Entry tags:
You wrecked my theater
Under normal conditions, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I would have spent Valentine's into President's Day in the balcony of the Somerville Theatre, watching our traditional twenty-four hours of science fiction film with the rest of the Boston Sci-Fi Marathon. This year, under conditions of plague and incompatible technologies, we did not attend even virtually. Instead, with recourse to our trusty handful of streaming services and a discreet ringer or two, we programmed ourselves the Black Cat 'Thon 2021. If I say so myself, it rocked.
Since we were determined to observe as many of the proprieties as possible from the safety of our own couch, we had always planned to kick off our marathon by counting down to the mutually assured disintegration of Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953), but since observation does not necessitate imitation, thanks to Rob's skills with bricolage we got the drop on Chuck Jones with a pre-show of bumpers and trailers including a PSA about PDA, a caution to juvenile delinquents about slicing up seat cushions which the cats immediately proceeded to ignore, and the original trailers for such classics of cinema as Invisible Invaders (1959), The Alligator People (1959), The Angry Red Planet (1959), and The Apple (1980), after which Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian squaring off over Planet X looked like the height of linear narrative. Every time I watch the cartoon, I notice something else stupid-clever and funny about it, like the specificity of "17,670,002 Micro-Cells" or the low-key sarcasm of the Eager Young Space Cadet. The gag itself can be seen coming for miles, but I love the bemused delivery of the topper, "What do you know, it disintegrated."
I had not seen John Hough's Escape to Witch Mountain (1975) since my summer camp days at the Arlington Boys & Girls Club when I was unable to forgive it for not acknowledging its obvious debt to Zenna Henderson's People, a situation not remedied in middle school when I discovered that the 1968 novel by Alexander Key didn't mention her, either. I remembered the conceit, but retained only fragments of the action: a black cat and a camper van, an older man almost angrily declaring his name, a rack of empty clothes piped into a terrifying ghost. Revisited through the slightly less resentful lens of adulthood, what strikes me most about the film is how little it resembles the stereotypical Disney movie despite starring a couple of towheaded kids and their cantankerous protector on the run from a ruthlessly greedy villain. Orphans of uncertain surname and even more obscure origins, their formative memories reduced to the vague sense of having once spoken another language and survived a wreck at sea, Tony and Tia (Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards) are anything but the kids next door even before factoring in the paranormal abilities that make them such objects of interest to the ESP-obsessed millionaire Aristotle Bolt (Ray Milland), who pursues them as relentlessly as would the government a decade later, his intentions all the more ominous for never being overtly expressed; it is left to the audience to understand from the shifting unease of his right-hand man Lucas Deranian (Donald Pleasence) that it won't be ice cream for dinner forever if Bolt doesn't get what he wants, which he never will. "We couldn't teach him even if we wanted to! We—we don't know why we do all these things." But even after a clue reveals itself in the form of a map hidden beneath the double sunburst of Tia's treasured "star case," the story doesn't turn into a puzzle-quest so much as a kid-sized succession of chase scenes just the family-friendly side of sci-fi horror, showcasing by turns the cute, spooky, and practical applications of the siblings' powers. Just when it looks predictably gendered that Tia can communicate telepathically while Tony possesses a harmonica-assisted form of telekinesis, we find out that Tony "knows about people" and Tia can mentally pick locks. Kindness to animals is repaid as in fairy tales; kindness to humans is more complicated, although it allows for a strikingly truthful scene where neither Tony nor Tia intends to hurt the curmudgeonly Jason O'Day (Eddie Albert) with the truth of his long-forsworn past, they are merely being as direct and thoughtless as real children and it makes them more believably found family than all his grouching with a heart of gold. "The name's Jason—" the line I had remembered for thirty years, though I had forgotten its gruff, wry, vulnerable chaser: "If you know so dang much about me, you might as well use it!" For these moments under the skin, for the way the film leans into both the wish-fulfillment and the alienation of difference, I can stand the occasional flying Winnebago or third-act digression of hillbillies. The memorable credits show a pair of luminous child-silhouettes loping dream-slow through moonlit wilderness, a snarl of animated hounds at their heels. It's not difficult to picture the entire film working in that scarier, lonelier key. You can't say that about a lot of live-action Disney. I still feel it's secretly about the People.
We were careful to screen Joe Dante's Matinee (1993) while the title was still applicable to its time slot, but I think I would have fallen in love with it at any hour of the day. It's a comedy about existential terror, a love letter to the escapism of movies with a keen eye for their feet of zeitgeist, a showcase for character actors and a frame for one of the best B-spoofs ever to insult science, and it is all of these things without gatekeeping or saccharine, an especially neat trick since it's also a period piece. It's October 1962 in Key West and while the U.S. Navy is dispatching ships to the blockade of Cuba, "The Screen's No. 1 Shock Expert" Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), like a magisterial fusion of William Castle and Ed Wood, is preparing to bring his latest low-budget blood-curdler MANT! to life with "Atomo-Vision," "Rumble-Rama," and all the seat-buzzer, bug-costume, fake-nurse-with-a-stack-of-consent-forms gimmicks he can cram into the 600-person house of the Key West Strand. "The country is on red alert," protests Howard (Robert Picardo), the theater's harried and high-strung manager. Expansive as a build-up, Woolsey returns, "What a perfect time to open a new horror movie!" By interweaving the nuclear brinksmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the premiere of a boffo schlocko atomic creature feature, the film is drawing an obvious line around the relationship of real and fictional frights, but the genius of the screenplay by Charles S. Haas is how sharply it extends this examination beyond the flickering cave of the silver screen. Nuclear war, nuclear apocalypse are understood to be themselves a kind of fantasy to the average American, stoked equally by science fiction and broadcast news and approached with the conviction of magical thinking. Students are drilled in duck-and-cover, cautioned to stray no more than fifteen minutes from home in the event of MAD. Adults stock their fallout shelters with guns and generators, double-check their lists for zero hour, and fight one another in the aisles over the last box of shredded wheat. What people scare themselves into believing does more damage than anything they can know for sure. In a deft demonstration of having one's meta and eating it too, the plot of Matinee follows the schema of dark ride thrills championed by Woolsey where "you make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything's okay," but it plays its fear surprisingly straight, right down to the simultaneous sweetness and ambivalence of the HFN. We know the bombs aren't going to fall, but the characters have no such guarantee, and while the film may observe the absurdity with which they have been conditioned to react to the prospect, it does not encourage us to condescend to them because of it. Howard makes an extremely funny barometer of national anxiety with his civil defense doomscrolling and his repeated mistaking of stage effects for Soviet first strikes, but he's just the foreshock of an audience so keyed up for nuclear annihilation that when the fourth wall breaks, it damn near takes the other three with it. When monster kid Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton) and his countercultural classmate Sandra (Lisa Jakub) find themselves trapped in the vault-like shelter under the Strand, it is heart-twinging that they discuss their presumed post-apocalyptic future very seriously in sci-fi clichés, the only language available for what seems to have happened to them: "It's like we're . . . Adam and Eve." I am a sucker for stories about the power of stories and Matinee is a particularly direct example, but it matters to me that at the same time that it goes full ahead with in-jokes like casting John Sayles and Dick Miller as a couple of bit-part confidantes or William Schallert and Kevin McCarthy as actors in the gloriously straight-faced goof of MANT! ("Human-insect mutation is far from an exact science"), it remembers that the movies have quieter, more intimate uses, too, like providing a sense of community for a lonely Navy brat or conjuring an absent husband briefly home. Woolsey is a huckster and a trickster and a dreamer who sincerely considers himself part of a tradition as ancient and honorable as cave paintings, which is presumably why a woman of such Olympian levels of world-weariness as Ruth Corday (Cathy Moriarty) sticks with him. There's substance to him; there's substance to this movie with its pastel air that should make it nostalgic or ephemeral, especially since so much of it is really, chaotically funny, and yet it's full of all these edges of history and hysteria and the differences between memorizing every issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland and facing the end of the world for real. If we'd had consistent house music like the Somerville, I'd have followed it with Miike Snow and Ninian Doff's "My Trigger." It really made me miss seeing movies in theaters. "You got to keep your eyes open."
Since 2013, Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände, 1924) had been the silent that got away. I can't speak to its literary antecedents, but it is the cinematic parent and original of every body horror from Mad Love (1935) to Possessor (2020) and a visceral, virtuoso opportunity for the disarticulation of Conrad Veidt. Just once we see the original hands of renowned pianist Paul Orlac, skimming powerfully over the keys as he closes out a tour; they are invested with sensitivity, mastery, and eroticism, and they are smashed beyond repair when his train derails. "Save his hands," Alexandra Sorina's Yvonne begs of the surgeon; she salvaged her husband from the flare-lit wreck herself. "His hands are his life . . . his hands are more than his life . . ." Paul wakes half-mummified in bandages, a forerunner of the 1931 Frankenstein's Monster in more ways than one: his riskily, experimentally transplanted hands were taken from the corpse of a convicted murderer and there's no telling what habits they might have brought with them. If the film is ultimately more psychological than supernatural horror, Veidt's performance doesn't see the difference. Even moving through a theatrically minimalist and receding mise-en-scène, other characters can behave with reasonable silent naturalism, but Paul is as alienated from them by the Expressionism of his physicality as by the narrative reasons for it. It is not merely that he holds his hands at literal arm's length, although he does so with such remarkable control that we accept them instantly as strangers. At times they look as lifeless as prostheses; at others they move with spine-crawling self-will, spidering over his lapels to steal inside his coat, comforting and concealing one another. They wrap around the cross-marked hilt of their former murder weapon like Sweeney Todd's arm complete again and lead their helpless owner through a macabre and compulsive ballet—when his wife breaks in on the tormented scene, he shouts at her to run, grappling his hands behind him like a prisoner. He tries to use the knife on them afterward. He can't. They won't. "Seduce his hands!" the Orlacs' maid is unnervingly commanded, and indeed they feel their way across her hair as if Paul himself has nothing to do with it, his face vicariously transported, at least until she begins to scream. By the time he's stumbled across a crime scene impossibly signed with his own new fingerprints, the atmosphere has reached such a pitch of Grand Guignol that when the stocky, grinning stalker played by Fritz Kortner claims to be the executed criminal Vasseur—or at least his head, transplanted onto a new body with a kerchief roguishly knotted to hide the seam; he jerks it loose with one stiff leather glove and the nervous laughter drains like blood from Paul's face—we see no reason not to take his word for it. I do not know how closely the film follows the 1920 novel by Maurice Renard, but its combination of crime and nightmarish identity crisis makes it almost too easy to read as one of the many ancestors of noir, that genre of destabilization and displacement. It even seems to have some of the same roots in that I don't think it's stretching the symbolism too far to interpret Paul's terrified, traumatized estrangement from his body as a civilian slant on a veteran's PTSD. If so, it at least makes some reconciliatory sense of the ending, which is otherwise whacked out of left field even for German Expressionism. In an ideal world, our viewing would have been accompanied by the live performance of Jeff Rapsis.
