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So we have to shoot the spider in the butt
I have both survived and enjoyed my fifth 'Thon with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel. I feel I have to include both qualifiers because as of Sunday morning I wasn't even sure I was going to make it to the marathon at all—I hadn't slept in essentially two nights already and feeling better did not equal being well. As it was, the twenty-four hours of science fiction film started at noon and I didn't manage to get to the Somerville until nearly quarter of four. For similar reasons, I am just getting around to writing about the experience today. I made it, though, and it was worth it.
I don't mind that we missed all of Gremlins (1984), because I was definitely not the target audience for horror-comedy with that much of a mean-spirited streak when shown it decades ago at summer camp, but I had really been looking forward to Starman (1984) in 70 mm. We caught the very last ten minutes and I was reminded that as a small child I associated it with "The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry," only without the final verse about the gunner and the very first shot, because my mother never sang me that ending. I wish I had seen more of the SETI researcher played by Charles Martin Smith, because I remember liking him—I suppose his purpose in the story is to represent genuine scientific curiosity that welcomes an alien to earth rather than the rapacious government of the '80's that wants to vivisect it on first sight, but he's also a nerdy little guy in an actual anorak who has more integrity than his employers give him credit for or want to hear about. Jeff Bridges is birdlike and not quite human to the last. We don't see the last of him, though. Just the expression on Karen Allen's face as she stands alone in a fall of strange snow, an entire other world reflected in her eyes.
I had not previously heard of Himmelskibet (Skyship, 1918), a Danish silent also known as A Trip to Mars, but it's a solid early planetary romance with a historically interesting slant. It starts off rather straightforwardly for its genre, with a lot of energetic gestures and wide-eyed rapt gazing, when the adventurous Avanti Planetaros, sea-captain son of a distinguished astronomer, turns his attention away from Earth toward his father's "planets that we long for—and that long for us." His sister Corona and her fiancé Dr. Krafft eagerly join in the effort to build the first spaceship; despite the doomsaying ridicule of envious Professor Dubius, they give lectures to scientific societies, supervise the construction of the gloriously un-spaceworthy Excelsior, and eventually recruit an international crew for its maiden flight to Mars, including a blustery American and a delegate from "the East" (who looks exactly like a short dark-haired Danish guy with center-parted hair and glasses, but I appreciate his inclusion, especially since he is neither a traitor nor a weak link; that's the American). The Himmelskibet itself looks like a cross between a dirigible, a biplane, and a double-decker bus; it launches to cheering crowds and some clever effects with aerial photography. Six months and one bad apple later, Avanti has barely averted a mutiny when the heretofore unseen Martians, monitoring the strangers' approach through their hexagonally-lensed telescopes, fire up the pre-E.E. Smith equivalent of a tractor beam and draw the Earth ship safely in from the sky at ten times its normal speed. And the film gets interesting. Holger-Madsen's Martians dress like the ancient world by way of the Celtic Revival, with white tunics and draperies and ziggurat architecture and ceremonial staves wreathed with fruit and flowers, long flower-garlanded hair for all the women and faintly Catholic vestments for the wise elders, though decorated with the Egyptian ankh; they are pacifists, philosophers, and vegetarians, and they have been observing the Earth for years, somewhat dismayed at its persistent warlike state. Knowing the human tendency toward knee-jerk violence in first contact situations, the audience braces for shooting first and reprisal later. Instead, the film is emphatically nice, and rather than being naively cloying, it's oddly sweet. Yes, there's an incident in which Avanti shoots what looks like the local equivalent of a swan and in the resultant outcry a young Martian man is seriously wounded, but the House of Judgment to which Avanti and Krafft are taken is not a place of punishment, but a kind of movie theater of Martian history from its Earthlike bloody origins to peaceful enlightenment, at the end of which our heroes feel so badly about their behavior that they convert to nonviolence on the spot. (The injured Martian recovers and, being played by Nils Asther, goes on to a starry career in silent Hollywood before being put out of work by the Production Code, which you can't imagine Himmelskibet's Mars having a use for.) Avanti falls in love with the beautiful Marya; they consummate their relationship in the Forest of Love after Avanti has, according to Martian tradition, slept under the Tree of Longing and dreamed of nothing but Marya. Krafft pines for Corona, who misses him just as badly in intercut scenes, so the Martian astronomers work out a way of signaling to her that the explorers have survived: lights flare across the face of the planet in the seven-star pattern of her namesake Corona Borealis. We worried all over again when Marya volunteered to return to Earth with the crew of the Excelsior—I did not want an interstellar repeat of Lost Horizon—but once again the film's positivity comes through, with the Earthly lovers reunited by the finale, Professor Planetaros saved from suicidal despair, and Marya welcomed by her new family as a harbinger of love and peaceful civilization. (Professor Dubius seals his own doom by climbing to the top of a bare windswept cliff to sneer at the Excelsior as it makes its reentry during a lightning storm, which was the funniest and-you-call-yourself-a-scientist moment we had all night.) It all looks very much like prescient flower power, but I suspect the wishful thinking of a progressive alien race willing to intervene in the endless violence of Earth had much more to do with the film's release in the last year of World War I than with any inkling of the counterculture to come. It's no Frau im Mond (1929), but I liked it so much more than I was expecting from its obscurity and its first act.
No wonder I love J.F. Sebastian from Blade Runner (1982). He's played by William Sanderson and his rain-fogged L.A. is three alternate years in our future rather than seventy years in our past, but he's the Elisha Cook, Jr. character, right down to the ambiguous age of his creased and boyish face. He's the fall guy. He can't catch a break, from his genetics, from the story he's in. The decency and sympathy he shows the replicants will kill him just as surely as if he were a creep or a weasel, because not every noir needs a detective or a femme fatale, but the genre always has room for another loser. We missed a chunk out of the second act, because we had to run to Tenoch if we wanted to eat dinner and see the rare early sound film screening next, but the parallel leapt out at me as soon as I saw Sebastian blinking apprehensively up at Roy, backed into the corner of Pris' strong doll-white arms. "I don't think there's another human being in the whole world who would have helped us," she comforts him in the accurate presumption of a done deal, and because he's the shlimazl of this dark city, he smiles nervously even though his life expectancy has just chopped itself even shorter than the effects of Methuselah Syndrome. It only took me a winter of film noir to notice.
I am guessing the silent version of High Treason (1929) played better than the sound, even though the latter is the rarer version, long thought lost and only recently restored. The problem is not necessarily the plot, although I won't deny that it has issues of its own—when a sinister cabal of arms dealers are organizing acts of terror in order to provoke a second world war in the futuristic year of 1940, I fully expect the denouement to involve exposing their machinations, not just firing a pistol at a third party and then beatifically accepting the consequences. The visuals are fantastic, with fine model work ranging from the skyscraper-crammed skyline of future London with its airways patrolled by small aircraft and dirigibles and the Thames spanned by even broader and more elaborate bridges to the startlingly nasty fireworks of two terrorist attacks, complete with what really looked like a Battleship Potemkin (1925) shout-out. The worldbuilding is not particularly convincing, but it's fascinating in retrospect. Trains run daily through the "Channel Tunnel" which links the former UK to ex-France, both now part of the Federated States of Europe. Television is nearly as ubiquitous in this future as it is in our present day, with most long-distance communication conducted over the two-way real-time "teleradiograph," basically Skype. Women still work as secretaries in men's offices and their place in wartime is in factories, not the front lines, but the casting tries, rather astonishingly, for gender parity in government. Fashions extrapolated from the Jazz Age are actually pretty snazzy-looking except for the hats. (Curiously for a film made in Britain, which never went in for Prohibition, there are bootleggers. Why not?) The problem is the sound. I'm not complaining about the recording quality; it's done competently enough. It's the effect on the tone and pacing of the movie. By the end of the first act, both Rob and I were willing to bet money that High Treason started production as a silent and converted to sound halfway through. Multiple scenes were obviously filmed without sound and dubbed over with crowd noise or dialogue. Others contain the kind of visuals that became superfluous in the talkies, as when the music playing in a dance hall is conveyed by a montage of different instruments fading in and out of prominence. You can watch Benita Hume switch acting styles between the two modes, with stylized, expressive gestures in long shot and much more naturalistic affect in close-up. Other actors don't fare so well; Jameson Thomas has a dashing mustache, but he's stiff as a plank as the romantic lead whose patriotic duty as an aviator conflicts with his love for the staunchly pacifist Hume. Humberston Wright's aquiline profile and disordered white hair reminded me just enough of Ernest Thesiger that I kept thinking how much more interesting he would have been as the saintly leader of the World League of Peace. I'm not sure he's speaking in his own voice, but Raymond Massey makes his first film appearance in long shot as an anti-war member of the Council of the Atlantic States. Too much of the dialogue is the kind that you can get away with reading in intertitles, but which sounds absolutely stupid when declaimed by carefully enunciated voices (and occasionally by actors whose tentative mumbles should never have been allowed anywhere near a mike, like the character we dubbed "the world's most diffident BBC announcer") at a recording-friendly, tension-killing pace. Speaking the dialogue actually slows down the action so much that I am genuinely wondering whether some of the plot was left on the cutting room floor in order to make room for the conversion, which would at least explain the political incoherence of the film. Don't get me wrong: I am delighted to have seen it. I just really want to see the silent version now. If it has fatal problems, at least they'll be different ones.
I missed the first act of Ex Machina (2015) because I was playing phone tag with an ER doctor, but I got into the story just in time to realize that it's a clever sci-fi incorporation of the Bluebeard story, complete with bloody chamber—the room of mirrored closets, each containing a previous generation of beautiful, imprisoned, girl-shaped AI, sullen as a heart in the red lights of a power outage—as well as a variation on Tiptree's women men don't see. Because the plot looks like a godgame between the two male characters, because that is the conventional structure of the story where an underdog takes on a genius with a woman's allegiance as his prize, the audience can be misled into thinking that the women are without agency or at least limited in their ability to take action independently. It may also be instructive to remember that while Perrault's La Barbe bleuë had the last wife rescued by her brothers, in other versions it is the ghosts of previous wives who warn her and the heroine who rescues herself. There are four main characters in Ex Machina, not three. The title is unfortunately generic as well as misleading; nobody in the film actually is a last-minute plot device. Our viewpoint character is just very bad at foreshadowing.
I should give The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) its own entry. It was the film the audience knew least what to do with; I heard more nervous laughter during it than during any other non-comedy, and not just during the scenes that were legitimately and intentionally funny. It was my second film by Nicolas Roeg, after Walkabout (1971). I loved its free-floating sense of time, its meandering through genres that never feels like a patchwork, the way it cross-cuts its fairly straightforward narrative—an alien traveler becomes fatally derailed from the purpose for which it came to Earth—with possibilities, allusions, and refractions, glancing every now and then into its secondary characters' lives. It's a collage with the feel of a documentary; scenes on a devastated desert planet are shot as matter-of-factly as skyscrapers in mid-'70's Manhattan or the quiet of a reflecting lake in whistle-stop Haneyville, but then a bout of human sex is presented with such aggressive, fragmentary disorientation that it comes off as weirder and more upsetting than the unmasking of human prosthetics from an extraterrestrial body or the dreamy telepathic reverie of the kind of sex that body should be having. It is correct that David Bowie should be almost impossibly beautiful as the alien who goes by the name of Thomas Jerome Newton, with his translucent face and his luminous clementine-peel hair; he can look dangerous and desperately vulnerable in the same breath, too thin-skinned for this planet of overwhelming mental noise and wasteful wealth. Genderless, fear-striking, so easily pinned to earth, he would be an angel in an earlier century. Now he's a "visitor," retaining the optimistic, transitory term for himself decades past the point where it has become clear that he might be a permanent resident. I love the scene of him in church, mumbling awkwardly along to "Jerusalem." Casting Bowie as a fallen angel of an androgynous spaceman who buys and sells the world until it breaks him is obvious; casting him as a character who can't sing is just droll. I am glad there was something in the marathon to remember him by. Probably it was my favorite film of the night.
Idiocracy (2006) runs eighty-four minutes; I spent most of them in a bath. I am aware that I am in the minority, but I bounced off the movie when I saw it the year after it came out and spending time in baths is doctor's orders these days, which is why B. (in town for Valentine's Day withgaudior and rushthatspeaks) asked delicately last night if I was beginning my transition into a rusalka.
There was only one short film on the schedule this year, but it was a doozy. Bride of Finklestein (2015) is the collaborative brainchild of Michael Schlesinger, Nick Santa Maria, and Will Ryan, the latter two of whom star as Biffle and Shooster, the tragically forgotten, unapologetically Jewish, and wholly off-the-wall vaudevillians whose now-lost two-reeler comedies have been lovingly recreated for the enjoyment of contemporary audiences and absolutely not in any way invented from whole cloth by the aforementioned. It is true that I would have appreciated this conceit even more if it had been played straighter, without the anachronistic nods to The Court Jester (1956) and Young Frankenstein (1974)—I buy that sort of in-joke when Red Shift plays Arisia, but I expect a higher level of historicity from Frank Cyrano. It is also true that about five minutes in I gave a cry of delight because the duo's first encounter with Phil Baron's Dr. Finklestein had just reenacted the most quotable exchange from Smith and Dale's "Dr. Kronkheit and His Only Living Patient." You know, "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!"–"So don't do that!" I don't know how old I was when I heard that for the first time; I got it from my grandparents. By now it's a family catchphrase. Joe Smith and Charlie Dale were another visibly Jewish comedy team, respectively né Joseph Sultzer and Charles Marks; I have been waiting impatiently since last year for their sole starring feature The Heart of New York (1932) to come around on TCM again. I applauded so hard I hurt my husband's hand (I was holding it at the time). After that the short could get as goofy as it liked and it still had my goodwill. It got very goofy. I'm seriously considering trying to find the other four Biffle and Shooster shorts. Their production company is "Wheeler St. Woolsey St." I can't argue with that, either.
Whengreygirlbeast showed me Pitch Black (2000) in 2011, I noted it at the time as "a surprisingly good little piece of science-fiction survival horror with a successful genre-switch halfway through." After seeing it again on a big screen, I want to retract the "surprisingly" and stress the cleverness of the genre-switch, which at first looks only like a killer's bravado: "It ain't me you got to worry about now." The film is gripping enough when it's just the psychodrama of a small group of stranded survivors with an unknown element in their midst, The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) with a Hannibal Lecter twist; when it shifts into true science fiction, the kind that three-sun orrery is critically relevant to, it doesn't miss a beat. The characters are sketched quickly, but not shallowly, and this time around I really appreciated that the script has a high degree of character attrition without falling into grimdark. You never feel that the cast is being picked off to get at the audience; it is simply the consequences of the extreme danger of their situation and their own brave, foolish, or ordinary actions. I love Paris' final defiant fire-breathing, both because it tells us what kind of person this fussy, fearful antiquities dealer is at the last—he wants to see what's going to kill him—and because it's such a magnificent image, flaring the outlines of alien monsters against the night like an etching by Hieronymus Bosch. The film belongs to Vin Diesel's Riddick and I am all right with that, but I enjoy the moral smudginess of Radha Mitchell's Fry, just because it's rare for a female character to carry the kind of guilt and authority she does. Someday I will see this movie on 35 mm and it will be awesome.
We had been intending to use Big Ass Spider! (2013) for our traditional Verna's break, but it was switched earlier in the schedule to an hour when the donut shop was not yet open, so I watched the first five and the last fifteen minutes, which turned out to be exactly as much Big Ass Spider! as I needed. I got all the enjoyable silliness without any of the jump scares or the danger of the knowingly thin premise wearing its welcome out. It furnished me with this subject header. The mid-credits scene is cute. I was going to make a joke about the relative directness of the title vs. the now-requisite animal disaster portmanteaux, but then I saw that director Mike Mendez was just responsible for SyFy's Lavalantula (2015), so, that happened.
