What’s it about?
Two dogs named Snitter and Rowf escape from a secret government research station in the wilds of Scotland. After being subjected to cruel experiments during their time there, they are only too happy to get away. But what they don’t realize (being dogs) is that their escape route took them through another laboratory where scientists were working with the bubonic plague.
The government at first tries to cover up the escape, but soon a dragnet is being cast for the dogs to prevent the possible spread of infection. As the days pass, the two dogs resort to killing sheep to eat, and before long the army is called in. Led by effective (but compassionate) commander Patrick Stewart, it seems certain they will quickly get the job done.
Is it any good?
Based on a novel by Richard Adams (who also wrote WATERSHIP DOWNS), THE PLAGUE DOGS is yet another animated sci-fi movie that isn’t really appropriate for kids. This is despite the fact that it’s a movie about two talking dogs (one voiced by John Hurt) and their animal pals, including a crafty fox named “the Tod”.
To be honest, this is the only movie I can think of where the talking animals are all anatomically correct. There’s no reason why dog testicles shouldn’t be in a kids’ movie, I suppose, but they just usually aren’t. After all, any kid who has owned a dog (or who has even played with one) would quickly be exposed to such anatomical realities, and yet for some reason it still seems strange to see them onscreen in a cartoon where someone deliberately drew them.
That’s not really what makes this movie less than ideal for kids though. The main reason is what I will call “adult themes” -- that is, the hopelessness of the dogs’ situation. It’s not their fault if they are infected with the plague, but all the same they need to be hunted down and destroyed. And the fact that the dogs understand none of this -- they talk, but they are still fairly simple-minded -- only adds to the pathos of the situation.
There’s also some cussing and a couple scenes of fairly shocking violence. Besides killing sheep for food, the dogs are also ultimately responsible for two human deaths -- one an accident, and the other in self-defense. In fact, the cut of the movie that I watched is an abridged version that apparently leaves out some even more disturbing material -- such as implications that Snitter and Rowf (while starving) make a meal out of a dead human. The animal experiments at the beginning of the movie are pretty tough to watch as well. In particular, Rowf is repeatedly thrown into a tank of water with no exit and allowed to practically drown -- presumably to measure his endurance or something.
Snitter, meanwhile, was subjected to experimental brain surgery before the start of the movie. It’s not really clear what the point of this surgery is, but it’s explained once as removing the wall between the subjective and the objective. Mostly, it results in Snitter having flashbacks to previous moments in his life at inopportune moments. During these flashbacks, he’s blinded to the world outside, and only sees what his memory shows him. This experimental brain surgery is really the only part of the movie that would traditionally be considered science fiction. But the whole thing is about animal experimentation and the arrogance of science and all that. If a movie about the ramifications of scientific research doesn’t count as science fiction, then we may have to reassess what science fiction is.
As far as the normal movie things go, I liked the story a lot -- even though there didn’t seem to be any possible happy ending. (Spoiler alert: In an odd twist of the usual paradigm, the book is apparently cheerier on the ultimate prospects of the dogs than the movie is. I haven’t read the book myself, but the comment boards on IMDb were pretty vocal on this subject.) There were some particular scenes that I thought were overwrought -- the accidental human death especially comes out of nowhere and is handled in a way that made me laugh out loud in a totally inappropriate way. The animation is pretty neat though. In addition to featuring more realistic character designs, the movie also has a dull, muddy look that fits well with the Scottish setting and the dispiriting, quasi-misanthropic themes. If you’re a fan of animation (especially animation for adults) or if you’re just interested in movies that are unique or unusual, then I’d definitely recommend checking it out.
THE PLAGUE DOGS would also make an interesting double feature with THE SECRET OF NIMH (1982) -- another animated flick from the same year which is coincidentally also about escaped laboratory animals. I’m not going to write about THE SECRET OF NIMH separately, but it’s worth a mention here. It was directed and produced by Don Bluth, a former Disney animator who left the company and started competing directly with his former employer by putting out high-quality cartoon movies like THE SECRET OF NIMH, AN AMERICAN TAIL (1986), and THE LAND BEFORE TIME (1988). In fact, Bluth’s movies often went head-to-head with Disney’s animated releases and beat them at the box office. To be fair, the 1970s and 1980s were not exactly rife with animated Disney classics, and some folks credit Bluth’s movies with shocking Disney out of its slump. After the 1980s, Bluth continued to turn out animated films and achieved some mainstream success again with ANASTASIA (1997) and notice among sci-fi fans with TITAN A.E. (2000).
In any event, THE SECRET OF NIMH is pretty exciting and surprisingly dark -- as it opens, the main (mouse) character’s husband has just been violently killed, her son is sick with a serious case of pneumonia, and a human farmer’s equipment is about to plow her home under and kill everyone still inside. There’s a lot of tension and action -- including some bloody swordfights -- but it still looks a lot like a kids’ movie and is clearly intended to be enjoyed by children. But since it contains hardly any pandering at all, there’s no reason adults can’t like it too.
I will say that the “message” of the movie strikes me as a little lame in places. The escaped lab animals I referred to earlier are rats who were made hyper-intelligent by the National Institute of Mental Health (the “NIMH” of the title, natch) and who then used their newfound smarts to escape the lab. They now live under a rosebush in this farmer’s yard, and in the past few years have figured out how to tap into the power grid and provide electricity to their colony. That’s not the lame part, though. The lame part is that in this movie, increases in intelligence and knowledge are linked directly to increases in moral awareness. The rats are preparing to move out of their home because they have realized that stealing is wrong, and they no longer want to rely on the human power grid to serve their needs.
To be fair, there is some internal disagreement among the rats about whether the move is really necessary. But the ones who want to stay and continue stealing are depicted as both morally corrupt and also not as intelligent as the others. If you don’t know stealing is wrong, says the movie, then you really aren’t that smart. That’s fine, I guess. But if the rats who want to stay aren’t even intelligent enough to be capable of moral awareness, then why should I feel satisfied when they get their comeuppance? Where’s the justice in punishing folks who don’t know right from wrong? Granted, it’s not 100% clear this is what the movie is saying, but that’s because the motivations the rats have for wanting to leave or wanting to stay are glossed over. THE SECRET OF NIMH is still an exciting, interesting movie -- but it doesn’t feel like as much thought was put into the moral center of the movie as was put into the world of mice and rats.
Showing posts with label U.K. production. Show all posts
Showing posts with label U.K. production. Show all posts
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
1982: THE DARK CRYSTAL
What’s it about?
On “another world”, the conjunction of three suns results in the appearance of a mysterious powerful crystal and two new races -- the cruel and vulture-like Skeksis and the peaceful Mystics. After a thousand years, both races are dying out, but the Skeksis have succeeded in taking control of the world. A prophecy predicts that a Gelfling (an elf-like creature) will be the downfall of the Skeksis, so they have eradicated practically all of the race.
As the wisest of the Mystics lies on his deathbed, he sends the last of the Gelflings (or so he thinks) on a quest to find a missing shard of the crystal, which is in some fashion the key to defeating the Skeksis. Though he succeeds in finding the shard, he doesn’t know what to do with it, and soon the Skeksis are hunting him with a variety of fearsome monsters. The Gelfling’s journey takes him to many strange places in the world, but there is limited time in which to fulfill the prophecy.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to end up writing about THE DARK CRYSTAL when I started watching it. I’d never seen it before, but it always sounded like a straight-up fantasy story with elves and crystals and sorcerers. And superficially that’s exactly what it is. But one of the big differences between this movies and other fantasy movies like THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) or the SINBAD movies or LABYRINTH is that THE DARK CRYSTAL takes place on a world with no humans. In many ways, it might as well be an alien planet.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973) or many of the planets in the STAR WARS movies, the world of THE DARK CRYSTAL has its own alien ecosystem. It’s not necessarily fully developed, but it is full of lots of strange creatures that don’t really have any traditional fantasy analogs. Instead, the world seems to be the product of imagination run amok -- just like a good alien planet should be.
Of course, there are limits to imagination. The world of THE DARK CRYSTAL still has forests and swamps and deserts. It has animals and plants and fish. Most of the creatures, in fact, seem to be based more on Earth animals than anything else. But one result of that is to make the creatures seem more “real” -- or at least as real as Muppets can feel. There’s no real sense that the ecosystem of the world “evolved” in any natural way, but familiar plant and animal shapes do lend a veneer of naturalness to the world, even if things are twisted all out of shape. And it’s worth noting that nothing looks exactly like an Earth animal.
There’s also not a whole lot of magic in THE DARK CRYSTAL. The crystal itself has some ill-defined powers that affect the world and its inhabitants, and there is the prophecy. But otherwise, things proceed more or less without any outright fantasy. Even these elements have a bit of logic behind them. There’s an old crone who uses a complicated piece of machinery to assist in figuring out her prophecies, for instance. And the Skeksis likewise use mechanical devices to focus the power of the crystal. The magical elements, in other words, don’t operate outside the logic of the world. They are inexplicable forces -- but forces that obey some natural laws of science nonetheless.
The other reason I decided to write about THE DARK CRYSTAL is that it’s a movie starring puppets. Like LABYRINTH, this is a Jim Henson movie through and through. But unlike that one, THE DARK CRYSTAL has no human actors at all. Every character is a Muppet of some sort -- either a hand puppet, a marionette, or a full-body puppet suit. (And possibly other kinds of puppets I couldn’t identify.)
There aren’t that many movies that have casts made up entirely of puppets. In fact, the only others I’ve watched for this blog are THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966) and JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969), both of which were created by British puppeteers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. There may be a few others I missed -- there’s at least one other THUNDERBIRDS movie anyway -- but it’s just not a common way to make a movie. Of course, puppet effects for specific monsters are fairly common -- Mothra and her offspring in MOTHRA (1961), the alien in ALIEN (1979), Yoda in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1981), E.T. in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) and countless others -- but its very rare that a movie relies solely on puppets to generate sympathy and excitement.
One reason for this is pretty clear from THE DARK CRYSTAL -- there’s a limit to what puppets can do and to how realistic they can be. The pace of the action in this movie is always hampered by the constraints of getting puppets to hit each other. And the faces of the puppets are often stiff and unemotional. Even some of the creatures (like the landstriders) are cooler in concept than they are in execution, and even in a relatively dark movie like this there are still Muppet-ish bits of comical character design that creep in.
I’m not really complaining though. There are always trade-offs when you use any kind of surrogates for human actors -- whether it’s cartoon animation, stop-motion animation, animal performers, computer graphics, or puppets. There is definitely a lot of artistry and craft in the puppets of THE DARK CRYSTAL. Even though none of them look much like the traditional Muppets, it’s still always obvious that the characters were designed by Jim Henson’s shop. There’s a clear and consistent aesthetic that ties everything together.
In the end, THE DARK CRYSTAL is yet another movie that’s not really science fiction. But its world is certainly believably alien in a way that most sci-fi alien worlds aren’t. The alien qualities of the characters are less well developed -- we don’t really see enough of any of the races’ cultures to get a taste of that. And the story and character arcs are all very much standard issue fantasy fare. But since I can’t really think of any other sci-fi movies that are set entirely on alien planets with no human characters at all, THE DARK CRYSTAL is probably as close as I’ll get to talking about that kind of story in this blog.
On “another world”, the conjunction of three suns results in the appearance of a mysterious powerful crystal and two new races -- the cruel and vulture-like Skeksis and the peaceful Mystics. After a thousand years, both races are dying out, but the Skeksis have succeeded in taking control of the world. A prophecy predicts that a Gelfling (an elf-like creature) will be the downfall of the Skeksis, so they have eradicated practically all of the race.
As the wisest of the Mystics lies on his deathbed, he sends the last of the Gelflings (or so he thinks) on a quest to find a missing shard of the crystal, which is in some fashion the key to defeating the Skeksis. Though he succeeds in finding the shard, he doesn’t know what to do with it, and soon the Skeksis are hunting him with a variety of fearsome monsters. The Gelfling’s journey takes him to many strange places in the world, but there is limited time in which to fulfill the prophecy.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to end up writing about THE DARK CRYSTAL when I started watching it. I’d never seen it before, but it always sounded like a straight-up fantasy story with elves and crystals and sorcerers. And superficially that’s exactly what it is. But one of the big differences between this movies and other fantasy movies like THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) or the SINBAD movies or LABYRINTH is that THE DARK CRYSTAL takes place on a world with no humans. In many ways, it might as well be an alien planet.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973) or many of the planets in the STAR WARS movies, the world of THE DARK CRYSTAL has its own alien ecosystem. It’s not necessarily fully developed, but it is full of lots of strange creatures that don’t really have any traditional fantasy analogs. Instead, the world seems to be the product of imagination run amok -- just like a good alien planet should be.
Of course, there are limits to imagination. The world of THE DARK CRYSTAL still has forests and swamps and deserts. It has animals and plants and fish. Most of the creatures, in fact, seem to be based more on Earth animals than anything else. But one result of that is to make the creatures seem more “real” -- or at least as real as Muppets can feel. There’s no real sense that the ecosystem of the world “evolved” in any natural way, but familiar plant and animal shapes do lend a veneer of naturalness to the world, even if things are twisted all out of shape. And it’s worth noting that nothing looks exactly like an Earth animal.
There’s also not a whole lot of magic in THE DARK CRYSTAL. The crystal itself has some ill-defined powers that affect the world and its inhabitants, and there is the prophecy. But otherwise, things proceed more or less without any outright fantasy. Even these elements have a bit of logic behind them. There’s an old crone who uses a complicated piece of machinery to assist in figuring out her prophecies, for instance. And the Skeksis likewise use mechanical devices to focus the power of the crystal. The magical elements, in other words, don’t operate outside the logic of the world. They are inexplicable forces -- but forces that obey some natural laws of science nonetheless.
The other reason I decided to write about THE DARK CRYSTAL is that it’s a movie starring puppets. Like LABYRINTH, this is a Jim Henson movie through and through. But unlike that one, THE DARK CRYSTAL has no human actors at all. Every character is a Muppet of some sort -- either a hand puppet, a marionette, or a full-body puppet suit. (And possibly other kinds of puppets I couldn’t identify.)
There aren’t that many movies that have casts made up entirely of puppets. In fact, the only others I’ve watched for this blog are THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966) and JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969), both of which were created by British puppeteers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. There may be a few others I missed -- there’s at least one other THUNDERBIRDS movie anyway -- but it’s just not a common way to make a movie. Of course, puppet effects for specific monsters are fairly common -- Mothra and her offspring in MOTHRA (1961), the alien in ALIEN (1979), Yoda in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1981), E.T. in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) and countless others -- but its very rare that a movie relies solely on puppets to generate sympathy and excitement.
One reason for this is pretty clear from THE DARK CRYSTAL -- there’s a limit to what puppets can do and to how realistic they can be. The pace of the action in this movie is always hampered by the constraints of getting puppets to hit each other. And the faces of the puppets are often stiff and unemotional. Even some of the creatures (like the landstriders) are cooler in concept than they are in execution, and even in a relatively dark movie like this there are still Muppet-ish bits of comical character design that creep in.
I’m not really complaining though. There are always trade-offs when you use any kind of surrogates for human actors -- whether it’s cartoon animation, stop-motion animation, animal performers, computer graphics, or puppets. There is definitely a lot of artistry and craft in the puppets of THE DARK CRYSTAL. Even though none of them look much like the traditional Muppets, it’s still always obvious that the characters were designed by Jim Henson’s shop. There’s a clear and consistent aesthetic that ties everything together.
In the end, THE DARK CRYSTAL is yet another movie that’s not really science fiction. But its world is certainly believably alien in a way that most sci-fi alien worlds aren’t. The alien qualities of the characters are less well developed -- we don’t really see enough of any of the races’ cultures to get a taste of that. And the story and character arcs are all very much standard issue fantasy fare. But since I can’t really think of any other sci-fi movies that are set entirely on alien planets with no human characters at all, THE DARK CRYSTAL is probably as close as I’ll get to talking about that kind of story in this blog.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
1981: OUTLAND
What’s it about?
Two weeks after being assigned to a remote mining outpost on one of Saturn’s moons, space cop Sean Connery begins investigating a string of strange suicides when workers begin offing themselves in gruesome ways. Although there doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for the deaths, the outpost’s doctor soon reveals that the suicides (which everybody says are the kind of thing that “just happens” in deep space) have increased more than ten-fold over the past year.
When an experimental stimulant with deadly side effects turns up in the blood of one victim, Connery investigates the drug dealing underworld of the outpost. The trail leads him straight to the mine’s operator, Peter Boyle. But as Connery gets closer to the truth, his friends begin deserting him while Boyle calls in for reinforcements.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to enjoy OUTLAND very much. Sean Connery is such a big superstar, that I figured any sci-fi movie where he played a space cop would be something I would have heard more about if it were even halfway enjoyable. I’m not really sure how to explain the lack of awareness around the movie since Wikipedia tells me that it’s been available on VHS and DVD for over ten years. But since OUTLAND is in fact at least halfway enjoyable, I can only conclude that this is a case of there being more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, Horatio. It makes me wonder what else is out there that nobody has really talked about in ages.
I don’t want to oversell OUTLAND here -- it’s not exactly what I would call a lost gem. It does some of its broad strokes very well, but the details are often less than compelling. The relationship between Connery and most of the other characters -- his wife, the other marshals reporting to him, Peter Boyle’s mine boss -- are all pretty interesting. It’s repeatedly suggested that Connery has been given this assignment because he’s not really fit for any other duty. We never learn any details about his past to justify this, but we do get the sense that nobody thinks he’s that good of a cop.
In fact, Boyle’s drug smuggling operation relies heavily on the apathy or corruptibility of the marshals stationed at the mine. There are only a couple thousand people in the whole place, so secrets aren’t easy to keep. Boyle imports the stimulants to keep his workforce producing at maximum efficiency -- which nets him big bonuses from his bosses. The extravagant suicides (which mostly involve workers exposing themselves to the vacuum of space one way or another) are a side effect of the drug, and over the past year about sixty workers have taken their own lives as a result of the drug.
The other key to Boyle’s scheme is the willingness of his superiors to turn a blind eye to the shady source of his success. There’s a strong anti-corporate undercurrent in OUTLAND which is very similar to that in ALIEN (1979). Both movies imagine a future where labor and management are at odds with one another, and where management ultimately has the upper hand. Of course, once you’ve signed up for a tour of duty on a space freighter or a mine on a moon of Saturn, there’s not much you can do if you decide you’re getting a bum deal once you’re there. The reveal of the callousness of the corporation in OUTLAND didn’t make me nearly as queasy as the similar reveal in ALIEN, however. That’s probably because it’s impossible to imagine that anybody else besides the corporation is behind the mysterious deaths in OUTLAND right from the beginning. Connery thinks there’s something fishy going on from the start, and so immediately the corporation becomes the prime target of suspicion. In ALIEN, on the other hand, there's no reason to suspect the corporation is complicit until deep into the movie when the danger's been heightened significantly.
Once Connery gets on the scent, Boyle doesn’t do much to hide his guilt. Things quickly get violent as Boyle decides that the quickest way to solve the problem is just to eliminate the nosey marshal who isn’t playing along as expected. OUTLAND is often compared to HIGH NOON (1952), and this part of the movie is a big reason why. I was also reminded of 3:10 TO YUMA (1957), and I’m sure there are plenty of other westerns that would fit the pattern as well.
What happens is that Connery decides he won’t roll over. Instead, he’ll stand up to the corrupt powers simply because it's the only way to prove to himself that he's not the useless, cowardly cop everybody thinks he is. So he refuses to back down even when it becomes clear that nobody else will stand with him. The most blatant reference (homage? rip off?) to HIGH NOON comes when Boyle calls for a couple of enforcers to come down on the next supply shuttle. Connery then spends the next several scenes in front of a giant clock counting down the arrival of the shuttle. It’s impossible to think of anything else besides HIGH NOON during this part of the movie, but it’s also a relatively short sequence, so suggestions that OUTLAND is simply “HIGH NOON in space” don’t really ring true to me. It's more like a space mystery/conspiracy thriller with HIGH NOON shoved in the middle.
In any event, this sequence is also one of several that I didn’t totally buy. Connery is supposed to be the supreme legal authority at the mine -- or at least the top cop. (It’s unclear who performs judicial functions, if anybody.) Yet he’s somehow powerless to stop the arrival of a shuttle that he knows is bringing two assassins to kill him. Somebody has to have the authority to shut down the space docks -- if Connery can't use probable cause to petition for that, then who can? And even if the shuttle did end up landing, it should be a trivial exercise to deny the bad guys access to the mine. All of the other marshals are afraid to stand up to the incoming goons. But they know exactly where and when they will be arriving, so three or four guys with space shotguns should be more than enough to keep them pinned down in the shuttle airlock. Connery, however, doesn’t even try any tactics like that. He just sits back and waits for them to enter the mine.
Another thing -- when Connery is asking the workers for help against the arrival of the assassins, one of them turns him down by saying, “You’re supposed to protect us.” Yet Connery is the only marshal in the past year who has even cared about the dangerous drugs being fed to the workers. He’s not trying to take down Boyle just out of some sense of manly obligation to justice -- he’s also protecting the lives and health of all the workers. In HIGH NOON and 3:10 TO YUMA, the townspeople all tell Gary Cooper and Van Heflin that the they (the townspeople) don't have any stake in the fight. But in OUTLAND, the fight very much is the fight of the workers -- it’s Connery who doesn’t really have a stake in the game except professional duty.
I’m not going to go on listing all the little flaws of OUTLAND. I will say that the movie has a 12 year old’s notion of what happens to people when they enter low pressure environments without proper protection. (Spoiler alert: They explode and make a bloody mess.) These scenes alone should qualify OUTLAND for midnight movie status. There are also space prostitutes, improbable fights in pressure suits, some poorly placed rifle shots in sensitive environments, and one of the worst child actors I have ever seen.
Those are the details, though. As I said at the beginning of this post, the broad strokes are interesting. Translating HIGH NOON to outer space could definitely make sense, even if OUTLAND doesn’t fully get there. Connery’s marshal is a pretty neat character, and it doesn’t hurt that he taps in liberally to the tradition of western tough guys. Boyle’s drug pushing scheme is a little cartoonish for my tastes, but here again the overall conflict between productivity and safety is worth exploring.
Back when I was writing about THE BLACK HOLE (1979), I said that part of me wanted to see that movie re-made while the other part of me was sure that any re-make would only be a bigger plate of hash than the movie we already have. With OUTLAND, on the other hand, I think the prospects for a re-make are much brighter. It would have to be handled gently, but it should be easy enough to take the working skeleton of the movie, strip away the parts that haven’t aged well, and beef up the bits that are more interesting. And since very little in the movie is iconic -- except perhaps the wide-screen space helmet designs -- there shouldn’t be much temptation to include anything silly just because people will expect it. (Note: IMDb informs me that an OUTLAND re-make is in fact in some stage of pre-production, which doesn't mean much except that somebody else thinks it's worth another go.)
OUTLAND’s director, Peter Hyams, has never been one of my favorites. I didn’t look up his filmography before I watched this movie, but I have it in front of me now. It’s probably saying everything I need to say that my “favorite” of Peter Hyams’s movies until I watched OUTLAND was probably the Jean Claude van Damme movie TIMECOP (1994). He also directed the surprisingly boring CAPRICORN ONE (1978), in which three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Watterson, and O.J. Simpson -- wrap your head around that casting if you can) are forced to fake a landing on Mars. In any event, I haven’t made it a habit of pointing out directors I don’t like, but I’m going to be hearing from Peter Hyams again when I watch 2010 (1984). Hopefully it’ll be another in the vein of OUTLAND, and not any of his numerous bad movies.
Two weeks after being assigned to a remote mining outpost on one of Saturn’s moons, space cop Sean Connery begins investigating a string of strange suicides when workers begin offing themselves in gruesome ways. Although there doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for the deaths, the outpost’s doctor soon reveals that the suicides (which everybody says are the kind of thing that “just happens” in deep space) have increased more than ten-fold over the past year.
When an experimental stimulant with deadly side effects turns up in the blood of one victim, Connery investigates the drug dealing underworld of the outpost. The trail leads him straight to the mine’s operator, Peter Boyle. But as Connery gets closer to the truth, his friends begin deserting him while Boyle calls in for reinforcements.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to enjoy OUTLAND very much. Sean Connery is such a big superstar, that I figured any sci-fi movie where he played a space cop would be something I would have heard more about if it were even halfway enjoyable. I’m not really sure how to explain the lack of awareness around the movie since Wikipedia tells me that it’s been available on VHS and DVD for over ten years. But since OUTLAND is in fact at least halfway enjoyable, I can only conclude that this is a case of there being more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, Horatio. It makes me wonder what else is out there that nobody has really talked about in ages.
I don’t want to oversell OUTLAND here -- it’s not exactly what I would call a lost gem. It does some of its broad strokes very well, but the details are often less than compelling. The relationship between Connery and most of the other characters -- his wife, the other marshals reporting to him, Peter Boyle’s mine boss -- are all pretty interesting. It’s repeatedly suggested that Connery has been given this assignment because he’s not really fit for any other duty. We never learn any details about his past to justify this, but we do get the sense that nobody thinks he’s that good of a cop.
In fact, Boyle’s drug smuggling operation relies heavily on the apathy or corruptibility of the marshals stationed at the mine. There are only a couple thousand people in the whole place, so secrets aren’t easy to keep. Boyle imports the stimulants to keep his workforce producing at maximum efficiency -- which nets him big bonuses from his bosses. The extravagant suicides (which mostly involve workers exposing themselves to the vacuum of space one way or another) are a side effect of the drug, and over the past year about sixty workers have taken their own lives as a result of the drug.
The other key to Boyle’s scheme is the willingness of his superiors to turn a blind eye to the shady source of his success. There’s a strong anti-corporate undercurrent in OUTLAND which is very similar to that in ALIEN (1979). Both movies imagine a future where labor and management are at odds with one another, and where management ultimately has the upper hand. Of course, once you’ve signed up for a tour of duty on a space freighter or a mine on a moon of Saturn, there’s not much you can do if you decide you’re getting a bum deal once you’re there. The reveal of the callousness of the corporation in OUTLAND didn’t make me nearly as queasy as the similar reveal in ALIEN, however. That’s probably because it’s impossible to imagine that anybody else besides the corporation is behind the mysterious deaths in OUTLAND right from the beginning. Connery thinks there’s something fishy going on from the start, and so immediately the corporation becomes the prime target of suspicion. In ALIEN, on the other hand, there's no reason to suspect the corporation is complicit until deep into the movie when the danger's been heightened significantly.
Once Connery gets on the scent, Boyle doesn’t do much to hide his guilt. Things quickly get violent as Boyle decides that the quickest way to solve the problem is just to eliminate the nosey marshal who isn’t playing along as expected. OUTLAND is often compared to HIGH NOON (1952), and this part of the movie is a big reason why. I was also reminded of 3:10 TO YUMA (1957), and I’m sure there are plenty of other westerns that would fit the pattern as well.
What happens is that Connery decides he won’t roll over. Instead, he’ll stand up to the corrupt powers simply because it's the only way to prove to himself that he's not the useless, cowardly cop everybody thinks he is. So he refuses to back down even when it becomes clear that nobody else will stand with him. The most blatant reference (homage? rip off?) to HIGH NOON comes when Boyle calls for a couple of enforcers to come down on the next supply shuttle. Connery then spends the next several scenes in front of a giant clock counting down the arrival of the shuttle. It’s impossible to think of anything else besides HIGH NOON during this part of the movie, but it’s also a relatively short sequence, so suggestions that OUTLAND is simply “HIGH NOON in space” don’t really ring true to me. It's more like a space mystery/conspiracy thriller with HIGH NOON shoved in the middle.
In any event, this sequence is also one of several that I didn’t totally buy. Connery is supposed to be the supreme legal authority at the mine -- or at least the top cop. (It’s unclear who performs judicial functions, if anybody.) Yet he’s somehow powerless to stop the arrival of a shuttle that he knows is bringing two assassins to kill him. Somebody has to have the authority to shut down the space docks -- if Connery can't use probable cause to petition for that, then who can? And even if the shuttle did end up landing, it should be a trivial exercise to deny the bad guys access to the mine. All of the other marshals are afraid to stand up to the incoming goons. But they know exactly where and when they will be arriving, so three or four guys with space shotguns should be more than enough to keep them pinned down in the shuttle airlock. Connery, however, doesn’t even try any tactics like that. He just sits back and waits for them to enter the mine.
Another thing -- when Connery is asking the workers for help against the arrival of the assassins, one of them turns him down by saying, “You’re supposed to protect us.” Yet Connery is the only marshal in the past year who has even cared about the dangerous drugs being fed to the workers. He’s not trying to take down Boyle just out of some sense of manly obligation to justice -- he’s also protecting the lives and health of all the workers. In HIGH NOON and 3:10 TO YUMA, the townspeople all tell Gary Cooper and Van Heflin that the they (the townspeople) don't have any stake in the fight. But in OUTLAND, the fight very much is the fight of the workers -- it’s Connery who doesn’t really have a stake in the game except professional duty.
I’m not going to go on listing all the little flaws of OUTLAND. I will say that the movie has a 12 year old’s notion of what happens to people when they enter low pressure environments without proper protection. (Spoiler alert: They explode and make a bloody mess.) These scenes alone should qualify OUTLAND for midnight movie status. There are also space prostitutes, improbable fights in pressure suits, some poorly placed rifle shots in sensitive environments, and one of the worst child actors I have ever seen.
Those are the details, though. As I said at the beginning of this post, the broad strokes are interesting. Translating HIGH NOON to outer space could definitely make sense, even if OUTLAND doesn’t fully get there. Connery’s marshal is a pretty neat character, and it doesn’t hurt that he taps in liberally to the tradition of western tough guys. Boyle’s drug pushing scheme is a little cartoonish for my tastes, but here again the overall conflict between productivity and safety is worth exploring.
Back when I was writing about THE BLACK HOLE (1979), I said that part of me wanted to see that movie re-made while the other part of me was sure that any re-make would only be a bigger plate of hash than the movie we already have. With OUTLAND, on the other hand, I think the prospects for a re-make are much brighter. It would have to be handled gently, but it should be easy enough to take the working skeleton of the movie, strip away the parts that haven’t aged well, and beef up the bits that are more interesting. And since very little in the movie is iconic -- except perhaps the wide-screen space helmet designs -- there shouldn’t be much temptation to include anything silly just because people will expect it. (Note: IMDb informs me that an OUTLAND re-make is in fact in some stage of pre-production, which doesn't mean much except that somebody else thinks it's worth another go.)
OUTLAND’s director, Peter Hyams, has never been one of my favorites. I didn’t look up his filmography before I watched this movie, but I have it in front of me now. It’s probably saying everything I need to say that my “favorite” of Peter Hyams’s movies until I watched OUTLAND was probably the Jean Claude van Damme movie TIMECOP (1994). He also directed the surprisingly boring CAPRICORN ONE (1978), in which three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Watterson, and O.J. Simpson -- wrap your head around that casting if you can) are forced to fake a landing on Mars. In any event, I haven’t made it a habit of pointing out directors I don’t like, but I’m going to be hearing from Peter Hyams again when I watch 2010 (1984). Hopefully it’ll be another in the vein of OUTLAND, and not any of his numerous bad movies.
Monday, March 1, 2010
1981: DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS
What’s it about?
A farmer raising highly venomous (and carnivorous and mobile) plants called triffids is stung by one and almost blinded. On the day his bandages are due to come off, he wakes up in the hospital to find that everyone else has gone blind due to radiation from lights seen in the sky the night before. The farmer -- whose sight was protected by the bandages -- sets out looking for others who can still see as well.
As he wanders through England, the farmer encounters many people trying to cope with the new epidemic of blindness. Some are trying to help the blind population survive, while others are taking advantage of the situation for personal gain, and still others are trying to stockpile supplies to ride out the inevitable violence, fires and disease that will soon follow. Meanwhile, the triffids -- which had been raised for a precious chemical they produce -- escape their farms and begin terrorizing the countryside.
Is it any good?
This version of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS is a six-episode BBC miniseries. There was also an earlier version, a theatrical feature in 1962 that is widely derided as cheesy and ridiculous. (I haven’t seen that one myself, so I can’t comment directly.) Both versions are of course based on John Wyndham’s novel of the same name, which is one of those modern classics of sci-fi that everybody has heard of but probably nobody has read. (John Wyndham also, incidentally, wrote a novel called THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS, which has been adapted into film more than once under the title VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.)
Having never read the novel myself, I’d always thought that DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS was about some kind of alien plant invasion. But in fact the triffids are implied to be either the discovery or the invention of Soviet scientists. The miniseries gives a bit of history of the triffids -- they appeared throughout the world, starting in South America, and quickly became both curiosity and nuisance. Wild growths were contained by fire teams, and soon only a few specimens with their stingers removed remained in gardens. But then it was discovered that triffids produced a chemical that increased the efficiency of fuel by 30% -- and extensive commercial farming commenced.
The weird lights that blind the human population of Earth aren’t part of an alien attack either -- they’re simply a natural phenomenon that nobody has seen before. It’s an interesting twist in an old type of story. The triffids aren’t actually launching a coordinated attack. Rather, they’re taking advantage of a weakness at the top of the food chain to break out of captivity and become the dominant species. With most humans blinded, they can easily hunt down food and evade destruction, and soon the rural areas of England are overrun with deadly triffids.
In the end, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS really focuses far more on the blindness than it does on the triffids. The triffids are there mostly to provide evolutionary pressure on humans -- to underline the fact that an epidemic of blindness wouldn’t just result in man-made chaos. In addition, it would be a chance for the rest of the natural world to get an upper hand on mankind again.
But the blindness is also an opportunity for all kinds of amateur survivalists to reform the world in whatever way they think is right for the new circumstances. For much of the miniseries, the protagonists are shuttled from group to group (sometimes forcibly), each with a different objective. They start with an organization of mostly sighted people that’s preparing to flee the cities for the countryside, leaving the blind folks to fend for themselves while they save what they can of civilization. Next, they are kidnapped by a group that handcuffs them to a set of blind people, forcing them to look after them. After escaping that, they find a country estate being run as a Christian commune, and then set up their own small family home for a while until they are found out by a neo-feudal paramilitary organization that wants to set them up as lords in vassal to a central authority.
This is not necessarily the most realistic part of the movie, since every group they fall in with is curiously well organized. There hardly seem to be any sighted people who are just hiding out and trying to get by -- everyone seems to have an agenda and a plan to resurrect the world from the ashes. But realism is not always the greatest virtue in science fiction, and there is ample opportunity for reminders that civilization isn’t always a force for good. It took thousands of years for the cultural and governmental organs of the world to evolve to the state they’re in today -- and hardly anybody would say we’ve got a perfect system even now. DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS shows some of the imperfect systems that could rise and fail in the wake of a catastrophic blow to law and order. And if it does show them in a neat, compressed timeline -- oh well.
I realize that I haven’t said very much about triffids. As I mentioned earlier, that’s because the movie is really more about blindness than about killer plants. But there are killer plants. They mostly succeed in not being ridiculous, but mostly only because there’s relatively little seen of them. I’ve said it before -- plants aren’t really scary. Moving plants with venomous stingers are perhaps a bit scarier, but they are still just vegetables.
Overall, the special effects are decent and the acting is adequate. It’s obvious that this is a television miniseries and not a feature film. On the other hand, the script is very good, and there are a lot of ideas banging around to think about. In those respects, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS has a lot in common with PBS’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979) or with another BBC sci-fi miniseries, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1981). It’s smart sci-fi made by smart people, doing the best they can with limited means.
A farmer raising highly venomous (and carnivorous and mobile) plants called triffids is stung by one and almost blinded. On the day his bandages are due to come off, he wakes up in the hospital to find that everyone else has gone blind due to radiation from lights seen in the sky the night before. The farmer -- whose sight was protected by the bandages -- sets out looking for others who can still see as well.
As he wanders through England, the farmer encounters many people trying to cope with the new epidemic of blindness. Some are trying to help the blind population survive, while others are taking advantage of the situation for personal gain, and still others are trying to stockpile supplies to ride out the inevitable violence, fires and disease that will soon follow. Meanwhile, the triffids -- which had been raised for a precious chemical they produce -- escape their farms and begin terrorizing the countryside.
Is it any good?
This version of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS is a six-episode BBC miniseries. There was also an earlier version, a theatrical feature in 1962 that is widely derided as cheesy and ridiculous. (I haven’t seen that one myself, so I can’t comment directly.) Both versions are of course based on John Wyndham’s novel of the same name, which is one of those modern classics of sci-fi that everybody has heard of but probably nobody has read. (John Wyndham also, incidentally, wrote a novel called THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS, which has been adapted into film more than once under the title VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.)
Having never read the novel myself, I’d always thought that DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS was about some kind of alien plant invasion. But in fact the triffids are implied to be either the discovery or the invention of Soviet scientists. The miniseries gives a bit of history of the triffids -- they appeared throughout the world, starting in South America, and quickly became both curiosity and nuisance. Wild growths were contained by fire teams, and soon only a few specimens with their stingers removed remained in gardens. But then it was discovered that triffids produced a chemical that increased the efficiency of fuel by 30% -- and extensive commercial farming commenced.
The weird lights that blind the human population of Earth aren’t part of an alien attack either -- they’re simply a natural phenomenon that nobody has seen before. It’s an interesting twist in an old type of story. The triffids aren’t actually launching a coordinated attack. Rather, they’re taking advantage of a weakness at the top of the food chain to break out of captivity and become the dominant species. With most humans blinded, they can easily hunt down food and evade destruction, and soon the rural areas of England are overrun with deadly triffids.
In the end, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS really focuses far more on the blindness than it does on the triffids. The triffids are there mostly to provide evolutionary pressure on humans -- to underline the fact that an epidemic of blindness wouldn’t just result in man-made chaos. In addition, it would be a chance for the rest of the natural world to get an upper hand on mankind again.
But the blindness is also an opportunity for all kinds of amateur survivalists to reform the world in whatever way they think is right for the new circumstances. For much of the miniseries, the protagonists are shuttled from group to group (sometimes forcibly), each with a different objective. They start with an organization of mostly sighted people that’s preparing to flee the cities for the countryside, leaving the blind folks to fend for themselves while they save what they can of civilization. Next, they are kidnapped by a group that handcuffs them to a set of blind people, forcing them to look after them. After escaping that, they find a country estate being run as a Christian commune, and then set up their own small family home for a while until they are found out by a neo-feudal paramilitary organization that wants to set them up as lords in vassal to a central authority.
This is not necessarily the most realistic part of the movie, since every group they fall in with is curiously well organized. There hardly seem to be any sighted people who are just hiding out and trying to get by -- everyone seems to have an agenda and a plan to resurrect the world from the ashes. But realism is not always the greatest virtue in science fiction, and there is ample opportunity for reminders that civilization isn’t always a force for good. It took thousands of years for the cultural and governmental organs of the world to evolve to the state they’re in today -- and hardly anybody would say we’ve got a perfect system even now. DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS shows some of the imperfect systems that could rise and fail in the wake of a catastrophic blow to law and order. And if it does show them in a neat, compressed timeline -- oh well.
I realize that I haven’t said very much about triffids. As I mentioned earlier, that’s because the movie is really more about blindness than about killer plants. But there are killer plants. They mostly succeed in not being ridiculous, but mostly only because there’s relatively little seen of them. I’ve said it before -- plants aren’t really scary. Moving plants with venomous stingers are perhaps a bit scarier, but they are still just vegetables.
Overall, the special effects are decent and the acting is adequate. It’s obvious that this is a television miniseries and not a feature film. On the other hand, the script is very good, and there are a lot of ideas banging around to think about. In those respects, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS has a lot in common with PBS’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979) or with another BBC sci-fi miniseries, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1981). It’s smart sci-fi made by smart people, doing the best they can with limited means.
Monday, February 15, 2010
1980: FLASH GORDON
What’s it about?
New York Jets quarterback Flash Gordon and travel agent Dale Arden get drafted by rogue scientist Dr Zarkov to help stop an attack on Earth by intergalactic warlord Ming the Merciless (the latter played by Max Von Sydow). Arriving on the planet Mongo in Zarkov’s rocket, the three find themselves embroiled in complicated political infighting among Ming’s subjugated vassal tribes.
After being captured by Ming’s guards, all three suffer seemingly final fates -- Flash Gordon is slated to be executed, Zarkov to have his mind wiped and reprogrammed, and Dale Arden to become Ming’s personal concubine. Meanwhile, Earth’s moon is being shredded by Ming’s firepower and threatens to destroy the entire planet. Even after escaping from their several dangers, Flash and his friends must convince Ming’s vassals to quit fighting each other and team up against the merciless overlord they all serve.
Is it any good?
I have never had much interest in the old sci-fi serials of the 1930s, since they are for the most part obviously intended for children. From the little I’ve seen, they have a general lack of interest not only in anything to do with “science” but also apparently anything that resembles “fiction” as well. Characters have no personality, themes are nonexistent, and events happen merely because they provide convenient excuses to move from one episode to the next. On the other hand, they do also seem to have a lot of creativity and inventiveness when it comes to spectacle, peril, and suspense.
The 1980 film adaptation of FLASH GORDON apparently takes its basic plot from the comics and serials of the 1930s -- and luckily takes a lot of the creativity and whimsy as well. Like BARBARELLA (1968) it’s a Dino De Laurentiis production, and the similarities are instantly obvious. Both movies are campy, light-hearted, fast-paced, and full of brightly stylized special effects and production design. Watching FLASH GORDON is a bit like watching a big budget stage musical -- the artifice is all perfectly obvious and brightly lit, but the “fakeness” of everything doesn’t reduce the enjoyment you get from seeing it all so expertly choreographed.
Somehow I had never seen FLASH GORDON before -- I think I had expected it to be ossified under the production design, like an actor slathered in so many layers of make-up, masks, and costumes that he can no longer emote or move. In other words, I expected it to be like BATMAN AND ROBIN -- a movie where a misguided sense of production design overwhelmed everything else. But it turns out that FLASH GORDON is nothing like that at all. It’s great fun from start to finish, and even though it has its own distinctive style, the movie never lets the spectacle get in the way of the adventure for a second.
I don’t know a whole lot about Dino De Laurentiis, except that he has produced a slew of movies including BARBARELLA, the Jeff Bridges/Jessica Lange KING KONG (1976) remake, FLASH GORDON, CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982), DEAD ZONE (1983), DUNE (1984), the original Hannibal Lecter movie MANHUNTER (1986), EVIL DEAD 2 (1987) and ARMY OF DARKNESS (1993), and numerous other projects covering a wide range of genres.
Producers don’t often get a lot of credit for creative input. Directors and screenwriters are the ones who win Academy Awards and get most of the attention. And maybe most producers really don’t have a lot of creative input compared to the folks working for them. But there are certainly exceptions to this. George Lucas has had a great deal of creative input on many of the movies he’s credited primarily as producer -- not least of which are THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980) and RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983). Val Lewton at RKO and, to a lesser extent, Carl Laemmle, Jr., at Universal are the classic examples of creative producers in the horror world. And Charles Schneer and Ray Harryhausen were clearly at the driver’s wheel in most of the movies they produced.
I’d like to add Dino De Laurentiis to this list, but I just don’t know enough about the guy. I get the sense from BARBARELLA and FLASH GORDON that there is a clear line connecting the two -- a consistent creative personality that is propelling them both. If you like one of those movies, you should go and check out the other right away. They aren’t exactly the same, but they both hearken back to the same tradition and tap into the same spirit in a way that practically no other science fiction movie does. FLASH GORDON may have been released in 1980, but it seems to be the product of a world where movies like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) or STAR WARS (1977) or ALIEN (1979) never existed.
If anything, it chooses histrionics over naturalism, artifice over immersion, and self-awareness over seamless plotting. In that way, it’s a bit like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or ZARDOZ (1974) or THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) or THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). It’s a movie for people who like movies to look good -- not necessarily real. And for people who like movies that have stories that are exciting -- not necessarily believable.
I guess I’m probably not going to say very much about specifically about FLASH GORDON, but I don’t really know if anything I could say would really be very helpful. BARBARELLA and FLASH GORDON seem to comprise an entire alternate history of science fiction in cinema -- they exist outside of other contemporary influences. If you like sci-fi, and especially if you enjoy a good space opera from time to time, then you have no excuse not to watch one or the other. Go out and experience them. You may not like them, but I guarantee a different movie watching experience than almost anything else you’ll get from other movies of their times.
Also, Timothy Dalton is in FLASH GORDON and he is awesome.
New York Jets quarterback Flash Gordon and travel agent Dale Arden get drafted by rogue scientist Dr Zarkov to help stop an attack on Earth by intergalactic warlord Ming the Merciless (the latter played by Max Von Sydow). Arriving on the planet Mongo in Zarkov’s rocket, the three find themselves embroiled in complicated political infighting among Ming’s subjugated vassal tribes.
After being captured by Ming’s guards, all three suffer seemingly final fates -- Flash Gordon is slated to be executed, Zarkov to have his mind wiped and reprogrammed, and Dale Arden to become Ming’s personal concubine. Meanwhile, Earth’s moon is being shredded by Ming’s firepower and threatens to destroy the entire planet. Even after escaping from their several dangers, Flash and his friends must convince Ming’s vassals to quit fighting each other and team up against the merciless overlord they all serve.
Is it any good?
I have never had much interest in the old sci-fi serials of the 1930s, since they are for the most part obviously intended for children. From the little I’ve seen, they have a general lack of interest not only in anything to do with “science” but also apparently anything that resembles “fiction” as well. Characters have no personality, themes are nonexistent, and events happen merely because they provide convenient excuses to move from one episode to the next. On the other hand, they do also seem to have a lot of creativity and inventiveness when it comes to spectacle, peril, and suspense.
The 1980 film adaptation of FLASH GORDON apparently takes its basic plot from the comics and serials of the 1930s -- and luckily takes a lot of the creativity and whimsy as well. Like BARBARELLA (1968) it’s a Dino De Laurentiis production, and the similarities are instantly obvious. Both movies are campy, light-hearted, fast-paced, and full of brightly stylized special effects and production design. Watching FLASH GORDON is a bit like watching a big budget stage musical -- the artifice is all perfectly obvious and brightly lit, but the “fakeness” of everything doesn’t reduce the enjoyment you get from seeing it all so expertly choreographed.
Somehow I had never seen FLASH GORDON before -- I think I had expected it to be ossified under the production design, like an actor slathered in so many layers of make-up, masks, and costumes that he can no longer emote or move. In other words, I expected it to be like BATMAN AND ROBIN -- a movie where a misguided sense of production design overwhelmed everything else. But it turns out that FLASH GORDON is nothing like that at all. It’s great fun from start to finish, and even though it has its own distinctive style, the movie never lets the spectacle get in the way of the adventure for a second.
I don’t know a whole lot about Dino De Laurentiis, except that he has produced a slew of movies including BARBARELLA, the Jeff Bridges/Jessica Lange KING KONG (1976) remake, FLASH GORDON, CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982), DEAD ZONE (1983), DUNE (1984), the original Hannibal Lecter movie MANHUNTER (1986), EVIL DEAD 2 (1987) and ARMY OF DARKNESS (1993), and numerous other projects covering a wide range of genres.
Producers don’t often get a lot of credit for creative input. Directors and screenwriters are the ones who win Academy Awards and get most of the attention. And maybe most producers really don’t have a lot of creative input compared to the folks working for them. But there are certainly exceptions to this. George Lucas has had a great deal of creative input on many of the movies he’s credited primarily as producer -- not least of which are THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980) and RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983). Val Lewton at RKO and, to a lesser extent, Carl Laemmle, Jr., at Universal are the classic examples of creative producers in the horror world. And Charles Schneer and Ray Harryhausen were clearly at the driver’s wheel in most of the movies they produced.
I’d like to add Dino De Laurentiis to this list, but I just don’t know enough about the guy. I get the sense from BARBARELLA and FLASH GORDON that there is a clear line connecting the two -- a consistent creative personality that is propelling them both. If you like one of those movies, you should go and check out the other right away. They aren’t exactly the same, but they both hearken back to the same tradition and tap into the same spirit in a way that practically no other science fiction movie does. FLASH GORDON may have been released in 1980, but it seems to be the product of a world where movies like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) or STAR WARS (1977) or ALIEN (1979) never existed.
If anything, it chooses histrionics over naturalism, artifice over immersion, and self-awareness over seamless plotting. In that way, it’s a bit like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or ZARDOZ (1974) or THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) or THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). It’s a movie for people who like movies to look good -- not necessarily real. And for people who like movies that have stories that are exciting -- not necessarily believable.
I guess I’m probably not going to say very much about specifically about FLASH GORDON, but I don’t really know if anything I could say would really be very helpful. BARBARELLA and FLASH GORDON seem to comprise an entire alternate history of science fiction in cinema -- they exist outside of other contemporary influences. If you like sci-fi, and especially if you enjoy a good space opera from time to time, then you have no excuse not to watch one or the other. Go out and experience them. You may not like them, but I guarantee a different movie watching experience than almost anything else you’ll get from other movies of their times.
Also, Timothy Dalton is in FLASH GORDON and he is awesome.
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.
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.
 |  |
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.)
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.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1972: HORROR EXPRESS
What’s it about?
Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.
As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.
Is it any good?
I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.
But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)
There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.
Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.
It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.
On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.
It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?
I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.
Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.
Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.
As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.
Is it any good?
I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.
But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)
There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.
Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.
It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.
On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.
It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?
I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.
Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1971: PUNISHMENT PARK
What’s it about?
In an alternate version of early 1970s America, the government has taken to sentencing “political criminals” (i.e., hippies, dissidents, draft dodgers, and the like) to serving brief but brutal stints in newly designated punishment parks throughout the country. The park featured in this movie is a desert wasteland in southern California. Any prisoner sentenced there has three days to make it fifty miles across the desert with no food or water to a checkpoint. If they succeed, they can go free. But if they are “apprehended” by law enforcement officers (who use the parks as a training ground) then they are taken to prison to serve out whatever their original sentence would have been.
Except for waiting two hours to give the prisoners a head start, the law enforcement officers have no restrictions on how they can hunt down the fugitives. They use vehicles, radios, and weapons with live ammunition to aid in their pursuit. Though they claim they won’t use violence unless the prisoners resist when they are apprehended, none of the prisoners believe them. And when a group of prisoners fights back and succeeds in killing a deputy, the game turns even more deadly.
Is it any good?
This is another documentary-style sci-fi movie from British director Peter Watkins -- the third that I’ve watched for this blog. The first one I watched, THE WAR GAME (1965), ranks among the most riveting movies I have ever seen in my life. But the second one, THE GLADIATORS (1970), was dull and disappointing. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from PUNISHMENT PARK. Based on what I knew about the movie, it sounded like it was more along the lines of THE GLADIATORS, so I was almost steeling myself to be bored. The DVD I had also included an introduction from Peter Watkins which consisted largely of the director reading from several densely typewritten pages about how PUNISHMENT PARK has been unfairly ignored by everybody for twenty minutes. The omens, then, were not so good.
Luckily, the bad omens never panned out. One of the biggest differences between the other two Peter Watkins movies I had watched is that THE WAR GAME depicts events that could have very plausibly taken place (a nuclear war), whereas the subject of THE GLADIATORS are much more allegorical and detached (an isolated institute where countries fight out wars using small numbers of troops). At first, I figured PUNISHMENT PARK would fall on the allegorical and detached side of the line, but there’s a few interesting things about the movie that give it much more of a punch than expected.
To start with, the premise behind PUNISHMENT PARK is mostly well within the realm of believability. The dissidents are tried by a civilian tribunal that operates outside the traditional American justice system. The defendants are presumed guilty and although they have a chance to state their case, the arguments are more about philosophy and politics than they are about evidence. I’m not going to try and rate how close the United States has come to systems like these in its history (though this country has certainly had its dark spots), but drumhead trials with foregone conclusions are nothing new or even especially unusual in the history of the world.
The arguments that do come up during the trials are also absolutely real ones on both sides of the debate. The tribunal members show a surprising indulgence in letting the accused speak and in responding to them with their own arguments. (Though there is an awful of indignant shouting on both sides, and as soon as things seem to be going badly for the tribunal they have the defendants hauled out.) But supposedly these trials were all unscripted -- Peter Watkins let the actors come up with their own arguments and just let them play out. Some of the establishment types were even supposedly conservatives who genuinely opposed the hippie movement. But the effect is that the movie serves as an interesting document of countercultural and mainstream opinions of the early 1970s, and the inability of the two sides to find common ground in their interactions.
The actual hunt through the desert should probably be the movie’s Achilles heel, and honestly it isn’t very plausible. Whether you believe that it’s possible that the United States might start holding summary trials of its own citizens and sentencing them to prison without due process, the idea that there would also exist a systemic punishment plan that involved hunting prisoners across deserts is pretty absurd. But despite the absurdity, the situation acts as a pretty powerful allegory for the dilemma of the countercultural movement. On the one hand, they find themselves trapped in a game with arbitrary rules that are clearly stacked against them. But if they refuse to play the game, then they will simply be apprehended and sent to prison -- or possibly worse.
Most of the hippies decide to play the game, since they see it as their best chance for survival (and some believe that they can even possibly “win”). They go along with the insane rules set up by the government, even though it’s obvious that the whole thing is designed to force them to fail. The others who refuse to play the game (and who wait in ambush for the cops instead of running) mock the rest of the hippies as hypocrites -- by even consenting to play the game, they are giving legitimacy to a corrupt system.
Just to be clear, anybody who is looking for an unbiased view of 1970s politics won’t find it here. Watkins is clearly on the side of the counterculture -- though the hippies don’t always come across as heroes and martyrs. Some of them come across as weak or snotty or naive or dangerous. They are also the first to use violence, and at one point even threaten the life of an innocent hostage. None of them deserve the kind of punishment they’re getting, however. And although Watkins lets the establishment make its arguments in a reasonable way much of the time, the fact still remains that the cops shoot down a lot of unresisting unarmed kids.
If I believed the movie was saying that this is an accurate portrait of America, ca. 1970, then I would probably be pretty offended. Pieces and parts of it are certainly accurate in isolated instances, but in general the picture doesn’t reflect what America is about. But I think the movie is in fact has two other far less objectionable messages. First, it can be seen as saying that this was how a certain segment of the population felt America was treating them at the time. And second, it could be saying that the government could easily usurp such powers on a wide scale if the people permit it. Either of those things I think are true -- some people DO believe that America is a fascist state, and the government really COULD quickly become frightening if the people let it. I also think they are important things to understand and be aware of. So even though I should probably be offended that some British panty-waist is making inflammatory movies about my country, I guess I will just say that he makes a couple of good points.
The movie does start to drag a bit as it goes along. After all, there are only so many times that you can listen to the same arguments over and over again. But at least there are characters to care about (mostly only among the hippies, but a little among the establishment) and ideas to think about. Things do get a little hysterical at times, and it's difficult to understand why the cops are so brutal when they know that a film crew is following them around. But if nothing else, the movie is a very interesting experiment in improvisation and an instructive document about attitudes that seemingly only survive in small paranoid pockets today.
Anyway, the final score puts Peter Watkins at 2 for 3. THE WAR GAME is still far and away his best, but PUNISHMENT PARK is well worth watching if you like unusual narratives and don't mind listening to a lot of angry hippies.
In an alternate version of early 1970s America, the government has taken to sentencing “political criminals” (i.e., hippies, dissidents, draft dodgers, and the like) to serving brief but brutal stints in newly designated punishment parks throughout the country. The park featured in this movie is a desert wasteland in southern California. Any prisoner sentenced there has three days to make it fifty miles across the desert with no food or water to a checkpoint. If they succeed, they can go free. But if they are “apprehended” by law enforcement officers (who use the parks as a training ground) then they are taken to prison to serve out whatever their original sentence would have been.
Except for waiting two hours to give the prisoners a head start, the law enforcement officers have no restrictions on how they can hunt down the fugitives. They use vehicles, radios, and weapons with live ammunition to aid in their pursuit. Though they claim they won’t use violence unless the prisoners resist when they are apprehended, none of the prisoners believe them. And when a group of prisoners fights back and succeeds in killing a deputy, the game turns even more deadly.
 |  |
Is it any good?
This is another documentary-style sci-fi movie from British director Peter Watkins -- the third that I’ve watched for this blog. The first one I watched, THE WAR GAME (1965), ranks among the most riveting movies I have ever seen in my life. But the second one, THE GLADIATORS (1970), was dull and disappointing. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from PUNISHMENT PARK. Based on what I knew about the movie, it sounded like it was more along the lines of THE GLADIATORS, so I was almost steeling myself to be bored. The DVD I had also included an introduction from Peter Watkins which consisted largely of the director reading from several densely typewritten pages about how PUNISHMENT PARK has been unfairly ignored by everybody for twenty minutes. The omens, then, were not so good.
Luckily, the bad omens never panned out. One of the biggest differences between the other two Peter Watkins movies I had watched is that THE WAR GAME depicts events that could have very plausibly taken place (a nuclear war), whereas the subject of THE GLADIATORS are much more allegorical and detached (an isolated institute where countries fight out wars using small numbers of troops). At first, I figured PUNISHMENT PARK would fall on the allegorical and detached side of the line, but there’s a few interesting things about the movie that give it much more of a punch than expected.
 |  |
To start with, the premise behind PUNISHMENT PARK is mostly well within the realm of believability. The dissidents are tried by a civilian tribunal that operates outside the traditional American justice system. The defendants are presumed guilty and although they have a chance to state their case, the arguments are more about philosophy and politics than they are about evidence. I’m not going to try and rate how close the United States has come to systems like these in its history (though this country has certainly had its dark spots), but drumhead trials with foregone conclusions are nothing new or even especially unusual in the history of the world.
The arguments that do come up during the trials are also absolutely real ones on both sides of the debate. The tribunal members show a surprising indulgence in letting the accused speak and in responding to them with their own arguments. (Though there is an awful of indignant shouting on both sides, and as soon as things seem to be going badly for the tribunal they have the defendants hauled out.) But supposedly these trials were all unscripted -- Peter Watkins let the actors come up with their own arguments and just let them play out. Some of the establishment types were even supposedly conservatives who genuinely opposed the hippie movement. But the effect is that the movie serves as an interesting document of countercultural and mainstream opinions of the early 1970s, and the inability of the two sides to find common ground in their interactions.
 |  |
The actual hunt through the desert should probably be the movie’s Achilles heel, and honestly it isn’t very plausible. Whether you believe that it’s possible that the United States might start holding summary trials of its own citizens and sentencing them to prison without due process, the idea that there would also exist a systemic punishment plan that involved hunting prisoners across deserts is pretty absurd. But despite the absurdity, the situation acts as a pretty powerful allegory for the dilemma of the countercultural movement. On the one hand, they find themselves trapped in a game with arbitrary rules that are clearly stacked against them. But if they refuse to play the game, then they will simply be apprehended and sent to prison -- or possibly worse.
Most of the hippies decide to play the game, since they see it as their best chance for survival (and some believe that they can even possibly “win”). They go along with the insane rules set up by the government, even though it’s obvious that the whole thing is designed to force them to fail. The others who refuse to play the game (and who wait in ambush for the cops instead of running) mock the rest of the hippies as hypocrites -- by even consenting to play the game, they are giving legitimacy to a corrupt system.
 |  |
Just to be clear, anybody who is looking for an unbiased view of 1970s politics won’t find it here. Watkins is clearly on the side of the counterculture -- though the hippies don’t always come across as heroes and martyrs. Some of them come across as weak or snotty or naive or dangerous. They are also the first to use violence, and at one point even threaten the life of an innocent hostage. None of them deserve the kind of punishment they’re getting, however. And although Watkins lets the establishment make its arguments in a reasonable way much of the time, the fact still remains that the cops shoot down a lot of unresisting unarmed kids.
If I believed the movie was saying that this is an accurate portrait of America, ca. 1970, then I would probably be pretty offended. Pieces and parts of it are certainly accurate in isolated instances, but in general the picture doesn’t reflect what America is about. But I think the movie is in fact has two other far less objectionable messages. First, it can be seen as saying that this was how a certain segment of the population felt America was treating them at the time. And second, it could be saying that the government could easily usurp such powers on a wide scale if the people permit it. Either of those things I think are true -- some people DO believe that America is a fascist state, and the government really COULD quickly become frightening if the people let it. I also think they are important things to understand and be aware of. So even though I should probably be offended that some British panty-waist is making inflammatory movies about my country, I guess I will just say that he makes a couple of good points.
The movie does start to drag a bit as it goes along. After all, there are only so many times that you can listen to the same arguments over and over again. But at least there are characters to care about (mostly only among the hippies, but a little among the establishment) and ideas to think about. Things do get a little hysterical at times, and it's difficult to understand why the cops are so brutal when they know that a film crew is following them around. But if nothing else, the movie is a very interesting experiment in improvisation and an instructive document about attitudes that seemingly only survive in small paranoid pockets today.
Anyway, the final score puts Peter Watkins at 2 for 3. THE WAR GAME is still far and away his best, but PUNISHMENT PARK is well worth watching if you like unusual narratives and don't mind listening to a lot of angry hippies.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1969: DOPPELGÄNGER
What’s it about?
A probe sent to investigate solar activity accidentally discovers a new planet in the same orbit as Earth on the other side of the sun. The pan-European space agency that created the probe hits up NASA for a donation and uses the money to prepare a manned mission to the new planet. (Meanwhile, communist spies have infiltrated the agency and stolen sensitive data using high-tech eyeball cameras and -- actually, never mind. Turns out later none of that part is important at all.)
The two astronauts selected for the mission are for some reason put into a deep sleep for the three weeks that it will take to reach the new planet. When they’re revived, they discover they’re orbiting a habitable planet. But disaster strikes when they try to land on the surface, and as they escape from the wreckage of their spaceship it appears that they have somehow landed back on Earth. But not all is as it seems...
Is it any good?
DOPPELGÄNGER (aka, JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN) was produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. If you’re not familiar with the names (I wasn’t until very recently), they’re a husband-and-wife team who created a long string of distinctive British children’s sci-fi/adventure shows over six decades starting in the 1950s. They’re probably best known for the series they developed using the Supermarionation puppet process -- especially THUNDERBIRDS and CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERIONS -- but they were involved in nineteen different series in all.
I actually don’t really know much about anything the Andersons did. I did check out THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO back when I was doing 1966 movies, but otherwise the only thing I have to go on are dim twenty year-old memories of CAPTAIN SCARLET. So obviously I don’t know how whether DOPPELGÄNGER is representative of the rest of their work or if it’s an anomaly. It is a live-action movie, so there aren’t any puppets. But the special effects (especially the buildings and spaceships) seem to use a lot of the same miniature techniques from the THUNDERBIRDS movies. If anything, the effects in DOPPELGÄNGER are even better -- or at least more realistic.
