What’s it about?
California senatorial candidate Hal Holbrook hatches a plan to pad his support in the electorate by getting the voting age lowered from 21 to 18. In order to get the measure passed before the election, he enlists the help of a major pop star named Max Frost -- a young runaway who commands Beatle-like adoration from millions of American teenagers. But the plan gets out of hand when Max Frost uses the occasion to start a grass roots movement to drop the voting age down to 14 instead.
With mobilized teenagers threatening violence across the country, a compromise is struck to give the vote to fifteen year-olds. But the compromise only further encourages the newly enfranchised youth of America, as they now also demand the right to run for political office -- not excluding the presidency. To pass the amendment, they spike the Washington water supply with gallons of LSD and cajole a two-thirds majority out of a turned-on, mind-blown, psyched-out Congress. The next order of business, of course, is to install Max Frost as president -- and soon he is shipping everyone over 35 to be neutralized at LSD therapy camps.
Is it any good?
I watched this flick on YouTube, so the bad news I don’t have any screen captures. But the good news is that you can watch it too if you want to! And although this is not exactly the greatest movie in the world, it is pretty interesting as a cultural artifact of the 1960s.
Old as I am, I wasn’t around for the sixties, so I have no idea how accurate WILD IN THE STREETS is about the culture and counterculture of the times. My guess is that it’s not very accurate at all since it paints with pretty broad strokes. (Max Frost’s mother -- a stand-in for the older generation as a whole -- is played with very little subtlety by Shelley Winters, if that tells you anything.) But parts of it ring true. For one thing, it’s hard to deny that the laws at the time which allowed 18 year-olds to be drafted to fight in Vietnam but not to vote were certainly unfair. And it’s this unfairness coupled with the rapidly expanding population of young people (who purportedly outnumbered adults at the time) that gives the movie the grain of reality under its layers of escalating silliness.
The cast is also pretty impressive for a relatively low budget picture. Besides Hal Holbrook and Shelley Winters, it features Ed Begley, a young Richard Pryor, a young Larry Bishop, and a handful of media types like Dick Clark in cameos. It was eventually nominated for an Academy Award for film editing -- presumably thanks to a few flashy split-screen montages with bright color washes and that kind of thing. (They really are pretty neat.) And the soundtrack produced a bona fide hit record called “The Shape of Things to Come”, though I’m not sure if the song was written for the movie specifically or if they just recorded a cover of it. The movie, by the way, is not exactly a musical, but there are several full songs since the main character is supposed to be a rock star. In any event, there’s a lot of neat stuff going on in the movie, even apart from the characters and story.
About that story -- it’s not terribly believable. It is a little terrifying to imagine what would have happened if the Beatles had started inciting young people to demonstrate en masse for some cause, but regardless of the numbers involved I cannot imagine any politician actually agreeing to lower the voting age to 15. The bit where the kids use LSD-spiked water to get amendments passed so they can run for office is even more off-the-wall. But the movie obviously needs to get to that point somehow, or else it wouldn’t have a reason for existence. So, implausible as it all is, it’s for a good cause.
Most of the movie could be taken as straight-up wish fulfillment for disillusioned young people. The kids steamroll the adults at every turn simply thanks to their superior numbers and grooviness. But one disappointing thing is that the teenagers don’t seem to have any objective except a pure power grab. Other than not wanting old people to run the show anymore, they don’t really have any clear platform -- yet dumping the old regime seems to be by itself a good enough reason for all the young people in the country to vote as a massive single-minded bloc. As president, Max Frost is most concerned with neutralizing the old people -- that is, anyone over 30 -- so that they’ll never gain power again. The main gear in this machine is to ship anybody over 35 off to a camp where they are forced to drink LSD-laced water so they do nothing all day except wander around in blue robes. Besides this, the only other goal of the government seems to be to establish a hedonist paradise for young people and to get rid of anything that is ungroovy (like a foreign policy).
That’s one half of the story anyway -- the half you might see if you were a young person sufficiently disgusted with the reigning establishment. The other half is a kind of indictment of the hypocrisy of old folks who worship some aspects of youth (like beauty and vitality) but who simultaneously don’t take young people themselves seriously. WILD IN THE STREETS is not really a cautionary tale since the events it depicts are so extreme and unlikely. But it does have a sort of cautionary message about attitudes towards youth. At its not-so-hidden center, the movie advocates a very traditional kind of society -- one where experienced adults are in charge and where young people pass through a kind of regulated wild period on the way to maturity. Permissive adults and adults who inappropriately seek to prolong their youth are the real bad guys here since they are the adults who allow the situation to get out of hand.
But, to be honest, it takes some digging to get down to that message. Rather than clearly impart any single message, WILD IN THE STREETS seems as though it would much rather have its cake (indulge in rabble-rousing youthful rebellion) and eat it too (condemn the people who allow such things to happen). Ultimately I’d say this one is more “interesting” than “good”, but it’s far from a bad movie. If it has any flaws, it’s probably that it cares too much about the mechanics of how this might actually happen and not enough about its characters.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
1968: BARBARELLA
What’s it about?
When an inventor in possession of a powerful weapon goes missing, the president of the world fears for the continuance of the universe-wide peace that has persisted for centuries. So he calls on Barbarella (played by Jane Fonda) who is in some mysterious way the person best equipped to deal with such a crisis. She sets off immediately for last known location of the missing inventor -- a backward and barbarous planet where violence and other evils still exist.
An accident forces Barbarella to land unexpectedly on the planet’s surface, where she is almost instantly captured by murderous feral children and given over as a sacrifice to their sharp-toothed mechanical dolls. After being rescued by a rugged and hairy mercenary, she sets off again to complete her mission and ends up deep underneath the city in a labyrinth where deviants (in this world, those who are not evil enough) are exiled. There she meets a blind angel who flies her to the city where further dangerous, trippy, and sexually suggestive adventures await. Eventually she must face off against the inventor and the sadistic woman who rules the city to stop the weapon from wreaking more destruction.
Is it any good?
From the very first scene of BARBARELLA -- in which Jane Fonda performs a zero-gravity striptease aboard her shag-carpeted spaceship -- it feels very much like a campy sci-fi spoof. But as I watched, I had a hard time putting my finger on what exactly the movie could possibly have been spoofing back in 1968. With only a handful of exceptions, sci-fi movies even in the late sixties were still very conservative, Earth-bound, and relatively unambitious with their speculations. Bizarre cultures on far-flung planets in unrecognizable futures just weren’t that common.
But then I remembered that there was also science fiction on television in the 1960s. Although it’s hard to imagine BARBARELLA emerging fully-formed from the giant insect, alien invasion, and lost civilization movies of the 1950s and 1960s, it makes far more sense in the context of shows like STAR TREK, LOST IN SPACE, DOCTOR WHO, or even THE PRISONER. In fact, it makes me wish I knew a lot more about those shows. There’s probably an earlier influence as well -- although I know even less about this kind of thing, it also seems likely that old movie serials like BUCK ROGERS, FLASH GORDON, and ROCKY JONES could have contributed to BARBARELLA’s genetic make-up.
All if this is a long way of saying that BARBARELLA is a feature-length version of the “planet of the week” style of science fiction. On her mission to retrieve the missing inventor and his weapon, Barbarella finds herself on a planet with a strange social structure, a couple of different alien races, pockets of bizarre subcultures, a dark secret that gives power to its authoritarian rulers, and otherworldly fashions and architecture. (By the way, have I mentioned yet that the inventor’s name is Durand-Durand -- the inspiration for a certain English rock band’s name.)
