journal features

movie review - Pitch Black

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Vancouver, 2001.11.28

This is a Sci-Fi flick, and quite a good one. It has got a rare quality for sci-fi in being both watchable and not entirely ridiculous. Yes, it is a lot closer to the "Mad Max"es of the sci-fi genre than it is to the "Forbidden Planet"s, but it has great writing, realistic characters, and some charming insights into humanity. The setting is as bleak as they get, and the survival rate is not much better.

This movie held up to a second viewing quite well.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton