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Our mother and father were binary stars
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spatch and I celebrated this year's President's Day with the Black Kitten 'Thon 2023, during which we did not program ourselves twenty-four hours of science fiction film so much as enjoy a selection of shorts and features readily accessible at whatever hours we were up for it. It gave us room to make dinner, tend to cats, if necessary even sleep. We did not begin with Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953).
Mad Love (1935) was released more than a year after the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code, but it doesn't feel like it. Technically the second screen version of Maurice Renard's Les Mains d'Orlac (1920), its screenplay credited to Guy Endore could pass for an original shocker from the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol with its medical hysteria and climactic irony per André de Lorde, a delirious spectacle of Freud and fetishism, urban legends and classical myths, and science as irrational as the human heart, all lensed by Gregg Toland and directed by once and future super-DP Karl Freund like a dark ride through the film's own Théâtre des Horreurs. "It's a fillip to jaded nerves! It's a new shudder!" The title is finger-scratched in the frost of a windowpane, the more conventionally printed credits suddenly shattered with the blow of a fist through the glass. Colin Clive's Stephen Orlac is introduced sweetly disembodied, a discreet cough at the beginning of every concert to tell his wife across the airwaves that he loves her, but following the dismembering horror of a train derailment, the once-promising pianist will find himself shackled with sickening corporeality to the hands of a guillotined knife-thrower while Frances Drake's Yvonne Orlac wrestles no less frightfully with the attentions of the surgeon whose obsession with her performances of passionate torture she exploited to save her husband's hands, Peter Lorre's Dr. Gogol. As sympathetically as Clive succumbs to the alienation of his new extremities and as spiritedly as Drake contradicts the helplessness of her martyr roles, the title favors Lorre and so does the film. Dr. Gogol is half-glimpsed first in a moment of exquisitely perverse spectatorship, a shadow-cut moon of a face lowering its eyes in delicate arousal at the staged racking and branding of Yvonne; his name evokes at once the grotesque and surreal which his shaven head and enormous eyes match, as corpselike and spectral as an experiment in reanimation himself. His romantic pursuit of Yvonne is too extreme to be ridiculous, a stolen kiss as raw as a much more intimate act performed in public. When he installs a waxwork of the actress in his apartments and addresses it as his "Galatea," it is played in blinkless, breath-held close-ups by Drake, so efficiently suggesting a sort of necrophiliac sex toy that the script can lampshade its confusion with an actual cadaver. Even his charity work with disabled children just provides a friction of benevolence into which the film's lowering expressionism crashes when his reflection in street clothes—a demonic little imp, another escapee from Russian literature—taunts and tempts the fevered doctor from the mirrors of his operating room: "Let them laugh! Nothing matters to you but one thing. Yvonne—Yvonne in your arms!" It's a performance as utterly unaware of the fourth wall as Gogol of the realities of other people, so weird and exposed that it doesn't once risk camp. It was Lorre's Hollywood debut. Around him, the film warps naturally into discordant keys, from an interlude at the guillotine which wipes the wisecracks off an American reporter to a revision of its silent predecessor's most deranged and creepiest scene, the confrontation of the maimed pianist by the apparent donor of his hands, elaborated by Mad Love into a whispering cyborg of articulated steel and surgical braces, black-goggled and laughing as mercilessly as a fairground automaton. The cake brought out for Yvonne's last night at the theater is topped with a guillotine and frosted with a danse macabre. A marble-veined sculpture of Stephen's lost hands crowns the piano where he struggles to practice his own music. Gogol plays the organ to his mannequin Yvonne. The film was a notorious flop for MGM, which I imagine accounts for my inability to find a recording of the darkly catchy classical rag that is Stephen's signature composition, supplied like the rest of the minimal score by Dimitri Tiomkin. "Wonderful invention, the phonograph. Keeps a man alive long after he's dead."
