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Believe me, I'd go out there myself if I wasn't so profoundly stoned
The house internet is still a bit of a problem. Written around one-thirty. Sigh.
I have not slept in over twenty-nine hours. The sci-fi film marathon was a success.
(I had expected to be asleep by now, but I sort of woke up on the bus ride home. I suppose it's useful to know I can be insomniac in the middle of the day for a change. These are still not reviews: I'm not that awake.)
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derspatchel met me at the theater. We sat in the balcony. There were a lot of other people there.
I did not want my hour and three-quarters back after Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), but neither would I evangelize you to seek it out except insofar as Andy Serkis is always a pleasure to watch, even when you can't see him. The plot unfortunately depends on some major leaps of stupidity, like nobody in a research lab which regularly works with gene-modifying viruses thinking to check on the lab tech who hasn't even called in to work in two days. The sequences in the redwood forest made me miss summer trees.
There are ways in which its science fiction is the standard military-industrial-pulls-shenanigans plot of the '80's, and I am not sure that I would chosen to wind it up with Dante (or maybe T.S. Eliot), but I had only heard of Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (1983) before I saw it on the program and I enjoyed it immensely. The sensory-recording technology that at first looks like just another near-future MacGuffin is so full of magnetic tape and clunky consoles and green-lettered screens, I kept having flashbacks to the Boston Museum of Science and the sun porch of the house I grew up in, where my father built all our computers until I was in high school. It is always nice to see Christopher Walken in a lead role. Whoever got to program the assembly line that goes haywire must have had the time of their life.
I missed the first fifteen minutes of War of the Satellites (1958) first because I was buying a lemon ginger tea from Mr. Crepe and then because I was buying a lemon ginger tea from Mr. Crepe to replace the one that was accidentally kicked over by a fellow marathoner and spilled all over my jacket and backpack before I had a chance to drink it, but it was Roger Corman; the complexity of the plot is not the point. The special effects were gorgeously terrible—I was particularly fond of the sudden mid-air stop of three rendezvousing rockets, missing only the sound effect of screeching to a halt to be interchangeable with a Warner Bros. cartoon. Possibly it's a side effect of not casting from the A-list, but all of his actors had interesting faces.
Enthiran (2010) is exactly as indescribable and spectacular (combine those adverbially as you wish) asrushthatspeaks told me a year ago. It's a Tamil science fiction musical about robots. It has too much final battle and the female lead is basically useless, but it is worth watching for the musical numbers alone, about which you find yourself saying things like "Daft Punk out of Metropolis by Busby Berkeley" and "We're in Peru. Where did the fan dancers come from?"
(We ran for dinner before the next movie: burritos from Anna's and Rob discovered a surprisingly non-candyish green apple seltzer in the convenience store next door. We also changed seats, because with the inevitability of certain punchlines, the rows in front of us filled up to the point of blocking out the screen only while the single subtitled film on the program was playing. I sort of shotgunned my burrito because I did not fancy trying to eat it in the dark and pay attention to a movie. Quite reasonably, there was then a problem with cueing up the next one and it started half an hour late. The Alien Mating Cry Challenge made me realize just how much of Allan Sherman's "Eight Foot Two, Solid Blue" I have apparently committed to memory.)
The find of the festival for me was Sloane U'Ren's Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011), about which I would actually wish to write when I'm conscious. Last night turned out to have been its North American premiere; I am praying it gets a proper release, but until then: if it screens anywhere near you, see it. It is probably the softest-spoken and most intelligent treatment of a science fiction trope I have seen since Primer (2004). It also makes real use of Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, not just the popular glosses. The setting is Cambridge University in the 1920's and '30's. The attention to both objective period detail and the way that memories warp and flare with grief or nostalgia is astonishing; the invented technology does not look like a contemporary design given a quick crystal-radio polish, but genuinely of its time (and its designer's idiosyncrasies) and therefore not instantly easy for the modern viewer to parse, unless you know something about vacuum tubes and Leyden jars and jangly Edwardian upright pianos. The script is spare, suggestive, full of questions, and I would only change two lines of it—they stick out because the film otherwise explains almost nothing about itself. There is always action you're not seeing. We had a theory afterward as to why.