But the crazy alien world and its crazy alien society are not really the main appeal of BARBARELLA. If I’m honest, the main appeal is probably actually Jane Fonda. Before watching this movie, I wasn’t familiar with anything she’d been involved with (except for workout records and the fall of Saigon) so I had no idea what to expect from her. I still don’t know if she’s a great actor or not, but she is definitely great in this role. A lot of what she has to do is look good in space age clothes (or the lack thereof), and she definitely aces that part of the exam. As an aside, I should mention that despite the five-minute striptease that opens the movie and the several sexual encounters throughout, there is very little in the way of prurient thrills. All of the sex takes place entirely off screen (and very matter-of-factly, I might add) except for a long scene of pill-assisted futuristic coupling experienced entirely through the palms of the hand.
But even better than the ability to look good in a spacesuit, Jane Fonda also apparently has a hilarious arsenal of facial expressions to fit any occasion. The dialogue is all delivered very breezily and professionally, but it seemed to me that most of the real acting happened in facial expressions and body language. In fact, Marcel Marceau has a supporting role as some kind of gnome-like sage-cum-mechanic, and even a legendary mime can’t overtop Jane Fonda when it comes to reaction shots. Of course, how much you’ll enjoy all of this probably depends on how much patience you have for mugging.
Anyway, the kind of story that BARBARELLA is most similar to is probably something like THE WIZARD OF OZ or ALICE IN WONDERLAND. She’s a woman on an episodic adventure through a strange world full of stranger characters and customs. Despite the rampant sex, Barbarella even has a lot of the same un-self-conscious innocence as Dorothy and Alice -- she mostly takes things as they come, except when she doesn’t, and she doesn’t spend too much time thinking about why. It’s campy and lighthearted, but it’s also enjoyable and creative and sometimes pretty funny too.
What else happened this year?
Stick around and find out over the next week!
When an inventor in possession of a powerful weapon goes missing, the president of the world fears for the continuance of the universe-wide peace that has persisted for centuries. So he calls on Barbarella (played by Jane Fonda) who is in some mysterious way the person best equipped to deal with such a crisis. She sets off immediately for last known location of the missing inventor -- a backward and barbarous planet where violence and other evils still exist.
An accident forces Barbarella to land unexpectedly on the planet’s surface, where she is almost instantly captured by murderous feral children and given over as a sacrifice to their sharp-toothed mechanical dolls. After being rescued by a rugged and hairy mercenary, she sets off again to complete her mission and ends up deep underneath the city in a labyrinth where deviants (in this world, those who are not evil enough) are exiled. There she meets a blind angel who flies her to the city where further dangerous, trippy, and sexually suggestive adventures await. Eventually she must face off against the inventor and the sadistic woman who rules the city to stop the weapon from wreaking more destruction.
Is it any good?
From the very first scene of BARBARELLA -- in which Jane Fonda performs a zero-gravity striptease aboard her shag-carpeted spaceship -- it feels very much like a campy sci-fi spoof. But as I watched, I had a hard time putting my finger on what exactly the movie could possibly have been spoofing back in 1968. With only a handful of exceptions, sci-fi movies even in the late sixties were still very conservative, Earth-bound, and relatively unambitious with their speculations. Bizarre cultures on far-flung planets in unrecognizable futures just weren’t that common.
But then I remembered that there was also science fiction on television in the 1960s. Although it’s hard to imagine BARBARELLA emerging fully-formed from the giant insect, alien invasion, and lost civilization movies of the 1950s and 1960s, it makes far more sense in the context of shows like STAR TREK, LOST IN SPACE, DOCTOR WHO, or even THE PRISONER. In fact, it makes me wish I knew a lot more about those shows. There’s probably an earlier influence as well -- although I know even less about this kind of thing, it also seems likely that old movie serials like BUCK ROGERS, FLASH GORDON, and ROCKY JONES could have contributed to BARBARELLA’s genetic make-up.
All if this is a long way of saying that BARBARELLA is a feature-length version of the “planet of the week” style of science fiction. On her mission to retrieve the missing inventor and his weapon, Barbarella finds herself on a planet with a strange social structure, a couple of different alien races, pockets of bizarre subcultures, a dark secret that gives power to its authoritarian rulers, and otherworldly fashions and architecture. (By the way, have I mentioned yet that the inventor’s name is Durand-Durand -- the inspiration for a certain English rock band’s name.)
But the crazy alien world and its crazy alien society are not really the main appeal of BARBARELLA. If I’m honest, the main appeal is probably actually Jane Fonda. Before watching this movie, I wasn’t familiar with anything she’d been involved with (except for workout records and the fall of Saigon) so I had no idea what to expect from her. I still don’t know if she’s a great actor or not, but she is definitely great in this role. A lot of what she has to do is look good in space age clothes (or the lack thereof), and she definitely aces that part of the exam. As an aside, I should mention that despite the five-minute striptease that opens the movie and the several sexual encounters throughout, there is very little in the way of prurient thrills. All of the sex takes place entirely off screen (and very matter-of-factly, I might add) except for a long scene of pill-assisted futuristic coupling experienced entirely through the palms of the hand.
But even better than the ability to look good in a spacesuit, Jane Fonda also apparently has a hilarious arsenal of facial expressions to fit any occasion. The dialogue is all delivered very breezily and professionally, but it seemed to me that most of the real acting happened in facial expressions and body language. In fact, Marcel Marceau has a supporting role as some kind of gnome-like sage-cum-mechanic, and even a legendary mime can’t overtop Jane Fonda when it comes to reaction shots. Of course, how much you’ll enjoy all of this probably depends on how much patience you have for mugging.
Anyway, the kind of story that BARBARELLA is most similar to is probably something like THE WIZARD OF OZ or ALICE IN WONDERLAND. She’s a woman on an episodic adventure through a strange world full of stranger characters and customs. Despite the rampant sex, Barbarella even has a lot of the same un-self-conscious innocence as Dorothy and Alice -- she mostly takes things as they come, except when she doesn’t, and she doesn’t spend too much time thinking about why. It’s campy and lighthearted, but it’s also enjoyable and creative and sometimes pretty funny too.
What else happened this year?
Stick around and find out over the next week!
Monday, May 18, 2009
1967: FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN
What’s it about?
Presumably tired of animating monsters, Dr Frankenstein (played by Peter Cushing) and his two assistants instead work on experiments intended to preserve life after death. Frankenstein’s plan to achieve this consists of trapping a departing soul as it takes flight after death, repairing or replacing any bodily damage, and returning the soul to bring the patient back to life. But while celebrating the partial success of one experiment in the local village, Frankenstein’s younger assistant gets into a brawl with three insolent dandies. Later, the dandies accidentally kill a man, and the assistant is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death.
Frankenstein sets his sights on using the boy for his first true attempt at bringing a corpse back to life. And when the boy’s sweetheart (a barmaid with some physical disabilities) drowns herself in grief after the execution, Frankenstein decides to transfer the boy’s soul to her body instead of repairing the mess the guillotine made. But the success of the experiment only results in complications as the revived girl seems to have two personalities -- and not necessarily nice ones.
Is it any good?
I haven’t seen as many Frankenstein movies as I probably should have, but the usual formula seems to consist of the doctor using spare body parts to construct a monster that then goes on to terrorize people and/or be terrorized by people until it is destroyed. Variations in the story are for the most part confined to adjustments in Frankenstein’s motivations (anywhere from “scientifically obsessed” to “demonically possessed”) and similar adjustments in the monster’s personality (“misunderstood and persecuted” to “homicidally evil”). But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN throws out about 95% of this formula, and I think it’s all the better for it.
