All right, true believers, I am getting ready to be back in business with this thing for 2010. I had some unexpected things come up caused me to take a break a little earlier than I expected, but I had been planning to regroup and figure out my gameplan to attack the 1980s anyway.
It's a big decade for sci-fi movies, and there is no way I can even remotely hope to be comprehensive without watching literally about a hundred movies. And that would take me almost all year. So for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, I am limiting myself to watching about 30 to 40 movies per decade. This means I won't be able to see everything, but I should be able to get to the most interesting stuff that I haven't seen yet and also some of the classics I want to see again.
But! If you have any movies that are near and dear to your heart that you really want me to watch, this would be a good time to make suggestions. I can't promise I'll watch or write about all of them, but I will definitely research them all and see if I should add them to my list. Also, I am eliminating screenshots at least for the time being, since they make the whole process more time-consuming. If you really need the visual stimulus, let me know and I'll see if I can restore them at least partially.
Finally, just to prove that this is not some idle promise forged of best intentions and no follow-through, here is a partial list of entries I already have written that will be going up in the coming weeks, starting with the week of January 4.
-- DEMON SEED (1977), in which Julie Christie is impregnated by an evil computer
-- WIZARDS (1977), the animated sci-fi/fantasy flick with Nazi bad guys that got Ralph Bakshi the job of adapting THE LORD OF THE RINGS
-- BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (1978), the original mini-series starring Lorne Greene, Dirk Benedict, and Jane Seymour
-- THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978), in which elderly Gregory Peck plays Dr Josef Mengele (!) and gets into a fist fight with elderly Laurence Olivier (!!)
-- STALKER (1979), which has been requested by more than one person
-- THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979), the first made-for-TV sci-fi movie produced by American public television
-- FLASH GORDON (1980), a movie that is practically impossible to describe
-- THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981), which everyone except Americans will know by its original title of MAD MAX 2
And some additional surprises! So tell all your friends to come on by in the new year. And thanks for hanging around so long!
Monday, December 28, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
1977: STAR WARS
What’s it about?
A couple of robots escape from a space battle with sensitive data that could help a scrappy band of rebels destroy a giant weapon called the Death Star. The robots crash land on a desert planet, where they hook up with a young moisture farmer (who dreams of space heroics) and a grizzled old hermit played by Alec Guinness (who hopes to teach the youngster an old martial arts philosophy called “the Force”).
A young Harrison Ford and an alien who looks like Bigfoot agree to transport the fugitives and the secret plans to the rebel base. But first they must rescue one of the rebellion’s leaders (a feisty princess) from deep inside the Death Star (a moon-sized space station that destroys entire planets) and have a quick electric sword fight with top bad guy Darth Vader (a black-helmeted mystic voiced by James Earl Jones). After all that’s done, the rebellion uses the captured plans to launch a last-ditch attack against the Death Star before their secret headquarters is blasted into oblivion.
Is it any good?
I said at the very beginning of this project that I was going to focus on less well-known movies instead of the ones that everybody knows about. That’s still true -- I’m still watching at least one movie that I haven’t seen yet for each year and still doing my best to dig a little deeper to find them. But I have known for a long time now that I was going to write something about STAR WARS. Even if I had nothing to say myself, it would at least give other people a chance to say whatever they wanted. Because, as you all know, everybody has an opinion on STAR WARS.
The version that I just finished watching is the DVD of the original theatrical version (as opposed to the special edition with additional footage that came out in 1997). I picked this version on purpose -- not because I think it’s “better”, but because it’s practically impossible for me to watch the special edition without playing a (very distracting) game of “spot the new footage”.
Like most folks my age, I watched STAR WARS a lot as a kid. It was on television every few months, and at some point my folks taped one of those broadcasts so that we could watch it whenever we wanted on long summer days. (We had no Nintendo in my house, incidentally.) I was in high school when the special edition version was released to theaters, and my friends and I naturally all went, since none of us had ever had the chance to see it on the big screen. And then, after that -- nothing. Except for a snippet here and there on television, I didn’t watch STAR WARS again for ten years. I did see a couple of the prequel movies (one in a second-run theater and one on DVD), but after 1997 I left the original trilogy alone for a decade.
The ten-year gap was at least partly on purpose. After watching something so many times during such formative years, I felt like STAR WARS was no longer just a movie to me. It’s a rare experience that I can remember having at many different points in my life. Watching STAR WARS had become like an archaeological expedition -- I could use the movie as a prism to look back into my past and remember how I felt at different stages of growing up. And for some reason, I wanted to put a rest to that. Without being too melodramatic about it, I suppose I packed up STAR WARS with the rest of my childhood and started looking for new experiences instead.
Until, that is, one fateful night in a hotel room in Ventura, California. Flipping around the cable stations, I came across the very beginning of STAR WARS on HBO. It was totally unplanned, but it had been ten years since I had last seen it and I decided right then that enough time had passed. I could watch it again with an uncritical eye and judge its merits as a mere movie. The result? I didn’t much like it.
I liked parts of it, of course. I couldn’t deny that the assault on the Death Star was an amazing fifteen minutes of cinema, and some of the screwball chemistry between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher was fun. But by and large, I was not impressed by the simple plot, flat characters, and borderline nonsensical events. I could see why Alec Guinness had asked George Lucas to kill him off. Yet, watching it again now, I can’t help but think I completely missed the point in that hotel room.
Of course, things are different now. For the past nine months, I have almost literally watched nothing else besides science fiction movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. A couple entries ago, I said that I had this secret hypothesis that science fiction could be divided into pre-STAR WARS and post-STAR WARS. I don’t really think that’s true anymore, but it is certainly true that there is nothing else prior to 1977 that looks or even feels even remotely like STAR WARS. George Lucas didn’t invent the space opera, but he made it look absolutely incredible.
One of the most interesting things about STAR WARS (in the context of the popular sci-fi flicks that came before it) is that it isn’t designed to make you think. It has no specific message or cautionary tale to deliver. George Lucas famously cribbed from Joseph Campbell’s work on the monomyth when he was working on the movie, but any “meaning” in the movie is vague and mushy. This is a big departure from movies like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) or even CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), where all the spectacle and circumstance seem crafted specifically to make you ponder the nature of humanity (or something equally heavy).
STAR WARS is entirely an adventure -- and it’s an adventure in a startling universe. The Mos Eisley cantina scene alone contains more surprising aliens than the rest of sci-fi cinema had managed to conjure up in the previous eighty years. The same holds true for the other details of the sci-fi world -- the giant skeleton of some extinct creature in the Tatooine desert, the glimpses of banthas being ridden by sand people, the brief allusions to the Galactic Senate by the Imperial brass, the battered and dirty ships of the rebellion, and so on.
STAR WARS is a movie that is just full of stuff -- much of it half-realized or barely mentioned. Even the concepts of Jedi knights and the Force itself are undeveloped here. I don’t think this is a bad thing though. Much of what I loved about STAR WARS as a kid were these tantalizing glimpses at a world beyond. It was a few years before I saw any of the sequels, and I know that I wanted to know more about everything in the world. (Most of all, I wanted to see more banthas.) In some ways, the sequels and the special editions ruin some of this feeling of wonder and excitement.
On the other hand, as I was watching this time, I was surprised how much my knowledge of the rest of the series gave more meaning to certain events. I found it very hard to identify anything redeeming about THE PHANTOM MENACE and ATTACK OF THE CLONES when I saw them (never saw REVENGE OF THE SITH), but I was aware this time that knowing what Obi Wan Kenobi was like back in his prime made his appearance here as an old man all that more meaningful. And his acquiescence to death at the hands of Darth Vader was something that never ever made any sense to me as a kid or teenager. It’s only in knowing what Obi Wan knows about the relationship between himself and Darth Vader, and between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, that it actually makes sense.
So STAR WARS is pretty well ruined for me as a movie, from a combination of individual factors, cultural factors, and George Lucas specific factors. From my point of view, we’ve all collaborated to turn a perfectly decent movie into... what exactly? Something more than a movie, I suppose, and something seemingly completely unique. Maybe generations from now or in countries somehow untouched by American culture, folks will think of STAR WARS as just another movie. But for me at least, I don’t think that kind of assessment is possible at all.
What else happened this year?
More entries to come! Stick around and find out!
A couple of robots escape from a space battle with sensitive data that could help a scrappy band of rebels destroy a giant weapon called the Death Star. The robots crash land on a desert planet, where they hook up with a young moisture farmer (who dreams of space heroics) and a grizzled old hermit played by Alec Guinness (who hopes to teach the youngster an old martial arts philosophy called “the Force”).
A young Harrison Ford and an alien who looks like Bigfoot agree to transport the fugitives and the secret plans to the rebel base. But first they must rescue one of the rebellion’s leaders (a feisty princess) from deep inside the Death Star (a moon-sized space station that destroys entire planets) and have a quick electric sword fight with top bad guy Darth Vader (a black-helmeted mystic voiced by James Earl Jones). After all that’s done, the rebellion uses the captured plans to launch a last-ditch attack against the Death Star before their secret headquarters is blasted into oblivion.
Is it any good?
I said at the very beginning of this project that I was going to focus on less well-known movies instead of the ones that everybody knows about. That’s still true -- I’m still watching at least one movie that I haven’t seen yet for each year and still doing my best to dig a little deeper to find them. But I have known for a long time now that I was going to write something about STAR WARS. Even if I had nothing to say myself, it would at least give other people a chance to say whatever they wanted. Because, as you all know, everybody has an opinion on STAR WARS.
The version that I just finished watching is the DVD of the original theatrical version (as opposed to the special edition with additional footage that came out in 1997). I picked this version on purpose -- not because I think it’s “better”, but because it’s practically impossible for me to watch the special edition without playing a (very distracting) game of “spot the new footage”.
Like most folks my age, I watched STAR WARS a lot as a kid. It was on television every few months, and at some point my folks taped one of those broadcasts so that we could watch it whenever we wanted on long summer days. (We had no Nintendo in my house, incidentally.) I was in high school when the special edition version was released to theaters, and my friends and I naturally all went, since none of us had ever had the chance to see it on the big screen. And then, after that -- nothing. Except for a snippet here and there on television, I didn’t watch STAR WARS again for ten years. I did see a couple of the prequel movies (one in a second-run theater and one on DVD), but after 1997 I left the original trilogy alone for a decade.
The ten-year gap was at least partly on purpose. After watching something so many times during such formative years, I felt like STAR WARS was no longer just a movie to me. It’s a rare experience that I can remember having at many different points in my life. Watching STAR WARS had become like an archaeological expedition -- I could use the movie as a prism to look back into my past and remember how I felt at different stages of growing up. And for some reason, I wanted to put a rest to that. Without being too melodramatic about it, I suppose I packed up STAR WARS with the rest of my childhood and started looking for new experiences instead.
Until, that is, one fateful night in a hotel room in Ventura, California. Flipping around the cable stations, I came across the very beginning of STAR WARS on HBO. It was totally unplanned, but it had been ten years since I had last seen it and I decided right then that enough time had passed. I could watch it again with an uncritical eye and judge its merits as a mere movie. The result? I didn’t much like it.
I liked parts of it, of course. I couldn’t deny that the assault on the Death Star was an amazing fifteen minutes of cinema, and some of the screwball chemistry between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher was fun. But by and large, I was not impressed by the simple plot, flat characters, and borderline nonsensical events. I could see why Alec Guinness had asked George Lucas to kill him off. Yet, watching it again now, I can’t help but think I completely missed the point in that hotel room.
Of course, things are different now. For the past nine months, I have almost literally watched nothing else besides science fiction movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. A couple entries ago, I said that I had this secret hypothesis that science fiction could be divided into pre-STAR WARS and post-STAR WARS. I don’t really think that’s true anymore, but it is certainly true that there is nothing else prior to 1977 that looks or even feels even remotely like STAR WARS. George Lucas didn’t invent the space opera, but he made it look absolutely incredible.