Fortunately, we had had sufficient reservations about Barbara Peeters' Humanoids from the Deep (1980) to program it in the traditionally negotiable dinner slot, so as soon as a lovely, rippling shot of kelp forests gave way to a sub-Amity dose of child death, boat explosion, and animal harm right out of the gate, we could ignore it completely in favor of finishing our dinner from Mamaleh's that had arrived during the last act of the previous film. I had really been hoping for exploitation Innsmouth. I had a very nice bagel and lox instead. Our second interlude of ephemera netted us the trailers for The Night the World Exploded (1958), Target Earth (1954), and Donovan's Brain (1953), plus the should-be-classic villain song of "The Money Cat" from Gay Purr-ee (1962). I had not actually heard of two out of the three B-movies and remain proud of asking right before the title for the first came up, "What is this, The Day the Earth Fell Apart?"
I was first shown John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet (1984) by my grandparents, as much or more than twenty-five years ago; I loved it then and may love it even more now, when I can catch so much more of its sharp and gentle, at times almost silent comedy of race, immigration, and New York City. Beautiful, soulful, and nonhuman in the ways that isolate the most important parts of the human condition, Joe Morton is an interstellar treasure as the nameless "Brother," who arrives on Earth by way of an apropos crash-landing at Ellis Island. He can't speak, but he can hear the voices of the past still echoing in stones and concrete; he can fix things with his hands, whether that means wounded bodies or zapped-out arcade cabinets; he can read a kind of alien hobo sign among the graffiti of Harlem; and absolutely no one he meets takes him for anything other than human, never mind his feet with their three bird-clawed toes or his occasionally removable eyeballs. Where better to be an alien in America than the Big Apple? In the loose, vivid cinematography of Ernest Dickerson, much of the runtime is devoted to the kind of small interactions that make up the life of a city, whether it's hanging out in a bar while the regulars shoot the shit or meeting a card trickster on the A train who hops out at the last stop before Harlem with the dead-on zinger, "I have another magic trick for you. Want to see me make all the white people disappear?" The Brother learns about money, drugs, and parenting; he shares a sweet one-night stand with a jazz singer played by Dee Dee Bridgewater, traverses the night-world of his chosen neighborhood with a Rastafarian Virgil, and uses his rapport with machines to give the ace of his local arcade the gaming experience of her life. Whenever he explains his origins with an space-pointing thumb, it is generally taken to mean uptown. It doesn't hit the viewer over the head to learn eventually that the Brother is himself a fugitive from extraterrestrial slavery, but it does explain the identities of the men in black asking after him, an arrogantly oddball couple played by an almost unrecognizably young David Strathairn and Sayles himself. They communicate with one another in electronic screeches, contradict their cover stories constantly and dress like new wave black ops manqués, and in Harlem these eccentricities merely occasion the timeless observation, "White folks get stranger all the time." It's a low-key story for a low-budget film, but the ending is still powerfully resonant with community; for all that it was written, directed, and edited by a white filmmaker, it looks like essential Afrofuturism to me. The steel-drum score by Mason Daring is as much a part of its world as hookers and keyboard hawkers and lost yuppies from Indiana, bodega owners and welfare case workers, even aliens after all.
Technically Rob had seen Kurt Maetzig's The Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern, 1960) before, but only in its Americanized re-cut which played Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the '90's, from which you may gather how good it wasn't. I had not encountered this East-German-Polish co-production in any form and was fascinated. In the peacefully moon-colonizing future of 1970, a glassily fused artifact uncovered in the Gobi Desert not only proves the Tunguska event was of extraterrestrial origin, it points toward the existence of intelligent life on Venus. At once a delegation to our sister planet is assembled from experts of all nations, a Mars mission is re-routed, our intrepid heroes contemplate the troubling silence of the world they have been hailing with all known SETI and continue working to decipher the full message of the "cylinder." What they find on reaching the magnificently wrecked and eddying surface of Venus cuts somberly to the heart of the Cold War, but the moral interests me less than the delivery. I can't imagine American science fiction of the same generation casting the crew of the Kosmokrator with such pointed internationalism—Russian, American, Polish, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Nigerian, almost all played by actors of the appropriate nationalities and I don't blame them for not having an American under contract at DEFA. There's painful history between the pilot (Günther Simon) and the medical officer (Yoko Tani), but the closest thing to a shipboard conflict is the running gag of a nuclear physicist (Oldřich Lukeš) consistently losing at chess to the robot designed by the chief engineer (Ignacy Machowski). A mathematician (Kurt Rackelmann) and a linguist (Tang Hua-Ta) are equally invaluable to the decoding effort. The communications officer (Julius Ongewe) may have to interface with Venusian systems. The ship itself is the baby of a Soviet aerospace pioneer (Mikhail N. Postnikov) whose friendship with the American physicist has stubbornly survived the space race; the latter has even brought a drawing from his young son in which the two men are depicted traveling together to the stars. I suppose there might be propaganda in this professional solidarity, but at this distance it just looks like a bunch of sympathetic, imperfect adults doing their jobs. On the same lines, I find it refreshing that since its cautionary tale is the nuclear answer to Fermi's paradox, the script doesn't mince words about our own atomic history: there's no monster-metaphor, merely a Japanese woman who lost her family and her fertility to the Manhattan Project musing, "Everything was decided for me by the Hiroshima bomb." She recognizes the significance of the shadows on the dead civilization's walls. Forests of melted glass, caverns of metal insects, tentacles churning a geothermal sludge of matter waiting to be converted to planet-killing energy, it's all convincingly alien at the same time it's forebodingly close to home, even the slow-flashing rotation of an orrery that looks like exploration and turns out to be a targeting device; it cannot be accidental that the command center of the Venusian war effort resembles a missile silo. The film ends on an elegant gesture of hope, but it gets there much more harshly than I would expect from contemporaneous Hollywood, too. Stanisław Lem didn't think much of it as a version of his novel The Astronauts (1951), but then I don't believe he liked any of the adaptations of Solaris (1961), either.
Joe Nussbaum's George Lucas in Love (1999) is a one-joke short whose conceit is contained in its title, but it is delightfully executed and doesn't wear out its welcome and some of its "inspirations" are truly inspired. I was particularly fond of the line—spoken by Lisa Jakub, one of the inadvertent presiding spirits of our 'Thon—"Maybe you just weren't meant to write agricultural space tragedies."
I had been hearing about René Laloux and Roland Topor's Fantastic Planet (La Planète sauvage, 1973) for years, which did not prepare me for the reality of watching it. It's not an especially difficult film to follow, with its far-future plot of exported humans—punningly known as Oms—kept as pets or hunted as pests on the planet of Ygam, whose dominant species is instead the blue-skinned, red-eyed titans of the Draags, who spend most of their time practicing a mysterious form of meditation and otherwise reproduce, at the wincing scale of a funhouse mirror, the cruelty and sentimentality with which we treat so many of the creatures with whom we share our own wild planet. For guide, we even have the narration of the wild-born Om Terr (Jean Valmont), whose impulsive adoption in infancy by the young Draag Tiwa (Jennifer Drake) will have unforeseen and far-reaching consequences for both species, abetted by the infodumps of the Draags' own teaching machines, which produce wonderfully sfnal sentences like "Some scientists today believe it is not organure but gambous amalga." It's just that the world itself is one of the most surreal and phantasmagoric environments I have seen realized on a screen, through a stunning combination of cut-out animation and colored-pencil cross-hatching that renders the dreamlike, often disturbing images even more uncannily than a more fluid or conventionally cartoon-like style might have done. From the first moments of a terrified woman dashing through gargantuan thorns to the closing image of an altered solar system revolving inside a child's mind, Ygam is a Boschian garden of carnal and carnivorous animals, vegetables, and minerals, none of which can necessarily be told from the others at any given moment. Crystals reproduce in season; clothes are extruded by a sort of sporophyte snail. An intestinally coiled desert landscape rears up in loops when rained on. Fins, tentacles, tongues, and eyes are never where you expect them and all of it is preying on each other to such a degree that when one clan of wild Oms ambushes another, it is not immediately apparent that the crab-blue pincher-tusks descending from a hollow comb of bushes are tools as opposed to evolutionary features. If you imagine the love children of brain coral and cactus with the occasional internal organ thrown in, you will get a general idea of the underbrush of the park which the Draags periodically, horrifyingly "de-Om." Their psychedelically streamlined technology has similarly shape-shifting properties; it almost feels like a rebellion of genres as well as intelligences when the Oms begin to construct their own inventions of identifiable electricity and metal. I don't really believe that dropping acid would have improved my experience of this movie, but the space-jazz score by Alain Goraguer seemed to want to convince me otherwise. I hope someone since the '70's has double-featured it with Belladonna of Sadness (哀しみのベラドンナ, 1973). Or Watership Down (1978).