Not only is the story in FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN less familiar than that in the usual Frankenstein movie, but I think it may actually be a better one. The big elephant in the room with Frankenstein has always been why anybody should go to all that trouble just to make a human being. After all, there already exists a pretty reliable method for making new humans -- and it doesn’t require grave robbery, hacksaws, electric shocks, or hunchbacks. So at some level it’s usually necessary to take Frankenstein as an allegory or a psychological case study -- why he wants to build monsters is ultimately less important than what happens when he tries. But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN doesn’t really need any of this hand-waving since the doctor’s goal -- restoring the recently deceased to life -- is one that has obvious medical benefits.
In fact, the Frankenstein that Peter Cushing plays here hardly even seems to be the same character who shows up in other movies. There is no mention of any monsters at all, neither in his past nor his future. Some of the villagers do suspect that the doctor may be a witch, but the law treats him as a perfectly law abiding citizen -- more eccentric than dangerous or frightening. Probably the best scene with Frankenstein is one where he appears as a character witness at his assistant’s trial. He seems genuinely concerned and gives a sympathetic testimony, but always remains intellectual and detached. When asked whether it would be “impossible” for the boy to have committed the crime, instead of insisting on his belief in the boy’s innocence, Frankenstein pauses and then says he can’t definitely rule out the possibility. There’s no suggestion that this piece of testimony is what sends the boy to the guillotine, but it’s certainly the kind of precise answer that scientific mind would give and that the villagers might misconstrue.
I wrote last week in my entry about THE FACE OF ANOTHER that I am starting to think it’s often better when movies simply hint at deeper themes instead of completely exploring them. It was while watching FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN that this idea hit me most clearly. There is, after all, a potentially rich and bizarre occurrence at the heart of this movie: a boy dies and is then brought back to life in the body of his girlfriend. Besides the gender switch, one would also expect a certain amount of distress to come from inhabiting the body of your old flame. Those questions are all natural enough, given the premise of the movie, but they remain for the most part completely unaddressed. Yet, I decided that I was okay with that. For once, I was watching an interesting Frankenstein movie with a fairly unique story, and mostly I just wanted to find out how it was going to end. It also didn’t seem likely that this particular movie could have really gone anywhere really satisfying with those deep, difficult questions. There’s something to be said for not biting off more than you can chew.
In any event, the way the story does end isn’t exactly a revelation. The revived girl doesn’t remember much of her past life, and mostly just wants to know who she is and where she came from. The boy’s soul seems to be mingled in with her own, and he only really asserts himself to exact murderous revenge on the dandies who got him killed. This is as close as the movie ever gets to a monster, and interestingly enough it means at the end that Frankenstein comes off looking pretty good. He never has to pay for his crimes against nature, and frankly it’s not clear that he actually committed any. In the usual Frankenstein story, it’s the doctor himself who gets blamed for the behavior of the monster since it is his creation. In this case, however, the murderous “monster” is really the soul of another human being which Frankenstein merely transferred to a new body, so there’s not much of a feeling that the doctor could be directly responsible for what follows. The ending is a bit run-of-the-mill, but all in all this is a refreshingly unusual take on a story that is often just way too familiar.
What else happened this year?
-- Professor Quatermass makes a horrific discovery in the London Underground that casts new light on the course of human evolution in the last of Hammer's original Quatermass trilogy, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.
-- And the Czechs put together one of the best sci-fi movies from anywhere in the Soviet bloc with THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE. It follows a group of young, wild women wandering a post-apocalyptic world where there are practically no male survivors.
-- George Lucas filmed his student short ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX-1138 4EB, which would be the basis for his first feature film in 1971.
-- Don Knotts and Leslie Nielsen starred in THE RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT, which I only just realized moments ago is available online or I would have definitely watched it already.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1967...
Go for QUATERMASS AND THE PIT if you can find it, or THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE if you can't.
Presumably tired of animating monsters, Dr Frankenstein (played by Peter Cushing) and his two assistants instead work on experiments intended to preserve life after death. Frankenstein’s plan to achieve this consists of trapping a departing soul as it takes flight after death, repairing or replacing any bodily damage, and returning the soul to bring the patient back to life. But while celebrating the partial success of one experiment in the local village, Frankenstein’s younger assistant gets into a brawl with three insolent dandies. Later, the dandies accidentally kill a man, and the assistant is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death.
Frankenstein sets his sights on using the boy for his first true attempt at bringing a corpse back to life. And when the boy’s sweetheart (a barmaid with some physical disabilities) drowns herself in grief after the execution, Frankenstein decides to transfer the boy’s soul to her body instead of repairing the mess the guillotine made. But the success of the experiment only results in complications as the revived girl seems to have two personalities -- and not necessarily nice ones.
Is it any good?
I haven’t seen as many Frankenstein movies as I probably should have, but the usual formula seems to consist of the doctor using spare body parts to construct a monster that then goes on to terrorize people and/or be terrorized by people until it is destroyed. Variations in the story are for the most part confined to adjustments in Frankenstein’s motivations (anywhere from “scientifically obsessed” to “demonically possessed”) and similar adjustments in the monster’s personality (“misunderstood and persecuted” to “homicidally evil”). But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN throws out about 95% of this formula, and I think it’s all the better for it.
Not only is the story in FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN less familiar than that in the usual Frankenstein movie, but I think it may actually be a better one. The big elephant in the room with Frankenstein has always been why anybody should go to all that trouble just to make a human being. After all, there already exists a pretty reliable method for making new humans -- and it doesn’t require grave robbery, hacksaws, electric shocks, or hunchbacks. So at some level it’s usually necessary to take Frankenstein as an allegory or a psychological case study -- why he wants to build monsters is ultimately less important than what happens when he tries. But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN doesn’t really need any of this hand-waving since the doctor’s goal -- restoring the recently deceased to life -- is one that has obvious medical benefits.
In fact, the Frankenstein that Peter Cushing plays here hardly even seems to be the same character who shows up in other movies. There is no mention of any monsters at all, neither in his past nor his future. Some of the villagers do suspect that the doctor may be a witch, but the law treats him as a perfectly law abiding citizen -- more eccentric than dangerous or frightening. Probably the best scene with Frankenstein is one where he appears as a character witness at his assistant’s trial. He seems genuinely concerned and gives a sympathetic testimony, but always remains intellectual and detached. When asked whether it would be “impossible” for the boy to have committed the crime, instead of insisting on his belief in the boy’s innocence, Frankenstein pauses and then says he can’t definitely rule out the possibility. There’s no suggestion that this piece of testimony is what sends the boy to the guillotine, but it’s certainly the kind of precise answer that scientific mind would give and that the villagers might misconstrue.
I wrote last week in my entry about THE FACE OF ANOTHER that I am starting to think it’s often better when movies simply hint at deeper themes instead of completely exploring them. It was while watching FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN that this idea hit me most clearly. There is, after all, a potentially rich and bizarre occurrence at the heart of this movie: a boy dies and is then brought back to life in the body of his girlfriend. Besides the gender switch, one would also expect a certain amount of distress to come from inhabiting the body of your old flame. Those questions are all natural enough, given the premise of the movie, but they remain for the most part completely unaddressed. Yet, I decided that I was okay with that. For once, I was watching an interesting Frankenstein movie with a fairly unique story, and mostly I just wanted to find out how it was going to end. It also didn’t seem likely that this particular movie could have really gone anywhere really satisfying with those deep, difficult questions. There’s something to be said for not biting off more than you can chew.
