Director Mark Slutsky’s science fiction short “The Decelerators” really is an ambitious short that ponders on the more complex minutiae of life that we don’t often explore. While the movie itself could stand twenty more minutes, and exposition, that doesn’t completely destroy director Slotsky’s intent to create a meaningful genre entry that tries to build conflict with time travel. It’s by no means a masterpiece, but “The Decelerators” is definitely above average.
Syfy’s newest Canadian import garners some of my favorite aspects of fiction. There’s a Utopian future. And Rachel Nichols. There’s time travel. And Rachel Nichols. There’s futuristic villains and clandestine organizations. And Rachel Nichols. And of course, there are plays on time travel paradoxes that “Continuum” has a lot of fun playing with. And there’s Rachel Nichols. One element of the initial storyline revolving around season one of “Continuum” is the inevitability of time and fates and what happens when time travel is used. Could going back in time and tinkering with the fates of others alter the timeline? Or is there an already preset path that can not be stopped no matter how much you attempt to destroy it? If our mind predetermines our actions, wouldn’t that be applied to time travel? If heroine Keira never traveled back in time to thwart the efforts of Liber8, would she have ended up in her life? And what effect does two existing Keira’s in the universe ultimately have?
To say that I knew what I was getting in to with “Midnight in Paris” is indeed would be a gross error. I had no idea what “Midnight in Paris” would bring me. So for the sake of not ruining what is ultimately a surprise filled comedy drama, I beg you to heed my warning about spoilers as “Midnight in Paris” is such a film that will demand audiences to suspend their belief, but in the meanwhile is typical Woody Allen whimsy. The man has the ability to channel surrealism and fantasy with films like “Zelig” and “Sleeper,” and thankfully “Midnight in Paris” is a return to form. Once again, Allen has lost a lot of his touch with his past films as he no longer spotlights the regular individual, but the glamorous one, but he surmounts such a caveat by delivering a premise in the tradition of the classic Allen pictures. The demented and lively, the ridiculous but existential.
At the start of “A Sound of Thunder,” One was that the quality was on par to an average stinker on the Sci Fi Channel, and the other was that there couldn’t possibly be that much truth to the suckiness of said film. At the start, our heroes are on prehistoric terrain and in enters a dinosaur; a dinosaur that is really intent on eating them. The whole time I watch this, I’m thinking to myself “This couldn’t be the special effects, they must be in a simulator” which is usually the case in films in which we think one scenario is actual distress, and it ends up being a complete red herring.