Rewarding myself with movies...

So yesterday, after biting two pages out of my anthropology midterm paper (finished it today, thank you very much), and reconstructing most of my screenplay after the file corrupted itself (for really expensive software, Final Draft suicides surprisingly often), I decided I deserved a break. Now, when I'm writing I tend to be on Wikipedia and TVTropes researching facts and pop-culture, because I'm the kind of person who aspires to show her research and do it in a brilliant way. I'm not quite there, but who's counting?

Anyways, there are a bunch of tropes relating to cavemen/neanderthals and while skimming the pages, I became aware of a movie called The Man from Earth. It looked really interesting, so I looked it up on Netflix, and lo and behold, it was there and it was interesting! So I made a note to go back to it later and kept working on my paper.

Later came, I watched the movie, it was relevant to ALL of my interests.

Some things:

• In terms of film-style storytelling, this isn't really a film sort of film? To me it felt like a novel or a play that had been shot in order to reach the widest possible audience.
• ACTUALLY I think this would be an amazing play and I wonder if the screenwriter is aware of the fact?
• The trailer spoils one of the big twists, but it's such a part of the premise that it doesn't even matter. Like, I don't think the twist is so much that he's a caveman so much as what he's been doing for 14,000 years.
• IT GETS WEIRD.

I don't think that subtlety is really this movie's strong point, but that's not the point - it's good because it's a thought experiment and an exploration of a high-concept piece of Sci-Fi without any special effects, taking place entirely in more or less one location. And that's what's so interesting to me - it's a huge, epic science fiction story boiled down to like eight people in a room, reacting. And the story is as much about their reactions as it is to the story being told, so I don't even mind that you could say this is a major breach of "Show, don't tell." In fact, if there were flashbacks in John's story, I daresay they would have ruined the movie.

(Huge, epic science fiction stories boiled down to tight human dramas are one of my favorite things. It's part of what appeals to me so much about Makoto Shinkai's work.)

Anyways, have a trailer, and check this movie out, because it's really, really interesting.

Oh, and I made a tumblr.