The 2001 anime spoof of “Star Wars” is so stuffed with inexplicable nonsense, you’ll likely get a few laughs out of if in the first ten minutes. And then get bored. And then begin fast forwarding until the very end. Thankfully the movie clocks in at a merciful forty five minutes in length; the rest of the film is all a lot of shots and scenes infringing on so many copyrights that it’s both impressive and moronic.
In the remote Shetland Islands of Scotland, legends of ritual sacrifices of surrogate mothers to great warriors’ children crop back up after Dr. Tora Hamilton arrives with her husband to his homeland after losing a child. Soon after, Tora finds a body in her new yard, minus the heart which sends her on a hunt for the truth. Director Peter A. Dowling wrote the script based on the novel of the same name by Sharon (S.J.) Bolton.
JJ Abrams has a lot of work to accomplish with “The Force Awakens,” removing the stigma and stench the series has accumulated over the years with the release of the “Star Wars” film prequels, the constant re-editing and changes to the original films, and so much more. “The Force Awakens” actively works as a rebuttal to the aforementioned legacy set, unleashing a film that’s very down to Earth and celebratory of the original trilogy as a whole. It not only musters up a lot of the tropes from the original trilogy, but acts as a launch pad for a massive movie series that Lucasfilm and Disney are planning for a very long stretch. While some have criticized the film for recycling some elements from “A New Hope,” Abrams fully understands what he’s working with, and working on, and uses “The Force Awakens” as a massive doorway accessible to literally anyone.
It’s so very rare to see a film like Tim Prescott’s, and one that is so genuine and original. Prescott’s film reminded me a lot of something from Charlie Kaufman of Spike Jonze in where our protagonist is a victim of their mental disability and it somehow unfolds in to an interesting tale of whimsy and tragedy. I can’t believe what I was watching when I sat down to view “Selective Listening.” At times I was baffled, other times I was confused, but throughout the entirety I was completely compelled. “Selective Listening” is a unique take on mental illness, as we center on nice guy Harrison. Harrison is a normal guy who lives alone in his flat, except he’s a victim to his obsessive compulsive disorder. It also doesn’t help matters that he’s a victim of schizophrenia and he can often hear various voices in his head.
The team from Red Letter Media, a small group of some of the best online movie critics and comedians finally get together to put the superhero movie through the wringer. “Space Cop” is a mixture of superhero movies, crime noirs, and classic Golan Globus stinkers where our hero is a testosterone junkie prone to shooting a lot of people and then asking questions later. In this instance we follow the futuristic space cop from 2058 who spends his time shooting down bad guys and royally destroying his city in an attempt to halt operations from disgruntled criminals. When he’s home, he indulges in an addiction to hot dogs and beer.
For the small fanbase that loves the “Species” series, they’ll be interested to see where the studio takes the original 1995 hyper sexual science fiction thriller. Set directly after “Species II,” Brad Turner attempts to connect the dots and further the mythos of the alien clone Sil. After her experience with her male alien counterpart and dying at his hands in an awfully weird manner in the ein of hentai, she is revealed to be pregnant. What happened to his millions of offspring, one only knows, but this time as Sil is being transported, she produces two female offspring of her own.
It’s the sheer absurd humor of Director and Writer David Cornelius’ short comedy film that I really enjoyed. It’s such an inexplicable scenario transformed out of a mundane situation involving a group of friends playing poker that I quite enjoyed where he was going with it. Even if director Cornelius never quite drew attention to the fact that a group of friends were casually playing poker, one of whom was a puppet, I still would have gotten a good laugh out of the unusual humor on display.