06-20-2018, 04:24 PM
The Zero Theorem (2013)
Since the current Terry Gilliam film is stuck in limbo, I thought I'd catch up with his last one which I unaccountably still hadn't finished watching years after buying the blu-ray. Seeing this in 2018 was the right choice, as it was perhaps 5-years ahead of it's time. The themes of sensory overload in a near-future world, online and offline truth and reality being blurred, corporations harvesting our data in order to generate algorithms to manipulate us, A.I. becoming hard to distinguish from humanity and a general sense of existential angst, all seem perfect for a post Facebook/Cambridge Analytical world. It raises many questions, answers almost none of them and leaves you wondering what it was all about but I'm still enjoying pondering the puzzle.
Blade of the Immortal (2017)
If like me you loved Takashi Miike's '13 Assassins' then you will not be disappointed by his latest Samurai film. Based on a Manga I haven't read about an immortal warrior called Manji ("The hundred man killer") who is kept alive by witchcraft and disgusting looking worms that crawl in his blood like Japanese feudal nano-bots. A young girl hires him to avenge the murder of her family, much like in 'True Grit', or 'Léon: The Professional'. The plot is episodic (in a good way) in the middle as the two of them encounter the various assassins sent to stop them. "You're not the only hero of a sad story" is a line that sums these encounters up, each villain having their own backstory. I'd begun to root for the badies as much as the heroes by the end. The film opens with Manji facing down 100 assassins and ends with him fighting 300 more, those two encounters and the 2-hours in between must make the body counter at least 500 or more, although the posters claim it's 1000. Kinda like playing the 'House of Leaves' level from 'Kill Bill' on god-mode
.
It's even more badass than this trailer makes it looks:
Since the current Terry Gilliam film is stuck in limbo, I thought I'd catch up with his last one which I unaccountably still hadn't finished watching years after buying the blu-ray. Seeing this in 2018 was the right choice, as it was perhaps 5-years ahead of it's time. The themes of sensory overload in a near-future world, online and offline truth and reality being blurred, corporations harvesting our data in order to generate algorithms to manipulate us, A.I. becoming hard to distinguish from humanity and a general sense of existential angst, all seem perfect for a post Facebook/Cambridge Analytical world. It raises many questions, answers almost none of them and leaves you wondering what it was all about but I'm still enjoying pondering the puzzle.
Blade of the Immortal (2017)
If like me you loved Takashi Miike's '13 Assassins' then you will not be disappointed by his latest Samurai film. Based on a Manga I haven't read about an immortal warrior called Manji ("The hundred man killer") who is kept alive by witchcraft and disgusting looking worms that crawl in his blood like Japanese feudal nano-bots. A young girl hires him to avenge the murder of her family, much like in 'True Grit', or 'Léon: The Professional'. The plot is episodic (in a good way) in the middle as the two of them encounter the various assassins sent to stop them. "You're not the only hero of a sad story" is a line that sums these encounters up, each villain having their own backstory. I'd begun to root for the badies as much as the heroes by the end. The film opens with Manji facing down 100 assassins and ends with him fighting 300 more, those two encounters and the 2-hours in between must make the body counter at least 500 or more, although the posters claim it's 1000. Kinda like playing the 'House of Leaves' level from 'Kill Bill' on god-mode
.It's even more badass than this trailer makes it looks:
![[+]](https://forums.fanedit.org/images/focus/collapse_collapsed.png)