In 2003, Tom Lehrer famously stated that he didn't want to satirize the Bush administration, he wanted to vaporize it. Joe Dante seems to have directed "Homecoming" (2005) for Showtime's Masters of Horror at exactly that point of flashover. Palpably animated by unfiltered rage at the "horseshit and elbow grease" that sold America the War on Terror, its premise of fallen soldiers returning to vote out the man who sent them to die for a lie is recognizable as black comedy, but only just; its right-wing antiheroes scarcely need to be stretched into cartoons with their nonchalant mendacity and demonizing spin, while nothing in the last sixteen years has even dented the notion of zombies as more patriotic and humane than the Republican Party. "God damn it," the President's right-hand fixer pointedly fumes, "why don't they do something? Eat a brain or bite somebody's throat out or something, God damn it, at least we'd have an excuse to round them up!" There's almost no metaphor at work here. The zombies are explicitly called out as the ugly face of war that gold stars and flag pins have always covered up, the radicalized undead of Dale Bailey's "Death and Suffrage" (2000) given the anti-war kick of Abel Gance's J'accuse (1919). But all good revenant stories must eventually return the repressed and before the end of the hour Jon Tenney's David Murch, the clean-cut consultant who summoned this mishegos with a half-glib, half-unconscious wish to a veteran's bereaved mother on live TV, will have to face his own secrets as well as his nation's, buried as deep or as shallowly as a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. I'm not sure the episode needs its jarringly, almost parodically sincere epilogue when its anger has carried it through both the inevitable Romero shout-outs and an ending whose flawless shock timing could have smash-cut just fine to black, but it doesn't wreck this artifact of a time I can remember being immersed in, even now that there's so much more to rage and despair of. Or as I reported to Rob when he wandered out from his nap, "I just watched Robert Picardo play Karl Rove and get killed by a zombie!" Despite the unpromising introduction of Gremlins (1984), I am beginning to think I really like Joe Dante.
Set ten years after "the most peaceful revolution the world has ever known" transformed the United States of America into the world's first socialist democracy, Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames (1983) is a no-wave, guerilla-style, near-documentary of direct action getting the goods, as a radical, intersectional women's movement coalesces out of the overlapping discontents of marginalized groups kept too long waiting on the self-congratulatory failures of their purportedly progressive state. And in case this precis sounds theoretical or dry, let me interject that I am talking about one of the touchstones of punk cinema. It's smashed-up and exhilarating, super-saturated and open-ended. Queerness and Blackness are front and center in the collage of mainstream and pirate radio broadcasts, FBI briefings, talk show clips, and fly-on-the-wall hangouts that interweave the principal players of this near future which could be the next present over or merely morning in Reagan's NYC: the calmly dissident Honey (Honey) of Phoenix Radio and the poetically restless Isabel (Adele Bertei) of Radio Ragazza, the charismatic Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield) of the Women's Army and her fabulous mentor Zella Wylie (Flo Kennedy), and the respectable editors of The Socialist Youth Review (Becky Johnston, Pat Murphy, Kathryn Bigelow), which is not to detract from any of the less-named women who sing and argue, wheatpaste and deal arms, take over TV stations and make love over the course of this film. It is an imperatively, not simplistically collective story, repeatedly stressing the importance of community organization and having one another's backs. A woman assaulted on the street is defended by a whistle-blowing all-girl bicycle gang; a woman harassed on the subway is rescued by a female couple who run off the creeper like they do it all the time. The title song recurs over montages of women's labor in which construction and grocery clerking are given equal weight with washing the dishes and sex work. Nothing gets done without solidarity—though the trio of editors initially serve as a type specimen of white feminism more concerned with keeping the favor of their male publisher than with acknowledging the legitimacy of grassroots activism, they come around to standing with the DJs and the Women's Army when their tone-policing runs aground on the fact of a federal cover-up. What hurts about this movie is how timely it still feels, how the systems against which its characters struggle and the internal tensions of their shared goals don't seem to have gone anywhere. Of course the rhetoric of socialism can be used as smoothly as capitalism to reinforce all the old stratifications of gender, race, and class. Graffiti in the street asks Who Killed Adelaide Norris? but nowadays might well read #SayHerName. "We are all here because we have fought in the wars of liberation," Honey reminds her listeners, "and we all bear witness to what has happened since the war." What keeps it from being a downer is its ferocious energy, from the scrappy, driving dance-punk of its theme to its continuing conversation about the visions and tactics of feminism to its explosive, hopeful, ambiguous finale. It reminds me of Le Guin, specifically "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974). It reminds me of recent years, not always for worse. The soundtrack featuring the contributions of the Slits, the Staples Singers, Billie Holiday, the Bloods, Jimi Hendrix, and Lora Logic is fantastic, anthemic and propulsive. Of America's mysteries none remain . . . We are born in flames. Lastly and shallowly, this film is filled with mostly queer women of various ethnicities who make no effort to look heteronormatively good, which means this film is filled with women who look great. You leave it and you want to have an argument and change the world.
Buster Keaton's The Electric House (1922) is science fiction only in the sense that I do not believe an automated house such as the one designed by his beleaguered botanist-turned-electrician existed at the time of filming—or has been incautiously built since—but that in no way impairs its two-reeler charm. I feel that everyone who has ever been on an escalator in their lives has at some point worried about being launched off the top of it. We should all be so lucky as to have an auto-filling pool lying in wait.
I must thanksasha_feather for recommending Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell's Prospect (2018); it is a kind of chamber space Western and it works admirably as such. Instead of the gold suggested by the title, the precious commodity mined from the soil of the thickly forested, spore-drifted moon known as "the Green" is aurelac, an amber-hearted gem extracted with difficulty from the acidic flesh of the subterranean creatures within which it accretes. Fortunately for teenage "floater" Cee (Sophie Thatcher), her jack-of-some-trades father Damon (Jay Duplass) has the skills to pull what he swears is a once-in-a-lifetime haul from the "queen's lair," enough to settle them permanently planetside instead of hitching endlessly between systems. Unfortunately, this plan does not survive contact with Ezra (Pedro Pascal), an ornately spoken prospector and self-admitted killer who shortly becomes Cee's only chance not just of fulfilling her father's side of a previously undisclosed bargain but catching the last freighter off the Green. From here on the plot is not unnecessary, but it takes a back seat to the complicated alliance between a wounded rogue and an unforgiving adolescent and the beautifully offhand worldbuilding of statements like "Ten thousand gets us back to Puggart Bench for maybe half a stand, then we're scanning boards for the next one." The film is real science fiction, not just planetary romance with true grit. With a handful of slang, an alien alphabet, and a retrofuturist production design that deliberately but not fetishistically recalls the broken-in, dinged-up, blue-collar futures of Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979), it conjures a universe extending far beyond the fern-hazed skies of the Green, as full of graffiti and music and stickers and snacks and fanfiction as our own society. The cinematography by Earl takes unusual advantage of the near-constant use of environmental suits and helmets to play with reflection and concealment; the favoring of practical effects over CGI adds to the throwback feel, but also grounds the action in irregularity and coincidence as much as laser fire. I really believe the last science fiction I encountered that devoted as much thought to the implications of its material culture was Pacific Rim (2013). In all honesty, although I wouldn't want a sequel per se, I would love to see the filmmakers revisit this world they created with such suggestion and density. Cee is talking about her favorite novel, but she could be speaking for the right audience when she confides, "I like to think about what happens in between what's already been written."
Around this time we ate the karnatzl from Mamaleh's, which got "Roumania, Roumania" intermittently stuck in my head for the rest of the morning.
Michael Almereyda and Steve De Jarnatt's Cherry 2000 (1987) is one of the '80's-est movies I have ever seen. Would you like some cyberpunk with your post-apocalyptic road movie? No problem. Romantic comedy with your action heroism? We can do that. Sexbots and bazookas? Got you covered. Set it all in 2017, make about two-thirds of it a Western, and away we go. After his beloved Cherry 2000 (Pamela Gidley) shorts out from an overspill of dishwater during an energetic bout of kitchen-floor sex, the grieving Sam Treadwell (David Andrews) seeks out the services of a "tracker" to locate a replacement model in the lawless wastes of "Zone 7," which is how the middle manager of a recycling center comes to find himself barreling through flaming barricades and swinging high above Hoover Dam in a rocket-modded 1965 Ford Mustang care of E. Johnson (Melanie Griffith), the crimson-haired, sharp-tongued tracker who never turns down a job. Do not watch this movie if you have a low tolerance for scenes that end in boom or for a careening semi-comedic sensibility that recalls The Road Warrior (1981) one minute and Romancing the Stone (1984) the next. E.'s reclusive mentor Six-Fingered Jake (Ben Johnson) shares his river cavern with two mules and a lifetime supply of toaster ovens. The psychotic warlord whose one-man vigilante rule over Zone 7 mandates the summary execution of all trackers goes by the name of Lester (Tim Thomerson) and hangs out at a sort of '60's-ish geodesic spa where he's constantly exhorting his followers to get into regular workouts and self-actualization. A road sign to a border town reads "Glory Hole, 10" and then "Rule of Law Ends, 15." It's not quite full spoof, but it can't all be taken straight, and yet woven through its flamethrower-toting quirkiness is a classically Hollywood conflict between the fantasy and the reality of love. The film takes some pains to represent a future where shacking up with a robot does not automatically code a person as a hopeless loser. What we see of the dating scene in neon-Brutalist Anaheim looks almost as dehumanizing as Tinder, encapsulating a society so corporatized that even one-night stands must be legally negotiated in advance: "Stick your tongue in my client's mouth and I'm going to sue your ass off!" At the same time, the film remains aware that Sam's pining for his pre-programmed lover is as creepily immature as it is quixotically romantic and it misses no chance to contrast the soft-focus, idealized object of Cherry with the wry toughness and human fallibility of E., with whom Sam might have something combustible and even lasting if he didn't screw it up so often by mooning over Cherry's memory chip, which plays back such gems of emotional connection as "I love you, Sam, I'm so lucky to be with you" and "Faster. Faster. Oh, I like that." I am still deciding how I feel about the film's total disinterest in justifying the future status quo except for a blink-and-miss-it mention of the "Border Wars," which serves mostly to explain how a white-collar nebbish knows anything about machine pistols and hand grenades. It is not at all what I would have expected from either its writer or director and I enjoyed it a great deal, but it has done nothing to disprove my accumulating impression of the 1980's as a deeply weird decade for film. "Les, watch out for the bees!"
Into every movie marathon a little MST3K must fall and Spencer Gordon Bennet's The Atomic Submarine (1959) landed like the climactic ICBM fired by the USS Tiger Shark at a flying saucer. In justice to the film, it has terrific model work, some unexpectedly grisly effects, and does its best to provide classical allusions and topical-political considerations along with the pulp thrills of a top-secret submarine hunting a sinister mystery beneath the ice of the North Pole. In actual reaction, as soon as the stentorian narrator began to describe the vital importance of the shipping lanes across the Arctic Ocean, I burst into "Northwest Passage." I have seen many worse B-movies, but I am not sure I have seen one so committed to catching itself every time it got halfway to establishing its mood. A grim, abstract first contact disaster ends in a macho punch line. I am still not convinced it is the smartest of tactics to ram a submarine into a flying saucer, especially when the result is a submarine sinking to crush depth still stuck into the saucer's side like a horny anglerfish. It is much easier to take a desperate gamble of speculative engineering seriously when the narrator isn't putting in his oar: "It was foolish, it was insane, it was fantastic—but it was their only hope!" The most character-driven aspect of the script unfortunately entails the scenes we spent the most time shouting at, because in a narrative of hostile alien incursion, any debate between militarism and pacifism is a mug's game. Since he spends most of his screen time defending his ban-the-bomb ideals against charges of cowardice, I appreciate that Brett Halsey's Dr. Carl Neilson is not required to kill anyone to prove his mettle and is even affectionately included among the future defenders of Earth by his former chief critic, Arthur Franz's Lt. Commander "Reef" Holloway, but the moral of the story remains that no ruthless, telepathic, technologically advanced menace from the stars is a match for good old American ingenuity and nukes. The avant-garde, electronically pinging score by Alexander Laszlo still sounds space-age uncanny. Rob suggested I summarize simply: "STREAM MOVIE GO BOOM."
Magali Barbé's This Time Away (2018) is a neat, poignant sketch starring Timothy Spall, Jessica Ellerby Stuart, and a robot, and I don't think I can tell you anything else that will make you want to watch or skip it, except that it understands the importance of building things. My father sent it to me.
I fell asleep during the second act of Ishirō Honda's Destroy All Monsters (怪獣総進撃, 1968), but I woke in time for the kaiju battle royale which is the point of that movie; it says so in the title. Rob helpfully filled me in on everyone who wasn't Godzilla, Mothra, or Rodan. It is difficult for me to accept a dragon as the villain of any story, but I am tempted to watch Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) just for its take on the majesty of King Ghidorah.
"Next year in Davis Square," I said at the end of the 'Thon in 2020, but some years a theater is where you make it. We are not counting our work as a miss or a substitute; we will observe our tenth anniversary of marathon-sharing next year. I should have guessed that we would skip fewer movies than usual when we selected them ourselves and didn't need to wait for the bus to feed the cats. It was worth it. This tradition brought to you by my time-honored backers at Patreon.
spatch and I would have spent Valentine's into President's Day in the balcony of the Somerville Theatre, watching our traditional twenty-four hours of science fiction film with the rest of the Boston Sci-Fi Marathon. This year, under conditions of plague and incompatible technologies, we did not attend even virtually. Instead, with recourse to our trusty handful of streaming services and a discreet ringer or two, we programmed ourselves the Black Cat 'Thon 2021. If I say so myself, it rocked.Since we were determined to observe as many of the proprieties as possible from the safety of our own couch, we had always planned to kick off our marathon by counting down to the mutually assured disintegration of Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953), but since observation does not necessitate imitation, thanks to Rob's skills with bricolage we got the drop on Chuck Jones with a pre-show of bumpers and trailers including a PSA about PDA, a caution to juvenile delinquents about slicing up seat cushions which the cats immediately proceeded to ignore, and the original trailers for such classics of cinema as Invisible Invaders (1959), The Alligator People (1959), The Angry Red Planet (1959), and The Apple (1980), after which Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian squaring off over Planet X looked like the height of linear narrative. Every time I watch the cartoon, I notice something else stupid-clever and funny about it, like the specificity of "17,670,002 Micro-Cells" or the low-key sarcasm of the Eager Young Space Cadet. The gag itself can be seen coming for miles, but I love the bemused delivery of the topper, "What do you know, it disintegrated."
I had not seen John Hough's Escape to Witch Mountain (1975) since my summer camp days at the Arlington Boys & Girls Club when I was unable to forgive it for not acknowledging its obvious debt to Zenna Henderson's People, a situation not remedied in middle school when I discovered that the 1968 novel by Alexander Key didn't mention her, either. I remembered the conceit, but retained only fragments of the action: a black cat and a camper van, an older man almost angrily declaring his name, a rack of empty clothes piped into a terrifying ghost. Revisited through the slightly less resentful lens of adulthood, what strikes me most about the film is how little it resembles the stereotypical Disney movie despite starring a couple of towheaded kids and their cantankerous protector on the run from a ruthlessly greedy villain. Orphans of uncertain surname and even more obscure origins, their formative memories reduced to the vague sense of having once spoken another language and survived a wreck at sea, Tony and Tia (Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards) are anything but the kids next door even before factoring in the paranormal abilities that make them such objects of interest to the ESP-obsessed millionaire Aristotle Bolt (Ray Milland), who pursues them as relentlessly as would the government a decade later, his intentions all the more ominous for never being overtly expressed; it is left to the audience to understand from the shifting unease of his right-hand man Lucas Deranian (Donald Pleasence) that it won't be ice cream for dinner forever if Bolt doesn't get what he wants, which he never will. "We couldn't teach him even if we wanted to! We—we don't know why we do all these things." But even after a clue reveals itself in the form of a map hidden beneath the double sunburst of Tia's treasured "star case," the story doesn't turn into a puzzle-quest so much as a kid-sized succession of chase scenes just the family-friendly side of sci-fi horror, showcasing by turns the cute, spooky, and practical applications of the siblings' powers. Just when it looks predictably gendered that Tia can communicate telepathically while Tony possesses a harmonica-assisted form of telekinesis, we find out that Tony "knows about people" and Tia can mentally pick locks. Kindness to animals is repaid as in fairy tales; kindness to humans is more complicated, although it allows for a strikingly truthful scene where neither Tony nor Tia intends to hurt the curmudgeonly Jason O'Day (Eddie Albert) with the truth of his long-forsworn past, they are merely being as direct and thoughtless as real children and it makes them more believably found family than all his grouching with a heart of gold. "The name's Jason—" the line I had remembered for thirty years, though I had forgotten its gruff, wry, vulnerable chaser: "If you know so dang much about me, you might as well use it!" For these moments under the skin, for the way the film leans into both the wish-fulfillment and the alienation of difference, I can stand the occasional flying Winnebago or third-act digression of hillbillies. The memorable credits show a pair of luminous child-silhouettes loping dream-slow through moonlit wilderness, a snarl of animated hounds at their heels. It's not difficult to picture the entire film working in that scarier, lonelier key. You can't say that about a lot of live-action Disney. I still feel it's secretly about the People.
We were careful to screen Joe Dante's Matinee (1993) while the title was still applicable to its time slot, but I think I would have fallen in love with it at any hour of the day. It's a comedy about existential terror, a love letter to the escapism of movies with a keen eye for their feet of zeitgeist, a showcase for character actors and a frame for one of the best B-spoofs ever to insult science, and it is all of these things without gatekeeping or saccharine, an especially neat trick since it's also a period piece. It's October 1962 in Key West and while the U.S. Navy is dispatching ships to the blockade of Cuba, "The Screen's No. 1 Shock Expert" Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), like a magisterial fusion of William Castle and Ed Wood, is preparing to bring his latest low-budget blood-curdler MANT! to life with "Atomo-Vision," "Rumble-Rama," and all the seat-buzzer, bug-costume, fake-nurse-with-a-stack-of-consent-forms gimmicks he can cram into the 600-person house of the Key West Strand. "The country is on red alert," protests Howard (Robert Picardo), the theater's harried and high-strung manager. Expansive as a build-up, Woolsey returns, "What a perfect time to open a new horror movie!" By interweaving the nuclear brinksmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the premiere of a boffo schlocko atomic creature feature, the film is drawing an obvious line around the relationship of real and fictional frights, but the genius of the screenplay by Charles S. Haas is how sharply it extends this examination beyond the flickering cave of the silver screen. Nuclear war, nuclear apocalypse are understood to be themselves a kind of fantasy to the average American, stoked equally by science fiction and broadcast news and approached with the conviction of magical thinking. Students are drilled in duck-and-cover, cautioned to stray no more than fifteen minutes from home in the event of MAD. Adults stock their fallout shelters with guns and generators, double-check their lists for zero hour, and fight one another in the aisles over the last box of shredded wheat. What people scare themselves into believing does more damage than anything they can know for sure. In a deft demonstration of having one's meta and eating it too, the plot of Matinee follows the schema of dark ride thrills championed by Woolsey where "you make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything's okay," but it plays its fear surprisingly straight, right down to the simultaneous sweetness and ambivalence of the HFN. We know the bombs aren't going to fall, but the characters have no such guarantee, and while the film may observe the absurdity with which they have been conditioned to react to the prospect, it does not encourage us to condescend to them because of it. Howard makes an extremely funny barometer of national anxiety with his civil defense doomscrolling and his repeated mistaking of stage effects for Soviet first strikes, but he's just the foreshock of an audience so keyed up for nuclear annihilation that when the fourth wall breaks, it damn near takes the other three with it. When monster kid Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton) and his countercultural classmate Sandra (Lisa Jakub) find themselves trapped in the vault-like shelter under the Strand, it is heart-twinging that they discuss their presumed post-apocalyptic future very seriously in sci-fi clichés, the only language available for what seems to have happened to them: "It's like we're . . . Adam and Eve." I am a sucker for stories about the power of stories and Matinee is a particularly direct example, but it matters to me that at the same time that it goes full ahead with in-jokes like casting John Sayles and Dick Miller as a couple of bit-part confidantes or William Schallert and Kevin McCarthy as actors in the gloriously straight-faced goof of MANT! ("Human-insect mutation is far from an exact science"), it remembers that the movies have quieter, more intimate uses, too, like providing a sense of community for a lonely Navy brat or conjuring an absent husband briefly home. Woolsey is a huckster and a trickster and a dreamer who sincerely considers himself part of a tradition as ancient and honorable as cave paintings, which is presumably why a woman of such Olympian levels of world-weariness as Ruth Corday (Cathy Moriarty) sticks with him. There's substance to him; there's substance to this movie with its pastel air that should make it nostalgic or ephemeral, especially since so much of it is really, chaotically funny, and yet it's full of all these edges of history and hysteria and the differences between memorizing every issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland and facing the end of the world for real. If we'd had consistent house music like the Somerville, I'd have followed it with Miike Snow and Ninian Doff's "My Trigger." It really made me miss seeing movies in theaters. "You got to keep your eyes open."