One of the most interesting things about STAR WARS (in the context of the popular sci-fi flicks that came before it) is that it isn’t designed to make you think. It has no specific message or cautionary tale to deliver. George Lucas famously cribbed from Joseph Campbell’s work on the monomyth when he was working on the movie, but any “meaning” in the movie is vague and mushy. This is a big departure from movies like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) or even CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), where all the spectacle and circumstance seem crafted specifically to make you ponder the nature of humanity (or something equally heavy).
STAR WARS is entirely an adventure -- and it’s an adventure in a startling universe. The Mos Eisley cantina scene alone contains more surprising aliens than the rest of sci-fi cinema had managed to conjure up in the previous eighty years. The same holds true for the other details of the sci-fi world -- the giant skeleton of some extinct creature in the Tatooine desert, the glimpses of banthas being ridden by sand people, the brief allusions to the Galactic Senate by the Imperial brass, the battered and dirty ships of the rebellion, and so on.
STAR WARS is a movie that is just full of stuff -- much of it half-realized or barely mentioned. Even the concepts of Jedi knights and the Force itself are undeveloped here. I don’t think this is a bad thing though. Much of what I loved about STAR WARS as a kid were these tantalizing glimpses at a world beyond. It was a few years before I saw any of the sequels, and I know that I wanted to know more about everything in the world. (Most of all, I wanted to see more banthas.) In some ways, the sequels and the special editions ruin some of this feeling of wonder and excitement.
On the other hand, as I was watching this time, I was surprised how much my knowledge of the rest of the series gave more meaning to certain events. I found it very hard to identify anything redeeming about THE PHANTOM MENACE and ATTACK OF THE CLONES when I saw them (never saw REVENGE OF THE SITH), but I was aware this time that knowing what Obi Wan Kenobi was like back in his prime made his appearance here as an old man all that more meaningful. And his acquiescence to death at the hands of Darth Vader was something that never ever made any sense to me as a kid or teenager. It’s only in knowing what Obi Wan knows about the relationship between himself and Darth Vader, and between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, that it actually makes sense.
So STAR WARS is pretty well ruined for me as a movie, from a combination of individual factors, cultural factors, and George Lucas specific factors. From my point of view, we’ve all collaborated to turn a perfectly decent movie into... what exactly? Something more than a movie, I suppose, and something seemingly completely unique. Maybe generations from now or in countries somehow untouched by American culture, folks will think of STAR WARS as just another movie. But for me at least, I don’t think that kind of assessment is possible at all.
What else happened this year?
More entries to come! Stick around and find out!
Thursday, October 15, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1976: IN THE DUST OF THE STARS
What’s it about?
A space-faring civilization sends a rocket mission in response to a distress signal from an unexplored planet. Arriving several years after the signal was sent, the crew lands safely on a strange and seemingly peaceful planet, but only after some emergency maneuvers during landing. After attending a party thrown by the local leader, most of the crew is strangely in favor of just leaving and starting the years long journey back to their home.
The sole member of the crew who stayed home from the party begins to suspect that there are some mind control shenanigans at work. He takes a probe out to investigate, and luckily discovers a shaft leading down underground -- where it is quickly apparent that an entire race of people is enslaved. It was these slaves who sent the distress signal, but it seems unlikely the small crew of the rocket can help them much -- especially after one of them is captured and tortured by the oppressive surface dwellers.
Is it any good?
This is a pretty unremarkable sci-fi flick, so I wasn’t originally planning to write about it. But it was produced by a Soviet bloc country (the third one I’ve seen from East Germany so far) and that alone should be worth remarking on. So I figured there’d be no harm in doing a short write-up and trying to find something to talk about.
IN THE DUST OF THE STARS feels like an extended episode of STAR TREK. A rocket crew lands on a planet and encounters a mystery, some cajoling, some deception, some threats, a horrible secret, and then some violence. The movie isn’t all that long, and there are some weird interludes that feel like padding (such as a lengthy nude dance by one of the mentally blocked crew members), so it’s easy to imagine the whole thing cut down to forty-five minutes.
I’m always kind of confused when I run across sci-fi movies like this. I expect science fiction movies to be “big” in some way. The bigness is often literal -- giant monsters always give a feeling of grandeur to things. Or the bigness can simply be that the entire Earth is threatened by destruction, or that there is some appropriately expansive theme or spectacle playing out. Of course, there are plenty of small science fiction stories -- they don’t all have to be epic. But I suppose I feel like these kind of small mysteries are more “television sized” for some reason.
Part of the reason for the small feeling here is that the story is set in some completely made-up galaxy and Earth is never mentioned at all. Both the planet where the rocket comes from and the one where it lands are made-up sci-fi worlds. There’s no sense that any of this will ever affect the Earth at all -- and not even any sense that the races in question are related to or descended from Earth folks. (Everyone does look 100% human though.)
I’m sure that using completely fantastical settings was the safest way to make sci-fi in the Soviet bloc. Talking about real nations would mean following the party line (whatever it might be that day), but putting your action on some distant world with no relation to Earth would help isolate the film makers from any criticism or repercussions if they did want to say anything subversive. On the other hand, IN THE DUST OF THE STARS is not really subversive of anything at all. The anti-slavery message is one that works equally well in communist and western societies. (These aren’t metaphorical wage-slaves after all. They are just the normal chain gang kind that everybody objects to.) There’s some disapproval of decadent lifestyles as well, which hardly seems like it would be controversial on groundbreaking on either side of the Iron Curtain. The harmless clowning in IVAN VASIELIVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE (1973) seems more likely to subvert the party than anything in this movie.
Things do get a bit “bigger” towards the end of the movie. The dilemma that the rocket crew finds themselves in is pretty interesting, though it’s not exactly spelled out. The crew consists of four women and two men, and obviously their numbers are not enough to do much against the entrenched aristocracy. The captain believes that they are honor-bound to stay and help the slaves resist their captors -- even though it will take many years (or generations) until they can be free again. The rest of the crew doesn’t believe they have any such obligation. This is a question worth wrestling over, and the movie doesn’t deliver any easy answers in the end.
There’s also a bit of appealing weirdness about the movie. The alien party is both futuristic and hedonistic -- the better to seduce the straight-arrow crew members, I suppose. And weird bits like the long nude dance I alluded to before actually add a bit of an off-balance feeling to the movie. So even though the plot could probably be compressed into television size, some of the atmosphere would probably be lost along the way. Still, if anybody is actually interested in Soviet bloc sci-fi movies, I would recommend THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967), EOLOMEA (1972), and SOLYARIS (1972) before you even think about watching this one.
A space-faring civilization sends a rocket mission in response to a distress signal from an unexplored planet. Arriving several years after the signal was sent, the crew lands safely on a strange and seemingly peaceful planet, but only after some emergency maneuvers during landing. After attending a party thrown by the local leader, most of the crew is strangely in favor of just leaving and starting the years long journey back to their home.
The sole member of the crew who stayed home from the party begins to suspect that there are some mind control shenanigans at work. He takes a probe out to investigate, and luckily discovers a shaft leading down underground -- where it is quickly apparent that an entire race of people is enslaved. It was these slaves who sent the distress signal, but it seems unlikely the small crew of the rocket can help them much -- especially after one of them is captured and tortured by the oppressive surface dwellers.
Is it any good?
This is a pretty unremarkable sci-fi flick, so I wasn’t originally planning to write about it. But it was produced by a Soviet bloc country (the third one I’ve seen from East Germany so far) and that alone should be worth remarking on. So I figured there’d be no harm in doing a short write-up and trying to find something to talk about.
IN THE DUST OF THE STARS feels like an extended episode of STAR TREK. A rocket crew lands on a planet and encounters a mystery, some cajoling, some deception, some threats, a horrible secret, and then some violence. The movie isn’t all that long, and there are some weird interludes that feel like padding (such as a lengthy nude dance by one of the mentally blocked crew members), so it’s easy to imagine the whole thing cut down to forty-five minutes.
I’m always kind of confused when I run across sci-fi movies like this. I expect science fiction movies to be “big” in some way. The bigness is often literal -- giant monsters always give a feeling of grandeur to things. Or the bigness can simply be that the entire Earth is threatened by destruction, or that there is some appropriately expansive theme or spectacle playing out. Of course, there are plenty of small science fiction stories -- they don’t all have to be epic. But I suppose I feel like these kind of small mysteries are more “television sized” for some reason.
Part of the reason for the small feeling here is that the story is set in some completely made-up galaxy and Earth is never mentioned at all. Both the planet where the rocket comes from and the one where it lands are made-up sci-fi worlds. There’s no sense that any of this will ever affect the Earth at all -- and not even any sense that the races in question are related to or descended from Earth folks. (Everyone does look 100% human though.)
I’m sure that using completely fantastical settings was the safest way to make sci-fi in the Soviet bloc. Talking about real nations would mean following the party line (whatever it might be that day), but putting your action on some distant world with no relation to Earth would help isolate the film makers from any criticism or repercussions if they did want to say anything subversive. On the other hand, IN THE DUST OF THE STARS is not really subversive of anything at all. The anti-slavery message is one that works equally well in communist and western societies. (These aren’t metaphorical wage-slaves after all. They are just the normal chain gang kind that everybody objects to.) There’s some disapproval of decadent lifestyles as well, which hardly seems like it would be controversial on groundbreaking on either side of the Iron Curtain. The harmless clowning in IVAN VASIELIVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE (1973) seems more likely to subvert the party than anything in this movie.
Things do get a bit “bigger” towards the end of the movie. The dilemma that the rocket crew finds themselves in is pretty interesting, though it’s not exactly spelled out. The crew consists of four women and two men, and obviously their numbers are not enough to do much against the entrenched aristocracy. The captain believes that they are honor-bound to stay and help the slaves resist their captors -- even though it will take many years (or generations) until they can be free again. The rest of the crew doesn’t believe they have any such obligation. This is a question worth wrestling over, and the movie doesn’t deliver any easy answers in the end.
There’s also a bit of appealing weirdness about the movie. The alien party is both futuristic and hedonistic -- the better to seduce the straight-arrow crew members, I suppose. And weird bits like the long nude dance I alluded to before actually add a bit of an off-balance feeling to the movie. So even though the plot could probably be compressed into television size, some of the atmosphere would probably be lost along the way. Still, if anybody is actually interested in Soviet bloc sci-fi movies, I would recommend THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967), EOLOMEA (1972), and SOLYARIS (1972) before you even think about watching this one.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
1976: THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
What’s it about?
Space alien David Bowie lands on Earth, files for nine lucrative patents, and becomes impossibly wealthy. His company, World Enterprises, makes futuristic consumer gadgets like self-developing film and metal balls that play music. But one day while traveling incognito, he faints on an elevator and ends up in a relationship with a hotel maid.
Meanwhile, college professor Rip Torn comes to work for World Enterprises on its new private space program. He begins to suspect that Bowie is not quite what he appears to be, and uses a hidden X-ray camera to determine that he’s not human. But just as Bowie is about to fly back to his family in outer space, the government starts hounding him for being too successful.
Is it any good?
I haven’t really decided whether I like David Bowie as an actor or not. He seems like the kind of guy you hire not so much for what he can do, but for who he is. (Kind of like Andre the Giant or Jenny McCarthy.) I don’t think he necessarily does a bad job as the alien visitor in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, but it seems pretty obvious that he was picked for the role at least partly because he’s a weird guy who had pretended to be an alien before in his albums and live performances. I can’t deny that David Bowie is a massively talented songwriter and musician -- but, look, there was a guy at my high school who told everybody for a year that he was a vampire, but that still doesn’t make him the right guy to play Dracula.
Then again, David Bowie is not really a problem in this movie. I can’t help wonder if another actor might have been better, but the alien we get is serviceable enough. The bigger problem is that so much of the movie is impossible to understand -- at least the first time through, but some of it is still obscure after more than one viewing. So much information is withheld for so long that a lot of interesting things just go by unnoticed.
The movie starts with Bowie’s arrival on Earth -- except we don’t see his spaceship or much of anything that suggests he’s any different from any drifter. He just starts out walking down a hill with no explanation of who he is, where he has come from, or why he is on Earth. And it’s quite a while into the movie before any of those questions are answered -- and one of the crucial ones (why he is there) never is at all.
