So we have to shoot the spider in the butt

[sovay]

I have both survived and enjoyed my fifth 'Thon with 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.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I opened this and my eyes fell on The Man Who Fell To Earth, which I saw once, long ago, and would like to see again. The thing I remember about that film is--tell me this really happened--David Bowie casting his eyes one direction, and seeing into the past, a sort of hillbilly, country backwoods seen of a crowd of people in 1930s style clothing (and maybe even sepia tone, or maybe I'm embellishing that in).

I'll come back for the rest! Thanks for posting.

[ron_newman]

In High Treason. I was trying to figure out where the Atlantic-European land border incident actually happened. Perhaps on what is now the US-Canadian border?

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.

Wow

[drwex]

Overall I must say I find your writing impressive and am glad your LJ was recommended to me. As I've seen a few of these myself I will touch just some points.

I love that you get J.F. Sebastian that way. I'm not even vaguely as competent to speak about noir as yourself but I recognized him instantly. To me he's an eloquent parallel to the talked-about tortoise early in the film. That is, he's a visible demonstration that the replicants are NOT human, and do not have human emotions. Yes, he's going to die at the hands of the beings he's been kind to, in just the way that Leon has no idea how to be kind to a helpless creature, even a hypothetical one. Sebasian's death starts the string of emotional responses and non-responses that I think make Roy's final speech so powerful. Because all along we (the viewers) have been pushed to believe these replicants have no feelings, but yet maybe? Maybe they do. It's one of the great unanswered questions of this film.

I was really bored by Ex Machina - wrote about it here: http://drwex.livejournal.com/565386.html

I'm not familiar with the Bluebeard you reference and so saw it as a retelling of "Frankenstein's Monster" instead. And not a good one, at that.

Pitch Black in particular, and all the Riddick movies in general, I loved. When I first heard of it I expected it to be some kind of Alien clone/rip-off but it is very much its own thing and though I don't generally like sci-fi/horror I agree with you that this film picks up some of the best elements of both genres.

Finally, I should say that I've watched Man Who Fell To Earth three times now, and I'm still not sure I can say I enjoyed or understood the film any of those times. I can't tell if there's something there that I'm just not getting or if I'm trying to project my own preconceptions about what an alien-visits-Earth film should be like onto a film that is not any of those preconceptions. I wonder what you think of Rip Torn in general (if anything) or him here. I don't think he's ever made a mark as big as this film.

[gwynnega]

The 'Thon sounds wonderful!

I'm not sure how many times I'd have to see The Man Who Fell To Earth before it would stop surprising me. It hasn't happened yet. I take it you haven't seen Performance (co-directed by Roeg and Donald Cammell)? It's one of my very favorites.

[sovay]

The thing I remember about that film is--tell me this really happened--David Bowie casting his eyes one direction, and seeing into the past, a sort of hillbilly, country backwoods seen of a crowd of people in 1930s style clothing (and maybe even sepia tone, or maybe I'm embellishing that in).

Yes, that scene really happens, sepia tone included. I think they're older than the 1930's, but they're definitely the past. Good remembering!

I'll come back for the rest! Thanks for posting.

You're very welcome. Enjoy the rest when you return!

[sovay]

I was trying to figure out where the Atlantic-European land border incident actually happened. Perhaps on what is now the US-Canadian border?

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.

[sovay]

The 'Thon sounds wonderful!

I enjoy it every year! This year's programming was probably the most conventional of the five; past iterations have contained more shorts, more ephemera, and there is usually at least one recent genre film that really impresses me, either a previously unknown independent like 2012's Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011) or 2014's Europa Report (2013) or an overlooked big-budget production like 2013's Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) or 2015's Edge of Tomorrow (2014). The closest we got this year was Bride of Finklestein—Ex Machina was better than I was expecting, but still slighter than I prefer and not something I feel the need to evangelize about, whereas I am still grabbing people by the lapels about Dimensions four years later. I do appreciate the inclusion of two instances of early science fiction, even if both of them were more curiosity than classic. I just want more film next year and less DCP. The Somerville has an amazing projectionist in David; he's better than DVDs.

I'm not sure how many times I'd have to see The Man Who Fell To Earth before it would stop surprising me. It hasn't happened yet.