Since 2013, Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände, 1924) had been the silent that got away. I can't speak to its literary antecedents, but it is the cinematic parent and original of every body horror from Mad Love (1935) to Possessor (2020) and a visceral, virtuoso opportunity for the disarticulation of Conrad Veidt. Just once we see the original hands of renowned pianist Paul Orlac, skimming powerfully over the keys as he closes out a tour; they are invested with sensitivity, mastery, and eroticism, and they are smashed beyond repair when his train derails. "Save his hands," Alexandra Sorina's Yvonne begs of the surgeon; she salvaged her husband from the flare-lit wreck herself. "His hands are his life . . . his hands are more than his life . . ." Paul wakes half-mummified in bandages, a forerunner of the 1931 Frankenstein's Monster in more ways than one: his riskily, experimentally transplanted hands were taken from the corpse of a convicted murderer and there's no telling what habits they might have brought with them. If the film is ultimately more psychological than supernatural horror, Veidt's performance doesn't see the difference. Even moving through a theatrically minimalist and receding mise-en-scène, other characters can behave with reasonable silent naturalism, but Paul is as alienated from them by the Expressionism of his physicality as by the narrative reasons for it. It is not merely that he holds his hands at literal arm's length, although he does so with such remarkable control that we accept them instantly as strangers. At times they look as lifeless as prostheses; at others they move with spine-crawling self-will, spidering over his lapels to steal inside his coat, comforting and concealing one another. They wrap around the cross-marked hilt of their former murder weapon like Sweeney Todd's arm complete again and lead their helpless owner through a macabre and compulsive ballet—when his wife breaks in on the tormented scene, he shouts at her to run, grappling his hands behind him like a prisoner. He tries to use the knife on them afterward. He can't. They won't. "Seduce his hands!" the Orlacs' maid is unnervingly commanded, and indeed they feel their way across her hair as if Paul himself has nothing to do with it, his face vicariously transported, at least until she begins to scream. By the time he's stumbled across a crime scene impossibly signed with his own new fingerprints, the atmosphere has reached such a pitch of Grand Guignol that when the stocky, grinning stalker played by Fritz Kortner claims to be the executed criminal Vasseur—or at least his head, transplanted onto a new body with a kerchief roguishly knotted to hide the seam; he jerks it loose with one stiff leather glove and the nervous laughter drains like blood from Paul's face—we see no reason not to take his word for it. I do not know how closely the film follows the 1920 novel by Maurice Renard, but its combination of crime and nightmarish identity crisis makes it almost too easy to read as one of the many ancestors of noir, that genre of destabilization and displacement. It even seems to have some of the same roots in that I don't think it's stretching the symbolism too far to interpret Paul's terrified, traumatized estrangement from his body as a civilian slant on a veteran's PTSD. If so, it at least makes some reconciliatory sense of the ending, which is otherwise whacked out of left field even for German Expressionism. In an ideal world, our viewing would have been accompanied by the live performance of Jeff Rapsis.
Fortunately, we had had sufficient reservations about Barbara Peeters' Humanoids from the Deep (1980) to program it in the traditionally negotiable dinner slot, so as soon as a lovely, rippling shot of kelp forests gave way to a sub-Amity dose of child death, boat explosion, and animal harm right out of the gate, we could ignore it completely in favor of finishing our dinner from Mamaleh's that had arrived during the last act of the previous film. I had really been hoping for exploitation Innsmouth. I had a very nice bagel and lox instead. Our second interlude of ephemera netted us the trailers for The Night the World Exploded (1958), Target Earth (1954), and Donovan's Brain (1953), plus the should-be-classic villain song of "The Money Cat" from Gay Purr-ee (1962). I had not actually heard of two out of the three B-movies and remain proud of asking right before the title for the first came up, "What is this, The Day the Earth Fell Apart?"
I was first shown John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet (1984) by my grandparents, as much or more than twenty-five years ago; I loved it then and may love it even more now, when I can catch so much more of its sharp and gentle, at times almost silent comedy of race, immigration, and New York City. Beautiful, soulful, and nonhuman in the ways that isolate the most important parts of the human condition, Joe Morton is an interstellar treasure as the nameless "Brother," who arrives on Earth by way of an apropos crash-landing at Ellis Island. He can't speak, but he can hear the voices of the past still echoing in stones and concrete; he can fix things with his hands, whether that means wounded bodies or zapped-out arcade cabinets; he can read a kind of alien hobo sign among the graffiti of Harlem; and absolutely no one he meets takes him for anything other than human, never mind his feet with their three bird-clawed toes or his occasionally removable eyeballs. Where better to be an alien in America than the Big Apple? In the loose, vivid cinematography of Ernest Dickerson, much of the runtime is devoted to the kind of small interactions that make up the life of a city, whether it's hanging out in a bar while the regulars shoot the shit or meeting a card trickster on the A train who hops out at the last stop before Harlem with the dead-on zinger, "I have another magic trick for you. Want to see me make all the white people disappear?" The Brother learns about money, drugs, and parenting; he shares a sweet one-night stand with a jazz singer played by Dee Dee Bridgewater, traverses the night-world of his chosen neighborhood with a Rastafarian Virgil, and uses his rapport with machines to give the ace of his local arcade the gaming experience of her life. Whenever he explains his origins with an space-pointing thumb, it is generally taken to mean uptown. It doesn't hit the viewer over the head to learn eventually that the Brother is himself a fugitive from extraterrestrial slavery, but it does explain the identities of the men in black asking after him, an arrogantly oddball couple played by an almost unrecognizably young David Strathairn and Sayles himself. They communicate with one another in electronic screeches, contradict their cover stories constantly and dress like new wave black ops manqués, and in Harlem these eccentricities merely occasion the timeless observation, "White folks get stranger all the time." It's a low-key story for a low-budget film, but the ending is still powerfully resonant with community; for all that it was written, directed, and edited by a white filmmaker, it looks like essential Afrofuturism to me. The steel-drum score by Mason Daring is as much a part of its world as hookers and keyboard hawkers and lost yuppies from Indiana, bodega owners and welfare case workers, even aliens after all.
Technically Rob had seen Kurt Maetzig's The Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern, 1960) before, but only in its Americanized re-cut which played Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the '90's, from which you may gather how good it wasn't. I had not encountered this East-German-Polish co-production in any form and was fascinated. In the peacefully moon-colonizing future of 1970, a glassily fused artifact uncovered in the Gobi Desert not only proves the Tunguska event was of extraterrestrial origin, it points toward the existence of intelligent life on Venus. At once a delegation to our sister planet is assembled from experts of all nations, a Mars mission is re-routed, our intrepid heroes contemplate the troubling silence of the world they have been hailing with all known SETI and continue working to decipher the full message of the "cylinder." What they find on reaching the magnificently wrecked and eddying surface of Venus cuts somberly to the heart of the Cold War, but the moral interests me less than the delivery. I can't imagine American science fiction of the same generation casting the crew of the Kosmokrator with such pointed internationalism—Russian, American, Polish, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Nigerian, almost all played by actors of the appropriate nationalities and I don't blame them for not having an American under contract at DEFA. There's painful history between the pilot (Günther Simon) and the medical officer (Yoko Tani), but the closest thing to a shipboard conflict is the running gag of a nuclear physicist (Oldřich Lukeš) consistently losing at chess to the robot designed by the chief engineer (Ignacy Machowski). A mathematician (Kurt Rackelmann) and a linguist (Tang Hua-Ta) are equally invaluable to the decoding effort. The communications officer (Julius Ongewe) may have to interface with Venusian systems. The ship itself is the baby of a Soviet aerospace pioneer (Mikhail N. Postnikov) whose friendship with the American physicist has stubbornly survived the space race; the latter has even brought a drawing from his young son in which the two men are depicted traveling together to the stars. I suppose there might be propaganda in this professional solidarity, but at this distance it just looks like a bunch of sympathetic, imperfect adults doing their jobs. On the same lines, I find it refreshing that since its cautionary tale is the nuclear answer to Fermi's paradox, the script doesn't mince words about our own atomic history: there's no monster-metaphor, merely a Japanese woman who lost her family and her fertility to the Manhattan Project musing, "Everything was decided for me by the Hiroshima bomb." She recognizes the significance of the shadows on the dead civilization's walls. Forests of melted glass, caverns of metal insects, tentacles churning a geothermal sludge of matter waiting to be converted to planet-killing energy, it's all convincingly alien at the same time it's forebodingly close to home, even the slow-flashing rotation of an orrery that looks like exploration and turns out to be a targeting device; it cannot be accidental that the command center of the Venusian war effort resembles a missile silo. The film ends on an elegant gesture of hope, but it gets there much more harshly than I would expect from contemporaneous Hollywood, too. Stanisław Lem didn't think much of it as a version of his novel The Astronauts (1951), but then I don't believe he liked any of the adaptations of Solaris (1961), either.
