Outgribe.com Science Fiction and Fantasy Movie Reviews

SF and Fantasy Movie Reviews Starting With G

GalaxyQuest (1999)

Genres: Adv Com SF

Terrific Star Trek spoof. Spoofs of popular space operas are idiotic, you say? Well they sure are, as a rule, but apparently not always. This is extremely loosely based on the original and it's really funny. Just to put your mind at ease, it has a perfectly good independent plot and doesn't spoof any particular episode or movie, just the atmosphere.

Garfield (2004) NR!!!

Genres: F Ani

Watched: trailer

This is the worst cat animation ever. It is fitting that it's based on a boring non-funny comic, but I'm not sure the comic comes down to the ickiness of this animation. However the script, as showcased by the trailer, seems fittingly awful.

Gepetto (2000) NR!!!

Genres: Mus F Kid

Watched: 20 min

Sometimes you see a face that is not merely plain but manages to contain nothing to suggest the possibility of beauty in a face. Sometimes you encounter a work like this, which is not merely crap but manages to make you doubt you ever liked anything in the genre. This Disney musical relates the adventures of Gepetto while Pinocchio is away. Gepetto can't sing in the least. It would be amazing that he's starring in this musical except the writing is so utterly inane that he fits right in. If you're young and impressionable you're likely to walk away with a depressed sensitivity to quality in musicals and fairy tales. I walked away merely depressed, and angry. Who allows those jerks to feed this kind of inane crap to the innocent who know no better? Well, not innocent of having bad taste, they probably have that anyway, but nobody is perfect and that's why the Bible prohibits tempting your neighbor. A corollary of this might be not encouraging your neighbor's lack of taste, especially if you stand to make money and the neighbor is a child and is in fact not your neighbor because you live somewhere where people can afford to have better taste than to give their kids this.

Ghost World (2000)

Genres: Dra MR

It's not very ghosty. An alternative misfit girl looks to make her own way in a small town, progressing away from normality.

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

Genres: Act Hor SF

It's plenty silly. The fighting tactics are really dumb. Given that, it's surprisingly entertaining.

Ginger Snaps (2000)

Genres: Hor

Fun and unusual werewolf movie with good teen dynamics and substantial gore.

God is Brazilian (2003 Brazil)

Genres: F Com

Some of the banter is funny, and the rest is serviceable to relax to. The plot is quite good.

Brazilian movies are great because Brazilians are so uninhibited and Brazil is so pretty. Everything is so natural: the races mix together freely, no-one thinks anything of cross-dressing, if someone has a whim to go on a crazy journey or give away all he owns or fall in love he goes right ahead. No-one is surprised by such things over there. There are always some colorful Brazilians in the background not paying attention and decoratively pounding fish or whatever it is they do. Not that having everything natural is always good . . . there are many failures in people and things, that maybe some falseness makes it more picturesque. Well, if you like it all natural, you can save a lot of money on your vacation.

God of Gamblers (1989 Hong Kong)

Genres: F Act Com Dra

After I saw GOG III I had to see this movie, even though it stars Chow Yun Fat (who for some reason doesn't like the convention followed by all other Hong Kong Chinese of using English names, probably the same reason I don't like him in general, he's so fake and show-offy and not funny. Because you gotta admit it's funny that they have names like Jimmy but they're little Chinese with Chinese last names). In Jing Wong's hands even Chow Yun Fat is good! Maybe he chose him as a challenge, to show he could make him look good. Like Woody Allen casts all these annoying stars but makes them work out OK in his movies -- Leonardo DiCaprio and such. Well, I suppose it might be credited to Chow Yun Fat himself to some extent. Maybe he just never gets roles where he isn't Chow Yun Fat, at least not in stuff that gets any play in the West. But if he's playing a retarded guy he's good. I thought I hated him, but now I don't.

To Western eyes the quirky comedy interposed with bloodbaths may seem a tad jarring but it's not a flaw, it's a cultural difference. Movies just have violent scenes, that's how it is over there, like Indian movies have musical numbers.

The fantasy element is slight. It's a natural extension of the glamorizing of gambling. The writer/director loves gambling and I guess at his level of finances (Wong Jing is one of Hong Kong's most famous directors), it probably is glamorous. From what I've seen, in the US anyway, it's anything but glamorous. Row upon row upon row of ugly retirees in shorts or stretch pants sitting in front of the gambling machines . . . I have a pretty negative view of it, based on that; some of those folks look pretty desperate, while others look mentally shut off. But I don't know, I guess it's great they're having fun. My retired-school-teacher neighbor just came back from a two-month cruise around the world and was telling me how great it was. She saw a load of countries, but most of her time was spent aboard that ship, gambling. She seems like she's got it together, so I guess it's OK.

God of Gamblers III: Back to Shanghai (1991 Hong Kong)

Genres: F Act Adv Com Rom

There's lots of funny banter, very fine physical comedy, a sweet musical number, and Stephen Chow! I love him, he's super adorable!