In any event, the way the story does end isn’t exactly a revelation. The revived girl doesn’t remember much of her past life, and mostly just wants to know who she is and where she came from. The boy’s soul seems to be mingled in with her own, and he only really asserts himself to exact murderous revenge on the dandies who got him killed. This is as close as the movie ever gets to a monster, and interestingly enough it means at the end that Frankenstein comes off looking pretty good. He never has to pay for his crimes against nature, and frankly it’s not clear that he actually committed any. In the usual Frankenstein story, it’s the doctor himself who gets blamed for the behavior of the monster since it is his creation. In this case, however, the murderous “monster” is really the soul of another human being which Frankenstein merely transferred to a new body, so there’s not much of a feeling that the doctor could be directly responsible for what follows. The ending is a bit run-of-the-mill, but all in all this is a refreshingly unusual take on a story that is often just way too familiar.
What else happened this year?
-- Professor Quatermass makes a horrific discovery in the London Underground that casts new light on the course of human evolution in the last of Hammer's original Quatermass trilogy, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.
-- And the Czechs put together one of the best sci-fi movies from anywhere in the Soviet bloc with THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE. It follows a group of young, wild women wandering a post-apocalyptic world where there are practically no male survivors.
-- George Lucas filmed his student short ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX-1138 4EB, which would be the basis for his first feature film in 1971.
-- Don Knotts and Leslie Nielsen starred in THE RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT, which I only just realized moments ago is available online or I would have definitely watched it already.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1967...
Go for QUATERMASS AND THE PIT if you can find it, or THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE if you can't.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1966: THE FACE OF ANOTHER
What’s it about?
After an industrial accident burns his face, a factory technician spends his days moping about with bandages covering his head. Convinced that his disfigurement makes him unfit for human contact, the man resigns himself to a life of seclusion with the wife he believes will never be anything but disgusted by him. But his psychiatrist suggests the use of an experimental mask that will perfectly mimic the look and feel of human skin.
Once the mask is in place, the man tests its effectiveness in a variety of interactions. He is soon convinced that not only is it convincing enough to pass for the real thing, but that his new face makes him unrecognizable to even his closest friends. But when he decides to use the mask to anonymously seduce his own wife, he starts to get in over his head.
Is it any good?
I have usually been the kind of guy who complains when movies and books simply brush on deeper themes instead of really trying to develop them. But as time goes by, I am starting to wonder why. THE FACE OF ANOTHER, for example, spends a great deal of time dissecting all the possible psychological and symbolic ramifications first of the condition of having no face, and then later of the use of a lifelike mask used to correct that condition. And yet through most of those conversations I found myself impatiently tapping my foot, waiting for the plot to resume.
The story is something of a continuation of EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), but with a couple very important differences. The first is that there is nothing obviously morally wrong about the facial replacement experiments in this movie -- the creation of the mask doesn’t require kidnapping, murder, or even any overt deceit. The second difference is that the experiments succeed and the patient ends up with a perfectly serviceable (though temporary) face. These are pretty important distinctions since it means that THE FACE OF ANOTHER isn’t about science ghoulishly trampling innocent victims for the sake of progress. Instead, it takes a subtler position that questions whether humans are really prepared to deal with all of the potential fallout from scientific advancements.
I don’t think that THE FACE OF ANOTHER is entirely convincing about the dangers of the specific technology it’s talking about. The doctor seems concerned that cheap, convincing masks would result in the total breakdown of society as everybody assumed anonymous and ever-changing identities. The most interesting part of this discussion is how closely it mirrors a lot of the hand-wringing about the anonymous culture of the Internet (some of which continues even today). But even if we take as a given that some people will always abuse the ability to change or mask their identity, I think the Internet itself has proven pretty conclusively that the majority of folks actually want to be recognized and to recognize others (most of the time anyway). So even though the ability to easily shed identity could plausibly lead to social anarchy, there seem to be fundamental human needs that make it unlikely on a wide scale.
But even though I’m not really convinced by the movie’s hypothesis, it is one of the few that I’ve watched so far that makes a specific comment about technology that is still relevant today -- even if it’s relevant in ways that the film makers probably never imagined. I do wish that they had stuck more with the story and spent less time spinning out complicated theories. Too much of the dialogue felt like a speculative essay, and the tendency of the main character to be overly melodramatic about everything didn’t help much either.
The movie also has a few surrealistic touches that I am not really sure what to make of. The neatest is probably the doctor’s office, which appears to have been furnished by somebody with a German expressionist sense of humor. It’s full of glass walls covered with arcane diagrams and furniture that’s cast from body parts. There’s another nifty bit at the end where the main character and doctor walk through a crowd of people who all have blanks for faces -- an attempt, I assume, to illustrate what it would be like if everyone were anonymous. It’s a cool image, but probably not as effective as it could be, considering that crowds are already pretty anonymous.
Finally, there’s also a parallel story about a pretty young woman with a bad burn on her face who lives a lonely life with her brother. It’s hard to tell whether her story is meant to be a contrast or a companion to the main action, but even though she leaves her scars unmodified she doesn’t end up with a happy ending either. In the end, I think I’d say that there is almost too much going on in THE FACE OF ANOTHER. Assuming that all of it has a meaning, it’s certainly too much to figure out in a single viewing. The relationship between the main character and his wife (both before and after the mask) is the best part of the movie, and the bits with the doctor are a close second. Distilled down to just those elements, I think this would have been a great flick. But with everything else in there, it’s a bit harder to enjoy as a story.
After an industrial accident burns his face, a factory technician spends his days moping about with bandages covering his head. Convinced that his disfigurement makes him unfit for human contact, the man resigns himself to a life of seclusion with the wife he believes will never be anything but disgusted by him. But his psychiatrist suggests the use of an experimental mask that will perfectly mimic the look and feel of human skin.
Once the mask is in place, the man tests its effectiveness in a variety of interactions. He is soon convinced that not only is it convincing enough to pass for the real thing, but that his new face makes him unrecognizable to even his closest friends. But when he decides to use the mask to anonymously seduce his own wife, he starts to get in over his head.
 |  |
Is it any good?
I have usually been the kind of guy who complains when movies and books simply brush on deeper themes instead of really trying to develop them. But as time goes by, I am starting to wonder why. THE FACE OF ANOTHER, for example, spends a great deal of time dissecting all the possible psychological and symbolic ramifications first of the condition of having no face, and then later of the use of a lifelike mask used to correct that condition. And yet through most of those conversations I found myself impatiently tapping my foot, waiting for the plot to resume.
The story is something of a continuation of EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), but with a couple very important differences. The first is that there is nothing obviously morally wrong about the facial replacement experiments in this movie -- the creation of the mask doesn’t require kidnapping, murder, or even any overt deceit. The second difference is that the experiments succeed and the patient ends up with a perfectly serviceable (though temporary) face. These are pretty important distinctions since it means that THE FACE OF ANOTHER isn’t about science ghoulishly trampling innocent victims for the sake of progress. Instead, it takes a subtler position that questions whether humans are really prepared to deal with all of the potential fallout from scientific advancements.
 |  |
I don’t think that THE FACE OF ANOTHER is entirely convincing about the dangers of the specific technology it’s talking about. The doctor seems concerned that cheap, convincing masks would result in the total breakdown of society as everybody assumed anonymous and ever-changing identities. The most interesting part of this discussion is how closely it mirrors a lot of the hand-wringing about the anonymous culture of the Internet (some of which continues even today). But even if we take as a given that some people will always abuse the ability to change or mask their identity, I think the Internet itself has proven pretty conclusively that the majority of folks actually want to be recognized and to recognize others (most of the time anyway). So even though the ability to easily shed identity could plausibly lead to social anarchy, there seem to be fundamental human needs that make it unlikely on a wide scale.