Joe Nussbaum's George Lucas in Love (1999) is a one-joke short whose conceit is contained in its title, but it is delightfully executed and doesn't wear out its welcome and some of its "inspirations" are truly inspired. I was particularly fond of the line—spoken by Lisa Jakub, one of the inadvertent presiding spirits of our 'Thon—"Maybe you just weren't meant to write agricultural space tragedies."
I had been hearing about René Laloux and Roland Topor's Fantastic Planet (La Planète sauvage, 1973) for years, which did not prepare me for the reality of watching it. It's not an especially difficult film to follow, with its far-future plot of exported humans—punningly known as Oms—kept as pets or hunted as pests on the planet of Ygam, whose dominant species is instead the blue-skinned, red-eyed titans of the Draags, who spend most of their time practicing a mysterious form of meditation and otherwise reproduce, at the wincing scale of a funhouse mirror, the cruelty and sentimentality with which we treat so many of the creatures with whom we share our own wild planet. For guide, we even have the narration of the wild-born Om Terr (Jean Valmont), whose impulsive adoption in infancy by the young Draag Tiwa (Jennifer Drake) will have unforeseen and far-reaching consequences for both species, abetted by the infodumps of the Draags' own teaching machines, which produce wonderfully sfnal sentences like "Some scientists today believe it is not organure but gambous amalga." It's just that the world itself is one of the most surreal and phantasmagoric environments I have seen realized on a screen, through a stunning combination of cut-out animation and colored-pencil cross-hatching that renders the dreamlike, often disturbing images even more uncannily than a more fluid or conventionally cartoon-like style might have done. From the first moments of a terrified woman dashing through gargantuan thorns to the closing image of an altered solar system revolving inside a child's mind, Ygam is a Boschian garden of carnal and carnivorous animals, vegetables, and minerals, none of which can necessarily be told from the others at any given moment. Crystals reproduce in season; clothes are extruded by a sort of sporophyte snail. An intestinally coiled desert landscape rears up in loops when rained on. Fins, tentacles, tongues, and eyes are never where you expect them and all of it is preying on each other to such a degree that when one clan of wild Oms ambushes another, it is not immediately apparent that the crab-blue pincher-tusks descending from a hollow comb of bushes are tools as opposed to evolutionary features. If you imagine the love children of brain coral and cactus with the occasional internal organ thrown in, you will get a general idea of the underbrush of the park which the Draags periodically, horrifyingly "de-Om." Their psychedelically streamlined technology has similarly shape-shifting properties; it almost feels like a rebellion of genres as well as intelligences when the Oms begin to construct their own inventions of identifiable electricity and metal. I don't really believe that dropping acid would have improved my experience of this movie, but the space-jazz score by Alain Goraguer seemed to want to convince me otherwise. I hope someone since the '70's has double-featured it with Belladonna of Sadness (哀しみのベラドンナ, 1973). Or Watership Down (1978).
In 2003, Tom Lehrer famously stated that he didn't want to satirize the Bush administration, he wanted to vaporize it. Joe Dante seems to have directed "Homecoming" (2005) for Showtime's Masters of Horror at exactly that point of flashover. Palpably animated by unfiltered rage at the "horseshit and elbow grease" that sold America the War on Terror, its premise of fallen soldiers returning to vote out the man who sent them to die for a lie is recognizable as black comedy, but only just; its right-wing antiheroes scarcely need to be stretched into cartoons with their nonchalant mendacity and demonizing spin, while nothing in the last sixteen years has even dented the notion of zombies as more patriotic and humane than the Republican Party. "God damn it," the President's right-hand fixer pointedly fumes, "why don't they do something? Eat a brain or bite somebody's throat out or something, God damn it, at least we'd have an excuse to round them up!" There's almost no metaphor at work here. The zombies are explicitly called out as the ugly face of war that gold stars and flag pins have always covered up, the radicalized undead of Dale Bailey's "Death and Suffrage" (2000) given the anti-war kick of Abel Gance's J'accuse (1919). But all good revenant stories must eventually return the repressed and before the end of the hour Jon Tenney's David Murch, the clean-cut consultant who summoned this mishegos with a half-glib, half-unconscious wish to a veteran's bereaved mother on live TV, will have to face his own secrets as well as his nation's, buried as deep or as shallowly as a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. I'm not sure the episode needs its jarringly, almost parodically sincere epilogue when its anger has carried it through both the inevitable Romero shout-outs and an ending whose flawless shock timing could have smash-cut just fine to black, but it doesn't wreck this artifact of a time I can remember being immersed in, even now that there's so much more to rage and despair of. Or as I reported to Rob when he wandered out from his nap, "I just watched Robert Picardo play Karl Rove and get killed by a zombie!" Despite the unpromising introduction of Gremlins (1984), I am beginning to think I really like Joe Dante.
Set ten years after "the most peaceful revolution the world has ever known" transformed the United States of America into the world's first socialist democracy, Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames (1983) is a no-wave, guerilla-style, near-documentary of direct action getting the goods, as a radical, intersectional women's movement coalesces out of the overlapping discontents of marginalized groups kept too long waiting on the self-congratulatory failures of their purportedly progressive state. And in case this precis sounds theoretical or dry, let me interject that I am talking about one of the touchstones of punk cinema. It's smashed-up and exhilarating, super-saturated and open-ended. Queerness and Blackness are front and center in the collage of mainstream and pirate radio broadcasts, FBI briefings, talk show clips, and fly-on-the-wall hangouts that interweave the principal players of this near future which could be the next present over or merely morning in Reagan's NYC: the calmly dissident Honey (Honey) of Phoenix Radio and the poetically restless Isabel (Adele Bertei) of Radio Ragazza, the charismatic Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield) of the Women's Army and her fabulous mentor Zella Wylie (Flo Kennedy), and the respectable editors of The Socialist Youth Review (Becky Johnston, Pat Murphy, Kathryn Bigelow), which is not to detract from any of the less-named women who sing and argue, wheatpaste and deal arms, take over TV stations and make love over the course of this film. It is an imperatively, not simplistically collective story, repeatedly stressing the importance of community organization and having one another's backs. A woman assaulted on the street is defended by a whistle-blowing all-girl bicycle gang; a woman harassed on the subway is rescued by a female couple who run off the creeper like they do it all the time. The title song recurs over montages of women's labor in which construction and grocery clerking are given equal weight with washing the dishes and sex work. Nothing gets done without solidarity—though the trio of editors initially serve as a type specimen of white feminism more concerned with keeping the favor of their male publisher than with acknowledging the legitimacy of grassroots activism, they come around to standing with the DJs and the Women's Army when their tone-policing runs aground on the fact of a federal cover-up. What hurts about this movie is how timely it still feels, how the systems against which its characters struggle and the internal tensions of their shared goals don't seem to have gone anywhere. Of course the rhetoric of socialism can be used as smoothly as capitalism to reinforce all the old stratifications of gender, race, and class. Graffiti in the street asks Who Killed Adelaide Norris? but nowadays might well read #SayHerName. "We are all here because we have fought in the wars of liberation," Honey reminds her listeners, "and we all bear witness to what has happened since the war." What keeps it from being a downer is its ferocious energy, from the scrappy, driving dance-punk of its theme to its continuing conversation about the visions and tactics of feminism to its explosive, hopeful, ambiguous finale. It reminds me of Le Guin, specifically "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974). It reminds me of recent years, not always for worse. The soundtrack featuring the contributions of the Slits, the Staples Singers, Billie Holiday, the Bloods, Jimi Hendrix, and Lora Logic is fantastic, anthemic and propulsive. Of America's mysteries none remain . . . We are born in flames. Lastly and shallowly, this film is filled with mostly queer women of various ethnicities who make no effort to look heteronormatively good, which means this film is filled with women who look great. You leave it and you want to have an argument and change the world.
Buster Keaton's The Electric House (1922) is science fiction only in the sense that I do not believe an automated house such as the one designed by his beleaguered botanist-turned-electrician existed at the time of filming—or has been incautiously built since—but that in no way impairs its two-reeler charm. I feel that everyone who has ever been on an escalator in their lives has at some point worried about being launched off the top of it. We should all be so lucky as to have an auto-filling pool lying in wait.
I must thank
sasha_feather for recommending Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell's Prospect (2018); it is a kind of chamber space Western and it works admirably as such. Instead of the gold suggested by the title, the precious commodity mined from the soil of the thickly forested, spore-drifted moon known as "the Green" is aurelac, an amber-hearted gem extracted with difficulty from the acidic flesh of the subterranean creatures within which it accretes. Fortunately for teenage "floater" Cee (Sophie Thatcher), her jack-of-some-trades father Damon (Jay Duplass) has the skills to pull what he swears is a once-in-a-lifetime haul from the "queen's lair," enough to settle them permanently planetside instead of hitching endlessly between systems. Unfortunately, this plan does not survive contact with Ezra (Pedro Pascal), an ornately spoken prospector and self-admitted killer who shortly becomes Cee's only chance not just of fulfilling her father's side of a previously undisclosed bargain but catching the last freighter off the Green. From here on the plot is not unnecessary, but it takes a back seat to the complicated alliance between a wounded rogue and an unforgiving adolescent and the beautifully offhand worldbuilding of statements like "Ten thousand gets us back to Puggart Bench for maybe half a stand, then we're scanning boards for the next one." The film is real science fiction, not just planetary romance with true grit. With a handful of slang, an alien alphabet, and a retrofuturist production design that deliberately but not fetishistically recalls the broken-in, dinged-up, blue-collar futures of Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979), it conjures a universe extending far beyond the fern-hazed skies of the Green, as full of graffiti and music and stickers and snacks and fanfiction as our own society. The cinematography by Earl takes unusual advantage of the near-constant use of environmental suits and helmets to play with reflection and concealment; the favoring of practical effects over CGI adds to the throwback feel, but also grounds the action in irregularity and coincidence as much as laser fire. I really believe the last science fiction I encountered that devoted as much thought to the implications of its material culture was Pacific Rim (2013). In all honesty, although I wouldn't want a sequel per se, I would love to see the filmmakers revisit this world they created with such suggestion and density. Cee is talking about her favorite novel, but she could be speaking for the right audience when she confides, "I like to think about what happens in between what's already been written."Around this time we ate the karnatzl from Mamaleh's, which got "Roumania, Roumania" intermittently stuck in my head for the rest of the morning.
