Overview of Postmodern Movies

Pastiche

Pulp Fiction - Quirky tribute to old Hollywood crime dramas and "Pulp" magazines, filled with numerous pop culture references

Jackie Brown - Tarantino's spin on "blaxploitation" action flicks of the 1970's that manages to reinvent Pam Grier and her co-stars

Kill Bill, Volume 1 - Stylized fusion and tribute of Hong Kong action flicks and spaghetti Westerns, filled with exaggerated stereotypes

Scream - A postmodern slasher movie, where the killer and his victims knowingly play out the clichéd plots of classic horror films

Scary Movie - Low brow, third order simulacra, is a pastiche of other pastiches (Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer)

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark - Campy cult comedy that follows a vampire TV hostess as fate brings her to suburbia

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Tongue-in-cheek horror/comedy that follows a suburban high school student and vampire hunter

This is Spinal Tap - Mockumentary about a fictitious British band on their American comeback tour

Austin Powers - Mock Bond film pays homage to the popular culture of the Swinging 60's, British Invasion, and ridiculous Spy flicks

 

Flattening of Affect

2001 - A Space Odyssey - Sci-Fi space tale where the ship's computer (HAL) shows more emotion than the machine-like human crew

Natural Born Killers - Victims of traumatized childhoods become serial killers glorified by the mass media

A Clockwork Orange - A dystopian examination of ultra-violence, social conditioning, free will, and post-industrial alienation

American Psycho - A look at our culture's desensitization to violence via a Wall Street professional and cold blooded killer

Rules of Attraction - A modern love triangle between numbed, self-absorbed, over-priviledged students at a fictional New England college

Less Than Zero - A rich college student in the 80's binges on sex, drugs, and alcohol and goes from having it all to having nothing

The Stepford Wives - Postmodern-feminist tale where the dull subservient lives of suburban women is part of a plot to replace them

Fight Club - Violent and schizophrenic tale of a man and his underground society, full of plot twists, ironies, and anarchy

Gattaca - Dull and sterile society where genetic imperfections relegate "real" people to menial lives

Apocalypse Now - Classic movie where the horrors of war lead to detachment and insanity

The Deer Hunter - Commentary on the futility of war follows long time friends trying to cope with their return to "normal" lives

Taxi Driver - A life of loneliness and alienation in the big city drives this taxi driver (Robert Deniro) to insanity and violence

Lost in Translation - A chance friendship of two lost souls in a foreign land brings true emotion to their affectless lives

 

Hyperreality

The Matrix Trilogy - Cyberpunk twist where the world is in fact a simulated prison for humanity run by intelligent machine agents

The Thirteenth Floor - Murder mystery set in a virtual recreation of 1930's Los Angeles

Total Recall - Adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story with the ambiguous premise that the whole experience was an implanted memory

eXistenZ - A designer gets lost in her own virtual reality game, full of Kafkaesque references and hallucinations

The Truman Show - A sense that the world is not quite right leads Truman to find that he is the star of an expansive reality TV hoax

Kick-Ass - Comic book geeks turned vigilantes make their superhero fantasies a bloody reality in this dark action-comedy

Inception - A team of con-men and architects loses touch with reality as they delve ever deeper into their targets' dreams

 

Time Bending

12 Monkeys - A man is forced to travel through time to find the reason for humanity's near extinction by a deadly virus

Paycheck - Scientist investigates why he turned down a $90M paycheck for a self-addressed envelope he doesn't remember sending

Dark City - A retro-futuristic setting where mysterious beings bend space and time to test the limits of humanity

Minority Report - A cop uses knowledge of the future to make arrests before crimes are actually committed

Primer - Time-travel thriller that looks at the paradoxes and ethical implications of the ability to change the past

Memento - Flashbacks lead the viewer back in time to better experience the life of a man with no long term memory

Donnie Darko - Cult classic about a troubled teenager and his attempt to save the world, covers topics like time travel and free will

 

Altered States

Videodrome - Sleazy cable TV operator's hallucinogenic nightmare of the "new flesh": merging of television with the human body

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - The drug-fueled chronicles of a journalist's hallucinogenic search for the American Dream

Naked Lunch - Fusion of Burrough's novel and his own life, follows a junkie author through his paranoid and Kafkaesque experiences

A Scanner Darkly - An undercover narcotics agent gets hooked and leads a double life as the hunter and the hunted

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind - A mind-bending look at reality when altered memories are used as a cure for heartbreak

A Beautiful Mind - Anti-social and schizoprenic genius John Nash battles back from a reality of his own creation

 

More Human than Human

Blade Runner - Simulacra-focused movie follows an android hunter who himself may be one of the "more human than human" copies

Screamers - Another movie based on a Philip K. Dick story, features a war against machines self-evolved to mimick humans

Artificial Intelligence - Pinocchio-like story of a robot boy and his quest to be "real"

Robocop - A cybernetically enhanced cop seeks to regain his identity in a dystopian future driven by capitalism and the mass media

Wall-E - Redemption comes from a garbage robot in its quest for love after technology wastes away earth and all of mankind

District 9 - A ruthless bureaucrat becomes a better person after turning into one of the aliens he most despises

Terminator Salvation - Ex-con Marcus gets a second chance as a cyborg and makes the ultimate sacrifice for John Connor

Avatar - Crippled Marine dons "new flesh" and regains his humanity among an indigenous alien population he was sent to eradicate

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