Skiffy

3 Science Fiction films, more or less.

Knowing. Really bad. Sorry Ebert. It is. The heart of the movie is a paper with numbers on it, but this plot device serves no other purpose than to redeem our hero. I don't buy into the core premise. The alien agenda has nothing to do with this piece of paper and everything could be accomplished without it. It's a dumb gimmick. At least Proyas had the guts to follow through with total destruction.

Solaris. Not bad, but ultimately disappointing. I finally broke down and decided to watch this after reading Soderbergh say the following: The analogy that I use was that the Lem book, which was full of so many ideas that you could probably make a handful of films from it, was the seed, and that Tarkovsky generated a sequoia and we were sort of trying to make a little bonsai. I'm excited about Che. What could Soderbergh have contributed to his own personal Solaris adaptation? It turns out that his film is his own film and not some bad knockoff. It stands as its own little bonsai. Unfortunately, I don't think that it succeeds as an SF film in the way that Tarkovsky's so obviously does. There is just way too much emphasis on the romance. I generally dislike flashbacks and I dislike them here. They work wonderfully to reinforce the core romantic idea being explored, I admit, but they do little to develop the alienness of the Solaris space station and they don't adequately illustrate the metaphysical problem that our hero is facing. I won't write more, because in a grand cosmic coincidence, a great installment of "The Conversations," featuring Solaris, was posted the same day that I watched the movie.

Monsters vs. Aliens. It's not as bad as I thought it would be, but that's the best that I can do on its behalf. Seth Rogen continues to play the same brainless jellyroll character over and over again. This may be his best performance in that role.