Thursday Movie Picks - Non-Linear Timelines

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

This week on Thursday Movie Picks, we're looking at movies with non-linear timelines. Time always moves forwards of course, but with film, we have the capability to rewind, fast forward, double back, start over... we can view a series of events in pretty much any way we want. And these movies take advantage of that.

Cloud Atlas (Wachowskis & Tom Tykwer, 2012) This wildly ambitious film, adapted from David Mitchell's Russian nesting doll of a novel, probably never should have been made. The book has such a literary conceit that it's nearly impossible to adapt to cinematic form, but God bless the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer for trying. Whole long sections of this are just thrilling arias of pure cinematic expression, linking stories hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart by the elemental forces of human experiences. The overarching story (such as it is) is about the journey of a soul as it learns over the course of several lifetimes what it means to be good. The ensemble cast is full of some spotty performances (and some even spottier makeup), but Halle Berry, Doona Bae, and a near-unrecognizable Hugh Grant have never been better than they are in sections of this.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) How this didn't win every single goddamn award walking away in 2004, I'll never know. It's a goddamn masterpiece, with career-best work from Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey, Charlie Kaufman, and Michel Gondry. Nothing I could write about it will ever top this that I wrote four years ago, so I won't even try.

The Rules of Attraction (Roger Avary, 2002) Oh those wild and crazy kids! What ever will they do to fuck themselves up next? This Bret Easton Ellis adaptation throws so much style at the wall to see what sticks, and a surprising amount of it does. Hopping back and forth between different attendees at a fateful college party and what led them to make the decisions they made there, we watch as teen heartthrobs Jessica Biel, James Van Der Beek, Ian Somerhalder, Kate Bosworth, and Kip Pardue do some VERY bad things, to themselves and to each other! The movie as a whole holds together only barely, but the best scenes (including a homoerotic bedroom dance/pillow fight to George Michael's "Faith", a rapid fast-forward through an entire vacation abroad, and one of the best, most effective suicide scenes ever put on film) really linger.

Thursday Movie Picks - Technology

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

OH, technology! In so many ways it makes life easier. But at the same time, it makes it a lot easier for a lot of things to go very wrong all at once. Quite often, I think that we should pay closer attention to the bad representations of technology in the movies, because every day it feels like we're getting closer and closer to the technological dystopias of many a sci-fi future. SUCH AS...

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999) Thomas Anderson is a computer programmer by day, super-hacker named Neo by night. He is obsessed with finding the answer to one of the hacker underground's most mysterious questions: "What is the matrix?" One day, he finally finds out: The matrix is a virtual reality computer program that surrounds him and everyone he knows, making them think the world of 1999 is real. In reality, it is much farther in the future, and the world is controlled by machines we created, who grow humans to harvest them for their energy, keeping them plugged in to the matrix to keep them subdued. And if you needed the synopsis to know what this movie is about, then you must be VERY young and/or living under a rock for the past long while, because The Matrix is one of the key texts of popular culture of the new millennium. Personally, this movie means a lot to me: It was the first R-rated movie I saw in the theater. The ground-breaking special effects still hold up, and the film is still as exciting as it ever was. It's a modern classic.

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015) Computer programmer Caleb wins a contest to have a week-long visit at the luxurious home of reclusive tech CEO Nathan Bateman. But when he gets there, he discovers he's not really there to relax and enjoy himself, but rather to help Nathan test his newest AI robot, Ava. Buoyed by incredibly strong performances by Oscar Isaac, Domnhall Gleason, and especially Alicia Vikander as Ava, Garland's talky screenplay teases out so many questions about artificial intelligence and the role technology plays in our daily lives, that it's almost mindblowing. It's never anything less than compelling, and constantly swerves away from where you think it's going to go. Just as the best sci-fi stories should.

Unfriended (Leo Gabriadze, 2015) Social media is a bitch. I am so glad it wasn't around when I was in high school. Because having to deal with anything like what happens in Unfriended would drive me insane. Basically, a group of friends get together online (via Skype) a year after one of their childhood friends committed suicide after a horrendously embarrassing video of her went viral. A mysterious, unknown individual ends up on their call somehow, and they can't get rid of them. And then the mystery entity starts taking revenge on each of the friends for their role in the suicide. And it's all seen from the perspective of one computer screen.  This method makes the film surprisingly immersive (you can see internet history and file contents that fill in character background), but the nature of the story unfortunately means that not a single one of these characters are likable. Some of the jump scares do work pretty well, though.

