I'll remember that now
2018-02-21 03:27In defiance of snowy weather and sleepless health, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I celebrated our seventh 'Thon together for President's Day. That means almost twenty-four hours of science fiction film during which we did not, in pleasant contrast to some previous years, at any point end up in an ER. I fell comprehensively over as soon as we got home and then I had a doctor's appointment and watched figure skating with my mother and consequently I am just getting around to writing things up, but it was worth it.
I am a little sorry that we missed the traditional opener of Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953) just because it's fun to shout a countdown with several hundred other people and then eat Atomic Fireballs through seven minutes of mutually assured mayhem, but at least we made it in time for the majority of the first feature. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was one of my grandmother's favorite movies. I don't what she loved about it any more than I know why she once wrote that Chandu the Magician was her favorite radio show, but the first and heretofore only time I had seen it was with her, upstairs on the scratchy autumn-colored fold-out couch in the TV room of the house in Maine that my grandfather sold the winter after her death, and so it didn't matter that I find Steven Spielberg's science fiction ineluctably schmaltzy or that I have all these questions now about why it is that Melinda Dillon's homing pilgrimage to Devils Tower ends with the recovery of her son while Richard Dreyfuss gets to desert his family for a merkabah-style assumption into the unknown that François Truffaut's professional ufologist envies, as soon as the lights and the tones started flickering between two worlds I choked up and stayed that way through the credits, where the combined imaginations of Douglas Trumbull and Ralph McQuarrie make the illuminated banks and spires of the mothership look like something fragile and luminous of the deep sea, turning on currents of stars. I remembered being frightened by much of the movie the first time around and it does get surprising mileage out of the uncanny, the uneasy spaces between horror and wonder and the human instinct to laugh nervously at both of these things: Dreyfuss obsessively playing with his mashed potatoes is funny ha-ha, but Dreyfuss turning his living room into an ten-foot topological map of a geological formation he's never seen while his terrified wife flees with the kids is funny mostly as in farm, and yet there's nothing tongue-in-cheek about the transcendence of the finale, even when it includes the U.S. government initiating a national conspiracy for patronizing but ultimately benevolent interstellar reasons. It may be the only first contact blockbuster of my experience that doesn't end with a firefight, even accidentally. I was pleased to see that my Lance Henriksen-detecting skills function just fine even when he's barely got lines in his face at all.
I had seen bits and pieces of George Pal's The Time Machine (1960) on television for years; I am not sure I had ever seen it all the way through. It is almost certainly unfair of me to compare it with Things to Come (1936), since H.G. Wells himself wrote the earlier film and it is therefore dense with his characteristic combination of big ideas and hopeless didacticism; Pal's film is basically a planetary romance with time instead of space travel. It's brightly colored, it has youthful stars—Yvette Mimieux as the doe-eyed Weena, Rod Taylor as the square-chinned H. George Wells—and its mix of stop-motion and time-lapse photography for the time travel sequences holds up as many practical effects do, because they look like the world out of joint. Shadows swing like hinges, the stars wheel about the pole and the sun dips faster and faster across the sky until it blurs like the frame rate of film; cracks plink and spider across hothouse glass, flowers breathe like anemones, the house itself is a ruin of boards and dead ivy and then it's a stone chamber for millennia in a mountain's heart, a petrified wave of lava escaped by a desperate leap forward in time. The screenplay wisely drops the idea of class differentiation between the Eloi and the Morlocks and makes them merely the descendants of two different philosophies of post-apocalyptic survival, which in context of nuclear and biological warfare still doesn't explain the Eloi's passive, incurious lack of empathy even for one another (not a feature of herd animals, FYI) but maybe handwaves the Morlocks' blue skin and heinous arm hair. I broke my rule of trying not to shout too loudly at the screen when George on discovering that the Eloi have no civilization to speak of—no fire, no literacy, books only as crumbling, neglected decorations and even futuristic voice-recordings as irrelevant toys—sighed colonially that he was "terribly sorry I was angry with your people. I had no right to be, no more than if I had visited the island of Bali in my own time." (Me, against a backdrop of similar outcry: "Bali had fire!") There are much better lines in the script. George's attention to women's changing fashions is an elbow in the ribs until he remarks after a couple of decades that he's grown quite attached to the shop-window mannequin "because, like me, she didn't age." I like the thought experiment the ending offers the audience, voiced by Alan Young's David Filby as he peruses the missing spaces in his once again vanished friend's bookcase: "Which three books would you have taken?"
I used the Alien Deflecting Helmet Device Contest to say hello to David the projectionist. I spent a lot of the interstitial time of this marathon running back and forth between the balcony of the Somerville Theatre and the concessions counter where the staff kindly put up with me asking for cup after cup of boiling hot water. I felt like Beyond the Fringe.
I am afraid I don't have much to say about Nathan H. Juran's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) except that I always like Ray Harryhausen's creatures and I may not be the target audience for monster fights, because I feel that if a wicked magician has kept a dragon chained up as an unwilling security system in his cave, the heroes should not end up shooting the dragon with the giant crossbow they brought to the island to defend themselves against another monster entirely—especially if it just saved them from a cyclops—they should just free the dragon and let it eat the magician and live out its life unmolested, like the genie who becomes human and part of Sinbad's crew. It didn't ask to be weaponized. It had such a catlike, lashing tail. The brief, enchanted appearance of a nagini and the fight scene with a skeleton foreshadowing Jason and the Argonauts (1963) were very good and I did not feel as protectively toward either one of them. Kerwin Matthews as Sinbad kept looking just enough like Russ Tamblyn that I kept thinking how much more I would have enjoyed this movie with Russ Tamblyn. I would also have settled for Alexander Korda's The Thief of Bagdad (1940).