Shockingly, it was not as cold at six-thirty in the morning on Monday as it was last year at a quarter to six. My eyelashes did not have ice on them by the time we reached Verna's. Maybe it was the minimal presence of sunlight rather than the setting moon. We had two donuts each, per our traditional 'Thon breakfast; Rob got coffee and I wrapped my hands around a cup of hot water. I need a real winter hat. I traded my grandfather's flat cap for a watch cap for purposes of not freezing my ears off, but I am under no illusions that it looks reasonable on me.
Never Let Me Go (2010) is one of the quietest dystopias I've ever seen. It is utilitarian in a politely restrained fashion, its grislier aspects hushed in routine and euphemism, and it does not change in its protagonist's lifetime or because of her: so far as we know at the film's end, healthy young clones with no less spirit and sentience than any of their "originals" will keep on being harvested for their organs until they die; they will "donate" until they "complete." It suits a film whose default is underplaying, from the minimalist science fiction of the setting—the alternate history which the narrator and her classmates inhabit looks very much like our recent past, if anything a little slower technologically and more remote from itself, although that might only be an effect of the hermetic, medical world to which the clones are passively confined—to the calm unreliability of Carey Mulligan's narration, whose steadiness might reflect the wisdom of acceptance or mask a hopelessness even deeper than Keira Knightley's disinterest in surviving her third operation or Andrew Garfield's incoherent screams of despair and rage. Everyone onscreen is amazingly damaged in ways the narrative barely draws attention to, because how could they be otherwise? They have not been raised to be functional people. They have been raised to be compliant spare parts. It's a glassy, melancholy film while you're watching it, but I really think it gets worse after the fact, the more time you have to think the implications through. I can't imagine wanting to rewatch it unless to study the script, but I'm glad to have seen it once.
Donovan's Brain (1953) is pure pulp overkill with nice production values. At the point where Lew Ayres' Dr. Cory is keeping a dead man's brain alive in a tank where it glows and pulses like a plasma globe, endeavoring to decipher its thoughts through the visual signatures of electroencephalography and the swooping theremin tones of a waveform oscillator, we've already attained a perfectly reasonable pitch of '50's mad science and we haven't even finished the first act. When his alcoholic colleague Frank tells him, "You're wackier sober than I ever was crocked," it's not just a good line, it's the most accurate thing anyone says to Cory in the entire film. It is hilarious and stupid that the plot is solved by an act of God, but I can't say it's out of key with the rest of the story. Seriously, telepathy? You brought this dybbuk on yourself, Cory. Having only seen her much later in life, it was extraordinarily weird to watch Nancy Davis acting instead of being part of the Reagan administration.
I fell asleep briefly during the second act of They Live (1988), but the good news is that it did not impede my understanding of the plot, which takes one brilliant satirical inspiration—that American consumer culture is the mechanism of a stealthy alien invasion, hypnotizing the human masses into buying and breeding for the benefit of an extraterrestrial one percent—and runs with it through a plot that feels almost more like a sequence of political sketches than sci-fi action, not necessarily to its detriment. I love how donning the special sunglasses reveals the world in the stiff black and white of a '50's B-movie, the aliens' skull-like faces exactly as grotesque and practical as the sight of a half-grown pod person. The better news is that I did not miss the legendary fight scene between Roddy Piper and Keith David, especially since Rob quoted it in the first episode of Red Shift I ever saw—it's a stupefying slugfest that goes on for so long that it stops being funny and becomes tedious and then goes on for so long after that that it breaks through tedium and into hilarity again, because they just don't stop. It must last about five minutes, but it feels like a legitimate challenger to the fistfight that takes up most of the third act of The Quiet Man (1952). The line about kicking ass and chewing bubblegum is justly famous, but I laughed most happily at Piper's "Brother, life's a bitch—and she's back in heat," because it's paraphrasing Brecht and I really should have seen that coming.
I am not sure that I would have programmed Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) directly after the Carpenter film as opposed to before, or as the last film in a twenty-four hour marathon no matter what, but it was nice to see it from the vantage point of a theater seat as opposed to peering around the flaking faux leather of the couch in my fifth grade classroom. We actually bailed before the finale because I was exhausted and refused to give in to the irony of falling asleep during a movie in which sleep equals replacement by conformist alien doppelgängers, but all things considered, I think I did pretty well. There was some falling over with my husband afterward. I can think of worse ways to celebrate Valentine's Day.
It is now officially too late for me to be awake any longer. Thank you for reading. This annual event brought to you by my staunch backers at Patreon.
derspatchel. I feel I have to include both qualifiers because as of Sunday morning I wasn't even sure I was going to make it to the marathon at all—I hadn't slept in essentially two nights already and feeling better did not equal being well. As it was, the twenty-four hours of science fiction film started at noon and I didn't manage to get to the Somerville until nearly quarter of four. For similar reasons, I am just getting around to writing about the experience today. I made it, though, and it was worth it.I don't mind that we missed all of Gremlins (1984), because I was definitely not the target audience for horror-comedy with that much of a mean-spirited streak when shown it decades ago at summer camp, but I had really been looking forward to Starman (1984) in 70 mm. We caught the very last ten minutes and I was reminded that as a small child I associated it with "The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry," only without the final verse about the gunner and the very first shot, because my mother never sang me that ending. I wish I had seen more of the SETI researcher played by Charles Martin Smith, because I remember liking him—I suppose his purpose in the story is to represent genuine scientific curiosity that welcomes an alien to earth rather than the rapacious government of the '80's that wants to vivisect it on first sight, but he's also a nerdy little guy in an actual anorak who has more integrity than his employers give him credit for or want to hear about. Jeff Bridges is birdlike and not quite human to the last. We don't see the last of him, though. Just the expression on Karen Allen's face as she stands alone in a fall of strange snow, an entire other world reflected in her eyes.