I also missed the first few minutes of Attack the Block (2011), but the rest of it was brilliant, funny, a little splattery, and didn't lose either a comedic or a heart-lurching beat cutting its classic alien invasion with the issues of race and class that are usually exactly what this genre doesn't focus on. I am hoping someone gives John Boyega more leading roles now that are worthy of his debut.
When I saw that Criterion was releasing a restored transfer of Island of Lost Souls (1932), I was very curious to know what pre-Code science fiction would look like. The answer is, actually, very much like something that would have given the Hays Office heart attacks. One might have been able to pass off the weird, flirtatious charge Laughton gives some of his kinkier lines as an illustration of the depravity of the scientific mind unfettered by morality etc., but there's no glossing over the vivisection or the bestiality—the latter all the more worrying because it is an alluring threat. Give me a girl with claws any day.
The print of Scanners (1981) that was screened at half past midnight was old enough to have decayed into red where there should have been black, lending an additionally sunset, lurid, hand-tinted quality to all the exploding heads, melting faces, and projectile eyeballs. I had been worried about having some of Cronenberg's images in my head, but fortunately the film was made in the window between suggestion and before CGI so that I could admire the prosthetics and the bright red wax. I loved the sounds of scanning, a slow underwater pulse like words dragged so far down the frequency, they burr in your bones and deafen, or the ear-stinging skitter that could be the same speech cranked up to blood-pitch.
I have now seen James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) on the big screen. I still prefer Bride of Frankenstein (1935), I think—Dr. Pretorius—but Boris Karloff really is still something else as the Monster, sunken-cheeked, silent. I could not stop myself from appropriating a line from Arsenic and Old Lace as a callback to a late scene, but in my defense it was after three in the morning.
handful_ofdust and teenybuffalo, thank you: aside from some dubious handling of its female character, I loved Re-Animator (1985). I liked Jeffrey Combs already from an episode of Babylon 5, but I could watch Herbert West's irritable, intense, glasses-scowling monomania all day. It's no surprise that he drags his roommate so effortlessly into his brightly splattered wake; it's a sort of anti-style ("And what would a note say, Dan? 'Cat dead, details later'?"), his most human moment when he curls protectively over a shock-shivering Dan Cain—and ignores Megan's terror as her zombie father spits up blood and shrieks. Possibly he's sympathetic by sheer pull of intellect, which is a trick I admire. Like a true scientist, he prizes his life's work over his life. On the other hand, the latter is a rather mutable quality from where he's standing.
And I still can't really claim that I've done a twenty-four-hour marathon, because around quarter of six we bailed on Cowboy Bebop (2001) and instead walked around Davis Square in the Chartres-blue cold and pre-dawn light, detoured through Porter and at half past six we were eating donuts for breakfast at Verna's on Mass. Ave. Neither of us were really interested in Paul (2011) and somehow by the time we'd gone back to Rob's for tea that didn't have to be paid for (well, at least by me), heading out again for Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (1979) or even the intriguingly-titled Folklore (2012) didn't hold the appeal it might have to brighter-eyed people. He played me the first episode of Red Shift: Interplanetary Do-Gooder ("Countdown to Chaos") and a Tomes of Terror (the Halloween episode of Our Miss Brooks) and I think I managed to leave just before either of us became too stupid to talk.
If I don't dream something interesting tonight, I don't know what we even have a subconscious for.
I have not slept in over twenty-nine hours. The sci-fi film marathon was a success.
(I had expected to be asleep by now, but I sort of woke up on the bus ride home. I suppose it's useful to know I can be insomniac in the middle of the day for a change. These are still not reviews: I'm not that awake.)
derspatchel met me at the theater. We sat in the balcony. There were a lot of other people there.I did not want my hour and three-quarters back after Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), but neither would I evangelize you to seek it out except insofar as Andy Serkis is always a pleasure to watch, even when you can't see him. The plot unfortunately depends on some major leaps of stupidity, like nobody in a research lab which regularly works with gene-modifying viruses thinking to check on the lab tech who hasn't even called in to work in two days. The sequences in the redwood forest made me miss summer trees.