I can see why Corey Sevier's Haley (2016) was voted "Best of the Fest" in the shorts category: it compresses several subgenres and an entire movie's worth of history and action into twenty character-driven, often dialogue-sparse minutes and then goes one beat further than the expected resolution, chiming eerily but not unwelcomely with the ending of Close Encounters. The three acts are each like a fragment of a larger story, but they don't feel haphazard. I wouldn't have minded seeing some of its competitors, but I guess that's what the festival is for.
We took Harry O. Hoyt's The Lost World (1925) as our dinner break because it was not the German silent science fiction that we'd been promised and anyway there was no better space in the schedule; we got takeout from the affordable and delectable Kor Tor Mor, which furnished Rob with a variation on drunken noodles and me with a plate of hoi tod, and nipped back into the movie with blessedly minimal exposure to the blackface and plenty of time with Willis O'Brien's Brontosaurus, its sides breathing naturalistically as it rampaged through nighttime London. Especially after The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, I was pleased to see it make its escape into the water off Tower Bridge, where Wallace Beery looked sadly after its snaky wake and I hoped it became a fixture of local folklore, like the ravens at the Tower. So long as the dinosaur swims the Thames, England shall never be taken by sea. And its enemies shall be very confused. Jeff Rapsis accompanied, to deserved applause.
I loved and may have difficulty talking about Marjorie Prime (2017), adapted and directed by Michael Almereyda from Jordan Harrison's Pulitzer-nominated play of the same name. It is soft-spoken science fiction, gathering not so much to a slow burn as a haunting release; it's a classically elegant composition of variations on grief and memory, how people tell the stories of their lives and how others tell them in turn, spanning decades of screen time and encompassing events all but lost in family legend long before. Most of it takes place in a single house, its wide glass walls open to the light and the mists of rain or surf off the sea. There are four characters and none is exactly the same person (but who is?) from scene to scene. It's not cold at all. In a future only as far from our own as a transparent smartphone or commercial AI, it is still not possible to call back the dead, but their semblances can be restored in the form of a "prime," a hologram whose adaptable programming quickly takes a familiar face from uncanny valley to uncannier continuity, its quirks and faults and secrets filled in—or withheld—by the objective facts and subjective memories of the people who knew its original. Their major use seems to be as a kind of grief counseling, but the first prime we meet in the film has the intriguingly opposite task: he's supposed to give memory back. At eighty-five, Marjorie (the magnificent Lois Smith) is starting to suffer from dementia and knows it; she's just barely living alone, a stocky, still girlishly smiling former violinist with arthritis-thickened hands and dark-dyed hair she's finally letting grow out silver, but she has trouble organizing for the future or keeping track of the past, so that not only does this calm, dark, young likeness of her long-dead husband Walter (Jon Hamm) have to encourage her to eat, sometimes he has to remind her that he's talking about My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) because it was the movie they saw the night he proposed to her. As enigmatic as their interactions often sound from the outside, composed of mutual reminders and corrections shared in the poignant knowledge that all the while Walter is sharpening into the shape of his life, Marjorie is blurring away from hers, it's an easier relationship than the one she has with Tess (Geena Davis), the tensely obliging daughter who is not coping well with either the slow loss of a mother who was always graceful, infallible, intelligent, gorgeous or the sudden acquisition of a father younger than she ever knew him. Son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins) talks readily enough to the prime, in effect serving as an informal programmer for its always absorbing algorithms, but there's something between Marjorie and Walter that grits at him like the unhappiness of the woman he married, who he never wants to have to sit across from and patiently remind of who she was when she was alive. Everything in the film will unfold from these initial conditions, as intimately and incompletely as one life meshes with another. I've seen three of Almereyda's films now and loved all of them; he doesn't play games with his audience, but he seems to enjoy inviting them into the play of ideas. There are ghosts in the machine in Marjorie Prime and ghosts in the more traditional sense—old wounds, family secrets, absences that become as huge and defining as presences, perhaps even more unwieldy. There's no mystery to be solved, but there are questions that may never be answered. Smith originated the role of Marjorie in Los Angeles in 2014 and reprised it off-Broadway in 2015 and it is tempting to think of her acting here as a kind of prime of those live performances, the meticulously tailored digital version for those of us who never had a chance to converse with the real thing. But a film is a real thing, too, isn't it? I'm talking with it right now. It told me things. "I see," one character says to another, gently in the middle of a difficult conversation. "You want to be more human, too."
Some years ago I described Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) as "the get-it-right remake for everyone who couldn't figure out why James Whale kept wasting his time in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with poor, redeemable, conscience-racked Henry when the gloriously immoral Dr. Pretorius was right there, smirking at God and aspiring to the Devil, the acid-tongued epitome of mad science at its most knowingly—even hampered by the Hays Code—decadent and depraved." I stand by this comparison, but I want to make it clear that Ernest Thesiger is not the only thing I love about Bride of Frankenstein, even though he is very high on the list. There's Una O'Connor screaming, Boris Karloff's aching loneliness, and both iconic faces of Elsa Lanchester, the demurely ghoulish Mary Shelley and the Monster's lightning-coiffed mate, slender bones in surgical mummy-wrap ticking her head at vigilant, raptorial angles, hissing like a swan as the Monster grasps the lever that will blow all of them (even the ghost of Colin Clive from an earlier cut) back to the dead. Kenneth Strickfaden's electro-alchemical laboratory equipment, fittingly resurrected for Young Frankenstein (1974). I still find Frankenstein an unsympathetic wet blanket, but blame it less on Clive now that I've seen him in roles where he's given more to do than wring his hands and succumb. But who wouldn't succumb to the irresistible Pretorius, corpse-stitching and bitching, merrily drinking with the dead? The queerness in this movie really does go to eleven, but I always forget the Christian imagery that comes and goes in the hunting of the Monster and his all too fragile respite of love in the hermit's hut. I wrote this movie a poem once, is what you need to know. It's a transformative work and it calls for response in kind. I might not have gone as full Weimar with it as she did, but I understand exactly why Elizabeth Hand wrote Pandora's Bride (2007). She doesn't belong dead.
