There have been few movies to this point in the year that I have looked forward to as much as Prometheus, the new Ridley Scott movie that marks his return to the science fiction genre decades after having made two of its best specimens - Alien and Blade Runner.
And while I've found the summer movies that I've seen to be largely disappointing, none has disappointed me as much as Prometheus.
The odd thing is that during the movie - which is about a deep space mission to a planet where scientists believe they will find a race of beings hat essentially were the starting point of evolution on earth millions of years before - I was enjoying it. Prometheus looks great, can be genuinely scary, and has one terrific performance (by Michael Fassbender as an android with a hidden agenda). When we came out of it, Mrs. Content Guy was rather disenchanted with the whole experience, while I was feeling pretty good. But as I kept thinking about it, the more my mood matched hers ... it was like, once I held the movie up to the light, I realized that it was mostly style without much content.
One of the big lures of Prometheus has been that if it is not a direct prequel to Alien, it "shares DNA" with that classic movie. And while that's true, it is hard for me to explain exactly why or how. It just does, but that's not good enough.
There's a new summer TV series on A&E that I want to recommend to you. It's called "Longmire," and it is based on a series of mystery novels by Craig Johnson with which I am unfamiliar. It focuses on a modern day Wyoming sheriff, played by the wonderfully taciturn Robert Taylor, who is hiding a whole lot of pain related to his wife's recent death and maybe a few other secrets as well.
So far, the cases are interesting, the landscape is beautiful, the performances strong, and it is a modern western with a strong thematic link to the classic westerns of the past. (It has a lot in common with Tom Selleck's TV movie versions of the Robert B. Parker Jesse Stone novels ... just a few time zones to the west. This is a good thing.)
Catch it.
That's it for this week. Have a great weekend, and I'll see you Monday.
Fins Up!
And while I've found the summer movies that I've seen to be largely disappointing, none has disappointed me as much as Prometheus.
The odd thing is that during the movie - which is about a deep space mission to a planet where scientists believe they will find a race of beings hat essentially were the starting point of evolution on earth millions of years before - I was enjoying it. Prometheus looks great, can be genuinely scary, and has one terrific performance (by Michael Fassbender as an android with a hidden agenda). When we came out of it, Mrs. Content Guy was rather disenchanted with the whole experience, while I was feeling pretty good. But as I kept thinking about it, the more my mood matched hers ... it was like, once I held the movie up to the light, I realized that it was mostly style without much content.
One of the big lures of Prometheus has been that if it is not a direct prequel to Alien, it "shares DNA" with that classic movie. And while that's true, it is hard for me to explain exactly why or how. It just does, but that's not good enough.
There's a new summer TV series on A&E that I want to recommend to you. It's called "Longmire," and it is based on a series of mystery novels by Craig Johnson with which I am unfamiliar. It focuses on a modern day Wyoming sheriff, played by the wonderfully taciturn Robert Taylor, who is hiding a whole lot of pain related to his wife's recent death and maybe a few other secrets as well.
So far, the cases are interesting, the landscape is beautiful, the performances strong, and it is a modern western with a strong thematic link to the classic westerns of the past. (It has a lot in common with Tom Selleck's TV movie versions of the Robert B. Parker Jesse Stone novels ... just a few time zones to the west. This is a good thing.)
Catch it.
That's it for this week. Have a great weekend, and I'll see you Monday.
Fins Up!
- KC's View:
