Covering for the damage I've done to the movie industry
It's bad. Really bad. I pirated some movies.
First it started with movies that aren't available in the U.S. Then it was just the slightly hard to find stuff. Now it's any movie that I haven't seen. I'd still like to own some of the great movies I've seen lately, but I'd rather see them now than wait until I have 20 bucks to throw at a luxury item other than beer.
So if you like off beat movies far from the main stream with a dark twist and sharp story, I highly suggest you see these. Maybe you'll buy one and make up for my stealing.
Kin Dza Dza
A really awesome low budget sci-fi from mid-80's Russia. It's said that the movie only made it past censorship because the director was the most famous Russian film maker of the day, and given the depth of social commentary mixed with a splash of uncommonly appropriate slapstick humor, it's amazing that this movie exists at all. Aside from a few scenes, the whole thing was filmed in the desert (think Dune) and almost all the props were scavenged from abandoned missile silos. The sparseness of the movie allows you to focus on the desperation of the main characters as they navigate the subjective ridiculousness of Pluk society.
The story is that two random, every day soviets are walking down the street when they suddenly find themselves on the planet Pluk in the Kin Dza Dza galaxy, where the verbal language consists of almost just one word (they must prefer telepathy), they've turned all their water into fuel (so if you want water you have to get it converted back), they have the technology to instantly go almost anywhere in the universe, and match-heads are like gold. We follow our heroes as they try to make it back home, making things more difficult as they try and take part in the ruthless bargaining style of Pluk.
Primer
This has got to be my favorite time travel movie of all time. It's another low budget experience (shot for $7,000), but again it was done right, using that "less is more" to an extreme degree. There's even less explanation, which makes everything infinitely more believable. For the first 30 minutes, we catch glimpses of engineers at work, snippets of conversations and flashes of stress, and none of it makes sense. Some people don't like this, but I've always enjoyed watching people work, and you really feel like this is real. The fact that they don't dumb anything down makes it feel like there was a hidden camera in an actual garage-based company. What is it they're building? Well, whatever it was they were trying to build, it ends up being a time machine.
Then begins all the confusion that time travel probably would bring. What happens if they alter the timeline or talk to one of themselves? What will they do with this amazing discovery? And will they need to try and undo it? If you don't mind a spoiler, take a quick look at this chart that illustrates the chaos they create.
The Machinist
A psychological thriller in the vein of Fight Club, with the darkness and strange distance that comes with a cinematic depiction of sleep deprivation. When Kathleen and I first saw Christian Bale in this movie as the lead, we both were sure that there was some CG going on and then both groaned in discomfort as we realized that it was real: the dude was CRAZY skinny, and we read later that Bale lost 60 pounds for the role.
The whole movie was like liquid discomfort, really carrying that creepy feeling you get from looking at a skelletonized person. The audience follows him in his decent into paranoia and we really don't have a clue what's really going on as he scrambles from disaster to accident, until the final revealing twist.
Ravenous
Guy Pierce plays a union officer in the Mexican-American war who freaked out during a gruesome battle and decided to just pretend to be dead. Though he was able to capture the enemy command because he was thrown into a cart of bodies to be buried later and forgotten, his commander knew that Pierce was a coward and assigned him to a distant camp in the California mountains. This is all explained in the first minute, using excellent editing to tell this back story and foreshadow the cannibalistic developments later.
Once at the camp and introductions are out of the way, evil stuff happens and everyone dies.
Some people call it a vampire movie, but it certainly isn't the classic vampire on display here. You get the feeling, probably just because of the antagonist's monologue while trying to recruit the protagonist, that this is somehow a metaphor for the "manifest destiny" that consumed the Americas, conquered hundreds of indigenous nations, and sucked the marrow from the earth. But really it's just fight between good and evil in a compellingly unique format.
First it started with movies that aren't available in the U.S. Then it was just the slightly hard to find stuff. Now it's any movie that I haven't seen. I'd still like to own some of the great movies I've seen lately, but I'd rather see them now than wait until I have 20 bucks to throw at a luxury item other than beer.
So if you like off beat movies far from the main stream with a dark twist and sharp story, I highly suggest you see these. Maybe you'll buy one and make up for my stealing.
Kin Dza Dza
A really awesome low budget sci-fi from mid-80's Russia. It's said that the movie only made it past censorship because the director was the most famous Russian film maker of the day, and given the depth of social commentary mixed with a splash of uncommonly appropriate slapstick humor, it's amazing that this movie exists at all. Aside from a few scenes, the whole thing was filmed in the desert (think Dune) and almost all the props were scavenged from abandoned missile silos. The sparseness of the movie allows you to focus on the desperation of the main characters as they navigate the subjective ridiculousness of Pluk society.
The story is that two random, every day soviets are walking down the street when they suddenly find themselves on the planet Pluk in the Kin Dza Dza galaxy, where the verbal language consists of almost just one word (they must prefer telepathy), they've turned all their water into fuel (so if you want water you have to get it converted back), they have the technology to instantly go almost anywhere in the universe, and match-heads are like gold. We follow our heroes as they try to make it back home, making things more difficult as they try and take part in the ruthless bargaining style of Pluk.
Primer
This has got to be my favorite time travel movie of all time. It's another low budget experience (shot for $7,000), but again it was done right, using that "less is more" to an extreme degree. There's even less explanation, which makes everything infinitely more believable. For the first 30 minutes, we catch glimpses of engineers at work, snippets of conversations and flashes of stress, and none of it makes sense. Some people don't like this, but I've always enjoyed watching people work, and you really feel like this is real. The fact that they don't dumb anything down makes it feel like there was a hidden camera in an actual garage-based company. What is it they're building? Well, whatever it was they were trying to build, it ends up being a time machine.
Then begins all the confusion that time travel probably would bring. What happens if they alter the timeline or talk to one of themselves? What will they do with this amazing discovery? And will they need to try and undo it? If you don't mind a spoiler, take a quick look at this chart that illustrates the chaos they create.
The Machinist
A psychological thriller in the vein of Fight Club, with the darkness and strange distance that comes with a cinematic depiction of sleep deprivation. When Kathleen and I first saw Christian Bale in this movie as the lead, we both were sure that there was some CG going on and then both groaned in discomfort as we realized that it was real: the dude was CRAZY skinny, and we read later that Bale lost 60 pounds for the role.
The whole movie was like liquid discomfort, really carrying that creepy feeling you get from looking at a skelletonized person. The audience follows him in his decent into paranoia and we really don't have a clue what's really going on as he scrambles from disaster to accident, until the final revealing twist.
Ravenous
Guy Pierce plays a union officer in the Mexican-American war who freaked out during a gruesome battle and decided to just pretend to be dead. Though he was able to capture the enemy command because he was thrown into a cart of bodies to be buried later and forgotten, his commander knew that Pierce was a coward and assigned him to a distant camp in the California mountains. This is all explained in the first minute, using excellent editing to tell this back story and foreshadow the cannibalistic developments later.
Once at the camp and introductions are out of the way, evil stuff happens and everyone dies.
Some people call it a vampire movie, but it certainly isn't the classic vampire on display here. You get the feeling, probably just because of the antagonist's monologue while trying to recruit the protagonist, that this is somehow a metaphor for the "manifest destiny" that consumed the Americas, conquered hundreds of indigenous nations, and sucked the marrow from the earth. But really it's just fight between good and evil in a compellingly unique format.