But even though I’m not really convinced by the movie’s hypothesis, it is one of the few that I’ve watched so far that makes a specific comment about technology that is still relevant today -- even if it’s relevant in ways that the film makers probably never imagined. I do wish that they had stuck more with the story and spent less time spinning out complicated theories. Too much of the dialogue felt like a speculative essay, and the tendency of the main character to be overly melodramatic about everything didn’t help much either.
 |  |
The movie also has a few surrealistic touches that I am not really sure what to make of. The neatest is probably the doctor’s office, which appears to have been furnished by somebody with a German expressionist sense of humor. It’s full of glass walls covered with arcane diagrams and furniture that’s cast from body parts. There’s another nifty bit at the end where the main character and doctor walk through a crowd of people who all have blanks for faces -- an attempt, I assume, to illustrate what it would be like if everyone were anonymous. It’s a cool image, but probably not as effective as it could be, considering that crowds are already pretty anonymous.
Finally, there’s also a parallel story about a pretty young woman with a bad burn on her face who lives a lonely life with her brother. It’s hard to tell whether her story is meant to be a contrast or a companion to the main action, but even though she leaves her scars unmodified she doesn’t end up with a happy ending either. In the end, I think I’d say that there is almost too much going on in THE FACE OF ANOTHER. Assuming that all of it has a meaning, it’s certainly too much to figure out in a single viewing. The relationship between the main character and his wife (both before and after the mask) is the best part of the movie, and the bits with the doctor are a close second. Distilled down to just those elements, I think this would have been a great flick. But with everything else in there, it’s a bit harder to enjoy as a story.
Monday, May 11, 2009
1966: FANTASTIC VOYAGE
What’s it about?
When an assassination attempt sends a Russian defector with important defense secrets into a coma, the American government decides to shrink a team of surgeons down to microbial size so they can repair the damage from the inside. The plan calls for injecting a submarine carrying five-person team (including Donald Pleasance and Raquel Welch) into the carotid artery for a relatively short jaunt to the affected area of the brain.
Things, however, immediately go wrong when the submarine is swept down a whirlpool of blood into the venous system and starts heading towards the heart. Still hoping to complete their mission, the team must now traverse the perils of the heart, the lungs, the lymphatic system, and the inner ear before arriving at the brain. And the probable presence of a saboteur on board only adds to the danger.
Is it any good?
There’s a part of me that wants to hail FANTASTIC VOYAGE as something like a culmination of the ambitions of sci-fi movies from the previous two decades. I don’t think the case for that kind of claim is foolproof -- there’s another part of me, after all, that recognizes it is a movie with a lot of flaws. But even though FANTASTIC VOYAGE is perhaps not exactly pioneering, it does feel to me like a big incremental step forward for the genre.
It would be nice if I could point to some particular element as the obvious keystone to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there really is one. Instead, I think the difference with FANTASTIC VOYAGE is really more about the shortcomings of the movies that came before it. Take DESTINATION MOON (1950), for instance. That movie stood out at the time because it combined a dramatic speculative vision with the budget needed to achieve it and a willingness to take the material seriously. But the science and special effects upstaged the plot and characters, and the story itself is just never satisfying. THE SILENT STAR (1960), by contrast, had the vision and spectacle, the willingness to treat sci-fi seriously, and a pretty good story -- but it lacked the budget and talent to really bring them to life. Again and again, most sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 1960s seem to fall short in one category or another. ON THE BEACH (1959) lacks a clear or compelling vision, THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955) and VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961) don’t take their science or their audiences seriously, and a whole host of movies fall prey to low budgets, short production times, or inexperienced cast and crew.
One part of my argument is that FANTASTIC VOYAGE succeeds (more or less) on every meaningful metric that I would use to rate a sci-fi movie. It has an compelling speculative vision that is really pretty unique. It has the budget to convincingly create a weird and alien world full of imaginative spectacle. It has an exciting story and a talented cast that makes it believable enough. And it has a real interest in science, a respect for accuracy, and a curiosity about what might exist beyond the bounds of the knowable world.
If I took half an hour to think about it, I could probably come up with a short list of six or seven sci-fi movies from 1966 and earlier that arguably meet all of those criteria just as well as FANTASTIC VOYAGE does. But I think the difference with FANTASTIC VOYAGE is that it succeeds while swinging for the fences -- it envisions a story on an epic scale, and mostly delivers what it promises without losing sight of the elements that make a good movie. This isn’t a black and white B-movie set mostly in an ordinary American town with a slow-building sci-fi premise. It’s an all out full color adventure that takes place largely in a world that none of us will ever see except on TV and movie screens. In saying this, I mean no disrespect to those quieter, less flashy movies like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) or I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958). The fact they are a less ambitious doesn’t make them any less enjoyable -- just less likely to create as big of a splash.
I also don’t want anybody to get the idea that I think FANTASTIC VOYAGE is a perfect movie. It’s got its share of flaws as well. The weakest link is probably the story, which exists entirely as a mechanism for first getting the surgical team from one bodily attraction to another. Even accepting that surgery via miniaturized submarine is the best option for this particular patient, there’s no reason that the operation in question should take the team through the heart, the lungs, and most of the other stops they make. So the story is mostly just a string of accidents that each justify the next stop on the journey. Yet, it’s all believable enough and certainly makes for a more exciting trip than there might otherwise have been.
I don’t want to spend too much time picking nits though. The acting is good, the submarine is neat, and the special effects are pretty effective. I had thought that at least some of the special effects were the result of miniature photography of real cells. But that’s not the case -- every special effect (from red blood cells to the chambers of the heart to alveoli to antibodies) are recreated at a giant size so they can be photographed with the models and actors. The fantastic voyage does eventually start to feel a bit like “the greatest hits of health class”, but even so there’s something undeniably interesting about a (seemingly fairly accurate) journey through the human body. And as far as cinematic images go, the sight of Donald Pleasance being eaten by a white corpuscle is one that sticks with you for decades.
What else happened this year?
-- John Frankenheimer directed SECONDS, in which an old man is given a chance for rejuvenation in the body of a relatively young (but still incredibly square) Rock Hudson. But when it turns out that he has just as little control over his new life as his old one, he starts trying to break out.
-- Francois Truffaut’s directed a surprisingly good adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451. The movie improves a bit on the novel as far as pacing and character interest goes, but it’s probably still all too allegorical for its own good. Julie Christie co-stars in Truffaut’s only English-language movie.
-- A man gets an experimental lifelike mask to cover up his disfigured face in THE FACE OF ANOTHER. But when he uses his new identity to anonymously seduce his own wife, the experiment starts to go awry.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1966...
I was all ready to recommend FAHRENHEIT 451, but I think after writing this entry I talked myself into going with FANTASTIC VOYAGE as the best movie of the year. As I said earlier, it’s a big incremental jump for the genre -- and it seems like an important stepping stone on the way to some of the true classics that arrived a couple years later.
When an assassination attempt sends a Russian defector with important defense secrets into a coma, the American government decides to shrink a team of surgeons down to microbial size so they can repair the damage from the inside. The plan calls for injecting a submarine carrying five-person team (including Donald Pleasance and Raquel Welch) into the carotid artery for a relatively short jaunt to the affected area of the brain.
Things, however, immediately go wrong when the submarine is swept down a whirlpool of blood into the venous system and starts heading towards the heart. Still hoping to complete their mission, the team must now traverse the perils of the heart, the lungs, the lymphatic system, and the inner ear before arriving at the brain. And the probable presence of a saboteur on board only adds to the danger.
