science-fiction — TV and MOVIES

So I’ve decided to break my TV watching recap into 2 or 3-month brackets instead of waiting till the end of the year. One reason is that my memory really is no longer what it used to be and another is that my end of year recap doesn’t include shows that maybe deserve a spot. Recapping what I’ve watched over the past 3 months allows me to have a fresh memory of the shows as well as it gives more room for more shows.

In all honesty, this beginning of the year was full of surprises! Shows I was convinced I would hate turned out to be favorites while shows I was waiting in anticipation to watch turned out to be duds.

Between January and mid-March, there’s been 5 show that deserve, in my opinion, a mention.

The Silent sea

This Korean scifi series is far from perfect but it has enough originality and intrigue for me to tune in for another episode and want to know more. The story takes place in the near future where Earth suffers from extreme water shortage and follows a space crew sent to the moon on a mission to retrieve mysterious samples from an abandonned research facility where five years prior, all the staff died in bizarre circumstances. Sure, there was some clumsiness in the writing and my first opinion after the first few episodes was that it’s probably an Alien rip-off, but they’ve managed to turn things around and some plot twists have made The Silent Sea a show deserving of more attention.

Archive 81

My previous comments about The Silent Sea’s clumsiness also applies here, for Archive 81. This is a supernatural horror series about a man who’s hired by a mysterious company to restore videocassettes belonging to a student who made, 15 or 20 years prior, a documentary about an appartment building in New-York. As he restores and watches the seemingly mundane footage, he quickly realizes that he’s getting pulled into an intrigue involving mysterious fires, disappearances, cults and conspiracies. Are there plot holes? Yes. Are there unnecessary jump scare techniques? Absolutely. But once again, the show has managed to bring enough to the table to catch the viewers’ attention and make them want to know more.

Suspicion

Suspicion premiered on February 4 and I’m only a few episodes in so my critique will only be about what I’ve seen so far. Four strangers, all ordinary British citizens, are accused of kidnapping the son of a high profile American media mogul. The kidnapping happened in a New York hotel, when all four characters happened to be there. As they desperately race to prove their innocence, one can’t help but wonder if they’re really telling the truth. I must admit that the 4 main characters are nor really sympathetic and I’m not really rooting for them, but curiosity got the better of me. I want to know what happened, who did it and why.

C’est comme ça que je t’aime

Being born and raised in Montral, Quebec, I’ve always been very critical of local TV shows. They very often lack creativity, borrowing from existing American shows, and/or lack nuances and subtility. I can literally count on the fingers of one hand all the Quebec productions I actually like : Rock et Belles Oreilles, Tout sur moi, La petite vie, Les Invincibles and Infoman. Last year, another series can be added to the list : C’est comme ça que je t’aime, a show about two couples who turn into murderous criminals during their kids’ stay at summer camp. The show is not constant but it’s got some killer hilarious lines! The second season has just begun to air and we binge-watched it in no time. Still pretty funny.

Peacemaker

Now this is a show I was sure I would hate! I didn’t even have the intention of watching it because I dislike anything about superheroes. What changed my mind was when I heard some hype about the opening credits and checked it out on Youtube. It was pure genius and convinced me to give the show a chance. I have to say that Peacemaker was a big surprise. Funny, silly, insightful and action packed, with a great ensemble cast and killer dialogues, this series is so different from the movie it’s supposed to come from! I saw bits of the Suicide Squad (1 and 2) and hated it. The TV series is nothing like the movies. The first half of the season is better than the second, but still, I can’t wait for season 2.

So that’s my top 5 series so far, but that’s not all I watched, though. I mentionned earlier that there were some shows I was waiting for with much anticipation. Well, when they finally aired, I was deeply disappointed. These are shows like Severance (too much emphasis on purposeless visuals) and The Afterparty (bad writing for such a talented cast). And then there were shows I just watched out of boredom, hoping to stumble on a surprise, like Dollface (season 2), The woman in the house across the street…., The girl before, Murderville, Shining Vale, Our flag means death. Unsurprisingly, they were disappointing. I also started watching the 4th season of Killing Eve but my interest wanes with each season.