There are ways in which its science fiction is the standard military-industrial-pulls-shenanigans plot of the '80's, and I am not sure that I would chosen to wind it up with Dante (or maybe T.S. Eliot), but I had only heard of Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (1983) before I saw it on the program and I enjoyed it immensely. The sensory-recording technology that at first looks like just another near-future MacGuffin is so full of magnetic tape and clunky consoles and green-lettered screens, I kept having flashbacks to the Boston Museum of Science and the sun porch of the house I grew up in, where my father built all our computers until I was in high school. It is always nice to see Christopher Walken in a lead role. Whoever got to program the assembly line that goes haywire must have had the time of their life.
I missed the first fifteen minutes of War of the Satellites (1958) first because I was buying a lemon ginger tea from Mr. Crepe and then because I was buying a lemon ginger tea from Mr. Crepe to replace the one that was accidentally kicked over by a fellow marathoner and spilled all over my jacket and backpack before I had a chance to drink it, but it was Roger Corman; the complexity of the plot is not the point. The special effects were gorgeously terrible—I was particularly fond of the sudden mid-air stop of three rendezvousing rockets, missing only the sound effect of screeching to a halt to be interchangeable with a Warner Bros. cartoon. Possibly it's a side effect of not casting from the A-list, but all of his actors had interesting faces.
Enthiran (2010) is exactly as indescribable and spectacular (combine those adverbially as you wish) as
rushthatspeaks told me a year ago. It's a Tamil science fiction musical about robots. It has too much final battle and the female lead is basically useless, but it is worth watching for the musical numbers alone, about which you find yourself saying things like "Daft Punk out of Metropolis by Busby Berkeley" and "We're in Peru. Where did the fan dancers come from?"(We ran for dinner before the next movie: burritos from Anna's and Rob discovered a surprisingly non-candyish green apple seltzer in the convenience store next door. We also changed seats, because with the inevitability of certain punchlines, the rows in front of us filled up to the point of blocking out the screen only while the single subtitled film on the program was playing. I sort of shotgunned my burrito because I did not fancy trying to eat it in the dark and pay attention to a movie. Quite reasonably, there was then a problem with cueing up the next one and it started half an hour late. The Alien Mating Cry Challenge made me realize just how much of Allan Sherman's "Eight Foot Two, Solid Blue" I have apparently committed to memory.)
The find of the festival for me was Sloane U'Ren's Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011), about which I would actually wish to write when I'm conscious. Last night turned out to have been its North American premiere; I am praying it gets a proper release, but until then: if it screens anywhere near you, see it. It is probably the softest-spoken and most intelligent treatment of a science fiction trope I have seen since Primer (2004). It also makes real use of Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, not just the popular glosses. The setting is Cambridge University in the 1920's and '30's. The attention to both objective period detail and the way that memories warp and flare with grief or nostalgia is astonishing; the invented technology does not look like a contemporary design given a quick crystal-radio polish, but genuinely of its time (and its designer's idiosyncrasies) and therefore not instantly easy for the modern viewer to parse, unless you know something about vacuum tubes and Leyden jars and jangly Edwardian upright pianos. The script is spare, suggestive, full of questions, and I would only change two lines of it—they stick out because the film otherwise explains almost nothing about itself. There is always action you're not seeing. We had a theory afterward as to why.
I also missed the first few minutes of Attack the Block (2011), but the rest of it was brilliant, funny, a little splattery, and didn't lose either a comedic or a heart-lurching beat cutting its classic alien invasion with the issues of race and class that are usually exactly what this genre doesn't focus on. I am hoping someone gives John Boyega more leading roles now that are worthy of his debut.
When I saw that Criterion was releasing a restored transfer of Island of Lost Souls (1932), I was very curious to know what pre-Code science fiction would look like. The answer is, actually, very much like something that would have given the Hays Office heart attacks. One might have been able to pass off the weird, flirtatious charge Laughton gives some of his kinkier lines as an illustration of the depravity of the scientific mind unfettered by morality etc., but there's no glossing over the vivisection or the bestiality—the latter all the more worrying because it is an alluring threat. Give me a girl with claws any day.