Michael Almereyda and Steve De Jarnatt's Cherry 2000 (1987) is one of the '80's-est movies I have ever seen. Would you like some cyberpunk with your post-apocalyptic road movie? No problem. Romantic comedy with your action heroism? We can do that. Sexbots and bazookas? Got you covered. Set it all in 2017, make about two-thirds of it a Western, and away we go. After his beloved Cherry 2000 (Pamela Gidley) shorts out from an overspill of dishwater during an energetic bout of kitchen-floor sex, the grieving Sam Treadwell (David Andrews) seeks out the services of a "tracker" to locate a replacement model in the lawless wastes of "Zone 7," which is how the middle manager of a recycling center comes to find himself barreling through flaming barricades and swinging high above Hoover Dam in a rocket-modded 1965 Ford Mustang care of E. Johnson (Melanie Griffith), the crimson-haired, sharp-tongued tracker who never turns down a job. Do not watch this movie if you have a low tolerance for scenes that end in boom or for a careening semi-comedic sensibility that recalls The Road Warrior (1981) one minute and Romancing the Stone (1984) the next. E.'s reclusive mentor Six-Fingered Jake (Ben Johnson) shares his river cavern with two mules and a lifetime supply of toaster ovens. The psychotic warlord whose one-man vigilante rule over Zone 7 mandates the summary execution of all trackers goes by the name of Lester (Tim Thomerson) and hangs out at a sort of '60's-ish geodesic spa where he's constantly exhorting his followers to get into regular workouts and self-actualization. A road sign to a border town reads "Glory Hole, 10" and then "Rule of Law Ends, 15." It's not quite full spoof, but it can't all be taken straight, and yet woven through its flamethrower-toting quirkiness is a classically Hollywood conflict between the fantasy and the reality of love. The film takes some pains to represent a future where shacking up with a robot does not automatically code a person as a hopeless loser. What we see of the dating scene in neon-Brutalist Anaheim looks almost as dehumanizing as Tinder, encapsulating a society so corporatized that even one-night stands must be legally negotiated in advance: "Stick your tongue in my client's mouth and I'm going to sue your ass off!" At the same time, the film remains aware that Sam's pining for his pre-programmed lover is as creepily immature as it is quixotically romantic and it misses no chance to contrast the soft-focus, idealized object of Cherry with the wry toughness and human fallibility of E., with whom Sam might have something combustible and even lasting if he didn't screw it up so often by mooning over Cherry's memory chip, which plays back such gems of emotional connection as "I love you, Sam, I'm so lucky to be with you" and "Faster. Faster. Oh, I like that." I am still deciding how I feel about the film's total disinterest in justifying the future status quo except for a blink-and-miss-it mention of the "Border Wars," which serves mostly to explain how a white-collar nebbish knows anything about machine pistols and hand grenades. It is not at all what I would have expected from either its writer or director and I enjoyed it a great deal, but it has done nothing to disprove my accumulating impression of the 1980's as a deeply weird decade for film. "Les, watch out for the bees!"
Into every movie marathon a little MST3K must fall and Spencer Gordon Bennet's The Atomic Submarine (1959) landed like the climactic ICBM fired by the USS Tiger Shark at a flying saucer. In justice to the film, it has terrific model work, some unexpectedly grisly effects, and does its best to provide classical allusions and topical-political considerations along with the pulp thrills of a top-secret submarine hunting a sinister mystery beneath the ice of the North Pole. In actual reaction, as soon as the stentorian narrator began to describe the vital importance of the shipping lanes across the Arctic Ocean, I burst into "Northwest Passage." I have seen many worse B-movies, but I am not sure I have seen one so committed to catching itself every time it got halfway to establishing its mood. A grim, abstract first contact disaster ends in a macho punch line. I am still not convinced it is the smartest of tactics to ram a submarine into a flying saucer, especially when the result is a submarine sinking to crush depth still stuck into the saucer's side like a horny anglerfish. It is much easier to take a desperate gamble of speculative engineering seriously when the narrator isn't putting in his oar: "It was foolish, it was insane, it was fantastic—but it was their only hope!" The most character-driven aspect of the script unfortunately entails the scenes we spent the most time shouting at, because in a narrative of hostile alien incursion, any debate between militarism and pacifism is a mug's game. Since he spends most of his screen time defending his ban-the-bomb ideals against charges of cowardice, I appreciate that Brett Halsey's Dr. Carl Neilson is not required to kill anyone to prove his mettle and is even affectionately included among the future defenders of Earth by his former chief critic, Arthur Franz's Lt. Commander "Reef" Holloway, but the moral of the story remains that no ruthless, telepathic, technologically advanced menace from the stars is a match for good old American ingenuity and nukes. The avant-garde, electronically pinging score by Alexander Laszlo still sounds space-age uncanny. Rob suggested I summarize simply: "STREAM MOVIE GO BOOM."
Magali Barbé's This Time Away (2018) is a neat, poignant sketch starring Timothy Spall, Jessica Ellerby Stuart, and a robot, and I don't think I can tell you anything else that will make you want to watch or skip it, except that it understands the importance of building things. My father sent it to me.
I fell asleep during the second act of Ishirō Honda's Destroy All Monsters (怪獣総進撃, 1968), but I woke in time for the kaiju battle royale which is the point of that movie; it says so in the title. Rob helpfully filled me in on everyone who wasn't Godzilla, Mothra, or Rodan. It is difficult for me to accept a dragon as the villain of any story, but I am tempted to watch Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) just for its take on the majesty of King Ghidorah.
"Next year in Davis Square," I said at the end of the 'Thon in 2020, but some years a theater is where you make it. We are not counting our work as a miss or a substitute; we will observe our tenth anniversary of marathon-sharing next year. I should have guessed that we would skip fewer movies than usual when we selected them ourselves and didn't need to wait for the bus to feed the cats. It was worth it. This tradition brought to you by my time-honored backers at Patreon.
no subject
One thing I've been struggling with over FANTASTIC PLANET is the banal cruelty of child Tiwa towards baby Terr, whose pained facial expressions every time he gets collar-dragged or food dumped on him contrast so sharply with Tiwa's bland, vacant, eerie smile. Children can be obliviously cruel to small animals (usually, hopefully, they learn some empathy and compassion) and boy was that point driven home hard to me. Terr's facial expressions really disturbed me. The film did a good job.
no subject
It makes sense to me. It's the one where we chose all of it, so none of it was disposable. Except for Humanoids of the Deep, which I am still disappointed about.
But I was glad to get that sleep, no doubt about it.
I regret nothing I stayed awake for, but I think it's why I spent most of last week out cold.
Children can be obliviously cruel to small animals (usually, hopefully, they learn some empathy and compassion) and boy was that point driven home hard to me. Terr's facial expressions really disturbed me. The film did a good job.
It did. There was something the opening sequence with Terr's mother reminded me of; I realized after the fact it was Frank Kelly Freas' famous cover illustration for Tom Godwin's "The Gulf Between" (1953). The image upset me very much as a child. I wonder if it stuck with Laloux and Tabor, too.
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
And iirc his voiceover narration ends that sequence with the words “she adored me,” and the terrible thing is that she does.
no subject
no subject
Thank you. Attending the 'Thon in 2012 was one of the very first things
no subject
:o)
no subject
A classic.
(Much of the Boston Sci-Fi audience can quote the entire thing from memory and generally does, which delights me. It's like The Rocky Horror Warner Bros. Show.)
no subject
And oh, oh, The Brother From Another Planet. It's not my favorite John Sayles movie but would have made that distinction from almost any other director. I love John Sayles so much. I love that movie so much. (Also I love two of his novels, A Moment in the Sun and Yellow Earth and am always trying to get people to read them, but A Moment in the Sun is such a large commitment that I usually fail at this.)
no subject
It struck me as a movie that holds up. It would have gotten a review of its own if it hadn't been part of a marathon.
It's not my favorite John Sayles movie but would have made that distinction from almost any other director. I love John Sayles so much. I love that movie so much.
I truly don't know if it or The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) was my introduction to his work. Both left impressions.
(Also I love two of his novels, A Moment in the Sun and Yellow Earth and am always trying to get people to read them, but A Moment in the Sun is such a large commitment that I usually fail at this.)
I have never read any of his novels! I feel they must never have turned up in used book stores or I would have bought them on principle. Do you mind if I ask what you love about those two?
(no subject)
no subject
no subject
I look forward to further reactions, even if just DEAR GOD MORE COFFEE.
There are several films whose still images I now want to stare at and some at which I headtilt.
I don't know why it's so hard to find good stills from Born in Flames, but here's a decent one of Flo Kennedy and Jean Satterfield. Satterfield is the one in the Ganja Farmers Union T-shirt. Florynce Kennedy, real-life activist lawyer legend, is here seen without her signature cowboy hat.
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
“What kind of things?”
(pause) “Patience.”
* Surprisingly for a ‘90s film, it’s up there with Ghostbusters for early-20th-century New Age references
no subject
You mentioned this version a few years ago, at which time the scene where Dourif is playing solitaire was on YouTube and I could see it for myself. It was a wonderful, quietly otherworldly fragment.
