About
I'm Eric Brochu, a PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the University of British Columbia. This blog is a place for me to sound off on my research, my life, and my obsession with zombie movies.
- Email me!
- More about me.
- My curriculum vitae.
- My publications.
- My top 100 movies.
- My favourite TV series, albums, books, and films of the past decade!
Recently Seen
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Moon (2009)
2010-02-15 22:17
Man, if there's one microgenre I really have a soft spot for, it's low-budget "hard" science fiction films, where story and character are... not unimportant, but secondary to exploring ideas in meticulous detail. Moon is the story of the only occupant of a lunar base (a brilliant performance by Sam Rockwell), and what happens when he's suddenly *not* the only occupant. It borrows hugely and openly from 1970s sci-fi, but its ideas are its own, and it's fascinating to watch them unfold.
2010-02-15
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The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
2010-02-07 17:38
Awesome movie, but what does the title mean? Shouldn't the second one, where Bourne threatens his former masters, be the ultimatum, and this one, where he kicks their collective asses, be the supremacy? It's a good thing it has some of the best action and suspense set pieces of all time to distract me from this, or I might get annoyed.
2010-02-07
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The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
2010-02-03 12:39
The weakest of the Bourne trilogy, though I still like it more than the best James Bond movie. For one thing, there's actual suspense -- the conclusion doesn't feel preordained and Matt Damon's grim efficiency reminds us that the stakes are serious, a sharp contrast to Bond's glib sociopathy. It also takes place in something closer to the real world than the Bond films, though it's increasingly hard to buy the consequence-free international carnage being wrought by US interests.
2010-02-03
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The Bourne Identity (2002)
2010-02-03 12:31
I picked up the Bourne trilogy on sale and I've been watching them in one-hour chunks before bed. The first one is definitely the most conventional, though it still has a lot of grit and a distinctive style, not to mention some pretty awesome stunt work.
2010-02-03
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The White Ribbon (2009)
2010-02-02 12:23
In a small, pre-WWI German town, repression, cruelty and hopelessness grip the townsfolk like a vise, and mysterious violence starts to erupt among the generation that would grow up to create National Socialism. Knowing Michael Haneke's previous films, I was expecting something bombastic. While there's definitely a take-home message, what I found fascinating was the dissection of how the groundwork for such an ideology is laid.
2010-02-02
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