Is it any good?
There’s a part of me that wants to hail FANTASTIC VOYAGE as something like a culmination of the ambitions of sci-fi movies from the previous two decades. I don’t think the case for that kind of claim is foolproof -- there’s another part of me, after all, that recognizes it is a movie with a lot of flaws. But even though FANTASTIC VOYAGE is perhaps not exactly pioneering, it does feel to me like a big incremental step forward for the genre.
It would be nice if I could point to some particular element as the obvious keystone to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there really is one. Instead, I think the difference with FANTASTIC VOYAGE is really more about the shortcomings of the movies that came before it. Take DESTINATION MOON (1950), for instance. That movie stood out at the time because it combined a dramatic speculative vision with the budget needed to achieve it and a willingness to take the material seriously. But the science and special effects upstaged the plot and characters, and the story itself is just never satisfying. THE SILENT STAR (1960), by contrast, had the vision and spectacle, the willingness to treat sci-fi seriously, and a pretty good story -- but it lacked the budget and talent to really bring them to life. Again and again, most sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 1960s seem to fall short in one category or another. ON THE BEACH (1959) lacks a clear or compelling vision, THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955) and VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961) don’t take their science or their audiences seriously, and a whole host of movies fall prey to low budgets, short production times, or inexperienced cast and crew.
One part of my argument is that FANTASTIC VOYAGE succeeds (more or less) on every meaningful metric that I would use to rate a sci-fi movie. It has an compelling speculative vision that is really pretty unique. It has the budget to convincingly create a weird and alien world full of imaginative spectacle. It has an exciting story and a talented cast that makes it believable enough. And it has a real interest in science, a respect for accuracy, and a curiosity about what might exist beyond the bounds of the knowable world.
If I took half an hour to think about it, I could probably come up with a short list of six or seven sci-fi movies from 1966 and earlier that arguably meet all of those criteria just as well as FANTASTIC VOYAGE does. But I think the difference with FANTASTIC VOYAGE is that it succeeds while swinging for the fences -- it envisions a story on an epic scale, and mostly delivers what it promises without losing sight of the elements that make a good movie. This isn’t a black and white B-movie set mostly in an ordinary American town with a slow-building sci-fi premise. It’s an all out full color adventure that takes place largely in a world that none of us will ever see except on TV and movie screens. In saying this, I mean no disrespect to those quieter, less flashy movies like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) or I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958). The fact they are a less ambitious doesn’t make them any less enjoyable -- just less likely to create as big of a splash.
I also don’t want anybody to get the idea that I think FANTASTIC VOYAGE is a perfect movie. It’s got its share of flaws as well. The weakest link is probably the story, which exists entirely as a mechanism for first getting the surgical team from one bodily attraction to another. Even accepting that surgery via miniaturized submarine is the best option for this particular patient, there’s no reason that the operation in question should take the team through the heart, the lungs, and most of the other stops they make. So the story is mostly just a string of accidents that each justify the next stop on the journey. Yet, it’s all believable enough and certainly makes for a more exciting trip than there might otherwise have been.
I don’t want to spend too much time picking nits though. The acting is good, the submarine is neat, and the special effects are pretty effective. I had thought that at least some of the special effects were the result of miniature photography of real cells. But that’s not the case -- every special effect (from red blood cells to the chambers of the heart to alveoli to antibodies) are recreated at a giant size so they can be photographed with the models and actors. The fantastic voyage does eventually start to feel a bit like “the greatest hits of health class”, but even so there’s something undeniably interesting about a (seemingly fairly accurate) journey through the human body. And as far as cinematic images go, the sight of Donald Pleasance being eaten by a white corpuscle is one that sticks with you for decades.
What else happened this year?
-- John Frankenheimer directed SECONDS, in which an old man is given a chance for rejuvenation in the body of a relatively young (but still incredibly square) Rock Hudson. But when it turns out that he has just as little control over his new life as his old one, he starts trying to break out.
-- Francois Truffaut’s directed a surprisingly good adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451. The movie improves a bit on the novel as far as pacing and character interest goes, but it’s probably still all too allegorical for its own good. Julie Christie co-stars in Truffaut’s only English-language movie.
-- A man gets an experimental lifelike mask to cover up his disfigured face in THE FACE OF ANOTHER. But when he uses his new identity to anonymously seduce his own wife, the experiment starts to go awry.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1966...
I was all ready to recommend FAHRENHEIT 451, but I think after writing this entry I talked myself into going with FANTASTIC VOYAGE as the best movie of the year. As I said earlier, it’s a big incremental jump for the genre -- and it seems like an important stepping stone on the way to some of the true classics that arrived a couple years later.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1965: SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH
What’s it about?
An unemployed ne’er-do-well nicknamed Shreeman Funtoosh goes out looking for a job with a friend. But before they get too far they literally bump into two beautiful women while stopping to pray for good fortune at a temple. The job interview goes badly, and so does the wooing -- at first anyway. But persistence soon pays off with the ladies, which earns the boys the wrath of the powerful family of one of their intended husbands.
The wrath takes the form of a complicated frame-up for theft that involves too many moving parts to mention here. But the nefarious schemes gang agley (as aft happens) when Shreeman Funtoosh evades the hoodlums sent to waylay him, and instead gets zapped by malfunctioning lab equipment. As a result, he is turned into an indestructible iron man, with disastrous consequences for everybody he comes into contact with. An interrupted attempt to restore him to his normal state simply makes things worse by shrinking him to a tiny size. Meanwhile, the woman that Shreeman Funtoosh loves is being forced into a marriage with a real jerk, and it looks pretty hopeless that he’ll be able to stop things.
Is it any good?
Apart from a few movies by Satyajit Ray, I know practically nothing about Indian cinema, so I was pretty interested to see what this flick would be like. It’s a Hindi language movie that was filmed in Mumbai (or Bombay, if you prefer), so based on my limited understanding of such things it seems that it would qualify as an honest-to-gosh Bollywood movie. But since I’ve never seen a Bollywood movie before, I have no idea if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is typical or not.
The first surprise was when I checked out the movie’s running time and discovered that it was two and a half hours long. There’s nothing in the story that requires the movie to be that long, but it seems content to take its time and stroll along leisurely from start to finish. The cast of characters isn’t especially big, but the main players are all tightly bound together by a series of coincidences so the outcome of the love story bears directly on the experiments that provide the sci-fi bits and also the fates of three families. (For example, the man that Shreeman Funtoosh tries to get a job from in the beginning is BOTH the guy who is bankrolling the scientist whose lab equipment malfunctions AND the guy who ends up trying to force the heroine into a loveless marriage with his jerky son. The other character relations are all just about as involved as that.)
The second surprise was that the movie is pretty funny. I’m never sure if I’m grading comedies from other countries on a curve -- at the very least, with foreign movies it’s less likely that I’ll recognize if all the jokes are stolen. So I don’t know if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is funny compared to other Bollywood movies, but the lead actors are all pretty likeable and amusing. I did end up watching the movie over the course of two days, so it’s not as though I was transfixed from start to finish. But it was much easier going than I expected from a two and a half hour Hindi-language musical. And speaking of the musical elements, the third surprise was that there were only six songs in the whole movie. I’m no fan of movie musicals, so I wasn’t too disappointed that there weren’t more songs. Though I will say that a couple of the songs were good enough that I went back and watched them again -- not for the lyrics (which were pretty trite) but for the dancing and costumes and humor, which all had a different flavor than in western musicals.