The movie really has three parts -- the first of which is probably the weakest. The first half hour or so is concerned entirely with things like getting funding for the mission, political maneuvering in the European space agency and abroad, and security concerns about leaks of sensitive data. I always feel like I’m hurtling through a cultural wormhole whenever I watch British sci-fi movies, because they spend so much time on such mundane things. This can be either refreshing or frustrating depending on how it’s handled -- in DOPPELGÄNGER it’s mostly just a confusing digression. But one amusing note is how dependent the European space agency is on American funding -- even in a British-produced movie, they still have to go begging to NASA when they want to launch a mission. American sci-fi flicks almost never give a single thought to funding, and the few that do certainly don’t solve the problem by getting foreign investment. (Possible exception: CONTACT? I can’t remember who ends up footing the bill in that one.)
In any event, the funding and security concerns are finally wrapped up and put away so we never have to hear about them again. Instead, the movie shifts into one of those “training for the mission” modes that directors seem to think we all love so much. I would not complain at all if I never see another astronaut ride a rocket sled again (this is the third movie from the 1960s I’ve seen so far with such a sequence), but luckily there are other things going on during this part of the movie that are a lot more interesting. One of the two astronauts, for instance, is an American who was brought into the project to help get the funding. Though he’s a Neil Armstrong-like superstar, he has problems in his personal life. His wife belittles him by claiming that the radiation in space has sterilized him, and meanwhile the pretty head of security at the space agency is making eyes at him... It’s all pretty soapy, but it’s nice to see astronauts with more or less realistic problems and flaws.
Once the rocket finally takes off, the movie takes another turn since Earth-bound problems must necessarily be left behind. The two astronauts go into their narratively convenient (but otherwise inexplicable) three-week sleep. When they awake -- well, at this point I should warn that some big spoilers are coming. If you think you might want to watch this movie, I’d recommend stopping here since the ending is a Twilight Zone kind of thing that’s probably better if you don’t know much about it going in.
For the rest of you, when the astronauts awaken from their sleep, they’re in orbit around the new planet on the other side of the sun -- or so they think. But after crashlanding on the surface, they’re immediately picked up by an English-speaking rescue worker hanging from a helicopter. The British astronaut is badly wounded in the crash and more or less sits out the rest of the movie wrapped in bandages in an iron lung. The American, meanwhile, is transported back to the European space agency (in secrecy, natch) where we learn that he’s only been gone three weeks instead of the expected six that a round trip should have taken. The top brass naturally figure that the astronauts turned the rocket around for some reason, but the American insists they did no such thing.
The American goes home with his wife and more domestic scenes ensue -- but things only get weirder when he notices that everything in his house (including all writing and numbers) is reversed. It takes a little while, but the scientists finally decide that the planet on the other side of the sun is an exact mirror image of Earth. When Earth launched its rocket, the mirror planet launched one of its own with mirror images of the astronauts inside. So the three-week journey really was a one-way trip, and the astronaut really is on the new planet on the other side of the sun.
This is, I admit, kind of stupid. We’re supposed to believe that the astronaut didn’t see any writing until he got home and glanced at a cologne bottle in the mirror. (You’d think he’d at least be asked to sign a statement -- or an autograph.) Not to mention that we also have to believe that the astronauts somehow failed to notice that the planet they were orbiting looked like Earth with the continents flipped. But at the same time, it’s kind of neat. I like the overall idea of a mirror world, though sadly not much ever really happens with it. Everybody is confused at first and they make a big deal out of the three-week/six-week discrepancy, but then as soon as the astronaut discovers the world is backwards they pretty quickly accept what’s going on. To confirm the theory, they decide to send the astronaut back up to a part of the spacecraft that’s still orbiting Earth. I guess to see if it’s backwards? Unfortunately, they expect the polarity of electricity to be reversed (turns out it ain’t) so things end badly and all the evidence is destroyed and, well, I may as well just stop here.
In any event, DOPPELGÄNGER is not a bad a movie and I enjoyed it well enough. But except for a few isolated interesting elements, it’s pretty forgettable overall. One thing I haven’t mentioned much yet is that the special effects are really very good. Some of the vehicles and buildings are implausibly automated, but otherwise they are very cool. In particular, there’s a scene during the spaceflight where the sun rises over Earth that is truly something to see. The explosive ending -- in which flaming space wreckage lays waste to the space agency’s headquarters -- is pretty terrific as well.
A probe sent to investigate solar activity accidentally discovers a new planet in the same orbit as Earth on the other side of the sun. The pan-European space agency that created the probe hits up NASA for a donation and uses the money to prepare a manned mission to the new planet. (Meanwhile, communist spies have infiltrated the agency and stolen sensitive data using high-tech eyeball cameras and -- actually, never mind. Turns out later none of that part is important at all.)
The two astronauts selected for the mission are for some reason put into a deep sleep for the three weeks that it will take to reach the new planet. When they’re revived, they discover they’re orbiting a habitable planet. But disaster strikes when they try to land on the surface, and as they escape from the wreckage of their spaceship it appears that they have somehow landed back on Earth. But not all is as it seems...
Is it any good?
DOPPELGÄNGER (aka, JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN) was produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. If you’re not familiar with the names (I wasn’t until very recently), they’re a husband-and-wife team who created a long string of distinctive British children’s sci-fi/adventure shows over six decades starting in the 1950s. They’re probably best known for the series they developed using the Supermarionation puppet process -- especially THUNDERBIRDS and CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERIONS -- but they were involved in nineteen different series in all.
I actually don’t really know much about anything the Andersons did. I did check out THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO back when I was doing 1966 movies, but otherwise the only thing I have to go on are dim twenty year-old memories of CAPTAIN SCARLET. So obviously I don’t know how whether DOPPELGÄNGER is representative of the rest of their work or if it’s an anomaly. It is a live-action movie, so there aren’t any puppets. But the special effects (especially the buildings and spaceships) seem to use a lot of the same miniature techniques from the THUNDERBIRDS movies. If anything, the effects in DOPPELGÄNGER are even better -- or at least more realistic.
The movie really has three parts -- the first of which is probably the weakest. The first half hour or so is concerned entirely with things like getting funding for the mission, political maneuvering in the European space agency and abroad, and security concerns about leaks of sensitive data. I always feel like I’m hurtling through a cultural wormhole whenever I watch British sci-fi movies, because they spend so much time on such mundane things. This can be either refreshing or frustrating depending on how it’s handled -- in DOPPELGÄNGER it’s mostly just a confusing digression. But one amusing note is how dependent the European space agency is on American funding -- even in a British-produced movie, they still have to go begging to NASA when they want to launch a mission. American sci-fi flicks almost never give a single thought to funding, and the few that do certainly don’t solve the problem by getting foreign investment. (Possible exception: CONTACT? I can’t remember who ends up footing the bill in that one.)
In any event, the funding and security concerns are finally wrapped up and put away so we never have to hear about them again. Instead, the movie shifts into one of those “training for the mission” modes that directors seem to think we all love so much. I would not complain at all if I never see another astronaut ride a rocket sled again (this is the third movie from the 1960s I’ve seen so far with such a sequence), but luckily there are other things going on during this part of the movie that are a lot more interesting. One of the two astronauts, for instance, is an American who was brought into the project to help get the funding. Though he’s a Neil Armstrong-like superstar, he has problems in his personal life. His wife belittles him by claiming that the radiation in space has sterilized him, and meanwhile the pretty head of security at the space agency is making eyes at him... It’s all pretty soapy, but it’s nice to see astronauts with more or less realistic problems and flaws.
Once the rocket finally takes off, the movie takes another turn since Earth-bound problems must necessarily be left behind. The two astronauts go into their narratively convenient (but otherwise inexplicable) three-week sleep. When they awake -- well, at this point I should warn that some big spoilers are coming. If you think you might want to watch this movie, I’d recommend stopping here since the ending is a Twilight Zone kind of thing that’s probably better if you don’t know much about it going in.
For the rest of you, when the astronauts awaken from their sleep, they’re in orbit around the new planet on the other side of the sun -- or so they think. But after crashlanding on the surface, they’re immediately picked up by an English-speaking rescue worker hanging from a helicopter. The British astronaut is badly wounded in the crash and more or less sits out the rest of the movie wrapped in bandages in an iron lung. The American, meanwhile, is transported back to the European space agency (in secrecy, natch) where we learn that he’s only been gone three weeks instead of the expected six that a round trip should have taken. The top brass naturally figure that the astronauts turned the rocket around for some reason, but the American insists they did no such thing.
The American goes home with his wife and more domestic scenes ensue -- but things only get weirder when he notices that everything in his house (including all writing and numbers) is reversed. It takes a little while, but the scientists finally decide that the planet on the other side of the sun is an exact mirror image of Earth. When Earth launched its rocket, the mirror planet launched one of its own with mirror images of the astronauts inside. So the three-week journey really was a one-way trip, and the astronaut really is on the new planet on the other side of the sun.
This is, I admit, kind of stupid. We’re supposed to believe that the astronaut didn’t see any writing until he got home and glanced at a cologne bottle in the mirror. (You’d think he’d at least be asked to sign a statement -- or an autograph.) Not to mention that we also have to believe that the astronauts somehow failed to notice that the planet they were orbiting looked like Earth with the continents flipped. But at the same time, it’s kind of neat. I like the overall idea of a mirror world, though sadly not much ever really happens with it. Everybody is confused at first and they make a big deal out of the three-week/six-week discrepancy, but then as soon as the astronaut discovers the world is backwards they pretty quickly accept what’s going on. To confirm the theory, they decide to send the astronaut back up to a part of the spacecraft that’s still orbiting Earth. I guess to see if it’s backwards? Unfortunately, they expect the polarity of electricity to be reversed (turns out it ain’t) so things end badly and all the evidence is destroyed and, well, I may as well just stop here.
In any event, DOPPELGÄNGER is not a bad a movie and I enjoyed it well enough. But except for a few isolated interesting elements, it’s pretty forgettable overall. One thing I haven’t mentioned much yet is that the special effects are really very good. Some of the vehicles and buildings are implausibly automated, but otherwise they are very cool. In particular, there’s a scene during the spaceflight where the sun rises over Earth that is truly something to see. The explosive ending -- in which flaming space wreckage lays waste to the space agency’s headquarters -- is pretty terrific as well.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1968: THE LOST CONTINENT
What’s it about?
A motley group of westerners fleeing Sierra Leone aboard a rickety boat (each for their own reasons) get a rude wake-up call when they discover that the ship is carrying a cargo of chemical explosives that react badly to moisture. As foul weather moves in, the hull starts to flood with water. Fearing an explosion, the captain orders the ship abandoned -- but not before mutinous activity by some crew members results in violence.
After weathering the typhoon (and losing a couple passengers to sharks) the lifeboat is blown into a massive patch of apparently carnivorous seaweed. Also caught in the seaweed is the ship they had all just abandoned -- apparently not in such danger of sinking as they had imagined. But the ship is not much of a refuge itself. Not only has the seaweed clogged its propellers, but soon they start to see strange creatures moving around out in the mist around them. When they are suddenly attacked by a raiding party of Spanish conquistadors, it’s clear that they are not trapped in your usual run-of-the-mill patch of carnivorous seaweed.