Do not judge The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) by its trailer, its taglines, or its title. It could be screened just as easily alongside Between the Lines (1977) as Seven Days to Noon (1950). It is not just a crisp, apocalyptically haunting vision of nuclear anxiety and climate change, it's a great newspaper movie. Without the opening frame of an eerily parched and deserted London, brassily tinted as if the film itself is smoldering in sympathy with typewriter ribbons and the dry flats of the Thames, we too might imagine that in the media doldrums of a wet summer when Soviet megabombs rate fewer inches than English cricket scores, nothing more exciting will come of a deadline for five hundred words on sunspots than an afternoon wasted at the Met Office. As we follow a thread of government evasion gathering ominous portents like a solar eclipse glaring blackly above a CND march ten days ahead of schedule, however, or a wall of heat mist rolling downriver less like the Great Smog of London than the tropical, deglaciating resurrection of a primeval swamp, the silly season starts to look like the end of the world faster than you can say, "Alcoholics of the press, unite!" The science that links a fatally competitive pair of H-bomb tests to the Earth's nutation is impeccable on the level of metaphor; as physics, it's completely balls. Filtered through the professional cynicism and the slip-edition hustle of the newsroom, it becomes explosively credible because they can do nothing else with the information but assimilate it into the cold equations of dummy sheets and photo extras, treat it as real because it is and their business is reality, even if a week ago it wasn't. "We leave prophecy to the street-corner cranks." The screenplay co-written by Wolf Mankowitz with producer-director Val Guest has the documentary audacity not only to stage its action in the old real-life offices of the Daily Express on Fleet Street but to reinstall its legendary editor Arthur Christiansen in his former job; then it can afford ringers like Edward Judd, Janet Munro, and the scene-stealing Leo McKern, filling out the staff with vivid, not too starrily obvious faces like Michael Goodliffe, Bernard Braden, and Edward Underdown. Pamela Green and Michael Caine turn up among the uncredited bit players. London plays itself, with assistance from the mattes and miniatures of Les Bowie and the temperature-sensitive photography of Harry Waxman. It is not a cozy catastrophe, for all that the scope of the picture rarely extends beyond Battersea Park; it is a genuinely strange case of future shock, unlaid ghosts of WWII casting shadows of the Cold War and in hindsight of the twenty-first century the devastation of global warming which did not after all require nuclear carelessness to cook the planet. "Like the old Blitz days, isn't it?" one reporter cheerily greets his fellows in the wake of a street-wrecking cyclone, the new weather patterns of the off-kilter world. A countdown across the globe will be described with terrible sincerity as "a historic occasion . . . like the Queen's speech on Christmas Day." It suspends itself between apocalypses, so much so that the unequivocally ambiguous ending feels like the only place it can leave us, looking forward to brave new uncertainties of our own. Because the majority of the film is populated by world-weary types with a strong line in sarcasm, however, the dialogue much more commonly tends toward lines like "If that's your last will and testament, don't forget to leave me my car." I was delighted to discover after the fact that this production was what Guest did with the proceeds from Expresso Bongo (1959). Had we programmed house music like the Somerville, the no-brainer needle-drop would have been Flanders and Swann's "20 Tons of TNT."
I have come to accept that public information films constitute their own subgenre of weird fiction, but I remain disproportionately amused that when the Oklahoma State Department of Health called upon its Mental Hygiene Division to caution against common household accidents, the best mouthpiece for this domestic message was deemed to be a sentient, malevolent mantel clock. Its wavery reflection of a face gloats over the sleeping household of Time Out for Trouble (1961), explaining its grievance as a sidelined heirloom and promising with Sapphire & Steel-like foreboding, "Time takes care of so many things, especially when you're a specialist in time like I am." Tragically, what the clock chiefly seems to mean is that it can inanimately afford to wait while impatient, emotional humans rush around and hurt themselves in their heedless tempers and anxieties, but the 16 mm film does get some weird mileage out of its black-and-white vignettes of mid-century, middle-American life shot with an eye to the menace of loosely coiled electric cords and pots boiling unattended, complete with the Halloween quavers of an organ—perhaps not entirely as intended, since it seems oblivious to the nature of the horror elicited by a digression concerning a husband who drinks himself into a hit-and-run because, apparently, his wife is boring. Nonetheless, I feel an unwarranted affection toward this short film because it was produced under the auspices of the University of Oklahoma where my grandfather was teaching at the time, although he had no involvement in the project, which I am confident it would have been better for. I still have somewhere a tape of my grandparents reading Sholem Aleichem's "The Clock": I dreamed that our old clock lay on the ground clad in a white shroud. I dreamed that the clock was alive, and a long tongue, a human tongue, was swaying back and forth in place of the pendulum. The clock was not chiming but groaning, and every groan rent my heart. Now that was nightmare fuel.
The first six and a half series of Red Dwarf (1988–97) were a staple of my social life in college. Given the premise, it would be nice to claim that I watched it with a bunkmate—I did watch most of it from a top bunk—but my first roommate moved out on me at midwinter with a snide crack about my shrimp ramen, leaving me uncertain whether I had been the Dave Lister or the Arnold Rimmer in that situation. Until Rob and I rewatched the first series earlier this month, I had seen none of the show in over twenty years. I had accurately remembered that "The Last Day" (1989) falls on the more sfnal side of the early series and even plays by a couple of the rules of old-school robot stories while cheerfully detonating the rest, but I had blurred a lot of the details and was pleased to be reminded of the total unconvincingness of the DIY Marilyn Monroe-bot or the small radioactive fruit salad for pudding. More of our household quotations than I had thought come from this one episode: "The one you really hate!" "Reboot startup disk, offline for thirty-six hours, and replace head." "Where would all the calculators go?" It could rest its marathon laurels, however, on one line alone, delivered with heartfelt hangover by Craig Charles: "Don't give me that Star Trek crap, it's too early in the morning."
