Realiti

This film is a head trip.  Vic (Nathan Meister) is a former journalist and up-and-coming junior executive at Tri Media Corporation.  They're involved in something - Realiti - a drug in development - secret trials - espionage - consumer manipulation - hallucination.  The story feels like Descent Into Madness, but maybe that depends on where it picks up...

Realiti

2014, 95 minutes, directed by Jonathan King

District 9

I'm impressed that a South Africa production was so eloquently able to disguise apartheid critique under a thick gory blanket of sci fi, the way it's meant to be done.  Plus Wikus Van De Merwe is such an awesome action hero, it's hard to not root for him as both a speciesist mid-level manager and a blood-thirsty killing machine.

For more commentary see my original review from 2009.

District 9
2009, 112 minutes, directed by Neill Blomkamp

Escape from Tomorrow

At this point, Escape from Tomorrow is better known for its surreptitious production than its story.  Filmed in secret at Walt Disney World in Florida, the film is billed as a parody of the make-believe story Disney wants its customers to see.

But then, there's the film itself.  Despite being fired that morning, Jim wants to have one good final day at the parks with his family.  Instead, he and his wife bicker and argue, and they take turns with their son and daughter separately, trying to keep either of them happy.  But then there's the two Parisian girls that Jim follows.  I don't think this was supposed to be an existential journey, so I keep trying to piece the parts together to make an arcing plot.  Exactly how are the scientists under the Spaceship Earth related to the aging witch with her mesmerizing necklace?  Was Jim selected as a child for this ultimate fate, and has his son now been selected to share the fate as well?

Escape from Tomorrow
2013, 90 minutes, directed by Randy Moore

Vanishing Waves

Lithuanian scientists experiment with brain-wave capture, in the hope of connecting human minds.  The first experiments with human-human contact find Lukas (Marius Jampolskis), a lead researcher, dropped in the dreams of coma patient Aurora (Jurga Jutaite), trapped since a car accident which took her husband.  Their immediate, deep connection troubles Lukas, who has to hide his experiences to dig deeper into Aurora's soul and bring her back from the depths.  It's such an intimate look into the woman's mind that I can overlook the story not going as I expected.

Vanishing Waves
2012, 124 minutes, directed by Kristina Buozyte

X-Men: First Class

Why?  The plot is disjointed and contrived.  I would have so much preferred more effort put into the third film of the original trilogy to make it not suck so much than spend any money on this at all.

Wait, is this supposed to be a reboot?  I can't tell.  That's a large part of the problem.  Set in the 1960s, this film shows events long before those of the trilogy, in a way compatible with (hello Hugh Jackman) the Wolverine origin film.  Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) is a former Nazi scientist bent on world destruction to reform it for the mutant race.  Erik Lehnsherr totally agrees with all of that except Shaw happened to have killed his mother, so Erik teams up with Charles Xavier and his new mutant understudies to take on Shaw and the simultaneous American and Soviet navies.  If they'd made it clear this was a reboot, I might have taken it differently.

X-Men: First Class
2011, 132 minutes, directed by Matthew Vaughn

Keyhole

The director of this film describes it as "gangsters meet ghosts" turned into an autobiography of a house. Ulysses returns to his family home, determined to reach his wife Hyacinth on the top floor. To get there, though, he must navigate the other rooms of the house and their unearthly inhabitants.

Or at least that's how it's billed. I describe it more as surreal experimentation. Or a black & white cinematic study of how many actors (young and quite old) you can get full nude and acting like a crazy ghost on film.

It's not really for me.

Keyhole
2012, directed by Guy Maddin