Best scifi movies

Recently, I saw two of my all-time-favorite science fiction movies again. Blade Runner and 13th Floor. Both these movies are highly rated and have set the trend for modern science fiction. The 13th floor is about a simulation where there is a earth like world with real chracters in it. It is a must see. The movie Matrix was very much like 13th floor and was based on a similar story. BladeRunner is about a cop whose job is to deactivate “replicants” ( Robots ) in the future los angeles. Deckard and Roy batty have given excellent performances. Harrison ford is remarkable. Here are some of my favorite quotes from Bladerunner.

Roy Batty: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams … glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those … moments will be lost … in time, like tears … in rain. Time … to die.

Tyrell : If we gived them a past, we’d create a cushion, a pillow for their emotions and consequently we can control them better.”
Deckard : “Memories. You’re talking about memories.”

To Kill a Mockingbird

The No. 1 movie hero, according to the American Film Institute, possesses no superpowers, doesn’t wield a lightsaber or mow down the enemy while shouting nifty catch-phrases. In fact, he’s a lawyer, played by Gregory Peck. The Oscar winner brings a deep decency to the role of Atticus Finch, who takes on the case of a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama. The film unfurls through the eyes of Finch’s daughter, Scout, and everything about it, from the opening credits to Robert Duvall in his first screen role, is exceptional. It’s almost as good as Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The set boasts plenty of extras, which tend to become repetitive. But “A Conversation With Gregory Peck” and the documentary “Fearful Symmetry” are both good.

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Borodin Quartet: Tchaikovsky String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2. Disc Review

This is the Borodin Quartet in 1987, with Mikhail Kopeiman as first violin, playing repertoire that all but courses through the musicians’veins. The Tchaikovsky is deeply liomantic, played with a plush velvet sound iiid a liquid melodic fluency, but imbued always with a sense of purpose that brings direction to even the most motoric of the composer’s writing.The players’ phrasing is frequently aided by an easy rubato, and their performances occasionally take greater liberties. As Tchaikovsky scurries energetically to his climaxes he is aided by some unscheduled accelerandos, balanced by hefty ritenutos elsewhere, while in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet the pulse comes from inside the music, and leaves the world of the metronome far behind.

In other hands, such fluctuations could be mannered and irritating; here they seem not only natural but essential.The many facets of Tchaikovsky’s music are all given glittering life, from the turmoil in some of the outer movements to the exquisite opening of the Scherzo of the Second Quartet.

There Is crisp, clean playing in Shostakovich’s Third Quartet, and the great threnody of the Adagio is a masterpiece of controlled passion and concentration, in the Eighth Quartet, the refinement that has marked so much of the playing is subsumed beneath a rawness both emotional and sometimes literal.The second movement is violent, the bows snapping against the strings, and there is a scarily neurotic intensity to the third.

The performances were fiimed in the neo-classical surroundings of Henry Wood Hall in London, with an added bleak backdrop for the Shostakovich.

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Classic Archive: Itzhak Perlman - Elgar, Prokofiev & Saint-Saens

I ‘ I’ Х great advantage of DVD Is the opportunity to watch players at short range, an advantage taken at its best in a top-quality recording, where, if you get fed up with fiddly camera angles, you can always just close your eyes.To that extent, these BBC recordings make a frustrating disc.The earliest recording here, of Saint-Saens’s Introduction et Rondo capriccioso. dates from 1970, followed by the Prokofiev in 1980 and the Elgar in 1981, and listening to such comparatively modern recordings in mono is somewhere between a tease and really annoying. The quality of the playing is, of course, phenomenal, with the odd fiuff of a live performance irrelevant in the context of playing by a man at the height of his abilities, his deep involvement In the music and his joy in performing it to an audience clear to see.

The Prokofiev, performed in an unidentified hall (the information given is minimal), sizzles, the pyrotechnics dispatched with jawdropping ease, the melodies quarried out of the instrument.The first movement of the Eigar Concerto, recorded at a Royal Albert Hall Prom, is taken at a cracking pace,all fire and virtuosity.The Andante, too, is on the brisk side, and for all the richness of the playing sounds as if it could have benefited from a little more room to breathe. The Saint-Saens is great fun.

Musically this is a rewarding DVD, given the caveat above, but the real joy of it is to watch the magic close-up - and still not be able to see how it’s done.

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David Oistrakh: Artist Of The People?

I belong to the generation that as students drooled over David Oistrakh’s new recordings, but then had quite a surprise when on stage we saw a dour person whose face showed so little emotion. Even more infuriating was his ability to make everything look so ridiculously easy, with technical challenges just swept aside.

This 1994 documentary from the French violinist and film-maker Bruno Monsaingeon traces Oistrakh’s life from early years spent in his native Odessa through to the time when, as a young Jew in the Soviet Union, his career was only as good as his last competition result.

He triumphed in one after another, while the Communist authorities used that success to bolster the image of their regime.That he was financially exploited by that regime is made abundantly clear in a film interview with Yehudi Menuhin, who condemns the fact that Oistrakh was forced to perform incessantly and that everything he earnt abroad was channelled back to the party machine.

The musical excerpts are historically interesting but are often in grainy black and white with indifferent sound quality, giving little evidence of his great performances. But many close-ups show a bowing technique every student should study, for it produced those incomparable long-spun passages of lyric beauty.

Oistrakh’s son, Igor, adds family touches, including the fact that his father played the violin incessantly, and before he did anything in the morning he would play an excruciatingly difficult passage, only after which he seemed content.

Lucid subtitles, when the soundtrack is not in English, provide the finishing touch to a fascinating disc.