Neither Rob nor I ever really wanted to see David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975) again in our lives, even if it was the sole print of the night, but fortunately some brilliant festival volunteer who didn't feel like watching venereal parasites either had counter-programmed Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998) in the microcinema, so we spent the same time slot rewardingly watching the neo-noir love child of Edward Hopper and Gnosticism instead. It's one of my favorite movies. I can't quite say that it wears its learning lightly, but it wears it joyously; with its obsessive motif of spirals and its existential shout-outs from Plato to PKD, Dark City remains one of the best pieces of metafiction I have ever seen that doesn't shrug into nihilism or disappear up its own self-consciousness. It is generous with its characters, because it knows they are all people; it watches them become aware of themselves as protagonists instead of moving parts, consistently transgressing the tropes of their lives however terrifying the alternatives. A serial killer, a straying wife, a dogged cop, a sinister scientist, they investigate instead of sexily expiring, refuse to kill just because circumstances say they should, hide the truth for safekeeping in headful of lies, and choose the wonder of knowing the world even if they die for it. All together, they break their story and they don't put it back together, because it was never theirs to begin with. The tragedy of the string-puller who finally steps onto the stage is that they confine themselves to a character, the pre-programmed fiction instead of the unpredictable reality. I was shown the film years ago by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greygirlbeast and I always associate it with Michael Cisco, partly because it feels like one of his stories, partly because he was the first person to recommend me Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), but perhaps most inevitably because Rufus Sewell really looks like him; it struck me this time around that Sewell as he races through his nameless nighttime city also looks not unlike Wittgenstein, which may be a coincidence of hair, intensity, and trenchcoat, but I can't rule it out. I mean, part of this plot is Bertrand Russell. The rest is Sewell, Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Richard O'Brien, goldfish, architecture, stars. For all its expressionist style, it's neo-noir that knows the core of its genre: it is all about the unknown, unstable world.
I saw Night of the Living Dead (1968) for the first time this past April at Lunacon, screened after midnight on 16 mm. It followed a condensed version of House of Frankenstein (1944); there was an introduction by Edward X. Young doing his best Zacherley and it played at first to the usual audience noise, but in the face of the low-budget, black-and-white, strangely intimate—like eavesdropping on someone else's nightmare, initially Barbra's, ultimately Ben's—horror flickering out onscreen, the audience fell silent and talked only during the reel changes, in hushed voices as if the "things" that scratched and butted against the barricaded windows of the farmhouse could hear us on the other side of a conference room door. The movie ended, the audience was stunned if they hadn't seen the ending before and stunned all over again if they had, and conversation only started to pick up when the lights were flipped on and somebody opened the door, reconnecting ghoul-gnawed, police-ridden 1968 to the contemporary, I want to write waking (but not so different) world. That was such a perfect cinematic experience that I did not feel like rewatching even an anniversary DCP at the 'Thon with people who might holler at the screen, so I went up to the projection booth and talked science fiction with David. I love the film, though. I hadn't expected to, but I hadn't known it was such outsider art—cast doubling as crew, ghouls performed by friends, neighbors, and various Pittsburghers whose financial or practical contributions to the production were repaid with the chance to shamble and moan and eat internal organs onscreen. The racial angle has really not become less relevant in the last fifty years at all.
"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1963) is not my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone, but unlike the equally famous "Time Enough at Last" I don't want to kill it with fire. It has a tight script by Richard Matheson, matchingly taut direction by Richard Donner, and a performance by William Shatner that goes over the top and should, because the plot is one of the simplest and worst manifestations of the Twilight Zone: there is something wrong with the world and you're the only one who knows it. The gremlin is a goofy design, but it shouldn't be tearing up the wing of a plane—it shouldn't be on the wing of a plane at all—it shouldn't even exist—and that makes it scary, because to Shatner it looks like his mind giving way and his wife thinks the same thing when he tries to describe it and he's already had a breakdown once. It's terrible if it's real and it's terrible if it's not. That's the Twilight Zone.
The best thing I can say about Edward Bernds' World Without End (1956) is that it first paired Rod Taylor with time travel and I can now say that I've seen what a miniskirt would look like with fins. Otherwise it criminally wastes its B-pulp premise of four red-blooded American astronauts catapulted into a post-apocalyptic future where the human race is dying out for want of hunky men—when it does go for the id, what we get is the NRA dream of blowing away the savage hordes with bazookas and restoring the glories of humanity by teaching everyone English, an especially egregious piece of cultural imperialism since there is a grand total of two languages left on Earth at this point. As far as cheap but heartfelt effects go, I respect Taylor's willingness to wrestle with a mammoth, extremely fake "mutate" spider almost visibly dropped onto him by some offscreen stagehand. My emotional investment sadly went out with the bazooka.
