Written for the blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join us by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and telling us about them!
I LOVE science fiction, so this week was full of fun films to pick, even with the restriction of no space or aliens. These are all different interpretations of science fiction. (It's been a busy week and day, so that's as much of an intro as you're going to get.)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) Okay, so this may be cheating a little, because the sci-fi is really only at the edges, but Melancholia is such a GORGEOUS film, and it uses its science fiction conceit (a planet, the titular Melancholia, is on a collision course with Earth) to explore depression in a way no film has done before or since. Featuring a career-best performance from Kirsten Dunst that justly won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, and another fantastic performance from von Trier muse Charlotte Gainsbourg. The best opening and closing scenes of any movie in recent memory. And the repeated use of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which features a minor chord repeated throughout that doesn't resolve until the very last note of the opera, is flat-out BRILLIANT. Bonus points for Udo Kier's hilarious minor role.
Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) For my money, Spielberg's greatest achievement of the 00s, Minority Report features some very cool, prescient special effects, great performances from Tom Cruise and Samantha Morton, and some of the coolest production design you'll see in a sci-fi film set in the not-too-distant future. The story is about a world in which crimes can be predicted by a set of three sibling "pre-cogs" who can see the future, and the policeman who hunts down the people who haven't yet committed the crime for which he's arresting them... until the pre-cogs announce he will kill someone. Of course it was written by Phillip K. Dick, and it's probably the best adaptation of one of the great author's works.
The Nutty Professor (Tom Shadyac, 1996) YES, THIS COUNTS. Eddie Murphy is a sweet, overweight scientist who concocts a weight loss formula which brings out his inner "Buddy Love" in this remake of the 60s Jerry Lewis picture (which I would have picked except I can't STAND Lewis in dork mode). Basically a comic spin on Jekyll & Hyde, The Nutty Professor is science fiction at its funniest. My family rented this one and were laughing so hard at the dinner scenes that we had to rewind and rewatch them. Murphy deserved an Oscar nomination for this, playing not only the titular Sherman Klump, but Klump's mother, father, brother, and grandmother, too, creating a whole family of comic genius. (Unfortunately, he was such a hit in all these roles that a sequel was made with more of them.)
