Filmvomit-1 Barbarella

While on top of KineCritical's B-List, which you should check out, I'm gonna start writing about movies here. Because while there are so many that aren't Bucket List material there are a bunch that are worth mentioning just for the fun of it. Plus I need to get in a better habit of just writing. So that's what Wordvomit is going to be. The occasional BitOFictions where I just throw out those first impression thoughts after seeing a film, reading a book, comic, ect.

So without further a due, 

Filmvomit-1 

This is Barbarella. Now I wont deny I find a good deal of amusement in old Sci-Fi, that might be because as a Midwestern I grew up on Svengoolie and the old broadcast channels. So at first I was drawn to the look of this quirky looking film. On the Netflix the film is described as "A shapely 41st-century space traveler must apprehend scientist Durand Durand, whose creation threatens to bring evil back to the galaxy. En route, Barbarella discovers the joys of celestial sex and has kinky misadventures with bizarre characters."... in a PG rated film. Bizarre was defiantly the word for it. So I was all ready for the turn to the camera wink lame sexual innuendo's and stupid one liners, but that's not really what you get. You get Jane Fonda undressing in zero gravity in her space ship lined in shag carpeting. All of which was obviously Jane laying on a glass platform which was suspended over a picture of the inside of the ship. Suddenly she's getting a video call from the President of Earth. Their greeting consisting of a salute with "Love", And that ladies and gentlemen is about where I sang "Hippies-In-Space!!" to the tune of Jews in Space (mel Brooks) ... but yeah, wasn't expecting a naked Jane in a PG film.

Apparently the galaxy has been pacified and weapons haven't been around for years; but some rouge scientist had been developing a weapon for an unknown reason, and was lost to an unknown planet, and you're the only gall with the diplomatic skills to save the galaxy (he tells Barbarella while she's naked). And so that's what kind of film this is. No, it's not riddled with naked with Jane Fonda, it's riddled with that free love, attacking the female for the sake of destroying her clothes, then changing for the sake of putting on new weird clothes, weird late sixty style of things. I.. I can't even... At one point Barbarella is put in a cage flooded with vicious parakeets, which is about as threatening and vicious looking as you'd imagine.

The film ends by Barbarella being protected by a bubble formed from her very innocence (I'm not even kidding) and an honest-to-god angle she hooked up with earlier flying her and the governor of the evil city off into the sunset... that was a thing.

That film.. wasn't really necessary: at all. But if you get a kick from those weird sometimes laughably bad films, and you're in the right mood with a group of friends; sure, it could be worth a laugh. But really this was a stupid, stupid movie.

The B-List: No 0.1 Hello Cruel World

The Bucket List Intro

Films To See Before You "Kick It"

The B-List is my new weekly column/series for KineCritical, UW Parkside's premier cinema review/ commentary site, where you'll get our lowdown on the must see films. Not just the revered classics and historic moments in cinema mind you; In no significant order we're going to be looking at the films that defined genres, spawned cult followings, the sort of films that inspired and shaped the modern cinema of today along with the those that will inspire the cinema of tomorrow.

Now as a ongoing series, and as we are only pulling of the collective knowledge of a very cool handful of cinema nerds here staffing KineCritical, if any of you readers know of a great flick that should be recognized  give us a shout out. Either post it in the comments on here, or on KineCritical's official blog, comment on our facebook page, hashtag The_B-List on twitter, or just think really hard about it and if you've been developing that telepathy correctly we'll have it up shortly.^^

Good-Bye Cruel World.

LOOK AT THAT BEAUTIFUL FACE

Well, if you were looking forward to any more of my rare and wonderful writing on films and cinema here, I'm sorry you won't get it. I'm going to be elsewhere. A brand new shiny thing called KineCritical is stealing me away and conditioning my brand of work into something more polished.
http://kinecritical.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/KineCritical/485729828138423
https://twitter.com/KineCritical

The location is temporary but this project is working its' way up to an internship for the Cinema Major at Parkside University. As any reviews or posts go up I'll throw down a link here, but the serious business you'll see happening after winter break, when we set up the sweatshop and factory of malnourished unpaid college students. But as my loyal readers, I thought I'd give you an exclusive first glance.

Now as the film aspect of BitOFiction is going to be happening elsewhere; the bits on literature  writing, general storytelling, will still be featured. Though it will admittedly be at a slower pace, seeing as it looks like I'm going to try to kill myself next semester and throughout the coming years of my college career. I'm going to aim to 'get use to it', adapt to the hell I'm putting myself with.

What doesn't kill you, only makes you stranger.
Night everyone.

Universal Monster Family, Know Your Classics

This is a quick teaser/introduction to the October content I'll be putting up, that's right

CLASSIC MOVIE MARATHON!!

We'll be looking at the original monster movies, where they came from, and what they've contributed to our collective psyche of the monsters in question; plus the impact that has had on our generations monster fiction. Keep tuned in, we'll get through as many monsters as possible.

[Film] Limitless Review (2011)

Review-Blaaha

INTRODUCTION

Alright, so Limitless is a 2011 thriller film based off the 2001 techno-thriller novel by Alan Glynn originally titled The Dark Fields. Now the premise is centered on a failed writer getting his hands on some mystery drug, NZT, which stimulates brain activity and organizes thought, memory, general cognitive abilities to a superhuman degree, spring boarding him into a fast track to success and wealth. The drug turns out to cause mental instability and dependency. If you haven't seen it yet, it's on Netflix, the cinematography is interesting to watch, the story is well paced, its failing is in the final one minute scene, so overall a decent interesting bit of fiction. I wouldn't watch it again, but it wouldn't be a horrible way to spend an evening. 