Time Piece (1965) resembles no other film I have seen by Jim Henson, a nine-minute pop-art meditation on the rat race of time conveyed in stream-of-consciousness montage set to a heartbeat of clock-ticking, shutter-clicking, hi-hat jazz and the occasional cry for help. There are animated interstitials, but no Muppets. Lanky as a cartoon, Henson himself plays the protagonist fast-forwarding through the rituals of adulthood American-style in everything from da Vinci's kite-wings to a loincloth—when his future wife snips the liana he's Tarzan-swinging from, he drops with the plop of an olive into the martinis they clink on their first date. Busywork in triplicate is stamped "FILE," "CONFORM," and "SEX / DAMN!" A stripper peels herself down from satin to skin and finally to her snake-dancing skeleton, punctuated by the pop of champagne and the jut of a naked banana. The prevailing metaphor chains the protagonist to a rock pile, he runs for his life and out of it and paints an elephant pink. It's disturbing, hilarious, and so quick-cut that it plays more like a music video pushing the subliminal threshold than even the contemporary films of Richard Lester. It did not win an Oscar in its year; the live-action short that did is now remembered primarily as the film that should have lost to Henson. Jerry Juhl and Frank Oz can be glimpsed almost in ellipsis as supporting players in this everyman's nightmare. It may have been an experiment storyboarded out of seconds stolen between commercials and shows, but it's a triumphant little eccentricity. Don't miss the topical spoof of Tom Jones (1963).
At this point in the night which happened to be about four in the morning, a carefully masked Rob dropped in on the actual 'Thon to catch the otherwise unattainable UFOria (1985) and eventually decide against staying for Beyond the Time Barrier (1960). I stayed on the couch with the cats and watched something completely different and we reconnected around dawn.
It would not be false advertising to call The Hidden (1987) a science fiction police procedural, but it is cheaply, gloriously, unapologetically one of the movies whose truest genre designation is "the 1980's." It kicks off with a high-speed Ferrari chase blasting hard rock through downtown L.A. and climaxes with the deployment of Chekhov's flamethrower at a political rally. Its low-budget thrills include the practical gross-out of an extraterrestrial parasite transmitted by regurgitation and a gorgeous stripper screwing a sleaze to death in the front seat of his 1963 Ford Galaxie 500. Its conceit of a body-hopping alien thrill killer is older than Robert Bloch, but in the same year as Gordon Gekko, the conspicuous consumption of an unbridled appetite from Altair differs only in satirical degree from the human vices of the sun-shameless, neon-hawked milieu it moves through, like a Porsche dealer casually sharing a scoop of coke with an arms trafficker, each successive encounter of the LAPD with the blunt-force body-snatcher escalating operatically in casualties, bullets, and cars, a grindhouse kaleidoscope of shootouts to the tune of Concrete Blonde. It's a vortex of gleeful midnight trash, but at its anchoring eye is the delicacy of Kyle MacLachlan, whose performance as FBI Agent Lloyd Gallagher is one of the most awkward and beautiful things committed to film in its decade. Surrounded by men who communicate in territorial contests of sarcasm and aggro, he's quiet, reactive, reflective, as gently sad and funny as the silent clown he resembles when confronted with the bewilderments of Alka-Seltzer and aspirin. He drives with gear-screeching ineptitude, concentrates so carefully on the mechanics of eating a meal that he can't hold a conversation at the same time as knife and fork, and admits with a self-conscious grin to reading minds. Asked where he's from, in echo of The Brother from Another Planet (1984) he points upward to his home binary star of Rasalhague. His own face in a mirror startles him. Paired with Michael Nouri's Detective Tom Beck—tall, rugged, abrasive, softening only around his wife and child, a possessor of all the standard-issue masculinity that Gallagher with his translucent face and seal-black hair slips past like water—he looks fragile to the point of negligibility, but his gravity pulls the strangeness of the film through its thick veneer of action cop into the luminous, bittersweet ending, so satisfyingly more soft-spoken than all the splatter and stunts that built up to it. I would not have liked this movie if I had walked in on it as a child. If the ultraviolence hadn't taken me out, the extinguishing mechanics of the body-hopping would have terrified me for nights. But if I had contrived to sieve him out from the trauma, I would have imprinted on MacLachlan as instinctively as I did on Daryl Hannah in Splash (1984) and for much the same reasons, the slant ways of being human that made so much more sense to me than the normative behaviors of Tom Hanks and Nouri. The screenplay written by Jim Kouf and rewritten by director Jack Sholder finds its emotional strength in these existential moments; a night-shot set piece of a gunfight in a warehouse full of mannequins even manages to fuse the philosophical and the balls-to-the-wall as its aliens in human armature exchange fire among facsimiles of humanity. All of the actors who play the Altairean convincingly share the same awful body language of instant gratification and meat-suited concrete, but Claudia Christian deserved to play its final form. She wouldn't be confused for an instant with Ivanova in a dollar-sign G-string and a fake leopard coat. "I guess a career in the police didn't really prepare you for this, did it?"
If you like the playful, surrealism-edged nature films of Jean Painlevé and the music of Yo La Tengo, then the eight short subjects and the ambient improvisations of The Sounds of Science (2002) have got you covered, eddying in and out of the lives of sea urchins and crabs and jellyfish and sea horses with a quizzical, abstract and intimate—and occasionally anatomical—interest, educating and defamiliarizing at the same beautifully framed and lit time. Shot between 1929 and 1972, scored at the turn of the twenty-first century, the combination is chill, hallucinatory stuff. Nothing of our oceans looks like it belongs to our world and just as often in this rendering it doesn't sound like it, either.
Neptune Frost (2021) is as difficult to describe as it is imperative to recommend. Written by Saul Williams and co-directed with cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, it is a dream-quest of queer Afrofuturism in five languages, an anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-capitalist musical that feels like a defiant embrace as much as a liberating rejection, literalizing a rainbow of broken binaries in its harsh, sumptuous, stunning palette of black-light paint, mountain forests, and repurposed e-waste. The exuberant drift of the plot sounds polemic when summarized: in a half-step of a future painfully inseparable from our own, the love of a bereaved coltan miner and a genderfluid refugee ignites a hacktivist collective into digital revolution, status quo reprisal, and enduring resistance. On the screen, each river journey or political argument melts oneirically into the next through the flight of an orange-dashed dove or the glimmering rotation of a bicycle wheel, the narrative encrusts itself with connections like the circuits and glitter that weave themselves organically into the bodies of the miners and hackers and students who greet one another, "Unanimous goldmine." Played in gracile turn by Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja, Neptune undergoes a transforming renewal to be recognized as the Motherboard, the crucial, fabled interface between the liminal enclave of Digitaria and the internet as we know it. Bertrand Ninteretse's Matalusa shape-shifts within his own name, lending the collective the mondegreen handle of "Martyr Loser King" as they challenge and evade the brutal repressions of the Burundi-like police state known only as the Authority and the wider complacencies of the western hegemony for whose convenience resource-cursed citizens invisibly toil and die. Their hybrid mythologies glitch through the equally imagistic dialogue and lyrics as if from a text of unwritten revelations, the dreams shared like a beacon by Eliane Umuhire's Memory, Rebecca Uwamahoro's Elohel, and Trésor Niyongabo's Psychology, but whenever the density of basket-masked soldiers or visionary torrential data threatens to slog the film into an indigestible manifesto, a character flips the bird through the fourth wall or another drops the question, "Maybe you're asking yourself, WTF is this? Is it a poet's idea of a dream?" It has the double-speaking shimmer of one. But it's also a gritty, ethereal, polyphonic and polyrhythmic invitation to "hack into land rights and ownership . . . hack into sexuality," or at least witness what happens when Neptune in a dress of red silk and a crown of copper wire does, eyelids dotted like motion capture with gems of hi-vis paint. It's so good to see cyberpunk that knows more colors than a dead channel. Black is a spellbinding one.
Next year, who knows? At home or in the theater, round the clock or on our own time, we keep this tradition as old as our acquaintance in person. This year, a round dozen. This goldmine brought to you by my stellar backers at Patreon.
spatch and I celebrated this year's President's Day with the Black Kitten 'Thon 2023, during which we did not program ourselves twenty-four hours of science fiction film so much as enjoy a selection of shorts and features readily accessible at whatever hours we were up for it. It gave us room to make dinner, tend to cats, if necessary even sleep. We did not begin with Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953).Mad Love (1935) was released more than a year after the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code, but it doesn't feel like it. Technically the second screen version of Maurice Renard's Les Mains d'Orlac (1920), its screenplay credited to Guy Endore could pass for an original shocker from the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol with its medical hysteria and climactic irony per André de Lorde, a delirious spectacle of Freud and fetishism, urban legends and classical myths, and science as irrational as the human heart, all lensed by Gregg Toland and directed by once and future super-DP Karl Freund like a dark ride through the film's own Théâtre des Horreurs. "It's a fillip to jaded nerves! It's a new shudder!" The title is finger-scratched in the frost of a windowpane, the more conventionally printed credits suddenly shattered with the blow of a fist through the glass. Colin Clive's Stephen Orlac is introduced sweetly disembodied, a discreet cough at the beginning of every concert to tell his wife across the airwaves that he loves her, but following the dismembering horror of a train derailment, the once-promising pianist will find himself shackled with sickening corporeality to the hands of a guillotined knife-thrower while Frances Drake's Yvonne Orlac wrestles no less frightfully with the attentions of the surgeon whose obsession with her performances of passionate torture she exploited to save her husband's hands, Peter Lorre's Dr. Gogol. As sympathetically as Clive succumbs to the alienation of his new extremities and as spiritedly as Drake contradicts the helplessness of her martyr roles, the title favors Lorre and so does the film. Dr. Gogol is half-glimpsed first in a moment of exquisitely perverse spectatorship, a shadow-cut moon of a face lowering its eyes in delicate arousal at the staged racking and branding of Yvonne; his name evokes at once the grotesque and surreal which his shaven head and enormous eyes match, as corpselike and spectral as an experiment in reanimation himself. His romantic pursuit of Yvonne is too extreme to be ridiculous, a stolen kiss as raw as a much more intimate act performed in public. When he installs a waxwork of the actress in his apartments and addresses it as his "Galatea," it is played in blinkless, breath-held close-ups by Drake, so efficiently suggesting a sort of necrophiliac sex toy that the script can lampshade its confusion with an actual cadaver. Even his charity work with disabled children just provides a friction of benevolence into which the film's lowering expressionism crashes when his reflection in street clothes—a demonic little imp, another escapee from Russian literature—taunts and tempts the fevered doctor from the mirrors of his operating room: "Let them laugh! Nothing matters to you but one thing. Yvonne—Yvonne in your arms!" It's a performance as utterly unaware of the fourth wall as Gogol of the realities of other people, so weird and exposed that it doesn't once risk camp. It was Lorre's Hollywood debut. Around him, the film warps naturally into discordant keys, from an interlude at the guillotine which wipes the wisecracks off an American reporter to a revision of its silent predecessor's most deranged and creepiest scene, the confrontation of the maimed pianist by the apparent donor of his hands, elaborated by Mad Love into a whispering cyborg of articulated steel and surgical braces, black-goggled and laughing as mercilessly as a fairground automaton. The cake brought out for Yvonne's last night at the theater is topped with a guillotine and frosted with a danse macabre. A marble-veined sculpture of Stephen's lost hands crowns the piano where he struggles to practice his own music. Gogol plays the organ to his mannequin Yvonne. The film was a notorious flop for MGM, which I imagine accounts for my inability to find a recording of the darkly catchy classical rag that is Stephen's signature composition, supplied like the rest of the minimal score by Dimitri Tiomkin. "Wonderful invention, the phonograph. Keeps a man alive long after he's dead."