I had not seen the original, black-and-white, non-musical The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) since I was very small. It's delightful. Roger Corman legendarily shot it in two days on the leftover sets of his previous film; it has a budget like its cast and crew scrounged under the couch cushions and everyone appears to be half-improvising and having the time of their lives, Jonathan Haze incarnating nebbishkeit as the hapless Seymour, Mel Welles expostulating himself into an ulcer as Skid Row flower king Gravis Mushnick, Jackie Joseph's Audrey the world's most adorable head cold. Dick Miller wanders genially through the action, munching on carnations with a dash of salt ("I've got to get home—my wife's making gardenias for dinner"). Jack Nicholson's giggling dental masochist steals his scenes to the point that Rob overheard 'Thon-goers misremembering him as the protagonist. The plot is funny even without songs, ricocheting kookily from petulant carnivorous plants to hypochondriac domestic comedy to police procedural parody so deadpan it sneaks up behind seriousness and then kicks it in the knees. It has kind of a non-ending, but the musical never solved that problem, either. The chase scene with tires and toilets is sublimely stupid.
Somewhere around the midpoint of Yellow Submarine (1968), as the screen continued to fill with pop-art monsters and surrealist jokes, I said to Rob, "When I saw Across the Universe, I didn't realize that 'weirdest Beatles jukebox musical' was a competition." I don't think Taymor won, either. The animated film is one of the most psychedelic things I have ever seen. Terry Gilliam really owes art director Heinz Edelmann and his creative team. I got very attached to the furry, puttering Nowhere Man, which I suppose is not a shocking reaction to an impressively useless polymath: "Eminent physicist, polyglot classicist, prize-winning botanist, hard-biting satirist, talented pianist—good dentist, too" who explains his penchant for Gilbertian rhyme with the sheepish "If I spoke prose, you'd all find out I don't know what I talk about!" I am not sure I had heard all of the songs on the soundtrack before. Various bits of it have been rotating on and off in my head since.
We bailed on Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness (1992): it was eight in the morning, we had both seen it recently, and we needed to feed the cats. We got breakfast from Davis Square Donuts & Bagels and caught a bus home, blinking in the very bright sunlight. The cats set up a great protestation of abandonment. I listened some to the Beatles. We got back to the theater in time for the third-act rampage of Nathan H. Juran's 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), in which the city is Rome and the creature is a sort of enormous fish-lizard designed and animated by Ray Harryhausen. I approved of the inclusion of an elephant, even if it wasn't actually representing Carthage.
And so we were in our seats and conscious for the final movie of the marathon, although it would probably have kicked us awake if we weren't. I have not yet seen The Last Jedi (2017), but on the strength of Rian Johnson's non-Star Wars work I feel confident saying that he likes intricately faceted mash-ups and tropes twisted for unexpected emotion and Looper (2012) is no exception. The plot is a stylishly brutal fusion of temporal paradox and splatterpunk with the deep structure of a Western, positing a decayed near future in which time travel has become the preserve of criminal combines who utilize it as a hands-free form of assassination: they have their victims whacked thirty years in the past, blown away at close range by a specialized class of contract killers known as "loopers" who take their payment in silver bars and live like the fast, cheap, flashy kings of their grimy city until the day a bound, hooded victim drops out of thin air loaded with a payoff in gold, signaling that the contract is up and it's time to "close the loop." This final hit is, of course, the looper's future self: a precaution against snitches. As Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Joe concedes, "This job doesn't tend to attract the most forward-thinking people." He should know, with his penchant for eyedropping drugs and getting sentimental over hookers. The best-laid plans of dystopian syndicates and meatheaded young hoods gang aft et cetera, and all too soon Joe's on the run from the cardinal sin of failing to X his older self. In his defense, his older self is played by Bruce Willis and has a punch like a kiss from a freight train. But he also has an idea—which, this being our future, he may well have gotten from watching The Terminator (1984)—about preventing the rise of the mysterious, devastating crime lord known as the Rainmaker with a well-aimed shot of infanticide, and while at first the younger Joe couldn't care less about saving kids or altering timelines just so long as he gets the chance to close his loop before his employer's "gatmen" find him, a fateful encounter in a cane field with shotgun-toting single mother Sara (Emily Blunt) and her troubled young son (Pierre Gagnon) starts to change him, several decades ahead of schedule but just as inexorably as older Joe warned when he told his story of "this woman who saved your worthless life." Maybe there's no surprise in where Looper ends, but it doesn't take every expected route to get there and it stops at some striking places along the way. Johnson's screenplay mines the sympathetic magic of the loop for both reflection and pathos (older Joe can remember anything younger Joe learns, which elides the need for infodumps but also begins to fog older Joe's memories of his lost wife in Shanghai with younger Joe's growing relationship with Sara) and stomach-clenching nightmare fuel (an escaped future looper is reduced to a pile of stumps and scars as his younger self is vivisected in the present day, the syndicate's visceral deterrent against double-cross), but it also plays fair with the psychodrama, making out neither Joe as villain or hero but two different ages, for better and worse, of the same man. Genre-wise, it pulls off a trick of narration that almost never works for me and gives what I can only describe as an extremely convoluted finger to the woman in the refrigerator. I don't know how many times I'd rewatch it, but it certainly sent the audience out on an adrenaline high.