I had not previously heard of Himmelskibet (Skyship, 1918), a Danish silent also known as A Trip to Mars, but it's a solid early planetary romance with a historically interesting slant. It starts off rather straightforwardly for its genre, with a lot of energetic gestures and wide-eyed rapt gazing, when the adventurous Avanti Planetaros, sea-captain son of a distinguished astronomer, turns his attention away from Earth toward his father's "planets that we long for—and that long for us." His sister Corona and her fiancé Dr. Krafft eagerly join in the effort to build the first spaceship; despite the doomsaying ridicule of envious Professor Dubius, they give lectures to scientific societies, supervise the construction of the gloriously un-spaceworthy Excelsior, and eventually recruit an international crew for its maiden flight to Mars, including a blustery American and a delegate from "the East" (who looks exactly like a short dark-haired Danish guy with center-parted hair and glasses, but I appreciate his inclusion, especially since he is neither a traitor nor a weak link; that's the American). The Himmelskibet itself looks like a cross between a dirigible, a biplane, and a double-decker bus; it launches to cheering crowds and some clever effects with aerial photography. Six months and one bad apple later, Avanti has barely averted a mutiny when the heretofore unseen Martians, monitoring the strangers' approach through their hexagonally-lensed telescopes, fire up the pre-E.E. Smith equivalent of a tractor beam and draw the Earth ship safely in from the sky at ten times its normal speed. And the film gets interesting. Holger-Madsen's Martians dress like the ancient world by way of the Celtic Revival, with white tunics and draperies and ziggurat architecture and ceremonial staves wreathed with fruit and flowers, long flower-garlanded hair for all the women and faintly Catholic vestments for the wise elders, though decorated with the Egyptian ankh; they are pacifists, philosophers, and vegetarians, and they have been observing the Earth for years, somewhat dismayed at its persistent warlike state. Knowing the human tendency toward knee-jerk violence in first contact situations, the audience braces for shooting first and reprisal later. Instead, the film is emphatically nice, and rather than being naively cloying, it's oddly sweet. Yes, there's an incident in which Avanti shoots what looks like the local equivalent of a swan and in the resultant outcry a young Martian man is seriously wounded, but the House of Judgment to which Avanti and Krafft are taken is not a place of punishment, but a kind of movie theater of Martian history from its Earthlike bloody origins to peaceful enlightenment, at the end of which our heroes feel so badly about their behavior that they convert to nonviolence on the spot. (The injured Martian recovers and, being played by Nils Asther, goes on to a starry career in silent Hollywood before being put out of work by the Production Code, which you can't imagine Himmelskibet's Mars having a use for.) Avanti falls in love with the beautiful Marya; they consummate their relationship in the Forest of Love after Avanti has, according to Martian tradition, slept under the Tree of Longing and dreamed of nothing but Marya. Krafft pines for Corona, who misses him just as badly in intercut scenes, so the Martian astronomers work out a way of signaling to her that the explorers have survived: lights flare across the face of the planet in the seven-star pattern of her namesake Corona Borealis. We worried all over again when Marya volunteered to return to Earth with the crew of the Excelsior—I did not want an interstellar repeat of Lost Horizon—but once again the film's positivity comes through, with the Earthly lovers reunited by the finale, Professor Planetaros saved from suicidal despair, and Marya welcomed by her new family as a harbinger of love and peaceful civilization. (Professor Dubius seals his own doom by climbing to the top of a bare windswept cliff to sneer at the Excelsior as it makes its reentry during a lightning storm, which was the funniest and-you-call-yourself-a-scientist moment we had all night.) It all looks very much like prescient flower power, but I suspect the wishful thinking of a progressive alien race willing to intervene in the endless violence of Earth had much more to do with the film's release in the last year of World War I than with any inkling of the counterculture to come. It's no Frau im Mond (1929), but I liked it so much more than I was expecting from its obscurity and its first act.
No wonder I love J.F. Sebastian from Blade Runner (1982). He's played by William Sanderson and his rain-fogged L.A. is three alternate years in our future rather than seventy years in our past, but he's the Elisha Cook, Jr. character, right down to the ambiguous age of his creased and boyish face. He's the fall guy. He can't catch a break, from his genetics, from the story he's in. The decency and sympathy he shows the replicants will kill him just as surely as if he were a creep or a weasel, because not every noir needs a detective or a femme fatale, but the genre always has room for another loser. We missed a chunk out of the second act, because we had to run to Tenoch if we wanted to eat dinner and see the rare early sound film screening next, but the parallel leapt out at me as soon as I saw Sebastian blinking apprehensively up at Roy, backed into the corner of Pris' strong doll-white arms. "I don't think there's another human being in the whole world who would have helped us," she comforts him in the accurate presumption of a done deal, and because he's the shlimazl of this dark city, he smiles nervously even though his life expectancy has just chopped itself even shorter than the effects of Methuselah Syndrome. It only took me a winter of film noir to notice.