The print of Scanners (1981) that was screened at half past midnight was old enough to have decayed into red where there should have been black, lending an additionally sunset, lurid, hand-tinted quality to all the exploding heads, melting faces, and projectile eyeballs. I had been worried about having some of Cronenberg's images in my head, but fortunately the film was made in the window between suggestion and before CGI so that I could admire the prosthetics and the bright red wax. I loved the sounds of scanning, a slow underwater pulse like words dragged so far down the frequency, they burr in your bones and deafen, or the ear-stinging skitter that could be the same speech cranked up to blood-pitch.
I have now seen James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) on the big screen. I still prefer Bride of Frankenstein (1935), I think—Dr. Pretorius—but Boris Karloff really is still something else as the Monster, sunken-cheeked, silent. I could not stop myself from appropriating a line from Arsenic and Old Lace as a callback to a late scene, but in my defense it was after three in the morning.
handful_ofdust and teenybuffalo, thank you: aside from some dubious handling of its female character, I loved Re-Animator (1985). I liked Jeffrey Combs already from an episode of Babylon 5, but I could watch Herbert West's irritable, intense, glasses-scowling monomania all day. It's no surprise that he drags his roommate so effortlessly into his brightly splattered wake; it's a sort of anti-style ("And what would a note say, Dan? 'Cat dead, details later'?"), his most human moment when he curls protectively over a shock-shivering Dan Cain—and ignores Megan's terror as her zombie father spits up blood and shrieks. Possibly he's sympathetic by sheer pull of intellect, which is a trick I admire. Like a true scientist, he prizes his life's work over his life. On the other hand, the latter is a rather mutable quality from where he's standing.And I still can't really claim that I've done a twenty-four-hour marathon, because around quarter of six we bailed on Cowboy Bebop (2001) and instead walked around Davis Square in the Chartres-blue cold and pre-dawn light, detoured through Porter and at half past six we were eating donuts for breakfast at Verna's on Mass. Ave. Neither of us were really interested in Paul (2011) and somehow by the time we'd gone back to Rob's for tea that didn't have to be paid for (well, at least by me), heading out again for Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (1979) or even the intriguingly-titled Folklore (2012) didn't hold the appeal it might have to brighter-eyed people. He played me the first episode of Red Shift: Interplanetary Do-Gooder ("Countdown to Chaos") and a Tomes of Terror (the Halloween episode of Our Miss Brooks) and I think I managed to leave just before either of us became too stupid to talk.
If I don't dream something interesting tonight, I don't know what we even have a subconscious for.
no subject
w00t!
"Eyes"? What's that?
"Eyes" is the first-season episode of Babylon 5 where I discovered Jeffrey Combs. I don't know how much you've seen of the show; if the answer is not much, suffice to say that the first season is incredibly uneven artistically, but it's necessary for any of the character development in later seasons to hold any resonance. "Eyes" is not one of the signpost episodes, but it was an interesting attempt to riff on the often consequence-free nature of captainhood in science fiction—a number of Sinclair's more reckless decisions come back to bite him—and it introduces some important information about Ivanova's background. An officer from Earthforce Internal Affairs is sent to investigate the command personnel on Babylon 5; he brings with him a liaison from the Psi Corps, a highly-rated telepath named Harriman Gray. This is Jeffrey Combs: a small, neatly dark-haired man with the psi on his shoulder and the black leather gloves of the Corps, as close at his colonel's heel as if he were leashed there. He has an odd affect, professionally expressionless, with a disquieting intensity of stare, and when he speaks out and tries to offer a moment of rapport, there's something awkward and overeager about it; it is difficult to tell whether he's as slimy as Ivanova assumes—she has bad history with the Corps—or whether there's more to him than his, frankly, fairly creepy assignment. The latter certainly turns out to be true, as he takes some pains to explain to Ivanova: he was a late-blooming telepath who manifested his first month in basic training and was claimed by the Corps, forever losing his dream of becoming a pilot in Earthforce. Liaison to the EIA is the closest he can get. He has a sweet, shy grin when you see it. You still don't know which way he'll jump until the final scene. Even after five seasons and, dear God, eighteen years, he remains one of my very favorite one-shot characters, both for what he illuminates about the world of Babylon 5 (reflecting in Ivanova's nightmares, an unspoken foil for Bester) and simply for his own sake; I believe I used to own a playing card of him, but I have no idea what happened to it. I hope it's still in the shoebox with all the Magic: The Gathering. I may have to look now.