Surprisingly for a ‘90s film, it’s up there with Ghostbusters for early-20th-century New Age references
Yeah, that is definitely, outside of period pieces, something I do not expect.
(no subject)
no subject
no subject
Thank you! We did our best to stick to the template of the 'Thon while choosing movies that interested both of us and it paid off!
no subject
no subject
Thank you! I did want to share.
no subject
Matinee is a movie that surprised me by being better than I expected when I first watched it, and on rewatching it years later. The straightforward pleasures of the film within the film are like a simple cold glass of milk alongside a complicated dessert, while also serving as a way to look the power and importance (and limitations) of stories as a way to think/feel through big scary complicated stuff.
I remember Fantastic Planet from the midpoint of a weeklong film fest, which was, for me, a less than ideal time to catch what it was throwing. I didn't leave to go get "a real meal", or refresh by hiking about in daylight, but I think most of what it was attempting bounced off of me.
no subject
Oh, fantastic. Have fun!
I am not sure why I am becoming interested in '80's movies after spending most of my life, including the part of my life that was the '80's, ignoring them, but I think they feel like a decade in film where the id was particularly close to the surface and that sort of thing always interests me.
The straightforward pleasures of the film within the film are like a simple cold glass of milk alongside a complicated dessert, while also serving as a way to look the power and importance (and limitations) of stories as a way to think/feel through big scary complicated stuff.
I like that way of describing it. I went into the film expecting it to be fun; I didn't expect it to be all the other things.
I remember Fantastic Planet from the midpoint of a weeklong film fest, which was, for me, a less than ideal time to catch what it was throwing.
I would call it worth revisiting.
(I have never done a week's worth of film fest. I am not actually sure if I would enjoy it or burn out.)
no subject
no subject
I didn't realize there was more than one book! My middle school library only had Escape.
I re-watched B&B on Disney Plus a few weeks back and found it charming.
Nice. It's another movie we were shown at day camp; I rewatched it in 2006 and found it much weirder and more interesting than I had remembered, so I'm glad to know it continues to hold up!
no subject
no subject
It screened at the 'Thon in 2019! It was my second positive experience of Joe Dante. (The first was
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
I remember TCM airing Fantastic Planet back to back with Belladonna of Sadness.
Your 'Thon sounds fantastic! I want to watch/rewatch several of the movies on your list.
no subject
I am not familiar with Ladybug Ladybug beyond looking it up just now, but you are absolutely right to class them. Per Joe Dante: "MATINEE owes a lot to this movie, which is one of the most poignant depictions of the atomic fear my high school generation felt in 1963."
I remember TCM airing Fantastic Planet back to back with Belladonna of Sadness.
Oh, good!
Your 'Thon sounds fantastic! I want to watch/rewatch several of the movies on your list.
Thank you! All the links should work; I hope you have access to the ones you want. I made sure to find streaming equivalents for our ringers.
(I think we had a better lineup than the actual 'Thon this year.)
no subject
Nine
no subject
Thank you! We had a wonderful time with it. Amen!
no subject
The other mini-review I dipped into is Brother from Another Planet, which I missed when it came out, but now I really want to see--and it looks like it's available on YouTube, so yay!
... okay. I'll be back. <--obligatory Arnie voice.
no subject
At your leisure! This review is not the longest I have written for Patreon, but only because I had so much to scream about Girl of the Port (1930).
Admittedly the dancing furniture in the police station was also in the book ....
It's a good scene in the film; it's not played for comedy. We've seen the children do things that scare adults before, but it's been mild, inadvertent, or unavoidable. Now the sheriff's just lucky that Tony only wants to keep him occupied so Tia can break the two of them out. I didn't realize until we were setting up our marathon that the film was directed by John Hough, who is far more famous as a horror/suspense director—I associate him instantly with The Legend of Hell House (1973) and Hammer's Twins of Evil (1971). His stint with Disney includes a cult favorite called The Watcher in the Woods (1980) which Rob remembers as true sci-fi folk horror and I am really curious to see. So he could have handled a darker, more faithful film of Witch Mountain; I feel like it creeps around the edges of the version that exists. The version that exists still feels out of the Disney norm to me. I mean, it was followed in the production schedule by The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975).
Maybe **I** need to rewatch the movie with the less-resentful eyes of an adult, except I feel like my eyes are steadfastly resentful?
The children are younger, and fair-haired, and Jason O'Day is neither a Vietnam vet nor a priest; the film may never work for you. There is a flying Winnebago! But I wasn't sure what I would think of it as an adult and what I think is that while I am not part of it, I understand why the film has a following who imprinted in childhood. However more lightly than the book, it gets the sense of knowing that you're different and not knowing why. That resonates with people. It just doesn't usually end with flying saucers.
The other mini-review I dipped into is Brother from Another Planet, which I missed when it came out, but now I really want to see--and it looks like it's available on YouTube, so yay!
Oh, excellent! Enjoy!
no subject
80s film really is deeply weird, sometimes in the best ways.
no subject
Under normal conditions, we sneak out on a lot more!
80s film really is deeply weird, sometimes in the best ways.
I have to say I am enjoying my discoveries. I'm not sure I should plunge headlong into the decade, but I'll take recommendations.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
Matinee and The Hands of Orlac
What people scare themselves into believing does more damage than anything they can know for sure. --This statement feels applicable more broadly than the film, maybe/probably because when people scare themselves into believing something, the something is limited only by their imaginations, and people's imaginations seem to work especially well in the fear department.
while the film may observe the absurdity with which they have been conditioned to react to the prospect, it does not encourage us to condescend to them because of it. --It sounds really good.
The Hands of Orlac
I got pretty spooked just reading your description; I can imagine being well and truly unnerved trying to watch it.
The idea that malice of the acts lives in the parts of the body that committed them (or that the genius does, with piano playing)--I mean with some things I suppose there really is muscle memory and so on--but I'm think how it's a folk notion of mind/consciousness that imagines us as like octopuses, with awareness and [a degree of] will distributed in our limbs.
Re: Matinee and The Hands of Orlac
I associate it especially with Val Lewton, but I really think of it as a tenet of horror in any medium: what you're left to imagine for yourself is always worse than what you can be shown. And you can show people some pretty terrible things! But there's something about the Schrödinger's potential of not knowing that really puts the suggestiveness in overdrive. The special effects department of radio was the human mind.
--It sounds really good.
It was one of my favorites of this marathon. It may in fact have edged its way—along with Born in Flames, which was a no-brainer—onto my list of favorite films.
I got pretty spooked just reading your description; I can imagine being well and truly unnerved trying to watch it.
I may always resent the 2013 'Thon for not showing it at four in the morning, which is such an awful hour for self-suspicion to begin with. (Jeff Rapsis usually goes home before midnight, however, so we put it in the more standard late afternoon/early evening slot.)
The idea that malice of the acts lives in the parts of the body that committed them (or that the genius does, with piano playing)--I mean with some things I suppose there really is muscle memory and so on--but I'm think how it's a folk notion of mind/consciousness that imagines us as like octopuses, with awareness and [a degree of] will distributed in our limbs.
I hadn't thought of it in octopus terms, but I love that image. As though the body remembers even when the mind no longer can—it carries its own history with it, even into a new body. And that is sort of true, but not the way these stories mean it. Like the pain of somebody else's phantom limb.
The Silent Star
... I feel bitter at how the American imagination can't ever quite wrap itself around true internationalism; there always has to be competition, and the US character always has to be best or most in some way. This sounds genuinely cooperative--obviously it's only a fantasy and an ideal, but at least the director wanted to articulate that as an ideal, you know?
Re: The Silent Star
I'm so glad! TCM and the Criterion Channel are sort of our home viewing staples (plus
I still haven't watched Brother from Another Planet, though, so I'm developing a queue.
Honestly, I am delighted and honored by the idea of our marathon spinning off little mini-marathons of its own.
... I feel bitter at how the American imagination can't ever quite wrap itself around true internationalism
I don't think the American imagination is incapable of it, but I do think it has a rough time in Hollywood. And there's no reason for it to—just think of how wholeheartedly audiences responded, including at the box office, to the international-interpersonal bridging of Pacific Rim.
This sounds genuinely cooperative--obviously it's only a fantasy and an ideal, but at least the director wanted to articulate that as an ideal, you know?
It certainly doesn't hurt that it is an ideal I am also in favor of.
Fantastic Planet
Re: Fantastic Planet
The animated portions of Pink Floyd's The Wall (1982) could probably stomp through without undue disturbance to the local ecosystem, too.
Adding this one to my list as well.
Cool!
(mid-read PS)
Re: (mid-read PS)
He's doing the character-actor thing of suddenly being everywhere, which I have been informed will only increase if I watch more Joe Dante.
finished Brother from another Planet
A few random notes: The presence of the twin towers in the beginning felt .... I don't know, something-something timelines. Also when the pursuers say in the bar, "We'll be back" with that deadpan implacability, of course it made me think of the Terminator, and it turns out *that* film came out in 1984 as well.
The kissing between the brother and the singer was maybe the most tender, genuine on-screen kiss and prelude to lovemaking I've ever seen. His expression of delight and--well, I just come back to the word "tender": tenderness. And her warm response.
I liked the loose way all the incidents fell together; I liked how the brother's silence let others open up; I liked how it had a happy ending.
(Oh and I loved the bureaucrat who drives off the pursuers with the Power of Paperwork; that was *awesome*)
Thanks, as always, for enriching my life with these great films.
Re: finished Brother from another Planet
You are very welcome. Thank you for coming back and telling me about this one! You should write about it for your own journal, which has a different set of readers than mine.
(I had remembered the scenes with the jazz singer from the first time around, but they were even better than I had remembered. I had forgotten the heroic obstructive bureaucracy and I loved it, too.)
Re: finished Brother from another Planet