I am guessing the silent version of High Treason (1929) played better than the sound, even though the latter is the rarer version, long thought lost and only recently restored. The problem is not necessarily the plot, although I won't deny that it has issues of its own—when a sinister cabal of arms dealers are organizing acts of terror in order to provoke a second world war in the futuristic year of 1940, I fully expect the denouement to involve exposing their machinations, not just firing a pistol at a third party and then beatifically accepting the consequences. The visuals are fantastic, with fine model work ranging from the skyscraper-crammed skyline of future London with its airways patrolled by small aircraft and dirigibles and the Thames spanned by even broader and more elaborate bridges to the startlingly nasty fireworks of two terrorist attacks, complete with what really looked like a Battleship Potemkin (1925) shout-out. The worldbuilding is not particularly convincing, but it's fascinating in retrospect. Trains run daily through the "Channel Tunnel" which links the former UK to ex-France, both now part of the Federated States of Europe. Television is nearly as ubiquitous in this future as it is in our present day, with most long-distance communication conducted over the two-way real-time "teleradiograph," basically Skype. Women still work as secretaries in men's offices and their place in wartime is in factories, not the front lines, but the casting tries, rather astonishingly, for gender parity in government. Fashions extrapolated from the Jazz Age are actually pretty snazzy-looking except for the hats. (Curiously for a film made in Britain, which never went in for Prohibition, there are bootleggers. Why not?) The problem is the sound. I'm not complaining about the recording quality; it's done competently enough. It's the effect on the tone and pacing of the movie. By the end of the first act, both Rob and I were willing to bet money that High Treason started production as a silent and converted to sound halfway through. Multiple scenes were obviously filmed without sound and dubbed over with crowd noise or dialogue. Others contain the kind of visuals that became superfluous in the talkies, as when the music playing in a dance hall is conveyed by a montage of different instruments fading in and out of prominence. You can watch Benita Hume switch acting styles between the two modes, with stylized, expressive gestures in long shot and much more naturalistic affect in close-up. Other actors don't fare so well; Jameson Thomas has a dashing mustache, but he's stiff as a plank as the romantic lead whose patriotic duty as an aviator conflicts with his love for the staunchly pacifist Hume. Humberston Wright's aquiline profile and disordered white hair reminded me just enough of Ernest Thesiger that I kept thinking how much more interesting he would have been as the saintly leader of the World League of Peace. I'm not sure he's speaking in his own voice, but Raymond Massey makes his first film appearance in long shot as an anti-war member of the Council of the Atlantic States. Too much of the dialogue is the kind that you can get away with reading in intertitles, but which sounds absolutely stupid when declaimed by carefully enunciated voices (and occasionally by actors whose tentative mumbles should never have been allowed anywhere near a mike, like the character we dubbed "the world's most diffident BBC announcer") at a recording-friendly, tension-killing pace. Speaking the dialogue actually slows down the action so much that I am genuinely wondering whether some of the plot was left on the cutting room floor in order to make room for the conversion, which would at least explain the political incoherence of the film. Don't get me wrong: I am delighted to have seen it. I just really want to see the silent version now. If it has fatal problems, at least they'll be different ones.
I missed the first act of Ex Machina (2015) because I was playing phone tag with an ER doctor, but I got into the story just in time to realize that it's a clever sci-fi incorporation of the Bluebeard story, complete with bloody chamber—the room of mirrored closets, each containing a previous generation of beautiful, imprisoned, girl-shaped AI, sullen as a heart in the red lights of a power outage—as well as a variation on Tiptree's women men don't see. Because the plot looks like a godgame between the two male characters, because that is the conventional structure of the story where an underdog takes on a genius with a woman's allegiance as his prize, the audience can be misled into thinking that the women are without agency or at least limited in their ability to take action independently. It may also be instructive to remember that while Perrault's La Barbe bleuë had the last wife rescued by her brothers, in other versions it is the ghosts of previous wives who warn her and the heroine who rescues herself. There are four main characters in Ex Machina, not three. The title is unfortunately generic as well as misleading; nobody in the film actually is a last-minute plot device. Our viewpoint character is just very bad at foreshadowing.
I should give The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) its own entry. It was the film the audience knew least what to do with; I heard more nervous laughter during it than during any other non-comedy, and not just during the scenes that were legitimately and intentionally funny. It was my second film by Nicolas Roeg, after Walkabout (1971). I loved its free-floating sense of time, its meandering through genres that never feels like a patchwork, the way it cross-cuts its fairly straightforward narrative—an alien traveler becomes fatally derailed from the purpose for which it came to Earth—with possibilities, allusions, and refractions, glancing every now and then into its secondary characters' lives. It's a collage with the feel of a documentary; scenes on a devastated desert planet are shot as matter-of-factly as skyscrapers in mid-'70's Manhattan or the quiet of a reflecting lake in whistle-stop Haneyville, but then a bout of human sex is presented with such aggressive, fragmentary disorientation that it comes off as weirder and more upsetting than the unmasking of human prosthetics from an extraterrestrial body or the dreamy telepathic reverie of the kind of sex that body should be having. It is correct that David Bowie should be almost impossibly beautiful as the alien who goes by the name of Thomas Jerome Newton, with his translucent face and his luminous clementine-peel hair; he can look dangerous and desperately vulnerable in the same breath, too thin-skinned for this planet of overwhelming mental noise and wasteful wealth. Genderless, fear-striking, so easily pinned to earth, he would be an angel in an earlier century. Now he's a "visitor," retaining the optimistic, transitory term for himself decades past the point where it has become clear that he might be a permanent resident. I love the scene of him in church, mumbling awkwardly along to "Jerusalem." Casting Bowie as a fallen angel of an androgynous spaceman who buys and sells the world until it breaks him is obvious; casting him as a character who can't sing is just droll. I am glad there was something in the marathon to remember him by. Probably it was my favorite film of the night.