I read the Walter Tevis novel that this movie is based on a couple of years ago, so I knew generally what to expect. I already knew, for instance, that when Bowie walks to a little town and sells a ring to a jeweler for twenty bucks that he is taking the first tiny step towards building up the seed money that he will use to found his corporate empire. But in the movie, there is no apparent reason for why we are watching such incredibly mundane things, and frankly the whole beginning is pretty boring as a result. The book, I should say, is not much better at this point at giving explanations. But at least there is some mystery about who the visitor is, and there is an awareness that he is somehow fundamentally different from everybody else. But since there’s no voiceover narration in the movie, we only get hints about that.
The same kind of problem persists throughout the movie. Characters are introduced (like Rip Torn’s college professor) with no indication of how they will fit into the story, so everything they do at first just seems meaningless. Once you know who they are and what role they play, it’s clear that there were key little details even in those early scenes that were providing information, but there was just not enough context to understand it. I’m sure that THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a much better movie the second time you see it -- or perhaps even the third or fourth. But there are parts that I’m not sure I would ever understand.
For instance, the government’s interest in Bowie is inexplicable. (At least, I think those characters represent the government. I can’t remember if they ever say who they are or not. If not, I suppose they might represent some competing business interest.) A couple of shady guys talk about how Bowie’s corporation is too innovative. Then they kidnap Bowie one hour before his spaceship is about to take off, throw some of his associates out of a high rise window, and lock Bowie up in a hotel where they perform medical tests on him. Why? Do they suspect he’s an alien? Do they just think his company is too successful? I don’t know.
And about that spaceship. In the novel, it’s explained clearly that the visitor was sent from his planet to Earth using the very last scraps of available fuel. The planet is dying and the inhabitants are completely out of energy and almost out of water. The visitor’s mission is to build up wealth on Earth (which they have learned about from television broadcasts), construct a spaceship, and return to his home planet with the means of salvation or escape. The visitor is on Earth in a last-ditch effort to save his race -- and that makes every moment of delay a matter of life and death.
None of this is explained in the movie, except for vague references to a “drought” on Bowie’s home planet and some brief shots of his family apparently dying. We know that Bowie is trying to get back to his planet, but so many key details are missing that it doesn’t seem to mean anything. Just following the movie itself, I would have guessed that Bowie is only trying to get back to his family -- presumably to die with them. Which of course raises the question of why he ever left in the first place.
As I said before, there are lots of neat things throughout the movie, but they are so subtle that they mostly just slip right by unnoticed. For instance, Bowie hires an actor who looks exactly like himself to play the father figure in his company’s commercials. The reason for this is that his wife watches the broadcasts on her planet, so she is able to see her husband in the commercials. We actually see this happen once, but at the time it just flew right over my head and I didn’t realize what the scene was supposed to be showing until I was skimming through the movie again to grab screenshots. There are also some just plain weird things that happen that are never explained either. At one point, a car that Bowie is riding in seems to travel back in time. Or, at least, he looks out the window and sees some folks from pioneer days and the folks from pioneer days look back in amazement at the car. But nobody else in the car is aware of it. What does it mean? Why does it happen? I have no idea. (Also, it’s just kind of dumb.)
The guy who directed this movie is Nicholas Roeg. He’s probably most famous for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH and the artsy quasi-horror flick DON’T LOOK NOW (1973). (People of a certain age may also know him -- and possibly fear him -- from his 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s THE WITCHES.) I didn’t really enjoy DON’T LOOK NOW all that much either when I saw it a few years ago. I don’t remember exactly what I didn’t like, but I think I had similar problems as the ones I have with THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH -- it’s just unnecessarily confusing and weird, boring in parts, emotionally distant, and occasionally ridiculous. I eventually read the Daphne du Maurier story that DON’T LOOK NOW is based on, and I enjoyed the written version pretty well. So I guess my advice is that if you are going to watch a Nicholas Roeg movie from the 1970s, read whatever it’s based on first and then just prepared to be kind of disappointed anyway. Then maybe try watching it a second time a few days later to see if you like it any better.
What else happened in 1976?
-- A man turns fugitive on his birthday to escape death in a society that kills anyone over thirty in the stone cold classic LOGAN'S RUN.
-- The East Germans return with another tale of communists in space in THE DUST OF THE STARS.
-- Yul Brynner also returns for a cameo in WESTWORLD's lesser known sequel, FUTUREWORLD.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1976...
In my opinion, LOGAN'S RUN is the only one from this year that's better than average. But it's also my opinion that it's one of the greatest science fiction flicks ever made.
Space alien David Bowie lands on Earth, files for nine lucrative patents, and becomes impossibly wealthy. His company, World Enterprises, makes futuristic consumer gadgets like self-developing film and metal balls that play music. But one day while traveling incognito, he faints on an elevator and ends up in a relationship with a hotel maid.
Meanwhile, college professor Rip Torn comes to work for World Enterprises on its new private space program. He begins to suspect that Bowie is not quite what he appears to be, and uses a hidden X-ray camera to determine that he’s not human. But just as Bowie is about to fly back to his family in outer space, the government starts hounding him for being too successful.
Is it any good?
I haven’t really decided whether I like David Bowie as an actor or not. He seems like the kind of guy you hire not so much for what he can do, but for who he is. (Kind of like Andre the Giant or Jenny McCarthy.) I don’t think he necessarily does a bad job as the alien visitor in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, but it seems pretty obvious that he was picked for the role at least partly because he’s a weird guy who had pretended to be an alien before in his albums and live performances. I can’t deny that David Bowie is a massively talented songwriter and musician -- but, look, there was a guy at my high school who told everybody for a year that he was a vampire, but that still doesn’t make him the right guy to play Dracula.
Then again, David Bowie is not really a problem in this movie. I can’t help wonder if another actor might have been better, but the alien we get is serviceable enough. The bigger problem is that so much of the movie is impossible to understand -- at least the first time through, but some of it is still obscure after more than one viewing. So much information is withheld for so long that a lot of interesting things just go by unnoticed.
The movie starts with Bowie’s arrival on Earth -- except we don’t see his spaceship or much of anything that suggests he’s any different from any drifter. He just starts out walking down a hill with no explanation of who he is, where he has come from, or why he is on Earth. And it’s quite a while into the movie before any of those questions are answered -- and one of the crucial ones (why he is there) never is at all.
I read the Walter Tevis novel that this movie is based on a couple of years ago, so I knew generally what to expect. I already knew, for instance, that when Bowie walks to a little town and sells a ring to a jeweler for twenty bucks that he is taking the first tiny step towards building up the seed money that he will use to found his corporate empire. But in the movie, there is no apparent reason for why we are watching such incredibly mundane things, and frankly the whole beginning is pretty boring as a result. The book, I should say, is not much better at this point at giving explanations. But at least there is some mystery about who the visitor is, and there is an awareness that he is somehow fundamentally different from everybody else. But since there’s no voiceover narration in the movie, we only get hints about that.
The same kind of problem persists throughout the movie. Characters are introduced (like Rip Torn’s college professor) with no indication of how they will fit into the story, so everything they do at first just seems meaningless. Once you know who they are and what role they play, it’s clear that there were key little details even in those early scenes that were providing information, but there was just not enough context to understand it. I’m sure that THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a much better movie the second time you see it -- or perhaps even the third or fourth. But there are parts that I’m not sure I would ever understand.
For instance, the government’s interest in Bowie is inexplicable. (At least, I think those characters represent the government. I can’t remember if they ever say who they are or not. If not, I suppose they might represent some competing business interest.) A couple of shady guys talk about how Bowie’s corporation is too innovative. Then they kidnap Bowie one hour before his spaceship is about to take off, throw some of his associates out of a high rise window, and lock Bowie up in a hotel where they perform medical tests on him. Why? Do they suspect he’s an alien? Do they just think his company is too successful? I don’t know.
And about that spaceship. In the novel, it’s explained clearly that the visitor was sent from his planet to Earth using the very last scraps of available fuel. The planet is dying and the inhabitants are completely out of energy and almost out of water. The visitor’s mission is to build up wealth on Earth (which they have learned about from television broadcasts), construct a spaceship, and return to his home planet with the means of salvation or escape. The visitor is on Earth in a last-ditch effort to save his race -- and that makes every moment of delay a matter of life and death.
None of this is explained in the movie, except for vague references to a “drought” on Bowie’s home planet and some brief shots of his family apparently dying. We know that Bowie is trying to get back to his planet, but so many key details are missing that it doesn’t seem to mean anything. Just following the movie itself, I would have guessed that Bowie is only trying to get back to his family -- presumably to die with them. Which of course raises the question of why he ever left in the first place.
As I said before, there are lots of neat things throughout the movie, but they are so subtle that they mostly just slip right by unnoticed. For instance, Bowie hires an actor who looks exactly like himself to play the father figure in his company’s commercials. The reason for this is that his wife watches the broadcasts on her planet, so she is able to see her husband in the commercials. We actually see this happen once, but at the time it just flew right over my head and I didn’t realize what the scene was supposed to be showing until I was skimming through the movie again to grab screenshots. There are also some just plain weird things that happen that are never explained either. At one point, a car that Bowie is riding in seems to travel back in time. Or, at least, he looks out the window and sees some folks from pioneer days and the folks from pioneer days look back in amazement at the car. But nobody else in the car is aware of it. What does it mean? Why does it happen? I have no idea. (Also, it’s just kind of dumb.)
The guy who directed this movie is Nicholas Roeg. He’s probably most famous for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH and the artsy quasi-horror flick DON’T LOOK NOW (1973). (People of a certain age may also know him -- and possibly fear him -- from his 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s THE WITCHES.) I didn’t really enjoy DON’T LOOK NOW all that much either when I saw it a few years ago. I don’t remember exactly what I didn’t like, but I think I had similar problems as the ones I have with THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH -- it’s just unnecessarily confusing and weird, boring in parts, emotionally distant, and occasionally ridiculous. I eventually read the Daphne du Maurier story that DON’T LOOK NOW is based on, and I enjoyed the written version pretty well. So I guess my advice is that if you are going to watch a Nicholas Roeg movie from the 1970s, read whatever it’s based on first and then just prepared to be kind of disappointed anyway. Then maybe try watching it a second time a few days later to see if you like it any better.
What else happened in 1976?
-- A man turns fugitive on his birthday to escape death in a society that kills anyone over thirty in the stone cold classic LOGAN'S RUN.
-- The East Germans return with another tale of communists in space in THE DUST OF THE STARS.
-- Yul Brynner also returns for a cameo in WESTWORLD's lesser known sequel, FUTUREWORLD.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1976...
In my opinion, LOGAN'S RUN is the only one from this year that's better than average. But it's also my opinion that it's one of the greatest science fiction flicks ever made.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1975: A BOY AND HIS DOG
What’s it about?
Young drifter Don Johnson wanders through post-apocalyptic America with his telepathic dog, Blood. Johnson’s life is an alternating selfish quest for food and women, and he thinks nothing of killing and raping to get what he wants. Blood helps him along, but tries to interest him in a potentially better life in a legendary place called “over the hill” where people still farm and live in peace.
One night, Blood sniffs out a woman at a violent make-shift hobo camp. In pursuing her, Johnson has to fight or evade other marauding drifters like himself and frightening mutants called “screamers”. When the girl gives him the slip despite his persistence, he follows her to her home “down under” -- an underground colony of superficially civilized survivors who operate a fascist police state underneath a twisted and creepy veneer of down-home, apple-cheeked Americana.
Is it any good?
I like to classify and categorize things, so I have been secretly working under an unverified hypothesis that there is some monolithic category of “pre-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies and another of “post-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies. This is, of course, completely untrue. I would say that sci-fi movies in the 1950s may have largely followed a predictable formula (handsome scientist saves world), but even by the end of that decade there were a lot of film makers branching out into new territory.