Do not judge The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) by its trailer, its taglines, or its title. It could be screened just as easily alongside Between the Lines (1977) as Seven Days to Noon (1950). It is not just a crisp, apocalyptically haunting vision of nuclear anxiety and climate change, it's a great newspaper movie. Without the opening frame of an eerily parched and deserted London, brassily tinted as if the film itself is smoldering in sympathy with typewriter ribbons and the dry flats of the Thames, we too might imagine that in the media doldrums of a wet summer when Soviet megabombs rate fewer inches than English cricket scores, nothing more exciting will come of a deadline for five hundred words on sunspots than an afternoon wasted at the Met Office. As we follow a thread of government evasion gathering ominous portents like a solar eclipse glaring blackly above a CND march ten days ahead of schedule, however, or a wall of heat mist rolling downriver less like the Great Smog of London than the tropical, deglaciating resurrection of a primeval swamp, the silly season starts to look like the end of the world faster than you can say, "Alcoholics of the press, unite!" The science that links a fatally competitive pair of H-bomb tests to the Earth's nutation is impeccable on the level of metaphor; as physics, it's completely balls. Filtered through the professional cynicism and the slip-edition hustle of the newsroom, it becomes explosively credible because they can do nothing else with the information but assimilate it into the cold equations of dummy sheets and photo extras, treat it as real because it is and their business is reality, even if a week ago it wasn't. "We leave prophecy to the street-corner cranks." The screenplay co-written by Wolf Mankowitz with producer-director Val Guest has the documentary audacity not only to stage its action in the old real-life offices of the Daily Express on Fleet Street but to reinstall its legendary editor Arthur Christiansen in his former job; then it can afford ringers like Edward Judd, Janet Munro, and the scene-stealing Leo McKern, filling out the staff with vivid, not too starrily obvious faces like Michael Goodliffe, Bernard Braden, and Edward Underdown. Pamela Green and Michael Caine turn up among the uncredited bit players. London plays itself, with assistance from the mattes and miniatures of Les Bowie and the temperature-sensitive photography of Harry Waxman. It is not a cozy catastrophe, for all that the scope of the picture rarely extends beyond Battersea Park; it is a genuinely strange case of future shock, unlaid ghosts of WWII casting shadows of the Cold War and in hindsight of the twenty-first century the devastation of global warming which did not after all require nuclear carelessness to cook the planet. "Like the old Blitz days, isn't it?" one reporter cheerily greets his fellows in the wake of a street-wrecking cyclone, the new weather patterns of the off-kilter world. A countdown across the globe will be described with terrible sincerity as "a historic occasion . . . like the Queen's speech on Christmas Day." It suspends itself between apocalypses, so much so that the unequivocally ambiguous ending feels like the only place it can leave us, looking forward to brave new uncertainties of our own. Because the majority of the film is populated by world-weary types with a strong line in sarcasm, however, the dialogue much more commonly tends toward lines like "If that's your last will and testament, don't forget to leave me my car." I was delighted to discover after the fact that this production was what Guest did with the proceeds from Expresso Bongo (1959). Had we programmed house music like the Somerville, the no-brainer needle-drop would have been Flanders and Swann's "20 Tons of TNT."
I have come to accept that public information films constitute their own subgenre of weird fiction, but I remain disproportionately amused that when the Oklahoma State Department of Health called upon its Mental Hygiene Division to caution against common household accidents, the best mouthpiece for this domestic message was deemed to be a sentient, malevolent mantel clock. Its wavery reflection of a face gloats over the sleeping household of Time Out for Trouble (1961), explaining its grievance as a sidelined heirloom and promising with Sapphire & Steel-like foreboding, "Time takes care of so many things, especially when you're a specialist in time like I am." Tragically, what the clock chiefly seems to mean is that it can inanimately afford to wait while impatient, emotional humans rush around and hurt themselves in their heedless tempers and anxieties, but the 16 mm film does get some weird mileage out of its black-and-white vignettes of mid-century, middle-American life shot with an eye to the menace of loosely coiled electric cords and pots boiling unattended, complete with the Halloween quavers of an organ—perhaps not entirely as intended, since it seems oblivious to the nature of the horror elicited by a digression concerning a husband who drinks himself into a hit-and-run because, apparently, his wife is boring. Nonetheless, I feel an unwarranted affection toward this short film because it was produced under the auspices of the University of Oklahoma where my grandfather was teaching at the time, although he had no involvement in the project, which I am confident it would have been better for. I still have somewhere a tape of my grandparents reading Sholem Aleichem's "The Clock": I dreamed that our old clock lay on the ground clad in a white shroud. I dreamed that the clock was alive, and a long tongue, a human tongue, was swaying back and forth in place of the pendulum. The clock was not chiming but groaning, and every groan rent my heart. Now that was nightmare fuel.