Idiocracy (2006) runs eighty-four minutes; I spent most of them in a bath. I am aware that I am in the minority, but I bounced off the movie when I saw it the year after it came out and spending time in baths is doctor's orders these days, which is why B. (in town for Valentine's Day with
gaudior and rushthatspeaks) asked delicately last night if I was beginning my transition into a rusalka.There was only one short film on the schedule this year, but it was a doozy. Bride of Finklestein (2015) is the collaborative brainchild of Michael Schlesinger, Nick Santa Maria, and Will Ryan, the latter two of whom star as Biffle and Shooster, the tragically forgotten, unapologetically Jewish, and wholly off-the-wall vaudevillians whose now-lost two-reeler comedies have been lovingly recreated for the enjoyment of contemporary audiences and absolutely not in any way invented from whole cloth by the aforementioned. It is true that I would have appreciated this conceit even more if it had been played straighter, without the anachronistic nods to The Court Jester (1956) and Young Frankenstein (1974)—I buy that sort of in-joke when Red Shift plays Arisia, but I expect a higher level of historicity from Frank Cyrano. It is also true that about five minutes in I gave a cry of delight because the duo's first encounter with Phil Baron's Dr. Finklestein had just reenacted the most quotable exchange from Smith and Dale's "Dr. Kronkheit and His Only Living Patient." You know, "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!"–"So don't do that!" I don't know how old I was when I heard that for the first time; I got it from my grandparents. By now it's a family catchphrase. Joe Smith and Charlie Dale were another visibly Jewish comedy team, respectively né Joseph Sultzer and Charles Marks; I have been waiting impatiently since last year for their sole starring feature The Heart of New York (1932) to come around on TCM again. I applauded so hard I hurt my husband's hand (I was holding it at the time). After that the short could get as goofy as it liked and it still had my goodwill. It got very goofy. I'm seriously considering trying to find the other four Biffle and Shooster shorts. Their production company is "Wheeler St. Woolsey St." I can't argue with that, either.
When
greygirlbeast showed me Pitch Black (2000) in 2011, I noted it at the time as "a surprisingly good little piece of science-fiction survival horror with a successful genre-switch halfway through." After seeing it again on a big screen, I want to retract the "surprisingly" and stress the cleverness of the genre-switch, which at first looks only like a killer's bravado: "It ain't me you got to worry about now." The film is gripping enough when it's just the psychodrama of a small group of stranded survivors with an unknown element in their midst, The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) with a Hannibal Lecter twist; when it shifts into true science fiction, the kind that three-sun orrery is critically relevant to, it doesn't miss a beat. The characters are sketched quickly, but not shallowly, and this time around I really appreciated that the script has a high degree of character attrition without falling into grimdark. You never feel that the cast is being picked off to get at the audience; it is simply the consequences of the extreme danger of their situation and their own brave, foolish, or ordinary actions. I love Paris' final defiant fire-breathing, both because it tells us what kind of person this fussy, fearful antiquities dealer is at the last—he wants to see what's going to kill him—and because it's such a magnificent image, flaring the outlines of alien monsters against the night like an etching by Hieronymus Bosch. The film belongs to Vin Diesel's Riddick and I am all right with that, but I enjoy the moral smudginess of Radha Mitchell's Fry, just because it's rare for a female character to carry the kind of guilt and authority she does. Someday I will see this movie on 35 mm and it will be awesome.We had been intending to use Big Ass Spider! (2013) for our traditional Verna's break, but it was switched earlier in the schedule to an hour when the donut shop was not yet open, so I watched the first five and the last fifteen minutes, which turned out to be exactly as much Big Ass Spider! as I needed. I got all the enjoyable silliness without any of the jump scares or the danger of the knowingly thin premise wearing its welcome out. It furnished me with this subject header. The mid-credits scene is cute. I was going to make a joke about the relative directness of the title vs. the now-requisite animal disaster portmanteaux, but then I saw that director Mike Mendez was just responsible for SyFy's Lavalantula (2015), so, that happened.
Shockingly, it was not as cold at six-thirty in the morning on Monday as it was last year at a quarter to six. My eyelashes did not have ice on them by the time we reached Verna's. Maybe it was the minimal presence of sunlight rather than the setting moon. We had two donuts each, per our traditional 'Thon breakfast; Rob got coffee and I wrapped my hands around a cup of hot water. I need a real winter hat. I traded my grandfather's flat cap for a watch cap for purposes of not freezing my ears off, but I am under no illusions that it looks reasonable on me.
Never Let Me Go (2010) is one of the quietest dystopias I've ever seen. It is utilitarian in a politely restrained fashion, its grislier aspects hushed in routine and euphemism, and it does not change in its protagonist's lifetime or because of her: so far as we know at the film's end, healthy young clones with no less spirit and sentience than any of their "originals" will keep on being harvested for their organs until they die; they will "donate" until they "complete." It suits a film whose default is underplaying, from the minimalist science fiction of the setting—the alternate history which the narrator and her classmates inhabit looks very much like our recent past, if anything a little slower technologically and more remote from itself, although that might only be an effect of the hermetic, medical world to which the clones are passively confined—to the calm unreliability of Carey Mulligan's narration, whose steadiness might reflect the wisdom of acceptance or mask a hopelessness even deeper than Keira Knightley's disinterest in surviving her third operation or Andrew Garfield's incoherent screams of despair and rage. Everyone onscreen is amazingly damaged in ways the narrative barely draws attention to, because how could they be otherwise? They have not been raised to be functional people. They have been raised to be compliant spare parts. It's a glassy, melancholy film while you're watching it, but I really think it gets worse after the fact, the more time you have to think the implications through. I can't imagine wanting to rewatch it unless to study the script, but I'm glad to have seen it once.