But one thing I have noticed about the more serious-minded sci-fi movies of the pre-STAR WARS period is that they very often have an obvious allegorical quality to them. By that I mean that many of the movies don’t seem interested in probable or even possible futures -- instead, they are interested in TWILIGHT ZONE worlds that reflect back some aspect of our own society in refracted ways.
I would put movies such as PLANET OF THE APES (1968), SILENT RUNNING (1972), SOYLENT GREEN (1973) and LOGAN’S RUN (1976) in this category. And since those are some of my favorite movies of all time, I can honestly say that I don’t really mind the whole allegorical approach to sci-fi. In fact, allegorical stories are the quickest route to one of my favorite things about science fiction: grumpy satirical misanthropy.
In the case of A BOY AND HIS DOG, though, the descent into the satirical world of the underground Kansas is pretty darn disappointing. The post-apocalyptic surface world is so full of interesting things (and so unlike anything else on film prior to 1975) that the creepy version of middle America under the surface just felt ordinary and lifeless by comparison. It was also completely unexpected. Nothing in the first two-thirds of the movie made it obvious that this underground world even existed -- let alone that Don Johnson would spend the last half hour of the movie down there, separated from his dog.
A BOY AND HIS DOG is not the first post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. But even the earlier movies that imagine a destroyed Earth -- like THE LAST MAN (1960) and THE OMEGA MAN (1971) -- don’t go much farther than overturned cars in their depiction of wreckage. THE WAR GAME (1965) and ZARDOZ (1974) add bombed-out buildings to the mix, but the survivors mostly just huddle in shell-shocked groups. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and especially BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) do go whole hog with the idea of world ravaged by nuclear war, but they take place thousands of years after the event in question, when modern civilization is an archaeological memory. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1974) features a recently post-apocalyptic New York City, but stays mostly in the steam tunnels and basements. The closest thing I can think of is the Czechoslovakian THE END OF AUGUST AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967). That movie is far more meditative, however, and the future is a severely underpopulated and woman-dominated one. (Which is pretty unique in itself, I might add.)
A BOY AND HIS DOG is the first movie I’m aware of that really takes pains to depict what life might be like for those who are forced to scrabble out a living from the ruins of a shattered world. But it was followed pretty quickly by DAMNATION ALLEY (1977), DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), QUINTET (1979), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981), and then a whole blossoming sub-genre. I think there’s not much doubt that THE ROAD WARRIOR was responsible for popularizing post-apocalyptic movies (and a whole dingy aesthetic that follow them to this day), but a whole lot of what you can see there was done first by A BOY AND HIS DOG.
The biggest disappointment about the shift in focus is that there is still so much of the post-apocalyptic surface world left unseen. Don Johnson spends much of his time in underpopulated wastelands, and though he does come into “town” for a little while, he doesn’t do anything there except go to the movies. The only people he interacts with are just as unpleasant as he is. In fact, the dog Blood is the only truly likeable character in the movie, and even he has his brutal moments. (Then again, he is a dog.)
I don’t want to give the impression that this is a bad movie. It’s not, and I enjoyed much of it quite a lot. But it definitely leaves many potentially interesting stones completely unturned -- which, I suppose, is why we have had many more post-apocalyptic movies since 1975.
Young drifter Don Johnson wanders through post-apocalyptic America with his telepathic dog, Blood. Johnson’s life is an alternating selfish quest for food and women, and he thinks nothing of killing and raping to get what he wants. Blood helps him along, but tries to interest him in a potentially better life in a legendary place called “over the hill” where people still farm and live in peace.
One night, Blood sniffs out a woman at a violent make-shift hobo camp. In pursuing her, Johnson has to fight or evade other marauding drifters like himself and frightening mutants called “screamers”. When the girl gives him the slip despite his persistence, he follows her to her home “down under” -- an underground colony of superficially civilized survivors who operate a fascist police state underneath a twisted and creepy veneer of down-home, apple-cheeked Americana.
 |  |
Is it any good?
I like to classify and categorize things, so I have been secretly working under an unverified hypothesis that there is some monolithic category of “pre-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies and another of “post-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies. This is, of course, completely untrue. I would say that sci-fi movies in the 1950s may have largely followed a predictable formula (handsome scientist saves world), but even by the end of that decade there were a lot of film makers branching out into new territory.
But one thing I have noticed about the more serious-minded sci-fi movies of the pre-STAR WARS period is that they very often have an obvious allegorical quality to them. By that I mean that many of the movies don’t seem interested in probable or even possible futures -- instead, they are interested in TWILIGHT ZONE worlds that reflect back some aspect of our own society in refracted ways.
I would put movies such as PLANET OF THE APES (1968), SILENT RUNNING (1972), SOYLENT GREEN (1973) and LOGAN’S RUN (1976) in this category. And since those are some of my favorite movies of all time, I can honestly say that I don’t really mind the whole allegorical approach to sci-fi. In fact, allegorical stories are the quickest route to one of my favorite things about science fiction: grumpy satirical misanthropy.
 |  |
In the case of A BOY AND HIS DOG, though, the descent into the satirical world of the underground Kansas is pretty darn disappointing. The post-apocalyptic surface world is so full of interesting things (and so unlike anything else on film prior to 1975) that the creepy version of middle America under the surface just felt ordinary and lifeless by comparison. It was also completely unexpected. Nothing in the first two-thirds of the movie made it obvious that this underground world even existed -- let alone that Don Johnson would spend the last half hour of the movie down there, separated from his dog.
A BOY AND HIS DOG is not the first post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. But even the earlier movies that imagine a destroyed Earth -- like THE LAST MAN (1960) and THE OMEGA MAN (1971) -- don’t go much farther than overturned cars in their depiction of wreckage. THE WAR GAME (1965) and ZARDOZ (1974) add bombed-out buildings to the mix, but the survivors mostly just huddle in shell-shocked groups. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and especially BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) do go whole hog with the idea of world ravaged by nuclear war, but they take place thousands of years after the event in question, when modern civilization is an archaeological memory. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1974) features a recently post-apocalyptic New York City, but stays mostly in the steam tunnels and basements. The closest thing I can think of is the Czechoslovakian THE END OF AUGUST AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967). That movie is far more meditative, however, and the future is a severely underpopulated and woman-dominated one. (Which is pretty unique in itself, I might add.)
 |  |
A BOY AND HIS DOG is the first movie I’m aware of that really takes pains to depict what life might be like for those who are forced to scrabble out a living from the ruins of a shattered world. But it was followed pretty quickly by DAMNATION ALLEY (1977), DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), QUINTET (1979), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981), and then a whole blossoming sub-genre. I think there’s not much doubt that THE ROAD WARRIOR was responsible for popularizing post-apocalyptic movies (and a whole dingy aesthetic that follow them to this day), but a whole lot of what you can see there was done first by A BOY AND HIS DOG.
The biggest disappointment about the shift in focus is that there is still so much of the post-apocalyptic surface world left unseen. Don Johnson spends much of his time in underpopulated wastelands, and though he does come into “town” for a little while, he doesn’t do anything there except go to the movies. The only people he interacts with are just as unpleasant as he is. In fact, the dog Blood is the only truly likeable character in the movie, and even he has his brutal moments. (Then again, he is a dog.)
I don’t want to give the impression that this is a bad movie. It’s not, and I enjoyed much of it quite a lot. But it definitely leaves many potentially interesting stones completely unturned -- which, I suppose, is why we have had many more post-apocalyptic movies since 1975.
 |  |
Monday, October 5, 2009
1975: ROLLERBALL
What’s it about?
After bringing his Houston rollerball team to the brink of the world championships, superstar player James Caan is pressured by his team’s corporate owners to quit the sport before the end of the season. Unable to understand the request (and suspicious of the executives trying to strong-arm him), Caan refuses to retire and instead intends to play out the final two games with the rest of his team.
Meanwhile, rule changes in the playoff games turn the dangerous sport into a downright gladiatorial one. First, penalties are eliminated in the semi-finals, which results in players practically executing each other on the rink without repercussions. For the championship game, time limits are removed -- which logically requires the winners to be the last men standing on the rink.
Is it any good?
I’ve had occasion to allude before to some movies about the futuristic sports we will all be playing in the year 2000 and beyond. There’s the globe-spanning cat and mouse of THE 10TH VICTIM (1965), the cross-country auto race of DEATH RACE 2000 (1975), the board game assassinations of QUINTET (1979), the gladiatorial combats of MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985), the game show hunt of THE RUNNING MAN (1987), the brutal jugger of THE BLOOD OF HEROES (1989), the pod race of THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999) and so on. Even the wargames and training exercises in THE GLADIATORS (1970) and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971) fall generally under the heading of games, even if they aren’t traditional spectator sports.
One thing that these future sports and games all have in common is their reliance on the entertainment value of violence -- and often the expectation of death on the courts. It’s true that movies very often focus on the violence inherent to even contemporary games -- the specter of death stalks (sometimes quite literally) the prison football of THE LONGEST YARD (1974), the road rally of THE GUMBALL RALLY (1976), the boxing of the ROCKY series, the quidditch of HARRY POTTER, the party game of THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), and even the chess match of THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) -- and yet, sports where death is a planned outcome of the event are still found almost exclusively in science fiction. (Or, I suppose, historical fiction about ancient Romans or Aztecs.)
In this context, ROLLERBALL is interesting in the sense that the sport starts out as a high-speed, high-impact game where death and injury are incidental (but tacitly expected) occurrences -- much like auto racing, boxing, steeplechase, hockey, and countless other sports today. True, rollerball looks much nastier than most any real sport I can think of, except perhaps the original no-rules “ultimate fighting” mixed martial arts tournaments of the 1990s. Rollerball is played with two teams of ten (seven on roller skates and three on motorbikes) who endlessly circle a rink at high speeds. Heavy metal balls are shot at high velocities into the rink, where they are picked up by players who then try to score by jamming them into small goals placed around the circuit. Body-checking, tackling, shoving, and fighting are all accepted parts of the game. At the start of the movie, even running another player over with a motorbike only results in a three-minute penalty.
Over the course of the movie, rollerball becomes even more violent as rule changes eliminate penalties and then time limits. The rule changes are presented as ways to keep fans interested (though there may also be an ulterior motive), but the result is that the game quickly turns into one of those far more common future sports where the maiming and killing is not just incidental -- it's the whole point. Those kinds of games always struck me as unrealistic -- it’s pretty difficult to imagine a world where DEATH RACE 2000 or THE RUNNING MAN could actually happen, for instance -- but ROLLERBALL makes the transition from violent sport to outright blood sport almost plausible. (Not shown in the movie: Any kind of public outcry against the rollerball rinks littered with bloody bodies and burning motorcycles. Though it does appear at the end of the film that the crowd may have finally gotten more spectacle than they really wanted.)
The three rollerball games that play out onscreen were certainly my favorite parts, as they contain some really amazing stunt work. There aren’t many quick cuts and no green screens here -- there really are stunt men on rollerskates and motorcycles ramming into each other on an inclined rink. As with most sports, the uniforms and numbers make it easy to follow who is doing what to whom (or who is having what done to them by whom), and the illusion that the game might actually possibly work is never fatally broken. There’s also practically no explanation of the rules of rollerball -- just tidbits here and there in the play-by-play announcing and a little later in character dialogue -- but it’s very easy to pick up simply by watching.
But the evolution of the sport is just the best part of ROLLERBALL -- there is, for better or for worse, more to the movie than that. The mystery angle -- the question of why Caan is being asked to retire if he’s so good at the game -- is not bad either. It seems like some kind of corporate conspiracy is afoot, and (this being a movie of the 1970s) that perception turns out to be correct. Despite Caan’s paranoia, however, the conspiracy never really becomes very ominous. It mostly amounts to a lot of cajoling and wheedling, though it does seem likely that the rule changes are put in place partly to help drive Caan from the game.