He's so great. Like, remember when I said it was so funny when his crotch kept catching on fire in A Chinese Odyssey: Part 1? Well here his butt catches on fire! He won't disappoint you! And now I know just the thing to get him for Valentine's Day: fire-retardant underwear. They make those you know. I know because I went to Burning Man.

The plot, well, it's sort of random but whatever, the plot isn't the point. It's an excuse for the rest of it. And the rest of it's great!

God Told Me To (1976) NR

Genres: SF

Boring and silly, and has an ugly blond guy with a disturbing prop on his hip.

Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla (2002 Japan) NR

Genres: SF Act

Guest review: The recurring theme of the Godzilla movies is that Science Is Bad, and this one brought that theme up-to-date by having the scientists dig evil Godzilla stem cells out of the bones of an old dead Godzilla, which they then put into a giant robot Godzilla designed to fight any other Godzillas that might appear. Unsurprisingly, Godzilla roared and the stem cells heard him and turned evil, and then MechaGodzilla rampaged through Tokyo and destroyed everything with rockets.

Even though MechaGodzilla was normally operated remotely from pilots in a plane, they hadn't included an off switch or anything like that. Although, cleverly, they did include an "Out Of Control" popup window on the GUI for operating him, so that you'd know it when it started rampaging. It is apparently part of the Japanese milieu that all important computer output is in English. Often bad English, or English saying very strange things. When MechaGodzilla didn't have enough energy and they tried to transmogrify more energy into him via a giant negative space maser wedgie, but it wasn't enough, the GUI flashed "Not Enough," for example. I need to include some screens like this in my GUIs.

Gravity (1976)

Genres: Com SF Short

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. A little girl embarks on an educational quest about gravity and learns plenty. Peed my pants laughing. Well not really but I pretended to have because my date was so cute and I wanted those silly things off. Go Big Sister.

Green Snake (1993 Hong Kong)

Genres: F

The theme felicitously corresponds to the current big news topic of gay marriage. In the movie, the region is overrun with animals who are striving to become human, training to do so for centuries. This is unnatural and displeasing to Buddha, and so a highly skilled monk goes around whipping their perverted hineys. Now I can't stop visualizing George Bush in Chinese monk robes fly-kicking all the cute but oh-so-unnatural gays.

It is strange that Buddha looks askance at animal people. In India, the birth of Buddhism, it's legal to marry an animal. (In France it's legal to marry a dead person.) Of course religions are evolving all the time and later interpretations may be quite surprising to the originators. And if you start with the premise that you shouldn't eat animals, you're sure to end up with some kind of BS.

It's such a good plot -- it's never clear for long who's good and who's bad, what's right and what's wrong. These sorts of issues are complicated, no matter what spin each camp puts on it. The audience and the protagonists are in the same boat as far as trying to sort it all out. Except it's much harder on the protagonists. Which makes it very entertaining for the audience.

What we can all easily come together on is our hatred for the guys who didn't reposition the subtitles. It's a very pretty movie and thankfully it's shown in wide screen. Which leaves vast room at the bottom of the picture for the subtitles. But that's not where they are. No, they have been shrunk with the rest of the content and appear in the picture in tiny white type. If you keep your eyes absolutely peeled you can make out what's going on most of the time, and sometimes you're lucky and a guy in dark robes walks across the screen from left to right. Whoever is responsible deserves a series of flying kicks to the head and then to be turned back into a louse.

Gremlins (1984)

Genres: Act Com F Hor

Exciting, cute, scary, and instructive fairy tale set in modern small-town America.

Guimba the Tyrant (1995 Mali)

Genres: F Com Dra

If you like your folklore heavily processed this is probably not the movie for you; you're better off watching Lord of the Rings. LOTR gets plenty baffling, boring, and ridiculous, just like raw folklore often does, but that isn't the distinction anyway, is it? It's that everyone has seen it too. Everything often gets baffling, boring, and ridiculous; the only distinction is your and your tribe's proximity to it. If you fancy a break from the stomping grounds of the tribe which surrounds you, this movie works very nicely. The fact that it's baffling (be prepared to confuse the characters, be thrown off by the pacing, and stumped by unexplained exotic folklore tropes) is helpful in achieving such a break -- it helps to flush out your habituated views and expectations. Leaving you ready for that wild and crazy thing you've always wanted to try but so far have pushed out of your mind! The thing to remember about that is that if it turns out to be baffling, boring, or ridiculous, do try it again, after a sufficient rest. Even things that never held any fascination for you, and about which you have a completely negative opinion, should be tried every once in a while to check if maybe you can start to appreciate them -- things like peanut butter, modern opera, and golf. In the least, you'll give yourself a nice little horror and that's worth something too! The desire for that is certainly deeply seated in the human psyche . . . maybe just for this purpose.

PS: I tested this review on J and he said he understood it. If you don't, ask him.

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