Several of the songs are integrated into the story fairly naturally as performances that the characters are staging that just happen to mimic their emotions. (Only two of the songs are really people spontaneously breaking out into song.) This one is pretty typical -- in it, Shreeman Funtoosh has tied up his jerky rival so he can take his part in a song-and-dance number with the heroine, thus wooing her more effectively with his moves.
But my favorite song is a much more restrained one that takes place when Shreeman Funtoosh has just found out that the girl he loves (and who he thought loved him) has been engaged to this same jerky guy. I just really like the way the heartbroken Shreeman Funtoosh floats around over the shoulders of the two other characters while simultaneously expressing his woes and providing the music for them to dance to.
So, uh, I guess I should talk about the sci-fi parts. They are mostly just kind of funny, but barely even serve any purpose in the story. I mean, the fact that Shreeman Funtoosh is first indestructible and then tiny creates some small obstacles to the love story. But really the sci-fi bits are an afterthought and could be completely dropped with barely any change to the main plot. (I guess the only thing that would have to change is there would need to be a different reason for Shreeman Funtoosh to be delayed showing up at the climactic wedding besides “being restored to normal height by a shower of rays scratched onto the film with a paperclip”.) For the most part, the iron man segment seemed to be an excuse to make some jokes about what it would be like if Superman were clumsy. I’m not sure why exactly the Shrunken Funtoosh bits are there, but it’s as good a reason as any for him to be late to breaking up the wedding.
Anyway, I have no idea if this is a good Bollywood movie, or just an okay one. But it’s the only Indian sci-fi flick I could find, so if you are (like me) watching a lot of science fiction movies all in a row then it’s not a bad diversion.
An unemployed ne’er-do-well nicknamed Shreeman Funtoosh goes out looking for a job with a friend. But before they get too far they literally bump into two beautiful women while stopping to pray for good fortune at a temple. The job interview goes badly, and so does the wooing -- at first anyway. But persistence soon pays off with the ladies, which earns the boys the wrath of the powerful family of one of their intended husbands.
The wrath takes the form of a complicated frame-up for theft that involves too many moving parts to mention here. But the nefarious schemes gang agley (as aft happens) when Shreeman Funtoosh evades the hoodlums sent to waylay him, and instead gets zapped by malfunctioning lab equipment. As a result, he is turned into an indestructible iron man, with disastrous consequences for everybody he comes into contact with. An interrupted attempt to restore him to his normal state simply makes things worse by shrinking him to a tiny size. Meanwhile, the woman that Shreeman Funtoosh loves is being forced into a marriage with a real jerk, and it looks pretty hopeless that he’ll be able to stop things.
 |  |
Is it any good?
Apart from a few movies by Satyajit Ray, I know practically nothing about Indian cinema, so I was pretty interested to see what this flick would be like. It’s a Hindi language movie that was filmed in Mumbai (or Bombay, if you prefer), so based on my limited understanding of such things it seems that it would qualify as an honest-to-gosh Bollywood movie. But since I’ve never seen a Bollywood movie before, I have no idea if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is typical or not.
The first surprise was when I checked out the movie’s running time and discovered that it was two and a half hours long. There’s nothing in the story that requires the movie to be that long, but it seems content to take its time and stroll along leisurely from start to finish. The cast of characters isn’t especially big, but the main players are all tightly bound together by a series of coincidences so the outcome of the love story bears directly on the experiments that provide the sci-fi bits and also the fates of three families. (For example, the man that Shreeman Funtoosh tries to get a job from in the beginning is BOTH the guy who is bankrolling the scientist whose lab equipment malfunctions AND the guy who ends up trying to force the heroine into a loveless marriage with his jerky son. The other character relations are all just about as involved as that.)
 |  |
The second surprise was that the movie is pretty funny. I’m never sure if I’m grading comedies from other countries on a curve -- at the very least, with foreign movies it’s less likely that I’ll recognize if all the jokes are stolen. So I don’t know if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is funny compared to other Bollywood movies, but the lead actors are all pretty likeable and amusing. I did end up watching the movie over the course of two days, so it’s not as though I was transfixed from start to finish. But it was much easier going than I expected from a two and a half hour Hindi-language musical. And speaking of the musical elements, the third surprise was that there were only six songs in the whole movie. I’m no fan of movie musicals, so I wasn’t too disappointed that there weren’t more songs. Though I will say that a couple of the songs were good enough that I went back and watched them again -- not for the lyrics (which were pretty trite) but for the dancing and costumes and humor, which all had a different flavor than in western musicals.
Several of the songs are integrated into the story fairly naturally as performances that the characters are staging that just happen to mimic their emotions. (Only two of the songs are really people spontaneously breaking out into song.) This one is pretty typical -- in it, Shreeman Funtoosh has tied up his jerky rival so he can take his part in a song-and-dance number with the heroine, thus wooing her more effectively with his moves.
But my favorite song is a much more restrained one that takes place when Shreeman Funtoosh has just found out that the girl he loves (and who he thought loved him) has been engaged to this same jerky guy. I just really like the way the heartbroken Shreeman Funtoosh floats around over the shoulders of the two other characters while simultaneously expressing his woes and providing the music for them to dance to.
So, uh, I guess I should talk about the sci-fi parts. They are mostly just kind of funny, but barely even serve any purpose in the story. I mean, the fact that Shreeman Funtoosh is first indestructible and then tiny creates some small obstacles to the love story. But really the sci-fi bits are an afterthought and could be completely dropped with barely any change to the main plot. (I guess the only thing that would have to change is there would need to be a different reason for Shreeman Funtoosh to be delayed showing up at the climactic wedding besides “being restored to normal height by a shower of rays scratched onto the film with a paperclip”.) For the most part, the iron man segment seemed to be an excuse to make some jokes about what it would be like if Superman were clumsy. I’m not sure why exactly the Shrunken Funtoosh bits are there, but it’s as good a reason as any for him to be late to breaking up the wedding.
Anyway, I have no idea if this is a good Bollywood movie, or just an okay one. But it’s the only Indian sci-fi flick I could find, so if you are (like me) watching a lot of science fiction movies all in a row then it’s not a bad diversion.
 |  |
Monday, May 4, 2009
1965: THE WAR GAME
What’s it about?
A Chinese incursion into South Vietnam sparks a rapid escalation of the Cold War which results in a Soviet blockade of Berlin. NATO mechanized infantry trying to force their way into the city clash with the East German army. As the fighting heats up, commanders on the battlefield make use of existing NATO protocols to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
Presented in documentary style, THE WAR GAME follows the reaction of U.K. citizens to these developments and the implementation of emergency measures designed to prepare the population for all-out war with the U.S.S.R. When the Soviets respond by launching their mid-range ballistic missiles at targets in Europe, the survivors in the English countryside must face all the unimaginable horrors of nuclear war.
Is it any good?
It is incredibly good, but -- fair warning -- pretty terrifying. The older I get, the more frightening the whole Cold War seems to me. I think partly it’s because I’m not a kid anymore and I can actually understand what it would mean if civilization as we knew it suddenly ceased to exist. But it’s also partly because I never heard much about what the realities would be if worse finally did come to worst back in the cold war days. Certainly there were some people talking about it -- hence the existence of movies like THE WAR GAME -- but for the most part folks just seemed willing to ignore it and trust Ronald Reagan not to get us all killed.
THE WAR GAME starts out by quickly sketching a plausible scenario for how a nuclear war might start. Berlin is the immediate flashpoint for the war -- and it’s implied that NATO commanders might be the first to use tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the city from being captured by Soviet or East German forces. This conclusion is based on what were supposedly real directives in place at the time for battlefield commanders. In THE WAR GAME, the big red button gets pushed by a relatively low ranking officer on the field who is responding to a tactical situation.