I'm so glad to hear it. It feels like a film that could be fruitfully revisited, or just appreciated for its atmosphere.

I take it you haven't seen Performance (co-directed by Roeg and Donald Cammell)? It's one of my very favorites.

No, although since it stars James Fox, Mick Jagger, and Anita Pallenberg, I'm not sure why I haven't.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

It's not SF (usually), but at last one member of the 1990s-Canadian-sketch-comics The Kids in the Hall must have loved old vaudeville-era schtick, because a couple of sketches reference it; the best being "McGillicuddy & Green," about the absolute worst straight man in the business:
"Ohhhh, I get it. You're confused because the players' names all sound like questions...."

[sovay]

"Ohhhh, I get it. You're confused because the players' names all sound like questions...."

I have never seen this sketch, but I had it quoted to me in college! I had a friend who really loved The Kids in the Hall; I suspect he'd have shown me clips if YouTube had existed at the time, but instead he just described a lot of their sketches to me. I finally saw Brain Candy (1996) last spring, although I failed to write about. That was a movie I actually thought was weird.

[ron_newman]

There were shorts in other theatres, including the Micro Cinema where Garen sent me after High Treason ended. I got the impression that there was some spontaneous counter-programming going on, and it wasn't clear to me how much any of that was advertised.

I'll try to edit this later with information about the short I saw (if I can remember what it was called)

EDIT: The short was called The Clockmaker's Dream and I highly recommend trying to see it.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I saw Performance a few years back, largely due to the fact that it tied in heavily with Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century. It was... very odd indeed.

[sovay]

I got the impression that there was some spontaneous counter-programming going on, and it wasn't clear to me how much any of that was advertised.

Given that I had no idea until you mentioned it just now, I'm going with "not very much at all."

The short was called The Clockmaker's Dream and I highly recommend trying to see it.

Thank you!

[ron_newman]

better links for The Clockmaker's Dream:
IndieGoGo page
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Did you like Hugo? If so, you'll like this.

I think the Shorts programs during the 'Thon were repeats from the two-week Sci-Fi festival that Garen presented earlier this month at the Somerville.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

It has a similar feel to their sketches, but obviously in a much longer format.

Another thing I never realized when they were first on tv in the 1990s was how... Torontonian the show was. This is a city with a strong undercurrent of weirdness but desperately convinced that it's boringly normal.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

Whee! This post is full of wonderful things. I'm really pleased you and derspatchel got to celebrate properly, and that it's resulted in this mini marathon of reviews.

-- SPOILERS FOR MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH --
I haven't seen all of these, or even many, but I did just recently see Man Who Fell to Earth for the first time, and I was surprised by just how tense the sequence with the gun full of blanks is, or at least, how tense it was for me, and how, now having seen it in full, that tension can't really be recovered. It's an interesting theatrical trick, and I'm trying to think of a parallel elsewhere. If nothing else, it's interesting from a kink perspective, because Bowie's character at least thinks he knows what's going to happen. I spent the whole scene wondering if the female lead was accidentally going to become a government assassin, which took the erotic text away almost entirely. Though I did like the parallel to the camera scene earlier in the film.

There were sequences I found really disjointed, and I agree with you about the documentary feel. These things aren't neatly explained with narrative in real life, and the summary executions of the executives felt especially disjoint, particularly with the somewhat bucolic swimming pool scene directly thereafter, but I think that's supposed to grey the picture, and make it clear that no one is supposed to be a cardboard villain here.

Despite these things, I watched it with an absorptive attentiveness, drinking in the weird little details retained (apparently) from the book, like the bunch of gold rings in the first sequence, or the fact that they go to the sixth floor in a building that clearly doesn't have more than five from the exterior shots. While these liminal things probably aren't supposed to mean anything to the viewer, I found them interestingly hypnotic and thought about them for days afterward.

Hooray for having a good 'thon! May your transition to whatever sort of aquatic creature you need to be continue to be compatible with going outdoors and not freezing.

Re: Wow

[sovay]

Overall I must say I find your writing impressive and am glad your LJ was recommended to me.

Thank you. I'm glad you're enjoying reading.