Donovan's Brain (1953) is pure pulp overkill with nice production values. At the point where Lew Ayres' Dr. Cory is keeping a dead man's brain alive in a tank where it glows and pulses like a plasma globe, endeavoring to decipher its thoughts through the visual signatures of electroencephalography and the swooping theremin tones of a waveform oscillator, we've already attained a perfectly reasonable pitch of '50's mad science and we haven't even finished the first act. When his alcoholic colleague Frank tells him, "You're wackier sober than I ever was crocked," it's not just a good line, it's the most accurate thing anyone says to Cory in the entire film. It is hilarious and stupid that the plot is solved by an act of God, but I can't say it's out of key with the rest of the story. Seriously, telepathy? You brought this dybbuk on yourself, Cory. Having only seen her much later in life, it was extraordinarily weird to watch Nancy Davis acting instead of being part of the Reagan administration.
I fell asleep briefly during the second act of They Live (1988), but the good news is that it did not impede my understanding of the plot, which takes one brilliant satirical inspiration—that American consumer culture is the mechanism of a stealthy alien invasion, hypnotizing the human masses into buying and breeding for the benefit of an extraterrestrial one percent—and runs with it through a plot that feels almost more like a sequence of political sketches than sci-fi action, not necessarily to its detriment. I love how donning the special sunglasses reveals the world in the stiff black and white of a '50's B-movie, the aliens' skull-like faces exactly as grotesque and practical as the sight of a half-grown pod person. The better news is that I did not miss the legendary fight scene between Roddy Piper and Keith David, especially since Rob quoted it in the first episode of Red Shift I ever saw—it's a stupefying slugfest that goes on for so long that it stops being funny and becomes tedious and then goes on for so long after that that it breaks through tedium and into hilarity again, because they just don't stop. It must last about five minutes, but it feels like a legitimate challenger to the fistfight that takes up most of the third act of The Quiet Man (1952). The line about kicking ass and chewing bubblegum is justly famous, but I laughed most happily at Piper's "Brother, life's a bitch—and she's back in heat," because it's paraphrasing Brecht and I really should have seen that coming.
I am not sure that I would have programmed Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) directly after the Carpenter film as opposed to before, or as the last film in a twenty-four hour marathon no matter what, but it was nice to see it from the vantage point of a theater seat as opposed to peering around the flaking faux leather of the couch in my fifth grade classroom. We actually bailed before the finale because I was exhausted and refused to give in to the irony of falling asleep during a movie in which sleep equals replacement by conformist alien doppelgängers, but all things considered, I think I did pretty well. There was some falling over with my husband afterward. I can think of worse ways to celebrate Valentine's Day.
It is now officially too late for me to be awake any longer. Thank you for reading. This annual event brought to you by my staunch backers at Patreon.
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I'd be interested to hear your view of Idiocracy back when you saw it. (How did you see it? It was never in general first-run release beyond a few cities, which didn't include Boston.)
I did not attend the whole 'thon; Garen Daly sold me a special ticket to see these two films because he knew I really wanted to see them.
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That makes sense; I think it's the only land border they've got. I'd assumed originally that the Atlantic States incorporated the entirety of North America, but then the map (of which I cannot easily find a screenshot!) made it look like Europe got Canada via the Commonwealth. Having the border signs in English, French, and German was slightly misleading.
[edit] Got it! Looks like the Atlantic States are the former United States, all of Central and South America, and a chunk of East and Southeast Asia, including Japan, though possibly not all of China. The European States got the British Empire plus Scandinavia, all of Africa, and the Middle East. The USSR appears to exist in this future and not care either way.
Man, that map has some severe Mercator projection going on. Greenland is not actually bigger than Africa.
[edit edit] I suppose the International Boundary might explain the bootleggers, although I find it even less plausible that the Atlantic States would be able to form between 1929 and 1940 with Prohibition still in effect. (It's a major worldbuilding gap! We know there wasn't an alternate World War II, because the previous one is referred to quite seriously as "the war to end war," and I doubt there was a Great Depression—High Treason was released the month before the Wall Street crash. So what caused the world to consolidate itself in this fashion?) Now I want to know about the history of superstates/superpowers in science fiction. Orwell divided the globe in three for Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he got the idea from the Tehran Conference. How far back does the concept go?
I'd be interested to hear your view of Idiocracy back when you saw it. (How did you see it? It was never in general first-run release beyond a few cities, which didn't include Boston.)
I saw it on DVD about a year after it came out. I just wasn't the right audience: I am a hard sell on comedy that depends on people doing stupid things and I am a hard sell on science fiction in the vein of "The Marching Morons" and it turns out that if you combine these two subgenres, what you get is a movie where I can recognize the satire perfectly well, it just doesn't do much for me. Almost everyone else I know thinks it's funny. I had to take a bath sometime in the twenty-four-hour window of the marathon, so I picked the movie I knew I'd miss least.
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Um . . . it didn't say that a few days ago. It should be visible below—let me know if it doesn't display?
I'm intrigued that a federation called "The Atlantic States" would somehow get parts of the world that are on the other side of the Pacific
Same, but I don't have any other way to interpret those colors!
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Yes, I see what you mean! My my! Of course the funny thing is that by the actual 1940s, Japan was trying to make that map come true in the other direction.