Thursday Movie Picks - The Chosen One

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join our merry band of pickers by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

Today is the hottest day of the summer so far in NYC, and I've been working like a dog all week (but I have tomorrow off to have a long weekend! YAY!), and The Chosen One is just about the oldest trope in all fantasy/sci-fi, so I'm just gonna do this Quick And Dirty Style. Hold onto your butts!

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999) In which the world you know is all a lie, you are forced to choose the red pill or the blue pill, and Keanu Reeves says what we were all thinking the first time we saw "bullet time": WOAH.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Jon Turteltaub, 2010) In which Disney actually manages to make an entertaining full-length movie out of a short from Fantasia, a physics nerd becomes a hero, and Jon Turteltaub (of all people) proves himself to be the Nicolas Cage Whisperer.

Moana (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2016) In which empathy is treated as the most heroic quality, The Rock attempts to sing, and Auli'i Cravalho becomes a star.

LIST: Directors Who Should Have Directed Fifty Shades of Grey

I read Fifty Shades of Grey. I saw Fifty Shades of Grey. It didn't suck. But I can't seem to stop myself from thinking about all the other, potentially better versions of that film we will never get to see, so I decided to entertain myself. Whose version of Fifty Shades would have been, if not better, then at least more interesting, than Sam Taylor-Johnson's? Here are my Top Ten, in alphabetical order:

Pedro Almodovar - Law of Desire is one of the sexiest films ever, and if it's bondage you want, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is where you should go. Almodovar has also dealt with the book's major themes of identity and coming of age in various films, most notably All About My Mother and Bad Education.

Lee Daniels - At the very least, his version would have been an entertaining mess. Daniels plays around with form a lot, and I can't help but wonder if he would have found a cool way of visualizing the novel's (admittedly, hilariously awful) conceit of the dialogue of Ana's "inner goddess".

David Fincher - Let's be clear: I don't think this would have happened in a million years, but Fincher's cool formalism would have been a good match for this, and as Fight Club and Gone Girl have shown, he knows his way around a strange sex scene. Plus, he got his start making sexy as hell music videos for the likes of Madonna ("Express Yourself") and Paula Abdul ("Cold Hearted").

Adrian Lyne - The master of the erotic drama, Lyne is the man behind Unfaithful (which boasted an Oscar-nominated performance from Diane Lane), Lolita (with Jeremy Irons), Fatal Attraction (another Oscar nominee), Indecent Proposal, Flashdance, and 9 1/2 Weeks (the big screen's big kahuna for kinky sex). Basically, his name on a project is a guarantee of well-made, steamy sex scenes.

Madonna - Hear me out. This is the woman who recorded "Erotica" and made it a hit Billboard single. The woman who made a coffee-table book called Sex. The woman who, in her fifties, posed in leather dominatrix gear on her album cover. Yes, W.E. was terrible. But if there's one thing Madonna knows, it's sex. And if you think a woman who has exerted this much control over her image throughout her career hasn't learned something about capturing hot, rough sex on film, you're crazy.

Nicolas Roeg - Three words: Don't Look Now. The 70s film was banned for the too-sexy sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Perhaps the guy's still got it?

Steven Shainberg - Don't recognize the name? I don't blame you. Shainberg is the man behind the 2002 film Secretary, in which Maggie Gyllenhaal gets involved in a BDSM relationship with her boss James Spader. It's sexy and darkly comic, which would be a good tone for a film adaptation of Fifty Shades. Of course, he's also the director of the terrible Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, so who knows about his taste level... but the fact remains that Secretary is a near-perfect calling card for this gig.

Lars von Trier - DUH. If you wanted a no-holds-barred, NC-17 version of Fifty Shades, this is the man who was most likely to deliver it. Granted, he probably would have had Charlotte Gainsbourg play Ana, and it's is very likely that his version would have also been the misogynistic, anti-feminist version the haters of Fifty Shades want it to be, but of all the directors on this list, he's probably the one whose version of the film I would want to see most.

The Wachowski Siblings - One word: Bound. They're now known for their action spectacles in the wake of The Matrix, but they got their start with this incredibly sexy neo-noir starring Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon. And as we've seen from the Matrix films, they know how to make leather fetish gear look good on film. If they bring on their Cloud Atlas collaborator Tom Tykwer, then so much the better!

John Waters - If you wanted the camp disasterpiece version of Fifty Shades, this is the only human being alive who could have possibly delivered a good one. His filmography revels in it, while never ever shortchanging his characters. Unless they deserve it. I actually REALLY wish this had happened.