Seven years makes a tradition. Every year is different. I regret that we did not manage our usual post-marathon lunch at Noor, but am delighted we avoided all major health issues. The cats curled up with us during the nap phase. I still have the Beatles stuck in my head. I think I just really like Michael Almereyda. This celebration brought to you by my perennial backers at Patreon.
spatch and I celebrated our seventh 'Thon together for President's Day. That means almost twenty-four hours of science fiction film during which we did not, in pleasant contrast to some previous years, at any point end up in an ER. I fell comprehensively over as soon as we got home and then I had a doctor's appointment and watched figure skating with my mother and consequently I am just getting around to writing things up, but it was worth it.I am a little sorry that we missed the traditional opener of Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953) just because it's fun to shout a countdown with several hundred other people and then eat Atomic Fireballs through seven minutes of mutually assured mayhem, but at least we made it in time for the majority of the first feature. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was one of my grandmother's favorite movies. I don't what she loved about it any more than I know why she once wrote that Chandu the Magician was her favorite radio show, but the first and heretofore only time I had seen it was with her, upstairs on the scratchy autumn-colored fold-out couch in the TV room of the house in Maine that my grandfather sold the winter after her death, and so it didn't matter that I find Steven Spielberg's science fiction ineluctably schmaltzy or that I have all these questions now about why it is that Melinda Dillon's homing pilgrimage to Devils Tower ends with the recovery of her son while Richard Dreyfuss gets to desert his family for a merkabah-style assumption into the unknown that François Truffaut's professional ufologist envies, as soon as the lights and the tones started flickering between two worlds I choked up and stayed that way through the credits, where the combined imaginations of Douglas Trumbull and Ralph McQuarrie make the illuminated banks and spires of the mothership look like something fragile and luminous of the deep sea, turning on currents of stars. I remembered being frightened by much of the movie the first time around and it does get surprising mileage out of the uncanny, the uneasy spaces between horror and wonder and the human instinct to laugh nervously at both of these things: Dreyfuss obsessively playing with his mashed potatoes is funny ha-ha, but Dreyfuss turning his living room into an ten-foot topological map of a geological formation he's never seen while his terrified wife flees with the kids is funny mostly as in farm, and yet there's nothing tongue-in-cheek about the transcendence of the finale, even when it includes the U.S. government initiating a national conspiracy for patronizing but ultimately benevolent interstellar reasons. It may be the only first contact blockbuster of my experience that doesn't end with a firefight, even accidentally. I was pleased to see that my Lance Henriksen-detecting skills function just fine even when he's barely got lines in his face at all.
I had seen bits and pieces of George Pal's The Time Machine (1960) on television for years; I am not sure I had ever seen it all the way through. It is almost certainly unfair of me to compare it with Things to Come (1936), since H.G. Wells himself wrote the earlier film and it is therefore dense with his characteristic combination of big ideas and hopeless didacticism; Pal's film is basically a planetary romance with time instead of space travel. It's brightly colored, it has youthful stars—Yvette Mimieux as the doe-eyed Weena, Rod Taylor as the square-chinned H. George Wells—and its mix of stop-motion and time-lapse photography for the time travel sequences holds up as many practical effects do, because they look like the world out of joint. Shadows swing like hinges, the stars wheel about the pole and the sun dips faster and faster across the sky until it blurs like the frame rate of film; cracks plink and spider across hothouse glass, flowers breathe like anemones, the house itself is a ruin of boards and dead ivy and then it's a stone chamber for millennia in a mountain's heart, a petrified wave of lava escaped by a desperate leap forward in time. The screenplay wisely drops the idea of class differentiation between the Eloi and the Morlocks and makes them merely the descendants of two different philosophies of post-apocalyptic survival, which in context of nuclear and biological warfare still doesn't explain the Eloi's passive, incurious lack of empathy even for one another (not a feature of herd animals, FYI) but maybe handwaves the Morlocks' blue skin and heinous arm hair. I broke my rule of trying not to shout too loudly at the screen when George on discovering that the Eloi have no civilization to speak of—no fire, no literacy, books only as crumbling, neglected decorations and even futuristic voice-recordings as irrelevant toys—sighed colonially that he was "terribly sorry I was angry with your people. I had no right to be, no more than if I had visited the island of Bali in my own time." (Me, against a backdrop of similar outcry: "Bali had fire!") There are much better lines in the script. George's attention to women's changing fashions is an elbow in the ribs until he remarks after a couple of decades that he's grown quite attached to the shop-window mannequin "because, like me, she didn't age." I like the thought experiment the ending offers the audience, voiced by Alan Young's David Filby as he peruses the missing spaces in his once again vanished friend's bookcase: "Which three books would you have taken?"
I used the Alien Deflecting Helmet Device Contest to say hello to David the projectionist. I spent a lot of the interstitial time of this marathon running back and forth between the balcony of the Somerville Theatre and the concessions counter where the staff kindly put up with me asking for cup after cup of boiling hot water. I felt like Beyond the Fringe.
I am afraid I don't have much to say about Nathan H. Juran's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) except that I always like Ray Harryhausen's creatures and I may not be the target audience for monster fights, because I feel that if a wicked magician has kept a dragon chained up as an unwilling security system in his cave, the heroes should not end up shooting the dragon with the giant crossbow they brought to the island to defend themselves against another monster entirely—especially if it just saved them from a cyclops—they should just free the dragon and let it eat the magician and live out its life unmolested, like the genie who becomes human and part of Sinbad's crew. It didn't ask to be weaponized. It had such a catlike, lashing tail. The brief, enchanted appearance of a nagini and the fight scene with a skeleton foreshadowing Jason and the Argonauts (1963) were very good and I did not feel as protectively toward either one of them. Kerwin Matthews as Sinbad kept looking just enough like Russ Tamblyn that I kept thinking how much more I would have enjoyed this movie with Russ Tamblyn. I would also have settled for Alexander Korda's The Thief of Bagdad (1940).
