December is CYBERPUNK!!!

This month's theme is "Cyberpunk." Over the course of the month of December, I will be viewing and reviewing the following movies, in the following order (hopefully). Follow along, if you'd like:

1. RoboCop (1987)
2. Hackers (1995)
3. Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
4. Strange Days (1995)
5. Dredd (2012)
6. Elysium (2013)
7. Ghost in the Shell (2017)
8. Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
9. Hotel Artemis (2018)
10. Mute (2018)

For those not in the know, cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science fiction. Most people use the following words to describe it: "high tech, low life." Cyberpunk is all about the abuse of technology, or the ways that the future leaves people behind, and how they find a way to make that tech work for them. Cyberpunk stories are political and nasty: it's one of the reason it doevtails so nicely with the noir genre. The aesthetic is all over the place, but the true spirit of the sub-genre is a little more specific. Hollywood has, much more often than not, got cyberpunk completely wrong. The movies in the list above represent an interesting sampler of Tinsel Town's track record in that regard.

The above list has been curated after much research and a lot of conversation with friends. It is neither complete, or comprehensive.

Not all of the movies are "good" movies. Some of them are quite bad. Some of them are "so bad they are good." Some of them are legitimately incredible. I do believe that the list will be a lot of fun to work through.

So join along, and trip down this genre movie hole with me.

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American Myth - Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

"Keep your lovin' brother happy." I remember the time my dad came home from Costco with the DVD of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly . It was a special edition, with a second disc full of features. I'd never seen anything like it: Sergio Leone had a specific vision that many would try, and fail, to replicate. He was the innovator of the so-called "Spaghetti Western." "Spaghetti," because Leone was Italian, and shot most of his movies in Europe and Italy on shoe-string budgets. It is an interesting thing to see this genre filtered through the eyes of a foreigner. His old west became even more fantasized, but not in the idealistic way: his westerns are gritty, larger than life epics that feel more like modern mythology than any John Wayne film ever did. You might think of John Ford as making the Disney-fied version of The American West: they are celebrations of American spirit and determination. But in the dark back corner of the library, you...

American Myth: A Series on the American Western

American Myth America is a young country. Younger, in context, than most of the other storied nations of the world. And, because of that, our nation's mythology is a bit different than other parts of the world. We don't have knights and castles and magic witches. No, the American mythology was formed when our country set its eyes westward. The American mythology was born when men and women set off from their homes and forged a life in untamed wilderness. That wilderness brought out the best in people. And the worst. And it brought out our myths. We traded knights for cowpokes, magic swords for six shooters, and dragons for deadly outlaws. Our castles were ramshackle towns in the middle of the desert, standing defiantly in the face of the natural order. A Genre is Born When the American film industry started, movies based on famous Old West tales were easy: there were no rights to speak of, they were adventurous and entertaining, and they celebrated the American spir...

Mob Month: Sin Nombre (2009)

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