The first six and a half series of Red Dwarf (1988–97) were a staple of my social life in college. Given the premise, it would be nice to claim that I watched it with a bunkmate—I did watch most of it from a top bunk—but my first roommate moved out on me at midwinter with a snide crack about my shrimp ramen, leaving me uncertain whether I had been the Dave Lister or the Arnold Rimmer in that situation. Until Rob and I rewatched the first series earlier this month, I had seen none of the show in over twenty years. I had accurately remembered that "The Last Day" (1989) falls on the more sfnal side of the early series and even plays by a couple of the rules of old-school robot stories while cheerfully detonating the rest, but I had blurred a lot of the details and was pleased to be reminded of the total unconvincingness of the DIY Marilyn Monroe-bot or the small radioactive fruit salad for pudding. More of our household quotations than I had thought come from this one episode: "The one you really hate!" "Reboot startup disk, offline for thirty-six hours, and replace head." "Where would all the calculators go?" It could rest its marathon laurels, however, on one line alone, delivered with heartfelt hangover by Craig Charles: "Don't give me that Star Trek crap, it's too early in the morning."
Time Piece (1965) resembles no other film I have seen by Jim Henson, a nine-minute pop-art meditation on the rat race of time conveyed in stream-of-consciousness montage set to a heartbeat of clock-ticking, shutter-clicking, hi-hat jazz and the occasional cry for help. There are animated interstitials, but no Muppets. Lanky as a cartoon, Henson himself plays the protagonist fast-forwarding through the rituals of adulthood American-style in everything from da Vinci's kite-wings to a loincloth—when his future wife snips the liana he's Tarzan-swinging from, he drops with the plop of an olive into the martinis they clink on their first date. Busywork in triplicate is stamped "FILE," "CONFORM," and "SEX / DAMN!" A stripper peels herself down from satin to skin and finally to her snake-dancing skeleton, punctuated by the pop of champagne and the jut of a naked banana. The prevailing metaphor chains the protagonist to a rock pile, he runs for his life and out of it and paints an elephant pink. It's disturbing, hilarious, and so quick-cut that it plays more like a music video pushing the subliminal threshold than even the contemporary films of Richard Lester. It did not win an Oscar in its year; the live-action short that did is now remembered primarily as the film that should have lost to Henson. Jerry Juhl and Frank Oz can be glimpsed almost in ellipsis as supporting players in this everyman's nightmare. It may have been an experiment storyboarded out of seconds stolen between commercials and shows, but it's a triumphant little eccentricity. Don't miss the topical spoof of Tom Jones (1963).
At this point in the night which happened to be about four in the morning, a carefully masked Rob dropped in on the actual 'Thon to catch the otherwise unattainable UFOria (1985) and eventually decide against staying for Beyond the Time Barrier (1960). I stayed on the couch with the cats and watched something completely different and we reconnected around dawn.
It would not be false advertising to call The Hidden (1987) a science fiction police procedural, but it is cheaply, gloriously, unapologetically one of the movies whose truest genre designation is "the 1980's." It kicks off with a high-speed Ferrari chase blasting hard rock through downtown L.A. and climaxes with the deployment of Chekhov's flamethrower at a political rally. Its low-budget thrills include the practical gross-out of an extraterrestrial parasite transmitted by regurgitation and a gorgeous stripper screwing a sleaze to death in the front seat of his 1963 Ford Galaxie 500. Its conceit of a body-hopping alien thrill killer is older than Robert Bloch, but in the same year as Gordon Gekko, the conspicuous consumption of an unbridled appetite from Altair differs only in satirical degree from the human vices of the sun-shameless, neon-hawked milieu it moves through, like a Porsche dealer casually sharing a scoop of coke with an arms trafficker, each successive encounter of the LAPD with the blunt-force body-snatcher escalating operatically in casualties, bullets, and cars, a grindhouse kaleidoscope of shootouts to the tune of Concrete Blonde. It's a vortex of gleeful midnight trash, but at its anchoring eye is the delicacy of Kyle MacLachlan, whose performance as FBI Agent Lloyd Gallagher is one of the most awkward and beautiful things committed to film in its decade. Surrounded by men who communicate in territorial contests of sarcasm and aggro, he's quiet, reactive, reflective, as gently sad and funny as the silent clown he resembles when confronted with the bewilderments of Alka-Seltzer and aspirin. He drives with gear-screeching ineptitude, concentrates so carefully on the mechanics of eating a meal that he can't hold a conversation at the same time as knife and fork, and admits with a self-conscious grin to reading minds. Asked where he's from, in echo of The Brother from Another Planet (1984) he points upward to his home binary star of Rasalhague. His own face in a mirror startles him. Paired with Michael Nouri's Detective Tom Beck—tall, rugged, abrasive, softening only around his wife and child, a possessor of all the standard-issue masculinity that Gallagher with his translucent face and seal-black hair slips past like water—he looks fragile to the point of negligibility, but his gravity pulls the strangeness of the film through its thick veneer of action cop into the luminous, bittersweet ending, so satisfyingly more soft-spoken than all the splatter and stunts that built up to it. I would not have liked this movie if I had walked in on it as a child. If the ultraviolence hadn't taken me out, the extinguishing mechanics of the body-hopping would have terrified me for nights. But if I had contrived to sieve him out from the trauma, I would have imprinted on MacLachlan as instinctively as I did on Daryl Hannah in Splash (1984) and for much the same reasons, the slant ways of being human that made so much more sense to me than the normative behaviors of Tom Hanks and Nouri. The screenplay written by Jim Kouf and rewritten by director Jack Sholder finds its emotional strength in these existential moments; a night-shot set piece of a gunfight in a warehouse full of mannequins even manages to fuse the philosophical and the balls-to-the-wall as its aliens in human armature exchange fire among facsimiles of humanity. All of the actors who play the Altairean convincingly share the same awful body language of instant gratification and meat-suited concrete, but Claudia Christian deserved to play its final form. She wouldn't be confused for an instant with Ivanova in a dollar-sign G-string and a fake leopard coat. "I guess a career in the police didn't really prepare you for this, did it?"