ROLLERBALL also envisions a future where corporations rule the world. National governments have collapsed, and cities are administered directly by one of a handful of massive monopolistic corporations that supply the necessities and luxuries of life. Houston is an Energy city and Chicago is a Food city, for instance, but even the characters have trouble remember who exactly is running each city and even what each corporation does. Though people in this world are mostly free from want, there’s little freedom of choice in any aspect of life and a small “executive class” controls all decision-making and enjoys most luxuries. Information has also been centralized in a way that is possibly more prescient than the film makers imagined. Books have all been digitized and are stored in a central database so that the corporations can edit and summarize them for the masses or restrict access altogether.
There are some slow parts to the movie -- most sections play out with very little exposition, so there are scenes like a long party where some information is learned through background chatter but which also seems to drag on and on. There’s also a subplot about Caan’s pining for his ex-wife which doesn’t go much of anywhere. But all in all this is a pretty great movie, and the rollerball games alone are worth watching for.
What else happened this year?
-- Don Johnson wandered a post-apocalyptic America with his telepathic dog in A BOY AND HIS DOG.
-- THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW forever made Tim Curry the favorite actor of sexually deviant theater geeks everywhere.
-- Roger Corman's DEATH RACE 2000 put David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone in a gory satire of the media obsession with violence, and contains one of the greatest puns in cinematic history.
-- Meanwhile, THE STEPFORD WIVES turned its satirical sights on a horror-tinged version of suburban America.
-- And anybody who spent any time in an elementary school classroom in the 1980s probably saw ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN on VHS more than once.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1975...
ROLLERBALL is about as awesome as it gets. (Unless you are a sexually deviant theater geek, in which case you already know what to do.)
After bringing his Houston rollerball team to the brink of the world championships, superstar player James Caan is pressured by his team’s corporate owners to quit the sport before the end of the season. Unable to understand the request (and suspicious of the executives trying to strong-arm him), Caan refuses to retire and instead intends to play out the final two games with the rest of his team.
Meanwhile, rule changes in the playoff games turn the dangerous sport into a downright gladiatorial one. First, penalties are eliminated in the semi-finals, which results in players practically executing each other on the rink without repercussions. For the championship game, time limits are removed -- which logically requires the winners to be the last men standing on the rink.
 |  |
Is it any good?
I’ve had occasion to allude before to some movies about the futuristic sports we will all be playing in the year 2000 and beyond. There’s the globe-spanning cat and mouse of THE 10TH VICTIM (1965), the cross-country auto race of DEATH RACE 2000 (1975), the board game assassinations of QUINTET (1979), the gladiatorial combats of MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985), the game show hunt of THE RUNNING MAN (1987), the brutal jugger of THE BLOOD OF HEROES (1989), the pod race of THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999) and so on. Even the wargames and training exercises in THE GLADIATORS (1970) and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971) fall generally under the heading of games, even if they aren’t traditional spectator sports.
One thing that these future sports and games all have in common is their reliance on the entertainment value of violence -- and often the expectation of death on the courts. It’s true that movies very often focus on the violence inherent to even contemporary games -- the specter of death stalks (sometimes quite literally) the prison football of THE LONGEST YARD (1974), the road rally of THE GUMBALL RALLY (1976), the boxing of the ROCKY series, the quidditch of HARRY POTTER, the party game of THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), and even the chess match of THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) -- and yet, sports where death is a planned outcome of the event are still found almost exclusively in science fiction. (Or, I suppose, historical fiction about ancient Romans or Aztecs.)
In this context, ROLLERBALL is interesting in the sense that the sport starts out as a high-speed, high-impact game where death and injury are incidental (but tacitly expected) occurrences -- much like auto racing, boxing, steeplechase, hockey, and countless other sports today. True, rollerball looks much nastier than most any real sport I can think of, except perhaps the original no-rules “ultimate fighting” mixed martial arts tournaments of the 1990s. Rollerball is played with two teams of ten (seven on roller skates and three on motorbikes) who endlessly circle a rink at high speeds. Heavy metal balls are shot at high velocities into the rink, where they are picked up by players who then try to score by jamming them into small goals placed around the circuit. Body-checking, tackling, shoving, and fighting are all accepted parts of the game. At the start of the movie, even running another player over with a motorbike only results in a three-minute penalty.
 |  |
Over the course of the movie, rollerball becomes even more violent as rule changes eliminate penalties and then time limits. The rule changes are presented as ways to keep fans interested (though there may also be an ulterior motive), but the result is that the game quickly turns into one of those far more common future sports where the maiming and killing is not just incidental -- it's the whole point. Those kinds of games always struck me as unrealistic -- it’s pretty difficult to imagine a world where DEATH RACE 2000 or THE RUNNING MAN could actually happen, for instance -- but ROLLERBALL makes the transition from violent sport to outright blood sport almost plausible. (Not shown in the movie: Any kind of public outcry against the rollerball rinks littered with bloody bodies and burning motorcycles. Though it does appear at the end of the film that the crowd may have finally gotten more spectacle than they really wanted.)
The three rollerball games that play out onscreen were certainly my favorite parts, as they contain some really amazing stunt work. There aren’t many quick cuts and no green screens here -- there really are stunt men on rollerskates and motorcycles ramming into each other on an inclined rink. As with most sports, the uniforms and numbers make it easy to follow who is doing what to whom (or who is having what done to them by whom), and the illusion that the game might actually possibly work is never fatally broken. There’s also practically no explanation of the rules of rollerball -- just tidbits here and there in the play-by-play announcing and a little later in character dialogue -- but it’s very easy to pick up simply by watching.
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But the evolution of the sport is just the best part of ROLLERBALL -- there is, for better or for worse, more to the movie than that. The mystery angle -- the question of why Caan is being asked to retire if he’s so good at the game -- is not bad either. It seems like some kind of corporate conspiracy is afoot, and (this being a movie of the 1970s) that perception turns out to be correct. Despite Caan’s paranoia, however, the conspiracy never really becomes very ominous. It mostly amounts to a lot of cajoling and wheedling, though it does seem likely that the rule changes are put in place partly to help drive Caan from the game.
ROLLERBALL also envisions a future where corporations rule the world. National governments have collapsed, and cities are administered directly by one of a handful of massive monopolistic corporations that supply the necessities and luxuries of life. Houston is an Energy city and Chicago is a Food city, for instance, but even the characters have trouble remember who exactly is running each city and even what each corporation does. Though people in this world are mostly free from want, there’s little freedom of choice in any aspect of life and a small “executive class” controls all decision-making and enjoys most luxuries. Information has also been centralized in a way that is possibly more prescient than the film makers imagined. Books have all been digitized and are stored in a central database so that the corporations can edit and summarize them for the masses or restrict access altogether.
There are some slow parts to the movie -- most sections play out with very little exposition, so there are scenes like a long party where some information is learned through background chatter but which also seems to drag on and on. There’s also a subplot about Caan’s pining for his ex-wife which doesn’t go much of anywhere. But all in all this is a pretty great movie, and the rollerball games alone are worth watching for.
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What else happened this year?
-- Don Johnson wandered a post-apocalyptic America with his telepathic dog in A BOY AND HIS DOG.
-- THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW forever made Tim Curry the favorite actor of sexually deviant theater geeks everywhere.
-- Roger Corman's DEATH RACE 2000 put David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone in a gory satire of the media obsession with violence, and contains one of the greatest puns in cinematic history.
-- Meanwhile, THE STEPFORD WIVES turned its satirical sights on a horror-tinged version of suburban America.
-- And anybody who spent any time in an elementary school classroom in the 1980s probably saw ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN on VHS more than once.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1975...
ROLLERBALL is about as awesome as it gets. (Unless you are a sexually deviant theater geek, in which case you already know what to do.)
Thursday, September 24, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1974: PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
What’s it about?
A devilish record producer named Swan (played by hobbit-sized songwriter Paul Williams) steals the music to a rock opera version of the Faust legend for the opening of his new club, the Paradise. After infiltrating Swan’s mansion in an attempt to get his music back, the opera’s geeky composer is beaten up and thrown in prison, where a sadistic warden pulls all of his teeth and replaces them with metal prosthetics. (Not sure why.) After hearing that one of Swan’s no-talent pre-fabricated bands will be performing his rock opera at the Paradise’s opening, the composer escapes from prison and is hideously disfigured by a record press while trying to destroy all the 45s of the singles bastardized from his music.
As the opening of the Paradise draws nearer, the composer (now presumed dead) lurks about the club and starts killing those who sing his music. Sensing an opportunity, Swan strikes a deal with the composer to rewrite the rock opera and then have it performed on his terms. But no sooner is the rewrite finished, then Swan attempts to go back on his word. The composer, meanwhile, sets out on a new round of revenge that only brings more ghoulish publicity to the Paradise.
Is it any good?
After doing THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, I swore to myself that I would stick with straight up science fiction for a while. After all, straight up science fiction still covers a very wide range of stories -- everything from ant invasions to giant robot monsters to expressionistic allegories about shirtless Sean Conneries to Mel Brooks parodies to Afrofuturistic musical manifestos. In fact, I really should be writing about SPACE IS THE PLACE right now, since Afrofuturism is an influential but under-represented branch of science fiction.
The problem is that Afrofuturism is so little regarded by most sci-fi fans that I know practically nothing about it myself. Neither do I know anything about the music of Sun Ra (or even George Clinton, to name another more prominent Afrofuturist). The other problem is that I didn’t enjoy SPACE IS THE PLACE all that much. I’m sure part of it is that I don’t have any of the cultural context needed to appreciate a story about a jazz musician leading an exodus of the black people of Earth to a planet where there are no white people. But it’s also, in a lot of ways, not that good of a movie and not even that good of a document of Sun Ra’s music.
Anyway, since I can’t tell you anything at all about Afrofuturism, I’ll just recommend that everybody go look it up on Wikipedia. (That’s what I did after watching SPACE IS THE PLACE.) It seems interesting, and I’m going to try and learn some more about it. But in the meantime, I am going to talk about PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE instead, since it would be a travesty if we made it all the way through the seventies without mentioning any rock operas. And I am probably going to skip THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), since there is a whole phenomenon around that movie that I have only experienced a little bit.
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not, strictly speaking, a rock opera itself. It’s about the production of a rock opera, and there are many songs in the movie -- many from the Faust show, but others not. Paul Williams is credited as the songwriter for all of the movie’s music. I’m not sure if you guys know much about Paul Williams, but he wrote easy-going seventies hits for groups like The Carpenters and Barbra Streisand and Three Dog Night. (“Just an Old Fashioned Love Song” and “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays” are all his work, for example.) He’s also a friend of the Muppets and wrote “The Rainbow Connection”, which is featured in THE MUPPET MOVIE. And, incidentally, he acted in a few movies -- including a role as an orangutang know-it-all in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973).
The music in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not much like any of those things I just listed. The songs are more prog-rock ballads (it is a rock opera, after all), and as Swan makes changes to the show they get heavier and more menacing. By the end of the movie, a mincing Transylvanian rocker named Beef is screaming the lyrics over grinding electric guitars while gyrating on the stage in full-body Frankenstein’s monster make-up as his bandmates pretend to dismember people in the audience. (By the way, one of the few unfortunate things about the movie is the stereotypically “gay” way that Beef acts. It’s too bad, since he’s otherwise a pretty great character.)
The movie’s story is obviously an update of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA with a heavy dose of FAUST, but it also weaves in bits of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and FRANKENSTEIN. The plot is pretty complicated, and Swan does a lot of back-stabbing and double-crossing. The music is almost all integrated into the story as performances or rehearsals, and there is usually something else going on to forward the plot while the songs are being sung. (For instance, the composer/phantom puts many of his plans into motion while his intended victims are on stage, singing.) One of my biggest complaints about musicals is that the plot usually stops when people start singing, so I was happy to see that wasn’t much of an issue here. There’s one amazing sequence in particular that features two long simultaneous tracking shots in split screen that plays out like a surf rock version of the opening of Orson Welles’s TOUCH OF EVIL.
Now, what about the science fiction? When Swan and the composer make their deal, part of it is that Swan will restore the composer’s voice, which had been destroyed in the same accident that disfigured him. This involves some shenanigans with a giant synthesizer that probably qualify as science fictional. But, yet again, this movie is probably more fantasy than sci-fi -- especially towards the end when the devil becomes an increasingly literal presence.
