Tag: movies

The First

What “The First” does share with “House of Cards” is a sense of outlining an institution. Its energy is procedural. But the show scarcely cares whether the talking points of the political lobbying, or the engineers’ urgent conversations about the return vehicle, or the astronauts’ gasping debates during training drills, amount to mumbo jumbo. The workplace dramatics exist partly as mere trials for inspirational figures to survive, partly as a spur to the sober soap-operatics that play out around kitchen islands and among taupe interiors. An ode to exploration undercut with a vague sense of elegy, “The First” offers escapism in its dream of gaining distant colonies, and introspection in its study of human limits.

Final Offer

In Mark Slutsky’s short scifi film “Final Offer”, a traffic ticket lawyer awakens in a doorless room and discovers he’s there to make a deal with an interstellar attorney that could affect all life on Earth.

BoJack Horseman history

The email from Raphael Bob-Waksberg to Lisa Hanawalt on March 22, 2010, was to the point: “Hey, do you have a picture of one of your horse guys, by himself? I came up with this idea for a show I’d like to pitch. Tell me what you think: BoJack the Depressed Talking Horse.” Lisa Hanawalt: I was like, “That sounds too depressing. Can you make something more fun and whimsical?” And he’s like, “What about The Spruce Moose and the Juice Caboose?” And I said, “Oh great, they can have cocktail waitresses called the Spicy Mice.” I think we should still make that show. For kids.

Kung fu explainer

Many directors and actors have been associated with the kung fu genre, Hong Kong cinema’s most unique creation, but no one compares to Lau Kar-leung (1937–2013) as a purist of the genre and the kung fu form. Associate curator La Frances Hui explores the history of the kung fu films, the actors and filmmakers associated with the genre like Bruce Lee, Gordon Liu, and Jackie Chan, and why Lau Kar-leung has been hailed as the grandmaster of kung fu films.

Salvation

Salvation is a terrific series about what could happen if the world learned an extinction-event sized asteroid was on a collision course with Earth. It does a great job researching how governments, the public, and hacktivist groups might respond to such news. (For instance, one government might try to send up something that would cause the asteroid to change course just enough to make it crash into a spot on the other side of the planet in order to minimize the damage in their country. This could cause world powers to consider nuclear warfare to stop that from happening.)

Annihilation

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the 2nd expedition ended in mass suicide; the 3rd expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the 11th expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer.

Fictional Bad Games

Robert Penney created a pixel-perfect animation of Stranger Things as a turn-of-the-1990s adventure game a la Secret of Monkey Island. Turns out that he’s got a knack for these displaced artifacts, each pulled from a parallel universe where 20th century game systems still received rushed, sloppy games based on inappropriate movies and shows.