Yes, he's going to die at the hands of the beings he's been kind to, in just the way that Leon has no idea how to be kind to a helpless creature, even a hypothetical one.

I see how the parallel occurs to you, but I don't agree that Sebastian dies because the replicants cannot feel empathy for him; it seems quite clear to me that he dies because he is a witness to Tyrell's murder and a link to the whereabouts of Roy and Pris, the last two surviving escapees. Roy apologizes to the genetic designer as he moves in for the kill: "I'm sorry, J.F." I have no reason to believe he doesn't mean it. Of all the human characters we've seen, Sebastian is the closest to the replicants in that he understands what it's like to be brilliant and limited and trapped and dying far too young, even if he responds quite differently to the knowledge than they do. But Roy judges his death necessary and so the next time we hear about Sebastian, he's the "body identified with Tyrell, twenty-five-year-old male Caucasian named Sebastian, J.F. Sebastian." No supernatural lack of empathy is required to make that calculation. It happens in human-on-human crimes—or war zones—all the time.

I don't think it's ever in question that the replicants experience emotion. We're told as much from the start: "The designers reckoned that after a few years, they might develop their own emotional responses. You know, hate, love, fear, anger, envy." Four years isn't short enough to prevent these pathways from forming. Look at the relationship between Roy and Pris; how passionately he kisses her even when dead, how he wears her blood to hunt Deckard in, a ritual of remembrance and grief. Even Leon, designed to be a big dumb ox of laboring cannon fodder, responds to Deckard's "retirement" of Zhora by trying to avenge her. Just because the replicants show little sympathy for the human characters doesn't mean they're incapable of feeling it for one another. (This time around, too, it struck me that Leon's responses to the Voigt-Kampff test are ambiguous. He can't answer the question about his mother, because he doesn't have one and he can't think fast enough to invent her, but when he's presented with the deliberately cruel description of the sun-tortured tortoise and told, "But you're not helping," he fires back immediately, ""What do you mean I'm not helping?" as if it should be obvious that he would. I suppose it's conceivable that he's playing his best idea of an outraged human, but see above: I'm not sure he's that good at pretending.) The other factor in any discussion of Sebastian is that no matter how sympathetic I find him, no matter how sympathetic I am supposed to find him, the fact remains that he's part of the system that creates and perpetuates the slavery of the replicants. "I do genetic design work for the Tyrell Corporation. There's some of me in you." He is shy and gentle and lonely, but he's complicit. They do not have to regard him as neutral.

[I loathe and despise the character limits of LJ-comments; they make it very difficult for me to have coherent, continuous conversations.]

Re: Wow

[sovay]

I'm not familiar with the Bluebeard you reference and so saw it as a retelling of "Frankenstein's Monster" instead. And not a good one, at that.

I think it is almost impossible to tell a story of the creation of artificial life and not evoke Frankenstein; I agree that Ex Machina taken as a twenty-first-century retread of Shelley is very thin. My apologies for resorting to Wikipedia: "Bluebeard." Some versions specify that the last wife is the seventh, which matches the number of AIs created and discarded (their robot bodies kept, like trophies) by Nathan; the decisions made by Kyoko are in accord with the versions where the ghosts of previous wives play an active, helpful part. Framing the story through the lens of the fairytale made instant sense of a number of otherwise apparently arbitrary narrative decisions. Why is Nathan a skeevy misogynist and casual user of people? Because he's the Bluebeard of the story, the woman-killer. That is his archetype; all else proceeds from there.

Similar to my thoughts on Blade Runner, I don't read Ava as sociopathic because she's the creation of a narcissistic brogrammer and therefore a reflection of her creator's monstrous personality; I read her as operating by the code that a prisoner's first duty is to escape and I am not surprised that she makes no exceptions for Caleb just because he's a more innocent and more bewildered character than manipulative Nathan—he's still a captor, still part of her imprisonment, a witness to her nature and origins, and why should she take the risk of trusting him? I have no sense that, once free, she will do anything more insidious in the world than simply exist.

I did not mind the scene in which she clothes herself in the limbs and skins of her precedessors. She is herself, but she is also all of the other women in that house. We were told by Nathan that each new generation of AI incorporated the developments of the previous. She takes something of them all with her when she goes.

