Moon (2009)

It has been so long since I've seen or read a really good hard science, science fiction story and then I get two in two days. You can't really beat that. HSF can run the gamut from epic to personal. I think it does this better than other forms of sf or fantasy because the focus is on the point of the story and science is necessary to the story , not in some McGuffin kind of way, but in an environmental kind of way. In many cases the science provides the setting as well as the mechanism for telling the story.
This film is all about Sam Rockwell. Much of the film is spent talking to a robotic arm that has Kevin Spacey's voice coming out of it, and the rest of the film is pent talking to himself (he plays multiple roles in the film). He inhabits the Sam Bell character in all of it's facets. The way he reacts to the earthshattering revelations, well earthshattering to him at least, seems very believable. I'm not sure how I would react to things if I had been living completely alone for three years, I think I might be a bit more, um, crazy than he is.
I loved the relationship between Sam and his robot companion Gerty. It was extremely reminiscent of the human-robot interaction in Robot & Frank. But, since this movie came first by three years, it's really the other film borrowing from this. I think this particular question, of can humans form friendships with machines is very germaine to modern life and calls into question what constitutes friendship and how it is different from companionship. I guess these films both presume that friendship is necessary for a human's well being, I'm not sure that it is, but I'm not sure that it isn't.
I think the great thing about HSF is that it always leaves you thinking. Maybe I've just been lucky and only read the good books and watched the good movies, but there seems to always be a question raised, often a societal ideal, for the audience to be left pondering long after the book or film is done. Sure, other genres do this too, but not as consistently. Or maybe because I am such a fan of this subgenre I dig deeper into the stories than I do in other types. Either way, I get a lot of stories like this one and I for one appreciate ruminating being part of my entertainment.

Moon on IMDb

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

I wanted to not like this movie. The last several movies recommended to me by the recommender of this film have totally sucked. And a couple of them, he admitted when I reported to him how much I disliked them, that he told me to watch them to confirm if they were as bad as he thought they were. What the fuck is up with that? It's one thing to recommend a movie to another and they end up disliking it. You might even offer a suggestion with a caveat of, "this might not be for you" or some such. You could even suggest a film with the warning of, "this movie sucked, but you might get a chuckle at a couple of the scenes." But to give a bad movie recommendation knowing it was bad and not give a warning...that's just wrong. I guess I'm spoiled by having one friend that is a good movie recommender.
I don't like Christopher Walken in most movies. The films where he has bit parts, they're okay as he's not on screen enough to bother me. I've mentioned before, but I'll say it again because I like the imagery - I think Walken would loose an "act off" against William Shatner. With that said, he was tolerable in this film. Not good. But tolerable.
Colin Farrel is one of those actors that I think is genuinely talented, but who I also think is a big enough wanker in real life that it sometimes bleeds through into his characters. *cough* *cough* Bullseye in the Daredevil film *cough* *cough* This is not one of those films. He plays a script writer who almost consciously fills the stereotype of writers and of the Irish, just so in the later half of the film he can have the break through of finally believing something and breaking the stereotype of the movie. I mean that he does, not that the movie breaks the stereotype.
Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell complete the cast of mains and are two of the seven psychopaths, well actually three, but I won't get into that. They both play quirky killers with aplumb. Harrelson plays the cold-hearted mob boss who will do anything for his dog, whom he loves dearly. Rockwell decides to become a killer to help his friend get ideas for a screen play. These are another two that toy with stereotypism so they can exploit later in the movie, though in ways that fit with how you think the movie will go, which is a bit of stereotype.
This film is very meta. It's about a man writing a screen play called Seven Psychopaths. The movie is the story of seven psychopaths, and some of the tales are made up while some are related to the writer as true while some are occurring both in his life and as stories related to him. They take the time to deconstruct several of the stories in depth. They talk about stereotypical roles in movies about killers and especially the stereotypes of women in these kinds of movies. There aren't a lot of women in the film and those that are there get very little air time, the one with the most on-screen time is the topless hooker. It's a bit of a slap in the face to spend so much time talking about how women are so much more than a victim or a bitch as they are portrayed in these movies, only to have all the female characters match the stereotypes that they say women are type-cast into.
The look of this film is a bit of a hodge-podge. It runs with one style for the first half an hour or so, and then changes, slowing way down for act II, and then picking back for an action-packed ending that is stylistically different from the beginning. We get started off with a Quentin Tarentino feel of fast cuts and graphics overlays, move into a Wes Anderson-like discussion of the higher morals of humans and end with a Sam Raimi goofy action flick, with all the predictable twists. Oh, and it's explosively violent, which means out of nowhere the film becomes graphically violent for a couple of moments and then goes back to it's mostly non-violent state.
This is a movie that you borrow, not buy. It has it's moments amd almost achieves some of it's own self-listed goals of stereotypes to break. Almost.

Seven Psychopaths on IMDb