A lot of nuclear war movies never get specific about “who started it”. It’s probably true that the survivors would never have a clear picture of what exactly happened, and of course there’s a message in that approach about how we are all more or less equally responsible. But by being perfectly explicit about exactly what happens, THE WAR GAME achieves a level of reality (or at least plausibility) that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The documentary style lets the movie stop and explain how one action follows inevitably from the other. For instance, the way the Soviets stored many of their warheads (above-ground, attached to highly explosive rockets) meant that they would have to launch them all in the early minutes of a nuclear conflict or risk losing all their remaining missiles in the counterstrike. By the time THE WAR GAME is over, it seems pretty unbelievable that we somehow got out of the Cold War alive.
The movie also deflates most of the so-called preparations that the British civil defense office were advising citizens to take in the event of nuclear war at the time. England is a relatively small target, and the best estimates at the time seemed to indicate that the Soviet Union had enough nuclear missiles allocated to the country to obliterate it many times over. The civil defense guidelines called for a mass evacuation of women and children (but not men) from population centers to less built-up areas away from tactical targets. But for a heavily urbanized country like England, that would have required shifting a huge percentage of its population to areas without the resources to take on the extra population. Even without an accompanying war, the very act of evacuation would have devastated the country’s economy.
By the time the bombs start falling, the movie has already both tracked the extensive preparations that people are told to take and debunked those preparations as mostly worthless. The immediate effects of the attack should be familiar to anybody who’s read John Hersey’s HIROSHIMA -- people blinded and burned by the flashes, houses flattened by shock waves, horrific firestorms raging in the cities, and most of the surviving population wandering around in deep shock. In fact, this part of the movie is familiar enough that it almost counts as a comforting stretch simply because the horrors are the expected ones. The long term effects continue with the onset of radiation sickness, food shortages, the implementation of martial law, and widespread lawlessness and rioting.
There is no hopeful ending either. THE WAR GAME returns at the end to studies of the survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and concludes that the psychological effects will be permanent and devastating. And the worst affected will be the children who grow up in a world that has little or none of the moral framework that civilization has refined over thousands of years. A full scale nuclear war truly would be a descent back into the Dark Ages where the strongest and most ruthless would be rewarded with slightly longer lives than everybody else.
What else happened this year?
-- THE 10TH VICTIM follows two participants in a futuristic game where the contestants (as in all futuristic games) try to kill each other. One of the first and also one of the best movies of the type, it focuses on a pretty intriguing cat and mouse scenario between Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastrioanni.
-- Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE is more interesting (and confusing) than enjoyable. Better people than I probably like it quite a lot, but I found it mostly incomprehensible and dull.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1965...
Go with THE WAR GAME. Unless you’re not in the mood to be totally depressed, in which case make it THE 10TH VICTIM. I can’t think of a better flick about those ultra-violent future games that we’ll all be playing in a decade or so. Mostly this is because it has one neat twist (the participants don’t necessarily know who they’re supposed to be trying to kill) that makes the game more about manipulation and nerves than it is about murder.
A Chinese incursion into South Vietnam sparks a rapid escalation of the Cold War which results in a Soviet blockade of Berlin. NATO mechanized infantry trying to force their way into the city clash with the East German army. As the fighting heats up, commanders on the battlefield make use of existing NATO protocols to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
Presented in documentary style, THE WAR GAME follows the reaction of U.K. citizens to these developments and the implementation of emergency measures designed to prepare the population for all-out war with the U.S.S.R. When the Soviets respond by launching their mid-range ballistic missiles at targets in Europe, the survivors in the English countryside must face all the unimaginable horrors of nuclear war.
 |  |
Is it any good?
It is incredibly good, but -- fair warning -- pretty terrifying. The older I get, the more frightening the whole Cold War seems to me. I think partly it’s because I’m not a kid anymore and I can actually understand what it would mean if civilization as we knew it suddenly ceased to exist. But it’s also partly because I never heard much about what the realities would be if worse finally did come to worst back in the cold war days. Certainly there were some people talking about it -- hence the existence of movies like THE WAR GAME -- but for the most part folks just seemed willing to ignore it and trust Ronald Reagan not to get us all killed.
THE WAR GAME starts out by quickly sketching a plausible scenario for how a nuclear war might start. Berlin is the immediate flashpoint for the war -- and it’s implied that NATO commanders might be the first to use tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the city from being captured by Soviet or East German forces. This conclusion is based on what were supposedly real directives in place at the time for battlefield commanders. In THE WAR GAME, the big red button gets pushed by a relatively low ranking officer on the field who is responding to a tactical situation.
A lot of nuclear war movies never get specific about “who started it”. It’s probably true that the survivors would never have a clear picture of what exactly happened, and of course there’s a message in that approach about how we are all more or less equally responsible. But by being perfectly explicit about exactly what happens, THE WAR GAME achieves a level of reality (or at least plausibility) that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The documentary style lets the movie stop and explain how one action follows inevitably from the other. For instance, the way the Soviets stored many of their warheads (above-ground, attached to highly explosive rockets) meant that they would have to launch them all in the early minutes of a nuclear conflict or risk losing all their remaining missiles in the counterstrike. By the time THE WAR GAME is over, it seems pretty unbelievable that we somehow got out of the Cold War alive.
 |  |
The movie also deflates most of the so-called preparations that the British civil defense office were advising citizens to take in the event of nuclear war at the time. England is a relatively small target, and the best estimates at the time seemed to indicate that the Soviet Union had enough nuclear missiles allocated to the country to obliterate it many times over. The civil defense guidelines called for a mass evacuation of women and children (but not men) from population centers to less built-up areas away from tactical targets. But for a heavily urbanized country like England, that would have required shifting a huge percentage of its population to areas without the resources to take on the extra population. Even without an accompanying war, the very act of evacuation would have devastated the country’s economy.
By the time the bombs start falling, the movie has already both tracked the extensive preparations that people are told to take and debunked those preparations as mostly worthless. The immediate effects of the attack should be familiar to anybody who’s read John Hersey’s HIROSHIMA -- people blinded and burned by the flashes, houses flattened by shock waves, horrific firestorms raging in the cities, and most of the surviving population wandering around in deep shock. In fact, this part of the movie is familiar enough that it almost counts as a comforting stretch simply because the horrors are the expected ones. The long term effects continue with the onset of radiation sickness, food shortages, the implementation of martial law, and widespread lawlessness and rioting.
There is no hopeful ending either. THE WAR GAME returns at the end to studies of the survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and concludes that the psychological effects will be permanent and devastating. And the worst affected will be the children who grow up in a world that has little or none of the moral framework that civilization has refined over thousands of years. A full scale nuclear war truly would be a descent back into the Dark Ages where the strongest and most ruthless would be rewarded with slightly longer lives than everybody else.
 |  |
What else happened this year?
-- THE 10TH VICTIM follows two participants in a futuristic game where the contestants (as in all futuristic games) try to kill each other. One of the first and also one of the best movies of the type, it focuses on a pretty intriguing cat and mouse scenario between Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastrioanni.
-- Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE is more interesting (and confusing) than enjoyable. Better people than I probably like it quite a lot, but I found it mostly incomprehensible and dull.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1965...
Go with THE WAR GAME. Unless you’re not in the mood to be totally depressed, in which case make it THE 10TH VICTIM. I can’t think of a better flick about those ultra-violent future games that we’ll all be playing in a decade or so. Mostly this is because it has one neat twist (the participants don’t necessarily know who they’re supposed to be trying to kill) that makes the game more about manipulation and nerves than it is about murder.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)