Anticipated for the next months

Shows I’m excited to watch for the next few months include:

The Larry David story
Peaky Blinders (season 6)
Stranger things (season 4)
Better call Saul (season 6)

Hopefully, I’ll discover someting new as well!

Primer

Released in 2004, this low-budget movie is probably one of the smartest, most complex, mind-boggling time-travel films that have been made. Intended to be seen, then seen again to be thoroughly understood, Primer is about 2 friends, both engineers, who have managed to create a machine that can freeze objects from the effects of gravity. They soon realize that the objects were frozen from the effects of time as well. Using this construct, they built themselves time travel machines to get richer with stock exchanges. Of course, things get freaky when unexpected interference messes up their timelines. This brilliant film was shot over a span of 5 weeks, with a budget of 7 000$, and a crew of 5 people. Shane Carruth, who plays one of the main characters, is the film’s writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor and music composer. Primer went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance film festival. Despite that, most people have never heard of it.

Ex-Machina

This beautifully made film about artificial intelligence by Alex Garland is both fascinating and frightening. A programmer wins a contest for a one-week visit to the isolated home of his billionaire boss and creator of the world’s most powerful search engine. As it turns out, this stay is to test his boss’ new project, humanoids equipped with artificial intelligence. The young programmer is to spend time with Ava to determine whether she is genuinely capable of thought and consciousness despite knowing she is artificial. As the days go by, he grows more uncomfortable at the isolated location, not knowing his strange boss’ intentions and who to trust or what to believe.

Safety not guaranteed

A journalist and his 2 interns investigate a weird classified ad that reads: “Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91 Ocean View, WA 99393. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before”. The person behind the ad is Kenneth Calloway, a paranoid man who wants to go back to the year 2001 to prevent his then girlfriend from being killed. Darius, one of the journalist’s interns, gains his trust and becomes a candidate to follow him in his mission. Though not perfect, this 2012 sci-fi romantic comedy is funny, quirky, original, endearing and films like that are not made anymore.

Colossal

This film starring Anne Hathaway and Andy Sudeikis was not what I expected it to be, and it was awesome. Gloria, an unemployed young writer returns to her hometown after her fed up boyfriend breaks up with her and kicks her out of his apartment. Upon her return, she reconnects with her childhood friend Oscar who now owns a bar. After a while, she discovers that she is inexplicably linked to a giant monster who is wreaking havoc halfway across the world. The film makes us believe it will go towards some romantic comedy clichés before leading us in a whole other path. The ending is a bit disappointing but the film as a whole is refreshingly different and very entertaining.

Idiocracy

Far from being a perfect movie, Idiocracy should be seen as a brilliant sketch scifi comedy rather than a film as a whole. Though tanked by its own studio, the film, thanks to DVD viewership, became a cult classic. I want to mention it here because still a lot of people haven’t heard of it yet and it is a great shame. Funny then and prophetic now, Idiocracy is a time travel comedy about an average man who participated in a secret government experiment on hibernation and accidentally wakes up 500 years in the future. Society in the dystopian universe he wakes up in has degraded to a point where he, a man of average, if not below-average intelligence in the 2oth century, became the smartest man in the world. Hyper-commercialism, illiteracy, anti-intellectualism and just plain apathy has become the norm, and as a result, the world is falling apart. Idiocracy contains some brilliant flashes of comedic genius, and its actors are plain and simply incredible. Terry Crews as the president of the United States is hilarious. Though a laugh-out-loud comedy then, the movie has foreseen so many things back then that, sadly, it’s practically become a documentary. This is one of my favorite comedies of all time, despite all its flaws. A must for everyone. I included one of my favorite scenes from the movie, below.