On the other hand, the look and sound of the movie is far more sci-fi than fantasy. The Paradise is a high-tech place, fitted for pyrotechnics and neon lights and all sorts of modern showiness. The Faust rock opera seems to have sci-fi elements as well -- I mentioned earlier that one of the characters is assembled in the style of Frankenstein’s monster. The composer’s phantom mask is also more like a space helmet or robot faceplate than any traditional kind of mask. And the movie is full of video cameras and synthesizers and all kinds of electronic doodads. It may be fantasy, but it’s not the old-fashioned unplugged kind.
A devilish record producer named Swan (played by hobbit-sized songwriter Paul Williams) steals the music to a rock opera version of the Faust legend for the opening of his new club, the Paradise. After infiltrating Swan’s mansion in an attempt to get his music back, the opera’s geeky composer is beaten up and thrown in prison, where a sadistic warden pulls all of his teeth and replaces them with metal prosthetics. (Not sure why.) After hearing that one of Swan’s no-talent pre-fabricated bands will be performing his rock opera at the Paradise’s opening, the composer escapes from prison and is hideously disfigured by a record press while trying to destroy all the 45s of the singles bastardized from his music.
As the opening of the Paradise draws nearer, the composer (now presumed dead) lurks about the club and starts killing those who sing his music. Sensing an opportunity, Swan strikes a deal with the composer to rewrite the rock opera and then have it performed on his terms. But no sooner is the rewrite finished, then Swan attempts to go back on his word. The composer, meanwhile, sets out on a new round of revenge that only brings more ghoulish publicity to the Paradise.
Is it any good?
After doing THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, I swore to myself that I would stick with straight up science fiction for a while. After all, straight up science fiction still covers a very wide range of stories -- everything from ant invasions to giant robot monsters to expressionistic allegories about shirtless Sean Conneries to Mel Brooks parodies to Afrofuturistic musical manifestos. In fact, I really should be writing about SPACE IS THE PLACE right now, since Afrofuturism is an influential but under-represented branch of science fiction.
The problem is that Afrofuturism is so little regarded by most sci-fi fans that I know practically nothing about it myself. Neither do I know anything about the music of Sun Ra (or even George Clinton, to name another more prominent Afrofuturist). The other problem is that I didn’t enjoy SPACE IS THE PLACE all that much. I’m sure part of it is that I don’t have any of the cultural context needed to appreciate a story about a jazz musician leading an exodus of the black people of Earth to a planet where there are no white people. But it’s also, in a lot of ways, not that good of a movie and not even that good of a document of Sun Ra’s music.
Anyway, since I can’t tell you anything at all about Afrofuturism, I’ll just recommend that everybody go look it up on Wikipedia. (That’s what I did after watching SPACE IS THE PLACE.) It seems interesting, and I’m going to try and learn some more about it. But in the meantime, I am going to talk about PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE instead, since it would be a travesty if we made it all the way through the seventies without mentioning any rock operas. And I am probably going to skip THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), since there is a whole phenomenon around that movie that I have only experienced a little bit.
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not, strictly speaking, a rock opera itself. It’s about the production of a rock opera, and there are many songs in the movie -- many from the Faust show, but others not. Paul Williams is credited as the songwriter for all of the movie’s music. I’m not sure if you guys know much about Paul Williams, but he wrote easy-going seventies hits for groups like The Carpenters and Barbra Streisand and Three Dog Night. (“Just an Old Fashioned Love Song” and “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays” are all his work, for example.) He’s also a friend of the Muppets and wrote “The Rainbow Connection”, which is featured in THE MUPPET MOVIE. And, incidentally, he acted in a few movies -- including a role as an orangutang know-it-all in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973).
The music in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not much like any of those things I just listed. The songs are more prog-rock ballads (it is a rock opera, after all), and as Swan makes changes to the show they get heavier and more menacing. By the end of the movie, a mincing Transylvanian rocker named Beef is screaming the lyrics over grinding electric guitars while gyrating on the stage in full-body Frankenstein’s monster make-up as his bandmates pretend to dismember people in the audience. (By the way, one of the few unfortunate things about the movie is the stereotypically “gay” way that Beef acts. It’s too bad, since he’s otherwise a pretty great character.)
The movie’s story is obviously an update of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA with a heavy dose of FAUST, but it also weaves in bits of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and FRANKENSTEIN. The plot is pretty complicated, and Swan does a lot of back-stabbing and double-crossing. The music is almost all integrated into the story as performances or rehearsals, and there is usually something else going on to forward the plot while the songs are being sung. (For instance, the composer/phantom puts many of his plans into motion while his intended victims are on stage, singing.) One of my biggest complaints about musicals is that the plot usually stops when people start singing, so I was happy to see that wasn’t much of an issue here. There’s one amazing sequence in particular that features two long simultaneous tracking shots in split screen that plays out like a surf rock version of the opening of Orson Welles’s TOUCH OF EVIL.
Now, what about the science fiction? When Swan and the composer make their deal, part of it is that Swan will restore the composer’s voice, which had been destroyed in the same accident that disfigured him. This involves some shenanigans with a giant synthesizer that probably qualify as science fictional. But, yet again, this movie is probably more fantasy than sci-fi -- especially towards the end when the devil becomes an increasingly literal presence.
On the other hand, the look and sound of the movie is far more sci-fi than fantasy. The Paradise is a high-tech place, fitted for pyrotechnics and neon lights and all sorts of modern showiness. The Faust rock opera seems to have sci-fi elements as well -- I mentioned earlier that one of the characters is assembled in the style of Frankenstein’s monster. The composer’s phantom mask is also more like a space helmet or robot faceplate than any traditional kind of mask. And the movie is full of video cameras and synthesizers and all kinds of electronic doodads. It may be fantasy, but it’s not the old-fashioned unplugged kind.
Monday, September 21, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1974: PHASE IV
What’s it about?
Following a strange event in space, a biologist notices peculiar behavior in ant colonies in the American southwest. Specifically, ants from different species appear to be communicating and working together. He gets funding to research the phenomenon, and brings along a young mathematician who has done work with computers decoding animal languages. But conflicting personalities cause the biologist and mathematician both to stay tight-lipped about their suspicions and discoveries.
As the project’s funding begins to run out, the scientists still have not observed any interesting ant activity. They decide to destroy a series of strange geometric structures (presumably built by the ants) to stimulate a response. When the response comes, it’s in the form of an overwhelming attack by the ants. The scientists repel it using a powerful poison, but the ants quickly adapt and begin severing the scientists’ links to the outside world.
Is it any good?
I first saw this movie as a freshman in college during a science fiction marathon. At the time, I thought it was pretty great -- despite being very different from most of the movies I had seen until then. Having seen a lot more movies since those salad days, I can say that PHASE IV falls into a category of understated, low budget cerebral (or pseudo-cerebral) 1970s flicks with a cynical streak that bridge the darker B-movies of the 1950s with the dour independent movies of the 1990s. It fits very much with COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), PUNISHMENT PARK (1971), IDAHO TRANSFER (1973), and many others of the same sort.
It probably goes without saying at this point that I have a soft spot for exactly this sort of movie, so I enjoyed PHASE IV plenty the second time through as well. But I should say that the other person I saw this movie with the first time ten years ago thought it was horrible. He usually has pretty good taste in movies, so I guess the lesson here is that PHASE IV may affect people differently. If you decide to watch it, be warned. You may hate it!
PHASE IV is a thriller about ants that want to take over the world. They aren’t giant ants like in THEM! (1954) -- they’re just normal-sized ants that are super smart. How smart? They do communicate somehow, and the mathematician decodes a bit of their language. Mostly he translates the parts that mean “stop” and “go” and “turn right” -- sort of the LOGO level of ant communication. But there are implications in the movie that the ants are talking about a lot more that the humans can’t figure out.
More implausibly, the ants also seem very familiar with human technology and weaknesses. In their first attack on the research station, they disable the truck engine that the scientists are using for a generator. (It’s later revealed that it was left outside on purpose as “bait” and that there is a back-up generator inside the station as well.) I’m not totally clear how ants manage that -- presumably they gummed up the works in such a way as to cause an explosion. In later attacks, they focus beams of sunlight on the station to overheat the computers and people inside. Not only that, but they send commandos to specifically disable the air conditioner to make the roasting more effective.
The ants are also capable of building complex structures. To focus the beams of sunlight, for instance, they build mounds with highly polished surfaces pointing at the research station just so to catch the sunlight. So clearly some of the applications of this supposed ant intelligence are more plausible than others. But the humans have some fairly wacky technology as well. The mathematician, for instance, is somehow able to “hear” the ant language and correlate it with individual ant movements perfectly clearly -- despite there being thousands of ants swarming around. And the biologist manages to locate the colony’s queen without stepping foot outside the research station.
But those eyebrow-raising bits aside, the stand-off between man and ant is pretty interesting. It plays out like a chess game -- each side trying to penetrate particular weaknesses of the other. The ants, with their vastly superior numbers, get and keep the upper hand as soon as they are able to isolate the scientists. And since the biologist is weirdly stubborn, nobody on the outside really knows what is going on or that there may be any danger at all. (The mathematician didn’t even learn the truth until it was too late himself.) There’s a pretty obvious parable about working together versus keeping things to yourself not far under the surface of PHASE IV -- but luckily it’s pretty interesting for other reasons too.
The movie does have a lot of shots of ants doing a lot of ant-like things. I’m not sure exactly how these were created. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a mixture of real ants placed in artificial environments, and possibly some miniature or stop-motion work. Surprisingly, it is always pretty clear what the ants are up to. One long sequence where a series of ants sacrifice themselves to bring the poison into the colony so that the queen can adapt herself to it is especially good. There’s also another pretty funny and exciting bit where the ants trying to sabotage the air conditioner run into a preying mantis that the biologist left inside as a deterrent.
The ending of the movie (as with almost all of its kind) gets pretty silly. People do things for no other reason than to move the plot forward out of the stalemate. The ants remain unavoidably inscrutable, but there’s still a long monologue about what they want and how they will get it. I guess really the more I think about the movie, the goofier it sounds. But it is a movie about ants that want to take over the world, after all, and when compared to any other insect swarm movie by any metric, I think it acquits itself extremely creditably.
Following a strange event in space, a biologist notices peculiar behavior in ant colonies in the American southwest. Specifically, ants from different species appear to be communicating and working together. He gets funding to research the phenomenon, and brings along a young mathematician who has done work with computers decoding animal languages. But conflicting personalities cause the biologist and mathematician both to stay tight-lipped about their suspicions and discoveries.
As the project’s funding begins to run out, the scientists still have not observed any interesting ant activity. They decide to destroy a series of strange geometric structures (presumably built by the ants) to stimulate a response. When the response comes, it’s in the form of an overwhelming attack by the ants. The scientists repel it using a powerful poison, but the ants quickly adapt and begin severing the scientists’ links to the outside world.
Is it any good?
I first saw this movie as a freshman in college during a science fiction marathon. At the time, I thought it was pretty great -- despite being very different from most of the movies I had seen until then. Having seen a lot more movies since those salad days, I can say that PHASE IV falls into a category of understated, low budget cerebral (or pseudo-cerebral) 1970s flicks with a cynical streak that bridge the darker B-movies of the 1950s with the dour independent movies of the 1990s. It fits very much with COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), PUNISHMENT PARK (1971), IDAHO TRANSFER (1973), and many others of the same sort.
It probably goes without saying at this point that I have a soft spot for exactly this sort of movie, so I enjoyed PHASE IV plenty the second time through as well. But I should say that the other person I saw this movie with the first time ten years ago thought it was horrible. He usually has pretty good taste in movies, so I guess the lesson here is that PHASE IV may affect people differently. If you decide to watch it, be warned. You may hate it!