If you like the playful, surrealism-edged nature films of Jean Painlevé and the music of Yo La Tengo, then the eight short subjects and the ambient improvisations of The Sounds of Science (2002) have got you covered, eddying in and out of the lives of sea urchins and crabs and jellyfish and sea horses with a quizzical, abstract and intimate—and occasionally anatomical—interest, educating and defamiliarizing at the same beautifully framed and lit time. Shot between 1929 and 1972, scored at the turn of the twenty-first century, the combination is chill, hallucinatory stuff. Nothing of our oceans looks like it belongs to our world and just as often in this rendering it doesn't sound like it, either.
Neptune Frost (2021) is as difficult to describe as it is imperative to recommend. Written by Saul Williams and co-directed with cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, it is a dream-quest of queer Afrofuturism in five languages, an anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-capitalist musical that feels like a defiant embrace as much as a liberating rejection, literalizing a rainbow of broken binaries in its harsh, sumptuous, stunning palette of black-light paint, mountain forests, and repurposed e-waste. The exuberant drift of the plot sounds polemic when summarized: in a half-step of a future painfully inseparable from our own, the love of a bereaved coltan miner and a genderfluid refugee ignites a hacktivist collective into digital revolution, status quo reprisal, and enduring resistance. On the screen, each river journey or political argument melts oneirically into the next through the flight of an orange-dashed dove or the glimmering rotation of a bicycle wheel, the narrative encrusts itself with connections like the circuits and glitter that weave themselves organically into the bodies of the miners and hackers and students who greet one another, "Unanimous goldmine." Played in gracile turn by Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja, Neptune undergoes a transforming renewal to be recognized as the Motherboard, the crucial, fabled interface between the liminal enclave of Digitaria and the internet as we know it. Bertrand Ninteretse's Matalusa shape-shifts within his own name, lending the collective the mondegreen handle of "Martyr Loser King" as they challenge and evade the brutal repressions of the Burundi-like police state known only as the Authority and the wider complacencies of the western hegemony for whose convenience resource-cursed citizens invisibly toil and die. Their hybrid mythologies glitch through the equally imagistic dialogue and lyrics as if from a text of unwritten revelations, the dreams shared like a beacon by Eliane Umuhire's Memory, Rebecca Uwamahoro's Elohel, and Trésor Niyongabo's Psychology, but whenever the density of basket-masked soldiers or visionary torrential data threatens to slog the film into an indigestible manifesto, a character flips the bird through the fourth wall or another drops the question, "Maybe you're asking yourself, WTF is this? Is it a poet's idea of a dream?" It has the double-speaking shimmer of one. But it's also a gritty, ethereal, polyphonic and polyrhythmic invitation to "hack into land rights and ownership . . . hack into sexuality," or at least witness what happens when Neptune in a dress of red silk and a crown of copper wire does, eyelids dotted like motion capture with gems of hi-vis paint. It's so good to see cyberpunk that knows more colors than a dead channel. Black is a spellbinding one.
Next year, who knows? At home or in the theater, round the clock or on our own time, we keep this tradition as old as our acquaintance in person. This year, a round dozen. This goldmine brought to you by my stellar backers at Patreon.
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I'm sure I've spoken of this many a time before, but of all movies, Mad Love makes me the happiest. I could recite swaths of the dialogue even now with fair accuracy. I have a level of emotional attachment to the Orlacs and Dr. Gogol that is hard to explain, given that they variously gaslight, stalk, exploit, and attempt to murder each other. (Well, the guys do. Yvonne is a brave and loyal cupcake who can do no wrong in my eyes. I love her eyes following the poker down out of camera range, and the contrast with her expressions when she's actually at risk of death later on.)
Your appreciation for Lorre in this is delightful to me. He's somehow hot and also a poor little murder gerbil. I think much of the fascinating quality is in his switching quickly between being in magnificent control of the situation and breaking down in front of the people he most wishes to impress.