I can see why Corey Sevier's Haley (2016) was voted "Best of the Fest" in the shorts category: it compresses several subgenres and an entire movie's worth of history and action into twenty character-driven, often dialogue-sparse minutes and then goes one beat further than the expected resolution, chiming eerily but not unwelcomely with the ending of Close Encounters. The three acts are each like a fragment of a larger story, but they don't feel haphazard. I wouldn't have minded seeing some of its competitors, but I guess that's what the festival is for.
We took Harry O. Hoyt's The Lost World (1925) as our dinner break because it was not the German silent science fiction that we'd been promised and anyway there was no better space in the schedule; we got takeout from the affordable and delectable Kor Tor Mor, which furnished Rob with a variation on drunken noodles and me with a plate of hoi tod, and nipped back into the movie with blessedly minimal exposure to the blackface and plenty of time with Willis O'Brien's Brontosaurus, its sides breathing naturalistically as it rampaged through nighttime London. Especially after The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, I was pleased to see it make its escape into the water off Tower Bridge, where Wallace Beery looked sadly after its snaky wake and I hoped it became a fixture of local folklore, like the ravens at the Tower. So long as the dinosaur swims the Thames, England shall never be taken by sea. And its enemies shall be very confused. Jeff Rapsis accompanied, to deserved applause.
I loved and may have difficulty talking about Marjorie Prime (2017), adapted and directed by Michael Almereyda from Jordan Harrison's Pulitzer-nominated play of the same name. It is soft-spoken science fiction, gathering not so much to a slow burn as a haunting release; it's a classically elegant composition of variations on grief and memory, how people tell the stories of their lives and how others tell them in turn, spanning decades of screen time and encompassing events all but lost in family legend long before. Most of it takes place in a single house, its wide glass walls open to the light and the mists of rain or surf off the sea. There are four characters and none is exactly the same person (but who is?) from scene to scene. It's not cold at all. In a future only as far from our own as a transparent smartphone or commercial AI, it is still not possible to call back the dead, but their semblances can be restored in the form of a "prime," a hologram whose adaptable programming quickly takes a familiar face from uncanny valley to uncannier continuity, its quirks and faults and secrets filled in—or withheld—by the objective facts and subjective memories of the people who knew its original. Their major use seems to be as a kind of grief counseling, but the first prime we meet in the film has the intriguingly opposite task: he's supposed to give memory back. At eighty-five, Marjorie (the magnificent Lois Smith) is starting to suffer from dementia and knows it; she's just barely living alone, a stocky, still girlishly smiling former violinist with arthritis-thickened hands and dark-dyed hair she's finally letting grow out silver, but she has trouble organizing for the future or keeping track of the past, so that not only does this calm, dark, young likeness of her long-dead husband Walter (Jon Hamm) have to encourage her to eat, sometimes he has to remind her that he's talking about My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) because it was the movie they saw the night he proposed to her. As enigmatic as their interactions often sound from the outside, composed of mutual reminders and corrections shared in the poignant knowledge that all the while Walter is sharpening into the shape of his life, Marjorie is blurring away from hers, it's an easier relationship than the one she has with Tess (Geena Davis), the tensely obliging daughter who is not coping well with either the slow loss of a mother who was always graceful, infallible, intelligent, gorgeous or the sudden acquisition of a father younger than she ever knew him. Son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins) talks readily enough to the prime, in effect serving as an informal programmer for its always absorbing algorithms, but there's something between Marjorie and Walter that grits at him like the unhappiness of the woman he married, who he never wants to have to sit across from and patiently remind of who she was when she was alive. Everything in the film will unfold from these initial conditions, as intimately and incompletely as one life meshes with another. I've seen three of Almereyda's films now and loved all of them; he doesn't play games with his audience, but he seems to enjoy inviting them into the play of ideas. There are ghosts in the machine in Marjorie Prime and ghosts in the more traditional sense—old wounds, family secrets, absences that become as huge and defining as presences, perhaps even more unwieldy. There's no mystery to be solved, but there are questions that may never be answered. Smith originated the role of Marjorie in Los Angeles in 2014 and reprised it off-Broadway in 2015 and it is tempting to think of her acting here as a kind of prime of those live performances, the meticulously tailored digital version for those of us who never had a chance to converse with the real thing. But a film is a real thing, too, isn't it? I'm talking with it right now. It told me things. "I see," one character says to another, gently in the middle of a difficult conversation. "You want to be more human, too."
Some years ago I described Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) as "the get-it-right remake for everyone who couldn't figure out why James Whale kept wasting his time in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with poor, redeemable, conscience-racked Henry when the gloriously immoral Dr. Pretorius was right there, smirking at God and aspiring to the Devil, the acid-tongued epitome of mad science at its most knowingly—even hampered by the Hays Code—decadent and depraved." I stand by this comparison, but I want to make it clear that Ernest Thesiger is not the only thing I love about Bride of Frankenstein, even though he is very high on the list. There's Una O'Connor screaming, Boris Karloff's aching loneliness, and both iconic faces of Elsa Lanchester, the demurely ghoulish Mary Shelley and the Monster's lightning-coiffed mate, slender bones in surgical mummy-wrap ticking her head at vigilant, raptorial angles, hissing like a swan as the Monster grasps the lever that will blow all of them (even the ghost of Colin Clive from an earlier cut) back to the dead. Kenneth Strickfaden's electro-alchemical laboratory equipment, fittingly resurrected for Young Frankenstein (1974). I still find Frankenstein an unsympathetic wet blanket, but blame it less on Clive now that I've seen him in roles where he's given more to do than wring his hands and succumb. But who wouldn't succumb to the irresistible Pretorius, corpse-stitching and bitching, merrily drinking with the dead? The queerness in this movie really does go to eleven, but I always forget the Christian imagery that comes and goes in the hunting of the Monster and his all too fragile respite of love in the hermit's hut. I wrote this movie a poem once, is what you need to know. It's a transformative work and it calls for response in kind. I might not have gone as full Weimar with it as she did, but I understand exactly why Elizabeth Hand wrote Pandora's Bride (2007). She doesn't belong dead.