PHASE IV is a thriller about ants that want to take over the world. They aren’t giant ants like in THEM! (1954) -- they’re just normal-sized ants that are super smart. How smart? They do communicate somehow, and the mathematician decodes a bit of their language. Mostly he translates the parts that mean “stop” and “go” and “turn right” -- sort of the LOGO level of ant communication. But there are implications in the movie that the ants are talking about a lot more that the humans can’t figure out.
More implausibly, the ants also seem very familiar with human technology and weaknesses. In their first attack on the research station, they disable the truck engine that the scientists are using for a generator. (It’s later revealed that it was left outside on purpose as “bait” and that there is a back-up generator inside the station as well.) I’m not totally clear how ants manage that -- presumably they gummed up the works in such a way as to cause an explosion. In later attacks, they focus beams of sunlight on the station to overheat the computers and people inside. Not only that, but they send commandos to specifically disable the air conditioner to make the roasting more effective.
The ants are also capable of building complex structures. To focus the beams of sunlight, for instance, they build mounds with highly polished surfaces pointing at the research station just so to catch the sunlight. So clearly some of the applications of this supposed ant intelligence are more plausible than others. But the humans have some fairly wacky technology as well. The mathematician, for instance, is somehow able to “hear” the ant language and correlate it with individual ant movements perfectly clearly -- despite there being thousands of ants swarming around. And the biologist manages to locate the colony’s queen without stepping foot outside the research station.
But those eyebrow-raising bits aside, the stand-off between man and ant is pretty interesting. It plays out like a chess game -- each side trying to penetrate particular weaknesses of the other. The ants, with their vastly superior numbers, get and keep the upper hand as soon as they are able to isolate the scientists. And since the biologist is weirdly stubborn, nobody on the outside really knows what is going on or that there may be any danger at all. (The mathematician didn’t even learn the truth until it was too late himself.) There’s a pretty obvious parable about working together versus keeping things to yourself not far under the surface of PHASE IV -- but luckily it’s pretty interesting for other reasons too.
The movie does have a lot of shots of ants doing a lot of ant-like things. I’m not sure exactly how these were created. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a mixture of real ants placed in artificial environments, and possibly some miniature or stop-motion work. Surprisingly, it is always pretty clear what the ants are up to. One long sequence where a series of ants sacrifice themselves to bring the poison into the colony so that the queen can adapt herself to it is especially good. There’s also another pretty funny and exciting bit where the ants trying to sabotage the air conditioner run into a preying mantis that the biologist left inside as a deterrent.
The ending of the movie (as with almost all of its kind) gets pretty silly. People do things for no other reason than to move the plot forward out of the stalemate. The ants remain unavoidably inscrutable, but there’s still a long monologue about what they want and how they will get it. I guess really the more I think about the movie, the goofier it sounds. But it is a movie about ants that want to take over the world, after all, and when compared to any other insect swarm movie by any metric, I think it acquits itself extremely creditably.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1974: GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA
What’s it about?
Hoo boy, let’s see. As near as I can make out, an archaeologist discovers a cave on Okinawa which contains ancient artifacts, including prophetic murals and a small statuette of a dog-like monster. While transporting the statuette back to mainland Japan, the prophecies begin to come true (purportedly signaling the arrival of a terrible monster) and mysterious agents try to steal the statuette.
Meanwhile, earthquakes with “moving epicenters” rumble across the country, and it’s really no surprise when Godzilla emerges from one of them. But wait! This Godzilla doesn’t move or look quite right, and soon a second Godzilla has appeared to fight it. The first one is soon revealed to be a giant robot that defeats the real Godzilla, and the only hope now is to use the statuette to awaken the traditional defender of Okinawa, King Caesar.
Is it any good?
I haven’t seen that many Godzilla movies, or even really that many Japanese giant monster movies of any type. Obviously I watched the original GOJIRA (1954), which I liked a lot. And I did check in with MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA (1964), but I saw it too late to write about it in the blog. That’s a shame, since that movie is also quite good. GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA, on the other hand, is slipshod and disappointing.
With all the Godzilla movies to choose from, why did I pick this particular one? I had wanted to watch MOTHRA (1961) and DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968) -- both of which are pretty highly regarded by fans -- but couldn’t find a convenient copy of either. So looking down the list of other possibilities, I was mostly confronted by match-ups with other monsters I knew nothing about: Ghidorah, Hedora, Gigan, Megalon, and so on. I remembered seeing a bit of GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA as a kid, and I’ve always liked the idea of characters confronting different versions of themselves. So that was about all there was to it.
One problem, of course, is that Godzilla is not really much of a character. He’s a force of nature -- a destructive event to be endured, like a hurricane or earthquake, until he passes away again. From the three movies I’ve seen so far, Godzilla has hardly any personality or even awareness at all, so a robot version of him is really just exactly the same thing (with different weapons).
In GOJIRA, the human characters have clear precedence over the monster. The conflict is about whether a scientist is willing to share knowledge of a new destructive weapon to stop the attacks. In MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA, the focus is largely on Mothra. And despite being a giant moth puppet, Mothra has considerably more personality than Godzilla -- partly because she can communicate through a pair of pixie twins who live in a box, but also because she actually has objectives and makes decisions.
In GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA, there isn’t really any worthwhile human conflict. The aliens who control Mechagodzilla are cartoonish villains who seem to be invading the Earth for no particular reason. At one point, one of the human characters is forced to help repair Mechagodzilla, which is intended to create some kind of moral crisis. But even that is executed stupidly and perfunctorily, like so much else in the movie.
In fact, the biggest problem of GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA is that the script-writers just don’t seem to have been trying very hard. The beginning of the movie is both incredibly complicated and incredibly linear. Besides the events I outlined in the synopsis, there’s also a young girl who has a vision of destruction and a reporter who discovers a radioactive metallic scale from Mechagodzilla. There’s so much going on that’s it hard to keep the characters and events straight, but it all just points towards the same thing: the arrival of Mechagodzilla, which the ancient Okinawans apparently predicted. Nothing is introduced that doesn’t relate directly to the main story, and its almost always immediately obvious how each piece fits into the big, dumb puzzle.
I will admit that King Caesar is a pretty neat monster. There’s a nice bit where a young girl must go and sing to him to awaken him -- it’s both eerie and suspenseful, since other monsters are fast approaching. His appearance is apparently based on a mythical animal called the shisa, which is a cross between a dog and a lion. There’s no doubt that he looks pretty goofy fighting, but while sleeping and waking up, he’s one of the cooler Japanese movie monsters I’ve seen.
Mechagodzilla, on the other hand, is always ridiculous. I’m not sure who exactly thought that Godzilla would be more awesome if he was made out of grey plastic and shot missiles out of his fingers and toes, but that’s more or less what Mechagodzilla is. He looks silly no matter what he’s doing -- flying, fighting, standing around. Another disappointment is that almost none of the monster scenes feature any miniature buildings or military units. To the extent that I find Godzilla’s rampages interesting at all, it’s almost all due to the nifty miniatures he destroys. So the fights in this movie are (as far as I’m concerned) pretty dull. There’s one scene early in the movie where Mechagodzilla does some rampaging through miniature city. But the scene is nothing special, and after that the monster action is restricted to guys in suits shooting colored beams at each other or grappling impotently.
I can’t talk about the Godzilla series in general, so I don’t know if this particular movie is a dud or if it’s indicative of the direction the series has followed in the decades since GOJIRA. I can imagine that the movies would have been pretty exciting for fans at the time, since they are essentially title-card fights between some well-known creatures. (Though I’m not sure exactly how many had an existence before taking on Godzilla or other monsters -- besides King Kong, Mothra, and Rodan.) The series seems similar to Universal’s “monster rally” movies where Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the Wolf Man met each other again and again. No doubt a person better acquainted with the history of Japanese movie monsters would get a lot more enjoyment out of watching them fight and defeat each other. For the most part, I’m not even sure who to root for, so a lot of that is completely lost on me.
Hoo boy, let’s see. As near as I can make out, an archaeologist discovers a cave on Okinawa which contains ancient artifacts, including prophetic murals and a small statuette of a dog-like monster. While transporting the statuette back to mainland Japan, the prophecies begin to come true (purportedly signaling the arrival of a terrible monster) and mysterious agents try to steal the statuette.
Meanwhile, earthquakes with “moving epicenters” rumble across the country, and it’s really no surprise when Godzilla emerges from one of them. But wait! This Godzilla doesn’t move or look quite right, and soon a second Godzilla has appeared to fight it. The first one is soon revealed to be a giant robot that defeats the real Godzilla, and the only hope now is to use the statuette to awaken the traditional defender of Okinawa, King Caesar.
Is it any good?
I haven’t seen that many Godzilla movies, or even really that many Japanese giant monster movies of any type. Obviously I watched the original GOJIRA (1954), which I liked a lot. And I did check in with MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA (1964), but I saw it too late to write about it in the blog. That’s a shame, since that movie is also quite good. GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA, on the other hand, is slipshod and disappointing.
With all the Godzilla movies to choose from, why did I pick this particular one? I had wanted to watch MOTHRA (1961) and DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968) -- both of which are pretty highly regarded by fans -- but couldn’t find a convenient copy of either. So looking down the list of other possibilities, I was mostly confronted by match-ups with other monsters I knew nothing about: Ghidorah, Hedora, Gigan, Megalon, and so on. I remembered seeing a bit of GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA as a kid, and I’ve always liked the idea of characters confronting different versions of themselves. So that was about all there was to it.
One problem, of course, is that Godzilla is not really much of a character. He’s a force of nature -- a destructive event to be endured, like a hurricane or earthquake, until he passes away again. From the three movies I’ve seen so far, Godzilla has hardly any personality or even awareness at all, so a robot version of him is really just exactly the same thing (with different weapons).
In GOJIRA, the human characters have clear precedence over the monster. The conflict is about whether a scientist is willing to share knowledge of a new destructive weapon to stop the attacks. In MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA, the focus is largely on Mothra. And despite being a giant moth puppet, Mothra has considerably more personality than Godzilla -- partly because she can communicate through a pair of pixie twins who live in a box, but also because she actually has objectives and makes decisions.
In GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA, there isn’t really any worthwhile human conflict. The aliens who control Mechagodzilla are cartoonish villains who seem to be invading the Earth for no particular reason. At one point, one of the human characters is forced to help repair Mechagodzilla, which is intended to create some kind of moral crisis. But even that is executed stupidly and perfunctorily, like so much else in the movie.
In fact, the biggest problem of GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA is that the script-writers just don’t seem to have been trying very hard. The beginning of the movie is both incredibly complicated and incredibly linear. Besides the events I outlined in the synopsis, there’s also a young girl who has a vision of destruction and a reporter who discovers a radioactive metallic scale from Mechagodzilla. There’s so much going on that’s it hard to keep the characters and events straight, but it all just points towards the same thing: the arrival of Mechagodzilla, which the ancient Okinawans apparently predicted. Nothing is introduced that doesn’t relate directly to the main story, and its almost always immediately obvious how each piece fits into the big, dumb puzzle.
I will admit that King Caesar is a pretty neat monster. There’s a nice bit where a young girl must go and sing to him to awaken him -- it’s both eerie and suspenseful, since other monsters are fast approaching. His appearance is apparently based on a mythical animal called the shisa, which is a cross between a dog and a lion. There’s no doubt that he looks pretty goofy fighting, but while sleeping and waking up, he’s one of the cooler Japanese movie monsters I’ve seen.
Mechagodzilla, on the other hand, is always ridiculous. I’m not sure who exactly thought that Godzilla would be more awesome if he was made out of grey plastic and shot missiles out of his fingers and toes, but that’s more or less what Mechagodzilla is. He looks silly no matter what he’s doing -- flying, fighting, standing around. Another disappointment is that almost none of the monster scenes feature any miniature buildings or military units. To the extent that I find Godzilla’s rampages interesting at all, it’s almost all due to the nifty miniatures he destroys. So the fights in this movie are (as far as I’m concerned) pretty dull. There’s one scene early in the movie where Mechagodzilla does some rampaging through miniature city. But the scene is nothing special, and after that the monster action is restricted to guys in suits shooting colored beams at each other or grappling impotently.