Is it any good?
I could fill another two paragraphs with additional plot -- the conquistador attack is only the beginning of the crazy hijinks to come -- but I suspect that it would all start to sound too much like I’m describing a dream I had once. And anyway, before I get into any of that, I feel like I should maybe explain why I am even writing about this movie. Most of the other ones I picked for this year are pretty widely recognized as “classics”, but what’s so great about THE LOST CONTINENT?
The short, unsatisfying answer is that there is nothing particularly great about it. I’ve never heard of the director or anybody in the cast, and I’d never heard of the movie itself before I stumbled across it on Netflix. It does have an interesting premise, and most of it is pretty well done. But it’s no better than half a dozen other movies I’ve watched that I enjoyed well enough, but didn’t think were compelling enough to write about. It’s a list that includes SPACEWAYS (1953), THE MONOLITH MONSTERS (1957), THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959), THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963), SECONDS (1966), and a few others.
For whatever reason, these are movies that just didn’t grab me strongly enough to write seven hundred words about them. Which is fine -- except that not wanting to write an essay about movie doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable. THE LOST CONTINENT could have very easily ended up in this category too, so I’m writing about it partly to atone for all the enjoyable movies I’ve skipped over simply because they weren’t notable or surprising or artful enough. But it’s nice to know that there are still a few layers of worthwhile sci-fi movies underneath the well-known classics. When I started this project, I was afraid that I had already seen most of the good sci-fi flicks in the world -- but now I am sure that there will always be a layer of solid and entertaining movies that just never get talked about because nobody ever bothered to call them classics.
The second, possibly slightly more satisfying reason to write about THE LOST CONTINENT is that it’s the last Hammer sci-fi movie I plan to watch. There are a few more Frankenstein movies that I could do, but Hammer in the 1970s increasingly specialized in horror and horror-tinged thrillers. I’m no film historian, but the consensus seems to be that changing standards and the emergence of more film makers willing to take sci-fi and horror seriously helped squeeze Hammer out of the market. Hammer was out-gored and out-sexed on one side, and out-classed and out-arted on the other, and by 1979 they were out of business altogether.
So in some ways, THE LOST CONTINENT is the last gasp of Hammer’s sci-fi productions. Even at the end, the studio stayed true to a lot of the conventions that I wrote about in my entry for THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957). The movie starts out like an ordinary thriller, building tension out of character relationships and the dangers of the natural world. In this case, the conflict is between the captain and passengers on one side (all of them criminals, fugitives, or exiles who will not return to port under any conditions) and the increasingly nervous crew on the other side (who grow outright mutinous as the captain insists they sail a leaky boat with explosive cargo straight into a hurricane). This particular story is one of the better ones they came up with -- there are maybe a few too many loose cannonballs rolling about, but the general situation is very exciting, tense, and mostly believable.
After the crew abandons ship, they disappear and never return again. And, in fact, very little of the first part of the movie is important again after the hurricane is over. The survivors discover that the ship somehow managed to weather the storm without sinking or blowing up, so they transfer from the lifeboat back onboard -- and then promptly get stuck in the carnivorous seaweed. One of the strangest things about the movie is that nobody really talks much about that seaweed -- after a couple of dramatic demonstrations of its killing power, they all just take it as a fact of life. And since they can’t unclog the propellers without being eaten by the plants, they have to find some other way out of the mess.
I think I’m on record somewhere already as saying that plant monsters are not very scary. I still stand by that statement, but THE LOST CONTINENT does a pretty good job at least making the giant patch of seaweed creepy. The actual tentacles and gullets look pretty silly -- there’s no doubt about that -- but the seaweed has trapped dozens of ships in its mass, and the glimpses of their rotting hulls through the misty air is pretty effective. It’s from one of these ships that the conquistadors (or, more accurately, the descendants of the original conquistadors) come. It’s not totally clear what they’re after -- it seems that they just attack any new ship and try to raid it for supplies and possibly female prisoners.
The real pay-off with the conquistadors is their social system, however. They are ruled by a boy monarch who takes his orders from a corrupted version of the medieval Catholic Church led by a Klan-hooded inquisitor. This leads to a little bit of myopic protesting by one of the more Protestant newcomers, but his theological objections are made moot when the conquistadors start doing things everybody can object to -- like throwing people down a hatch and feeding them to the seaweed monster.
In any event, I’m not really sure where else to take this. I could keep describing the events of the movie, but I’d hope that anybody could figure out from what I’ve said so far whether they’d be interested in seeing it or not. Everything -- the acting, the special effects, the sets, the story, the monsters -- are either pretty good or at least serviceable enough. It doesn’t add up to anything except an entertaining movie. And honestly, in a lot of ways I preferred the ordinary thrills at the beginning to the sci-fi ones at the end -- at least partly because the characters become pretty flat and dull as soon as they start getting picked off one by one. It would be nice if I had some insightful observation to close this out with, but like I said at the beginning -- it’s not that kind of movie.
A motley group of westerners fleeing Sierra Leone aboard a rickety boat (each for their own reasons) get a rude wake-up call when they discover that the ship is carrying a cargo of chemical explosives that react badly to moisture. As foul weather moves in, the hull starts to flood with water. Fearing an explosion, the captain orders the ship abandoned -- but not before mutinous activity by some crew members results in violence.
After weathering the typhoon (and losing a couple passengers to sharks) the lifeboat is blown into a massive patch of apparently carnivorous seaweed. Also caught in the seaweed is the ship they had all just abandoned -- apparently not in such danger of sinking as they had imagined. But the ship is not much of a refuge itself. Not only has the seaweed clogged its propellers, but soon they start to see strange creatures moving around out in the mist around them. When they are suddenly attacked by a raiding party of Spanish conquistadors, it’s clear that they are not trapped in your usual run-of-the-mill patch of carnivorous seaweed.
Is it any good?
I could fill another two paragraphs with additional plot -- the conquistador attack is only the beginning of the crazy hijinks to come -- but I suspect that it would all start to sound too much like I’m describing a dream I had once. And anyway, before I get into any of that, I feel like I should maybe explain why I am even writing about this movie. Most of the other ones I picked for this year are pretty widely recognized as “classics”, but what’s so great about THE LOST CONTINENT?
The short, unsatisfying answer is that there is nothing particularly great about it. I’ve never heard of the director or anybody in the cast, and I’d never heard of the movie itself before I stumbled across it on Netflix. It does have an interesting premise, and most of it is pretty well done. But it’s no better than half a dozen other movies I’ve watched that I enjoyed well enough, but didn’t think were compelling enough to write about. It’s a list that includes SPACEWAYS (1953), THE MONOLITH MONSTERS (1957), THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959), THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963), SECONDS (1966), and a few others.
For whatever reason, these are movies that just didn’t grab me strongly enough to write seven hundred words about them. Which is fine -- except that not wanting to write an essay about movie doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable. THE LOST CONTINENT could have very easily ended up in this category too, so I’m writing about it partly to atone for all the enjoyable movies I’ve skipped over simply because they weren’t notable or surprising or artful enough. But it’s nice to know that there are still a few layers of worthwhile sci-fi movies underneath the well-known classics. When I started this project, I was afraid that I had already seen most of the good sci-fi flicks in the world -- but now I am sure that there will always be a layer of solid and entertaining movies that just never get talked about because nobody ever bothered to call them classics.
The second, possibly slightly more satisfying reason to write about THE LOST CONTINENT is that it’s the last Hammer sci-fi movie I plan to watch. There are a few more Frankenstein movies that I could do, but Hammer in the 1970s increasingly specialized in horror and horror-tinged thrillers. I’m no film historian, but the consensus seems to be that changing standards and the emergence of more film makers willing to take sci-fi and horror seriously helped squeeze Hammer out of the market. Hammer was out-gored and out-sexed on one side, and out-classed and out-arted on the other, and by 1979 they were out of business altogether.
So in some ways, THE LOST CONTINENT is the last gasp of Hammer’s sci-fi productions. Even at the end, the studio stayed true to a lot of the conventions that I wrote about in my entry for THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957). The movie starts out like an ordinary thriller, building tension out of character relationships and the dangers of the natural world. In this case, the conflict is between the captain and passengers on one side (all of them criminals, fugitives, or exiles who will not return to port under any conditions) and the increasingly nervous crew on the other side (who grow outright mutinous as the captain insists they sail a leaky boat with explosive cargo straight into a hurricane). This particular story is one of the better ones they came up with -- there are maybe a few too many loose cannonballs rolling about, but the general situation is very exciting, tense, and mostly believable.
After the crew abandons ship, they disappear and never return again. And, in fact, very little of the first part of the movie is important again after the hurricane is over. The survivors discover that the ship somehow managed to weather the storm without sinking or blowing up, so they transfer from the lifeboat back onboard -- and then promptly get stuck in the carnivorous seaweed. One of the strangest things about the movie is that nobody really talks much about that seaweed -- after a couple of dramatic demonstrations of its killing power, they all just take it as a fact of life. And since they can’t unclog the propellers without being eaten by the plants, they have to find some other way out of the mess.
I think I’m on record somewhere already as saying that plant monsters are not very scary. I still stand by that statement, but THE LOST CONTINENT does a pretty good job at least making the giant patch of seaweed creepy. The actual tentacles and gullets look pretty silly -- there’s no doubt about that -- but the seaweed has trapped dozens of ships in its mass, and the glimpses of their rotting hulls through the misty air is pretty effective. It’s from one of these ships that the conquistadors (or, more accurately, the descendants of the original conquistadors) come. It’s not totally clear what they’re after -- it seems that they just attack any new ship and try to raid it for supplies and possibly female prisoners.
The real pay-off with the conquistadors is their social system, however. They are ruled by a boy monarch who takes his orders from a corrupted version of the medieval Catholic Church led by a Klan-hooded inquisitor. This leads to a little bit of myopic protesting by one of the more Protestant newcomers, but his theological objections are made moot when the conquistadors start doing things everybody can object to -- like throwing people down a hatch and feeding them to the seaweed monster.
In any event, I’m not really sure where else to take this. I could keep describing the events of the movie, but I’d hope that anybody could figure out from what I’ve said so far whether they’d be interested in seeing it or not. Everything -- the acting, the special effects, the sets, the story, the monsters -- are either pretty good or at least serviceable enough. It doesn’t add up to anything except an entertaining movie. And honestly, in a lot of ways I preferred the ordinary thrills at the beginning to the sci-fi ones at the end -- at least partly because the characters become pretty flat and dull as soon as they start getting picked off one by one. It would be nice if I had some insightful observation to close this out with, but like I said at the beginning -- it’s not that kind of movie.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)