Underrated Movies

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Spanish. Bites its own tail so well it would have made Heinlein proud.
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Mood is everything. So foggy that you want to tell the director to use a wind machine to clear the landscape. And your brain. First time I saw it, at a SF movie marathon, Nicholas Brendon answered questions. He said that he was initially as foggy about what was going on as was the audience.
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Predicted the future so well that even though the future was 1999, it still isn't dated.
 
Coherence is great. I just took a look at my film diary and note that, "I was amazed to find it had a running time of 124 minutes. I would have sworn it was only 80/90 minutes long." Which is striking when you think that the film is all set in one location and consists mainly of people bickering with each other about what they should do next. I've watched it a couple of times now and I'm still wrong-footed and have to work at keeping up with the twists. Very good stuff

But I have to disagree about Timecrimes. Spoilers ahead:

Los Cronocrímenes (aka Timecrimes 2007) - Spanish looping time travel tale. The internal logic is flawless, the same events are revisited again and again as our protagonist just keeps on making mistakes and making things worse and worse for himself. The plot is no way as complex as some people seem to find. The real problems I had with the film was that it was far too long - it felt like a short film extended to an unreasonable length. And the fact the protagonist, with whom I guess we were supposed to feel sympathy as his life spiralled out of control, was such an unmitigated dick. He gets into the time travel looping mess by pervily peeping on a girl undressing in the woods and then keeps making stupid plot-driving mistake after stupid plot-driving mistake and acting like an arsehole. In the end he ends up killing the girl he was perving over and we are somehow supposed to feel sorry for him.

Strange Days I just remember as an ok millennial movie with the central SF idea just turning into a macguffin that didn't really play any part in the story other than just being The Desirable Thing. The important information it contains might just as well have been on a microfilm or a VHS tape - or minidisc if you were being contemporaneously 'futuristic'.
 
JunkMonkey said:
Coherence is great. I just took a look at my film diary and note that, "I was amazed to find it had a running time of 124 minutes. I would have sworn it was only 80/90 minutes long." Which is striking when you think that the film is all set in one location and consists mainly of people bickering with each other about what they should do next. I've watched it a couple of times now and I'm still wrong-footed and have to work at keeping up with the twists. Very good stuff

But I have to disagree about Timecrimes. Spoilers ahead:

Los Cronocrímenes (aka Timecrimes 2007) - Spanish looping time travel tale. The internal logic is flawless, the same events are revisited again and again as our protagonist just keeps on making mistakes and making things worse and worse for himself. The plot is no way as complex as some people seem to find. The real problems I had with the film was that it was far too long - it felt like a short film extended to an unreasonable length. And the fact the protagonist, with whom I guess we were supposed to feel sympathy as his life spiralled out of control, was such an unmitigated dick. He gets into the time travel looping mess by pervily peeping on a girl undressing in the woods and then keeps making stupid plot-driving mistake after stupid plot-driving mistake and acting like an arsehole. In the end he ends up killing the girl he was perving over and we are somehow supposed to feel sorry for him.

Strange Days I just remember as an ok millennial movie with the central SF idea just turning into a macguffin that didn't really play any part in the story other than just being The Desirable Thing. The important information it contains might just as well have been on a microfilm or a VHS tape - or minidisc if you were being contemporaneously 'futuristic'.
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JM,
I take your crit seriously. It's been more than a decade since I saw it. What stuck in my mind was the perfection of the back and forth time jumps. Preferable to the better known Predestination, or even the Japanese version of Door Into Summer.
 
Predestination I came to cold (I like knowing as little as possible about a film before I sit and watch) but realised not long in that it was based on "All You Zombies" and had fun staying one step ahead. I remember being mightily impressed by Sarah Snook and wondering why she didn't go on to have a stellar career. I thought she did an incredible job.
 
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