Posted by Aditya »
Add Comment »Continuing from the previous two posts about weird movies (Primer and Pi) comes Darkness/Light/Darkness, a short film by Jan Švankmajer. A very short film with running length less than 8 minutes. There isn’t much to write about this movie. It’s about limbs – human limbs. They come together and try to put themselves together in a room. Hands, ears, eyes, teeth, tongue – it goes on and in great detail.
Jan is known for his work with stop motion animation. He uses clay models for the movie with weird sounds in the background. Stop motion animation is a pain in the ass. I have tried it in the past after watching a how-to on Discovery’s popular mechanics for kids (wonder how this was mechanics, but anyway) this thing is painfully slow. You keep changing the models every frame, so slightly, as not to lose the persistence of vision, take a picture, change the model again. It a meticulous process done very well in this movie. [Read more →]
Posted by Aditya »
Add Comment »What would you do if you were a frustrated engineer with friends who share your point of view? Start a company in your garage of course. Don’t worry, Primer isn’t another movie to take a bite of an apple and start the Apple. Turns out, these people were much more intelligent. I am currently reading Hyperspace, a book about parallel universes, time warp and the 10th dimension; written by Michio Kaku. I will review that book as soon as I finish it. Reading that book brought back some memories. He talks about possibilities of time travel in that book from a scientific standpoint. Like any other kid of my age the first thought that touched my mind was Back to the Future. It’s a very nicely written movie series, scientifically incorrect yet really exciting and I just enjoy the movies immensely.
There’s another movie, not as popular as Back to the Future, that deals with time travel – Primer. A movie which has been hailed by the critics at Rotten Tomatoes as one of the best science fiction movies for the thinking man, Primer is about the accidental discovery of a means of time travel. [Read more →]
Posted by Aditya »
Add Comment »Continuing from the last post about nothing, this is a review of the movie Pi. No, not American Pie. The mathematical Pi. Released in 1998, Pi was director Darren Aronofsky‘s first film which won him a few awards. A relatively low budget movie with unknown stars and a weird setting. The movie was shot with an extremely high grain, high contrast black and white film. This is one of the reasons I love it. It feels weird and it really is.
The narrator of the story is Max Cohen. A number theorist Max believes that the world around us can be explained with numbers alone. He thinks everything is a mathematical model. Everything is governed by a deterministic function. You can tell when a passion turns into an obsession. As soon as that hint of obsession is observed, things begin to get interesting. [Read more →]