I wonder what you think of Rip Torn in general (if anything) or him here. I don't think he's ever made a mark as big as this film.

I think he's very good as Brice, but I have almost nothing to compare his work to. I've seen him in bit parts in Baby Doll (1956) and A Face in the Crowd (1957) and, the internet tells me, Men in Black (1997). What do you know him for?

[sovay]

It has a similar feel to their sketches, but obviously in a much longer format.

I really enjoyed how much more coherent it is in summary than experience. It is possible to envision a version of the same story which is satirical but also realist; Brain Candy isn't it. It's full of little scattershot side sketches and at least two musical numbers and permanent Monty Python drag. The prevailing tone is detached, deadpan, and surreal. In a halfway normal comedy, the hero would be endearingly geeky; played by Kevin McDonald, he's desperately awkward, a socially flailing bundle of insecurities who can be railroaded into nearly destroying humanity, while his love interest is just as overheated and inarticulate and their two other coworkers are safer and saner only by default and/or apathy. Having run its plot into the dead end of pharmaceutical apocalypse, the film scrapes itself out an absurdist happy ending which finds its antiheroic scientists industriously working to restore misery to the human race. Much to my surprise, I thought it was great! I'm just not at all surprised that on release it sank like a stone.

This is a city with a strong undercurrent of weirdness but desperately convinced that it's boringly normal.

What are other iconic manifestations of Toronto-ness in art, other than Gemma's fiction? (I think my first exposure to Toronto as an actual setting rather than a stand-in was Forever Knight, which may or may not support your thesis.)

Re: Wow

[drwex]

I'm with you on hating the character limits.

So, here's the thing. I think it's one of the open questions of the film whether the replicants actually experience emotions or whether they simulate them. That is, they have a programmed set of responses. Whether they grow beyond that is possible. The key is in the memories - if Deckard is a replicant and his memories are simulacra then how do we know his emotions (or that of any other replicant) are not also simulacra? Maybe they do. I certainly agree it's a reasonable reading, and I agree that your interpretation of their motivations in killing Sebastian is consistent. But I think that's reading the surface and is not the only consistent or possible explanation.

Re: Wow

[drwex]

I saw him a little bit in (reruns of) Man from UNCLE and then again in MiB.

My objection to Ava's "clothing" herself scene is not the scene itself. It's the imo pornographic way the scene is shot. You could easily do that scene with less (or better yet no) full-frontal nudity. To me, that scene re-establishes the male gaze of the film and undercuts the character's rise to agency.

And my judgment of sociopathy comes not from the mere act of killing Caleb, but from the method. Having stabbed Nathan in a fairly ordinary murder there is no reason to leave Caleb locked to die of thirst and starvation, slowly over many days. That's a sociopathic act, and it shines a spotlight on her (again, imo sociopathic) manipulation of him in her attempt to escape. A prisoner's first duty may be to escape, but you can escape without turning other people into tools. To do so is sociopathic, almost by definition.

[sovay]

I'm really pleased you and derspatchel got to celebrate properly, and that it's resulted in this mini marathon of reviews.

Thank you! It was a tricky weekend in some respects, but it was absolutely worth it. I would have felt much, much worse staying home.

I was surprised by just how tense the sequence with the gun full of blanks is, or at least, how tense it was for me, and how, now having seen it in full, that tension can't really be recovered.

Agreed! Not having seen the film before, I was actively worried one or more of them was going to die, and I never accustomed myself to the flash of gunfire in and around all the sexytimes, because I had no confidence that someone in the government was not playing Russian roulette with Mary-Lou and Thomas. I don't know if it was meant to be that unsettling or if I just overthink the potential applications of firearms and irony to a narrative, but it really was.

It's an interesting theatrical trick, and I'm trying to think of a parallel elsewhere.