I can’t talk about the Godzilla series in general, so I don’t know if this particular movie is a dud or if it’s indicative of the direction the series has followed in the decades since GOJIRA. I can imagine that the movies would have been pretty exciting for fans at the time, since they are essentially title-card fights between some well-known creatures. (Though I’m not sure exactly how many had an existence before taking on Godzilla or other monsters -- besides King Kong, Mothra, and Rodan.) The series seems similar to Universal’s “monster rally” movies where Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the Wolf Man met each other again and again. No doubt a person better acquainted with the history of Japanese movie monsters would get a lot more enjoyment out of watching them fight and defeat each other. For the most part, I’m not even sure who to root for, so a lot of that is completely lost on me.
Monday, September 14, 2009
1974: ZARDOZ
What’s it about?
Sean Connery is an “exterminator” in a savage world, a job that consists of slaughtering the hapless and defenseless masses who inhabit the countryside on the orders of the god Zardoz. But unlike most gods, Zardoz regularly manifests himself physically in the form of a giant flying stone head to issue edicts, dispense weapons, and collect tribute. One day, Connery hides inside a tribute of wheat and sneaks aboard to find out what is really going on behind the giant flying stone head.
What he finds when it lands is a secret village full of peaceful, educated immortals who have been controlling the outside world for hundreds of years. Though the immortals are afraid that Connery will disrupt their seemingly idyllic life, they decide to let him stay for a while -- more out of boredom than anything else. But their fears begin to come true when Connery’s presence begins to bring long-festering dissatisfactions to the surface. Before long, he’s actively colluding with rebellious elements among the immortals to bring the whole society down.
Is it any good?
I’ve thought about watching ZARDOZ a few times before, but I’ve always assumed it was pretentious, self-consciously weird, and (worst of all) boring. My prediction hadn’t really changed at all -- I mean, just look at that trailer -- but I figured this would be the perfect time to watch it nonetheless. It’s not as though there aren’t plenty of other sci-fi movies that are pretentious, self-consciously weird, and boring. Luckily, it turns out that ZARDOZ is never actually boring, and in fact is not nearly as weird as I expected it to be.
Yes, this is a movie where a giant stone head flies around and talks to men who wear nothing but red diapers and belts of ammo across their chests. But that’s considered weird even within the world of the movie. One character, as he is confronted with the reality of how the “outlands” are being managed, notes that nobody else wanted the job and the current manager is at least leavening his barbarism with some wit.
And the way the story is told is very straightforward. This isn’t some experimental narrative like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973), or even THE SEED OF MAN (1969) or THX-1138 (1971). In fact, the movie is precisely as weird as FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966) and BARBARELLA (1968) and PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and LOGAN’S RUN (1976). In other words, its story depends on the existence of a strange, semi-allegorical, upside-down society that could never really exist -- but which is nonetheless perfectly consistent and logical as soon as you make concessions for the impossible conditions it operates under.
In the case of ZARDOZ, those conditions are the division of the world into two distinct groups: the ageless immortals living in intellectual seclusion, and the masses of brutals killing and dying all around them. Despite the fact that the main character -- Sean Connery’s exterminator Zed -- is a brutal himself, we see very little of the way the world works in the outlands. All we know is that some brutals (the exterminators) constitute a very slightly privileged class that either kills or enslaves humanity as they are ordered. The world of the immortals, on the other hand, is extensively shown. Practically every element that we see, from the perfunctory democracy to the clinging conformity to the frustration and ennui, ring true. The movie seems to be saying that any society (even one with the noblest of intentions and the finest of citizens) so afraid of change that it outlaws aging, death and reproduction will necessarily stagnate and fester until it becomes self-destructive.
Even before Connery arrives among the immortals, they are already falling prey one by one to either of two social diseases. Some become rebellious and begin acting anti-socially, which is invariably punished by democratically selected sentences of aging. Eventually, the rebellious ones receive so many sentences that they age into senility and are placed in a kind of demented rest home apart from the others. Other immortals simply opt out of social life instead -- becoming “apathetics” who do nothing but stand around dumbly all day. Slowly but surely these two fates are spreading to more and more of the immortals, and it seems in time that it will eventually touch all of them.
When Connery arrives, then, the world of the immortals is already a hollow shell surrounding a pit of dissatisfaction, resentment and boredom. One interesting aspect of Connery’s character is that the immortals soon realize he is in fact superior to them in every way -- except possibly education. But physically and mentally, his powers exceed their own. In other words, Connery is not (as he first seems) some ancient relict of a simpler, earthier time. Instead, he is called a “mutant” -- the product of careful selective breeding, and potentially the next step above and beyond the immortals.
Which is not to say that Connery doesn’t have his earthy side. He spends much of his early life killing and raping other brutals in the outlands. True, he believes he is following the orders of the god Zardoz, but he also never seems to gain any awareness of his crimes even as he becomes more educated. (It is clear by the end of the movie that he won’t go on killing and raping -- but whether he has any remorse for his past actions is never explored at all.)
The ending of the movie is a bit bizarre, as these things tend to be. We learn that Connery knows more than he has been letting on, and that his arrival was no mere accident. When he sneaked aboard the flying giant stone head, he fully expected to discover an imposter behind the “god”. He probably didn’t imagine the kind of world that he landed in, but the plan was always to destroy whoever the imposter turned out to be. Connery soon discovers that many of the immortals would welcome such a release -- they have forgotten how to end their lives, and many simply want to die. But this requires destroying a computer that automatically resurrects any immortal who is killed, though none of them remember where the computer is or how to destroy it.
The events that surround the discovery and destruction of the computer don’t all make a whole lot of sense. Some of the immortals do escape to live out their lives naturally. Others are slaughtered by an invading army of brutals. In the carnage and confusion of the moment, Connery separates himself from both groups, and we never learn exactly what shape the world takes in the wake of the passing of the immortals.
What else happened this year?
-- A couple of arrogant scientists meet their match when they tangle with some super-intelligent ants alone in the desert in PHASE IV.
-- Afrofuturist cosmic jazz band leader Sun Ra returns from outer space to free the black race and take them away to a planet with no white people in SPACE IS THE PLACE.
-- And Mel Brooks directs Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, an almost unrecognizable Gene Hackman, and a sadly under-utilized Madeleine Kahn in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.
-- There’s also an interesting musical adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s THE LITTLE PRINCE. I only watched a little bit of it, but the sets and special effects look pretty amazing. The songs, not so much.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1974...
ZARDOZ is the obvious choice.
Sean Connery is an “exterminator” in a savage world, a job that consists of slaughtering the hapless and defenseless masses who inhabit the countryside on the orders of the god Zardoz. But unlike most gods, Zardoz regularly manifests himself physically in the form of a giant flying stone head to issue edicts, dispense weapons, and collect tribute. One day, Connery hides inside a tribute of wheat and sneaks aboard to find out what is really going on behind the giant flying stone head.
What he finds when it lands is a secret village full of peaceful, educated immortals who have been controlling the outside world for hundreds of years. Though the immortals are afraid that Connery will disrupt their seemingly idyllic life, they decide to let him stay for a while -- more out of boredom than anything else. But their fears begin to come true when Connery’s presence begins to bring long-festering dissatisfactions to the surface. Before long, he’s actively colluding with rebellious elements among the immortals to bring the whole society down.
Is it any good?
I’ve thought about watching ZARDOZ a few times before, but I’ve always assumed it was pretentious, self-consciously weird, and (worst of all) boring. My prediction hadn’t really changed at all -- I mean, just look at that trailer -- but I figured this would be the perfect time to watch it nonetheless. It’s not as though there aren’t plenty of other sci-fi movies that are pretentious, self-consciously weird, and boring. Luckily, it turns out that ZARDOZ is never actually boring, and in fact is not nearly as weird as I expected it to be.
Yes, this is a movie where a giant stone head flies around and talks to men who wear nothing but red diapers and belts of ammo across their chests. But that’s considered weird even within the world of the movie. One character, as he is confronted with the reality of how the “outlands” are being managed, notes that nobody else wanted the job and the current manager is at least leavening his barbarism with some wit.
And the way the story is told is very straightforward. This isn’t some experimental narrative like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973), or even THE SEED OF MAN (1969) or THX-1138 (1971). In fact, the movie is precisely as weird as FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966) and BARBARELLA (1968) and PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and LOGAN’S RUN (1976). In other words, its story depends on the existence of a strange, semi-allegorical, upside-down society that could never really exist -- but which is nonetheless perfectly consistent and logical as soon as you make concessions for the impossible conditions it operates under.
In the case of ZARDOZ, those conditions are the division of the world into two distinct groups: the ageless immortals living in intellectual seclusion, and the masses of brutals killing and dying all around them. Despite the fact that the main character -- Sean Connery’s exterminator Zed -- is a brutal himself, we see very little of the way the world works in the outlands. All we know is that some brutals (the exterminators) constitute a very slightly privileged class that either kills or enslaves humanity as they are ordered. The world of the immortals, on the other hand, is extensively shown. Practically every element that we see, from the perfunctory democracy to the clinging conformity to the frustration and ennui, ring true. The movie seems to be saying that any society (even one with the noblest of intentions and the finest of citizens) so afraid of change that it outlaws aging, death and reproduction will necessarily stagnate and fester until it becomes self-destructive.
Even before Connery arrives among the immortals, they are already falling prey one by one to either of two social diseases. Some become rebellious and begin acting anti-socially, which is invariably punished by democratically selected sentences of aging. Eventually, the rebellious ones receive so many sentences that they age into senility and are placed in a kind of demented rest home apart from the others. Other immortals simply opt out of social life instead -- becoming “apathetics” who do nothing but stand around dumbly all day. Slowly but surely these two fates are spreading to more and more of the immortals, and it seems in time that it will eventually touch all of them.
When Connery arrives, then, the world of the immortals is already a hollow shell surrounding a pit of dissatisfaction, resentment and boredom. One interesting aspect of Connery’s character is that the immortals soon realize he is in fact superior to them in every way -- except possibly education. But physically and mentally, his powers exceed their own. In other words, Connery is not (as he first seems) some ancient relict of a simpler, earthier time. Instead, he is called a “mutant” -- the product of careful selective breeding, and potentially the next step above and beyond the immortals.
Which is not to say that Connery doesn’t have his earthy side. He spends much of his early life killing and raping other brutals in the outlands. True, he believes he is following the orders of the god Zardoz, but he also never seems to gain any awareness of his crimes even as he becomes more educated. (It is clear by the end of the movie that he won’t go on killing and raping -- but whether he has any remorse for his past actions is never explored at all.)
The ending of the movie is a bit bizarre, as these things tend to be. We learn that Connery knows more than he has been letting on, and that his arrival was no mere accident. When he sneaked aboard the flying giant stone head, he fully expected to discover an imposter behind the “god”. He probably didn’t imagine the kind of world that he landed in, but the plan was always to destroy whoever the imposter turned out to be. Connery soon discovers that many of the immortals would welcome such a release -- they have forgotten how to end their lives, and many simply want to die. But this requires destroying a computer that automatically resurrects any immortal who is killed, though none of them remember where the computer is or how to destroy it.
The events that surround the discovery and destruction of the computer don’t all make a whole lot of sense. Some of the immortals do escape to live out their lives naturally. Others are slaughtered by an invading army of brutals. In the carnage and confusion of the moment, Connery separates himself from both groups, and we never learn exactly what shape the world takes in the wake of the passing of the immortals.
What else happened this year?
-- A couple of arrogant scientists meet their match when they tangle with some super-intelligent ants alone in the desert in PHASE IV.
-- Afrofuturist cosmic jazz band leader Sun Ra returns from outer space to free the black race and take them away to a planet with no white people in SPACE IS THE PLACE.
-- And Mel Brooks directs Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, an almost unrecognizable Gene Hackman, and a sadly under-utilized Madeleine Kahn in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.
-- There’s also an interesting musical adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s THE LITTLE PRINCE. I only watched a little bit of it, but the sets and special effects look pretty amazing. The songs, not so much.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1974...
ZARDOZ is the obvious choice.
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