Neither Rob nor I ever really wanted to see David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975) again in our lives, even if it was the sole print of the night, but fortunately some brilliant festival volunteer who didn't feel like watching venereal parasites either had counter-programmed Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998) in the microcinema, so we spent the same time slot rewardingly watching the neo-noir love child of Edward Hopper and Gnosticism instead. It's one of my favorite movies. I can't quite say that it wears its learning lightly, but it wears it joyously; with its obsessive motif of spirals and its existential shout-outs from Plato to PKD, Dark City remains one of the best pieces of metafiction I have ever seen that doesn't shrug into nihilism or disappear up its own self-consciousness. It is generous with its characters, because it knows they are all people; it watches them become aware of themselves as protagonists instead of moving parts, consistently transgressing the tropes of their lives however terrifying the alternatives. A serial killer, a straying wife, a dogged cop, a sinister scientist, they investigate instead of sexily expiring, refuse to kill just because circumstances say they should, hide the truth for safekeeping in headful of lies, and choose the wonder of knowing the world even if they die for it. All together, they break their story and they don't put it back together, because it was never theirs to begin with. The tragedy of the string-puller who finally steps onto the stage is that they confine themselves to a character, the pre-programmed fiction instead of the unpredictable reality. I was shown the film years ago by
greygirlbeast and I always associate it with Michael Cisco, partly because it feels like one of his stories, partly because he was the first person to recommend me Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), but perhaps most inevitably because Rufus Sewell really looks like him; it struck me this time around that Sewell as he races through his nameless nighttime city also looks not unlike Wittgenstein, which may be a coincidence of hair, intensity, and trenchcoat, but I can't rule it out. I mean, part of this plot is Bertrand Russell. The rest is Sewell, Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Richard O'Brien, goldfish, architecture, stars. For all its expressionist style, it's neo-noir that knows the core of its genre: it is all about the unknown, unstable world.I saw Night of the Living Dead (1968) for the first time this past April at Lunacon, screened after midnight on 16 mm. It followed a condensed version of House of Frankenstein (1944); there was an introduction by Edward X. Young doing his best Zacherley and it played at first to the usual audience noise, but in the face of the low-budget, black-and-white, strangely intimate—like eavesdropping on someone else's nightmare, initially Barbra's, ultimately Ben's—horror flickering out onscreen, the audience fell silent and talked only during the reel changes, in hushed voices as if the "things" that scratched and butted against the barricaded windows of the farmhouse could hear us on the other side of a conference room door. The movie ended, the audience was stunned if they hadn't seen the ending before and stunned all over again if they had, and conversation only started to pick up when the lights were flipped on and somebody opened the door, reconnecting ghoul-gnawed, police-ridden 1968 to the contemporary, I want to write waking (but not so different) world. That was such a perfect cinematic experience that I did not feel like rewatching even an anniversary DCP at the 'Thon with people who might holler at the screen, so I went up to the projection booth and talked science fiction with David. I love the film, though. I hadn't expected to, but I hadn't known it was such outsider art—cast doubling as crew, ghouls performed by friends, neighbors, and various Pittsburghers whose financial or practical contributions to the production were repaid with the chance to shamble and moan and eat internal organs onscreen. The racial angle has really not become less relevant in the last fifty years at all.
"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1963) is not my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone, but unlike the equally famous "Time Enough at Last" I don't want to kill it with fire. It has a tight script by Richard Matheson, matchingly taut direction by Richard Donner, and a performance by William Shatner that goes over the top and should, because the plot is one of the simplest and worst manifestations of the Twilight Zone: there is something wrong with the world and you're the only one who knows it. The gremlin is a goofy design, but it shouldn't be tearing up the wing of a plane—it shouldn't be on the wing of a plane at all—it shouldn't even exist—and that makes it scary, because to Shatner it looks like his mind giving way and his wife thinks the same thing when he tries to describe it and he's already had a breakdown once. It's terrible if it's real and it's terrible if it's not. That's the Twilight Zone.
The best thing I can say about Edward Bernds' World Without End (1956) is that it first paired Rod Taylor with time travel and I can now say that I've seen what a miniskirt would look like with fins. Otherwise it criminally wastes its B-pulp premise of four red-blooded American astronauts catapulted into a post-apocalyptic future where the human race is dying out for want of hunky men—when it does go for the id, what we get is the NRA dream of blowing away the savage hordes with bazookas and restoring the glories of humanity by teaching everyone English, an especially egregious piece of cultural imperialism since there is a grand total of two languages left on Earth at this point. As far as cheap but heartfelt effects go, I respect Taylor's willingness to wrestle with a mammoth, extremely fake "mutate" spider almost visibly dropped onto him by some offscreen stagehand. My emotional investment sadly went out with the bazooka.