BREAKDOWN

This story is reflective of a classical Deal with the Devil, or Faustian bargain story archetype. This archetype is characterized by a character making some sort of deal and giving up something that represents an essence of their self for diabolical or inhuman powers, traditionally ending poorly for the protagonist.

The film has been mirrored to Daniel Keyes's novel Flowers for Algernon, a wonderful bit of fiction that deals with the super stimulated intelligence, but plays more towards the alienation of genius. At the climax the protagonist has obtained so much knowledge he has surpassed not only all his peers but the experts in each field of knowledge, reaching a level of understanding where he simply cannot communicate with others. Like an adult in a world of infants he simply beyond understanding by those around him and his peers inevitably isolate and even fear him. Because of his unique position his love interest becomes unattainable and he predicts his fall long before it starts. A beautiful interpretation of the Faustian archetype, and my comparison of where Limitless went wrong. Here is where most people stop me, 'but Limitless wasn't based off Flowers for Algernon, it's based off another book.' and there my rebuttal was then there was were that book went wrong. But with my top-notch reporter researching powers....

I'm here to tell you that, shock, the book had it done better. 
In the ending of Glynn's novel the protagonist hasn't found some way out of the hole he has dug himself into, he's at the and of his rope when he notices the same drug stimulated eyes in a televised address from the president. Bringing the story full circle, the curse continued. And yet still, until the last minutes of the film, Limitless had the potential to be the better interpretation. It's very rare when a trans-media interpretation of the source material has a stronger narration (if only slightly) then the source, but it happens.

CLIMAX

Essentially what happened in Limitless is the conclusion of the film didn't support everything else the narration had built up to. Bradley Cooper plays just-dumped looser turned confident respond-to-your-argument-before-you-finish-your-sentence, kind of cocky know-it-all well and has a great supporting cast that make the story and situations believable. The cinematography is pretty darn great at representing how the mind of a super genius might see and interact with the world. At the moment the drugs effects start to go haywire and his world of infinite potential start to crumble around him, he's forced to expose his secret to the girlfriend he had won back (arguably the reason he starts using in the first place). She tells him she can't stay with him anymore as long as he's on the drug. That this ability and level of confidence wasn't the man she knew, it's not him anymore. His humanity was lost. A tone reminiscent of Flowers for Algerenon's ostentation of genius starting. And it looks pretty strongly like a classic Faustian story turn, where the character's actions have inevitably turned his life against him. This builds to the climax and confrontation with his Russian Mob loan shark friend pretty well. Eddie (Cooper's character) is back on the ledge of his high-rise apartment, where we were introduced to him in the first scene, and rethinking the past few days where it all went wrong. He's lost the love of his life, his job, and soon to be his life, but he prevails. 
Surviving his debt with the mob and addiction there's a flash forward and Eddie goes onto become a politician and running for Senator, obviously still under the enhancing influence of NZT as of this point the conclusion is still acceptable. We've seen none of the characters from his former life and it's plausible to say that as up and running politician Eddie has accepted a life of ostracization from common living and sacrificed the normal life for his future of "limitless success" while behind the scenes doing everything he can to sustain and keep his drug dependency secret. And it looks like that's how it's going to end up... right up till the point when we see him going to dinner with his love interest. She looks at him after he speaks to the waitress in Mandarin and he innocently asks, "What?" with a smile on his face before the credits roll. Now if you're seeing the issue, a paragraph or so ago we established the part where his love interest says she can't stay with  him while he's on the drug because while under its effect he is fundamentally a different person. The man she loved was not capable of the level of manipulation or the kind of acts the protagonist has had to do to keep his super human ability. 
If the final scene had been, say, Eddie having a dinner with no one in-particular or not at all then coming back to sleep in an empty apartment/hotel room, it would have had carried the powerful ending tone the entire film built up to. By having the definitive, he's right and anything he's done is justified so things should end well for him ending, all the character conflict -essentially the film- has been rendered pointless. Every time that made him second guess if he was really doing the right things, or if he should have this kind of powers, none of that mattered because he got everything he wanted. 
Now if this was the original ending or not I don't know, we've seen scripts like this changed last minute because of the focus group audience before.

  
And because of it the film completely lost what the book went out to say, and that kind of defeats the point of making it into a film. Why don't they just have fans of the original work in this focus group, or try to throw in a few film critics or something. Get some opinions that actually know what they're talking about and will actually have an effect on how the film is rated, and thereby seen by the public.   

CONCLUSION
It's a decent film, if you turn it off before the ending it's a good film. But other then being thoroughly upset by the ending there wasn't much reason to think about the film after seeing it. If you're bored or interested in seeing how archetypes go wrong you could watch it, but if you're going to watch it on Netflix there are simply better films to occupy your time and attention with. 
Goodnight everyone :)

Yay, starting something.

This blog is for discussion on storytelling, film, literature, comics, tv shows, writing in general, ect. Reviews will be on media that has been out for a while because retrospective thought is more clear minded and critical. It gives time to consider all the elements in their use more as a whole then just what stood out at the moment. So that's what you can be expecting from this blog... enjoy.