atmosphere of the satellite (apparently the rich are too cheap to build a roof, and who’s worried about cosmic rays?), and who only want to use Elysium’s magical healing machines for their ailments (all machines conveniently placed in the living or dining room of every Elysian home!). The sci-fi trappings of the film are so utterly absurd and poorly considered that I couldn’t stop laughing at the screen.

Not only that, but Blomkamp apparently has no sense of time and space. At one point a group of hunters is flying a hovercraft around L.A. airspace on the hunt for Max Da Costa (Matt Damon), and have sent out half a dozen video-equipped drones throughout the city to help locate him. His face shows up on one of their drone monitors, and the leader tells them to turn the craft around to get him. No less than five seconds later they fly up to Max, him still holding the drone in his hands. Unless the hovercraft had a teleportation device we didn’t know about, it should have taken them much longer to arrive at their destination. Little problems like this, and worse, show up repeatedly in the film. One that really bugged me was that Elysium always seems to be easily visible from the Earth’s surface at all times, regardless of a person’s location, the local pollution level, or the distance between Elysium and Earth.

The dialogue spitting out of the characters’ mouths is just as inane as the rest of the film’s problems would suggest. There’s a lot of unearned sentimentalism surrounding Max and his childhood love Frey (Alice Braga). Jodie Foster plays Jessica Delacourt, a government minister in charge of the sort of military operations which make Elysium’s president queasy, but she speaks only cliched dialogue which tells us nothing of her inner life, and she plays it with an odd accent that seems entirely unlike the accents of her fellow aristocrats. Even America’s favorite bad guy actor William Fichtner has lines that could have been written by a teenager (“I need to be busy not talking to you now”). Matt Damon is playing his usual Bland Action Man role, so there’s not much going on there. The only actor who’s even not boring is Sharlto Copley, who played the “racist with a heart of gold” Wikus in District 9, and who here plays a South American mercenary named Kruger. I never thought I’d watch a big-budget science fiction film that had worse writing than Avatar.

Acting ability extraction… complete.

[IMPENDING SPOILERS, if you still care.] Unsurprisingly, the film rumbles full speed into the train wreck of its inevitable ending where the magical healthcare machines on Elysium are distributed to all the poor and ailing people of Earth. Sure, I realize that Elysium has more of these machines than it knows what to do with (remember the part about a machine sitting in every living room), but I don’t think that very many of the sick people of Earth will be able to be healed before the machines start breaking down, and then who can still afford to fix them? I get that Blomkamp was going for a sort of anti-Atlas Shrugged story here, but his ideas are even sillier and less realistic than Ayn Rand’s.

The director recently stated in an interview that “I just want to be an artist that’s just left alone.” Well, if he doesn’t clean up his act quickly, Hollywood might leave him alone indefinitely. Elysium had almost four times the budget of District 9, and only a small fraction of the imagination. This is less a sophomore slump than a sophomore suicide attempt. His third film Chappie is set to release next year, so I guess we’ll see if he can recuperate. I’m not holding my breath.

Thor: The Dark World Trailer Posted at 11:21 AM by Jonathan McDonald

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But will it be better than Iron Man 4?

Hell is Adaptations: Carrie Posted at 8:02 AM by Charles Dee Mitchell

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Hell is Adaptations: Carrie

Horror fans owe Tabitha King a dozen roses, a box of chocolates, something. When her husband Stephen tossed the unfinished manuscript of his first novel into the trash, it was Mrs. King who fished it out, read it over, and convinced him to finish it. And so we have Carrie and possibly all that has come after it.

I am not a Stephen King reader, and so, almost forty years after its publication, Carrie is the first of his novels I have read. However, on whatever Friday in 1976 Brian de Palma’s film version opened in Dallas, I was in line. I had seen de Palma’s films Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, and Obsession and loved them all – well, maybe I admired Obsession more than it loved it. Those films and a poster featuring Sissy Spacek covered in blood got myself and some friends to the theater for that Friday bargain matinee. We expected to enjoy ourselves. We had no idea just how much fun the next ninety-eight minutes were going to be.

Fun!

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Man of Steel – Review Posted at 12:06 PM by Jonathan McDonald

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"Seriously, put your underpants back on."

“Seriously, put your underpants back on.”

How can you judge a film like Man of Steel without comparing it to all the various media adaptations of the Superman character that have come before? The character has been around for 75 years, and he’s appeared on radio, television, and film almost non-stop ever since. As such, any reboot made with the intention of doing something brand new with the franchise is more than a little naive. That being said, Snyder, Nolan, and Goyer have fashioned a Superman story that is fresh, interesting, exciting, and quite a bit more mature than most adaptations that have come before.

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New Poster for The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug Posted at 8:19 AM by Jonathan McDonald

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I don’t know if I’ll love the movie, but I do have to hand it to Jackson’s design team. They do impressive work. Click the poster for a high-res version.

(The Hobbit on WWEnd.)

The Desolation of Smaug

Hell is Adaptations: Cloud Atlas Posted at 8:28 AM by Daniel Roy

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Hell is Adaptations: Cloud Atlas

When British writer David Mitchell published Cloud Atlas, the novel struck the reading public as a daring, multilayered work. It was a critical and commercial success, yet seemed impossible to adapt to the big screen. Yet as the story goes, Nathalie Portman shared her love for the novel with the Wachowskis during the filming of V for Vendetta, and the two siblings determined to do the impossible, and bring the book to the big screen.

Photo from the script meeting.

Photo from the script meeting.

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Star Trek Into Darkness – Review Posted at 4:51 PM by Jonathan McDonald

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Star Trek Into Darkness

“I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh, there has been technical advancement, but how little man himself has changed.”

I’m just going to get the most annoying part of this out of the way: Benedict Cumberbatch plays the role of Khan Noonien Singh. I do not consider this a spoiler, as he is clearly listed as such on IMDb. I find this annoying for two reasons: (1) the cast and crew have been denying that Khan would be any part of this film for over a year, and (2) this character would have been much more interesting if there hadn’t been any “twist” at all. Those involved with The Dark Knight Rises made a similar string of disavowals about Marion Cotillard being the daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul, only to have it “revealed” at the end of the film. While I understand the desire of movie makers to keep some aspects of their upcoming films secret before release in an age of non-stop internet gossip, so many of them have cried wolf that future denials will likely be taken as confirmation.

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