I had not seen the original, black-and-white, non-musical The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) since I was very small. It's delightful. Roger Corman legendarily shot it in two days on the leftover sets of his previous film; it has a budget like its cast and crew scrounged under the couch cushions and everyone appears to be half-improvising and having the time of their lives, Jonathan Haze incarnating nebbishkeit as the hapless Seymour, Mel Welles expostulating himself into an ulcer as Skid Row flower king Gravis Mushnick, Jackie Joseph's Audrey the world's most adorable head cold. Dick Miller wanders genially through the action, munching on carnations with a dash of salt ("I've got to get home—my wife's making gardenias for dinner"). Jack Nicholson's giggling dental masochist steals his scenes to the point that Rob overheard 'Thon-goers misremembering him as the protagonist. The plot is funny even without songs, ricocheting kookily from petulant carnivorous plants to hypochondriac domestic comedy to police procedural parody so deadpan it sneaks up behind seriousness and then kicks it in the knees. It has kind of a non-ending, but the musical never solved that problem, either. The chase scene with tires and toilets is sublimely stupid.
Somewhere around the midpoint of Yellow Submarine (1968), as the screen continued to fill with pop-art monsters and surrealist jokes, I said to Rob, "When I saw Across the Universe, I didn't realize that 'weirdest Beatles jukebox musical' was a competition." I don't think Taymor won, either. The animated film is one of the most psychedelic things I have ever seen. Terry Gilliam really owes art director Heinz Edelmann and his creative team. I got very attached to the furry, puttering Nowhere Man, which I suppose is not a shocking reaction to an impressively useless polymath: "Eminent physicist, polyglot classicist, prize-winning botanist, hard-biting satirist, talented pianist—good dentist, too" who explains his penchant for Gilbertian rhyme with the sheepish "If I spoke prose, you'd all find out I don't know what I talk about!" I am not sure I had heard all of the songs on the soundtrack before. Various bits of it have been rotating on and off in my head since.
We bailed on Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness (1992): it was eight in the morning, we had both seen it recently, and we needed to feed the cats. We got breakfast from Davis Square Donuts & Bagels and caught a bus home, blinking in the very bright sunlight. The cats set up a great protestation of abandonment. I listened some to the Beatles. We got back to the theater in time for the third-act rampage of Nathan H. Juran's 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), in which the city is Rome and the creature is a sort of enormous fish-lizard designed and animated by Ray Harryhausen. I approved of the inclusion of an elephant, even if it wasn't actually representing Carthage.
And so we were in our seats and conscious for the final movie of the marathon, although it would probably have kicked us awake if we weren't. I have not yet seen The Last Jedi (2017), but on the strength of Rian Johnson's non-Star Wars work I feel confident saying that he likes intricately faceted mash-ups and tropes twisted for unexpected emotion and Looper (2012) is no exception. The plot is a stylishly brutal fusion of temporal paradox and splatterpunk with the deep structure of a Western, positing a decayed near future in which time travel has become the preserve of criminal combines who utilize it as a hands-free form of assassination: they have their victims whacked thirty years in the past, blown away at close range by a specialized class of contract killers known as "loopers" who take their payment in silver bars and live like the fast, cheap, flashy kings of their grimy city until the day a bound, hooded victim drops out of thin air loaded with a payoff in gold, signaling that the contract is up and it's time to "close the loop." This final hit is, of course, the looper's future self: a precaution against snitches. As Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Joe concedes, "This job doesn't tend to attract the most forward-thinking people." He should know, with his penchant for eyedropping drugs and getting sentimental over hookers. The best-laid plans of dystopian syndicates and meatheaded young hoods gang aft et cetera, and all too soon Joe's on the run from the cardinal sin of failing to X his older self. In his defense, his older self is played by Bruce Willis and has a punch like a kiss from a freight train. But he also has an idea—which, this being our future, he may well have gotten from watching The Terminator (1984)—about preventing the rise of the mysterious, devastating crime lord known as the Rainmaker with a well-aimed shot of infanticide, and while at first the younger Joe couldn't care less about saving kids or altering timelines just so long as he gets the chance to close his loop before his employer's "gatmen" find him, a fateful encounter in a cane field with shotgun-toting single mother Sara (Emily Blunt) and her troubled young son (Pierre Gagnon) starts to change him, several decades ahead of schedule but just as inexorably as older Joe warned when he told his story of "this woman who saved your worthless life." Maybe there's no surprise in where Looper ends, but it doesn't take every expected route to get there and it stops at some striking places along the way. Johnson's screenplay mines the sympathetic magic of the loop for both reflection and pathos (older Joe can remember anything younger Joe learns, which elides the need for infodumps but also begins to fog older Joe's memories of his lost wife in Shanghai with younger Joe's growing relationship with Sara) and stomach-clenching nightmare fuel (an escaped future looper is reduced to a pile of stumps and scars as his younger self is vivisected in the present day, the syndicate's visceral deterrent against double-cross), but it also plays fair with the psychodrama, making out neither Joe as villain or hero but two different ages, for better and worse, of the same man. Genre-wise, it pulls off a trick of narration that almost never works for me and gives what I can only describe as an extremely convoluted finger to the woman in the refrigerator. I don't know how many times I'd rewatch it, but it certainly sent the audience out on an adrenaline high.
Seven years makes a tradition. Every year is different. I regret that we did not manage our usual post-marathon lunch at Noor, but am delighted we avoided all major health issues. The cats curled up with us during the nap phase. I still have the Beatles stuck in my head. I think I just really like Michael Almereyda. This celebration brought to you by my perennial backers at Patreon.