Colin Clive is usually relegated to a side note in this film (it's difficult being the human romantic lead when the audience checked in for the monster), but his performance lives in my heart and the film wouldn't feel right with anyone else in that role. I enjoy his making Frankenstein's Monster arms towards Dr. Gogol when he panics.
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You should always speak multiple times of movies that make you happy.
Yvonne is a brave and loyal cupcake who can do no wrong in my eyes. I love her eyes following the poker down out of camera range, and the contrast with her expressions when she's actually at risk of death later on.
She's wonderful! And you're right about the very careful differences between Yvonne performing fear and Yvonne living through the real thing. Her stage persona never just hauls off and hits one of her torturers across the face.
Your appreciation for Lorre in this is delightful to me.
Aw. Thank you.
He's somehow hot and also a poor little murder gerbil. I think much of the fascinating quality is in his switching quickly between being in magnificent control of the situation and breaking down in front of the people he most wishes to impress.
First of all, if "murder gerbil" is yours, it's perfect and you should keep it. I am increasingly wary of praising characters or performances as "relatable," but one of the things that struck me during Mad Love is the way Lorre is playing romantic obsession at a fever pitch of fantastic creepiness and at the same time incarnating the kind of real, horrible, naked vulnerability that love and limerence can make people feel, the oblivious magical thinking and the dread of rejection like a universal referendum. He's unnervingly human and his performance of it doesn't belong anywhere but Grand Guignol.
Colin Clive is usually relegated to a side note in this film (it's difficult being the human romantic lead when the audience checked in for the monster), but his performance lives in my heart and the film wouldn't feel right with anyone else in that role. I enjoy his making Frankenstein's Monster arms towards Dr. Gogol when he panics.
It took seeing him as anyone other than Frankenstein, ironically, but I really like Colin Clive. Someday TCM or Criterion will run a transfer of Journey's End (1930) that doesn't look as though it has literally been through the wars.
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I never had any idea! I don't even think it had to do with kashrut. This was the same roommate, however, who greeted my first Friday on campus by telling me, "I thought you were Jewish," as I did my Greek homework instead of dressing for services, so we were probably always doomed. I got a much nicer person for the spring semester. We couldn't live in the same climate, but we liked one another at least.
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Thanks, as always, for your excellent movie reviews. Double thanks for the existence of Kanopy, which means I got to watch Jim Henson on demand. I particularly loved the photo-shutter click that accompanied his blinks. A little older, but he's definitely rocking a David Tennant look.
Unlike Disney and HBO, the Criterion Channel doesn't restrict DVD distribution -- I'm glad to be able to add Neptune Frost to my library holds.
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You're welcome! Thank you for letting me know.
Double thanks for the existence of Kanopy, which means I got to watch Jim Henson on demand. I particularly loved the photo-shutter click that accompanied his blinks. A little older, but he's definitely rocking a David Tennant look.
I'm so unused to seeing him as his own person rather than any one of his characters. I knew he must have been flexible because no one comes up with Muppets who can't get their body into some amazing shapes, but he has such mime-like physicality. It was wonderful to watch.
(I loved the soundtrack's mix of diegetic and not noises.)
Unlike Disney and HBO, the Criterion Channel doesn't restrict DVD distribution -- I'm glad to be able to add Neptune Frost to my library holds.
I'm delighted to hear it! Enjoy!
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... okay, I'll come back after I've read the rest of the entry, but I saw the subject line and was like !!!!
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Thank you! I loved it! I wanted to tell people!
The music is extraordinary. I love how it flows between languages. I kept playing clips and tracks off YouTube.
... okay, I'll come back after I've read the rest of the entry, but I saw the subject line and was like !!!!
I remember when you wrote about it. It seemed like the right time to see it.
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You're welcome! I believe it got on my radar through
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Dammit, I haven't even finished watching the original run of Twin Peaks!
(He should remember it fondly; he was great.)
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Thank you! It's on Kanopy if that makes it easier for you to see it.
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Thank you! I take that seriously.
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I support this course of action: it is entirely its own thing and exactly the sort of thing I would like to see its filmmakers get the chance to make more of. On which note, I appreciate you backing the project originally! It's a good thing to have in the world.
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Damn, Time Piece was amazing. I want to say Henson did a few live-action film bits for early Sesame Street (I think he did the Painter bits) but nothing could possibly catch what he did in his grown-up work.
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I am still floored they had gotten ahead of schedule. I am pretty sure every year we attended ran at least slightly behind, even when they lost or had to substitute or couldn't play a movie because the digital key expired, which I maintain is one of the stupidest things allowed to happen with film distribution these days.
The film was dumped and sank and as far as we know never had a DVD release. We may very well have been watching the only extant 35mm print, which was why I decided to hike down the hill to the theater at 4 in the morning.
I am glad you saw as much of it as you did. Movies that weird and rare are always worth catching in the wild.
That said: *cough*
Damn, Time Piece was amazing. I want to say Henson did a few live-action film bits for early Sesame Street (I think he did the Painter bits) but nothing could possibly catch what he did in his grown-up work.
It should have won its Oscar! The Tarzan/olive cut alone.