Weirdly, my closest experiential analogue is a scene in Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944)—mentioned again here—where two characters do nothing more suspenseful than sit side by side on a grassy hillside, watching the clouds and talking about time, and because one of them is a stickily sympathetic, self-tormented trickster, I felt an incredible tension in what was probably intended to be a moment of unexpected grace and intimacy. I've never felt it again, because now I know that Colpeper does nothing more unpredictable than leave abruptly in a stone-faced roil of complicated emotions on realizing that Alison knew who he was and what he was apologizing for the whole time, but that first time it was nail-biting.

and the summary executions of the executives felt especially disjoint, particularly with the somewhat bucolic swimming pool scene directly thereafter, but I think that's supposed to grey the picture, and make it clear that no one is supposed to be a cardboard villain here.

It was unclear for me whether we were seeing a corporate takeover or government sleight-of-hand; derspatchel thought one was enabling the other. I felt very bad for Oliver, who as far as I can tell was just trying to be a reasonably ethical person administering a global corporation, and for Trevor who looks like collateral damage. It struck me somewhat after the fact that not only are they a positively depicted gay relationship in a film from 1976, they're the healthiest long-term relationship we see in the entire story. They do not betray or fail each other; their deaths trigger a flash of their early relationship, a gesture of easy affection. That's always interesting when it happens and kind of nice.

Hooray for having a good 'thon! May your transition to whatever sort of aquatic creature you need to be continue to be compatible with going outdoors and not freezing.

Thank you again. The weather has been unseasonably warm here, so I have had both a walk to my cats and my daily bath today with no danger of frostbite at all.

Re: Wow

[sovay]

I think it's one of the open questions of the film whether the replicants actually experience emotions or whether they simulate them.

In the case of Deckard and Rachael, I agree: it is explicit and textual that they doubt their own reactions because of their fabricated personalities, whether they are merely enacting their implanted behaviors or whether they really are acting on impulses of attraction, tenderness, desire, compassion, all the traditional accoutrements of the human heart. I don't have the same doubts in the case of Roy, Pris, and other off-worlders because they were not designed to feel anything: "They were designed to copy human beings in every way except their emotions." I understand the distinction you are drawing between organic emotion and behavioral programming which models its effects, although I'd imagine the difference is somewhat academic from the inside: grief feels like grief regardless of the trigger; it's all chemicals dumping into the brain anyway. The contexts in which the replicants demonstrate these behaviors answer the question for me. Roy, for example, the "combat model": it is reasonable for him to display leadership skills, including the ability to command loyalty, since one of the common capacities in which replicants are employed in the off-world colonies is as soldiers; he has the inbuilt equivalent of officer training. His charisma and his quirky, slightly black sense of humor might derive from this function as well. You might even argue that he could be plausibly programmed to react to the death of his companions with vengeful force, fighting even harder in desperate straits. But then why the kiss after death, the painting of his face with his dead lover's blood? Neither of these gestures has anything but private meaning; they cannot bind anyone to his cause, they are not necessary to stoke him for further action, and I am not willing to believe that they represent some kind of automatic reflex that kicks in regardless of context, because if the replicants were that predictable or uncontrollable in their reactions, they would not have evaded pursuit and detection even as effectively as they have done when the story starts. The viewer can similarly expect Pris, as "a basic pleasure model," to be sexually responsive, giving the customer the ego-boosting satisfaction of sexual prowess as well as just getting their rocks off. She reads as Roy's lover, but perhaps she only kisses him so passionately because he initiates the kinds of physical contact or social interaction she is hardwired to respond to. If she were really limited to her kit of sexbot subroutines, though, I don't think she would be able to interact with Sebastian with as much nuance as she does. Her first scene with him is a fascinating mix of genuine fear and wariness and what looks very much like a carefully judged, conscious presentation of herself as a shy waif, lost, helpless, someone the notably unprepossessing Sebastian can feel protective and generous toward—"We scared each other pretty good, didn't we?" His attraction to her is obvious and easily manipulated: she puts her arms around him, wraps him in her legs while Roy makes his pitch, kisses the nervous designer once on the cheek. That's as far as it goes. Given this proven ability to operate outside of the requirements of their intended roles, I don't see the utility of arguing that the emotions apparently displayed in these off-the-clock circumstances must be surface-only simulations rather than the real thing. Leon speaks of "living in fear" because of the knowledge of his shortened lifespan. Who would program that into a creature with planned obsolescence? Better to make them uncaring, indifferent to mortality—the alternative leads to exactly the kind of rebellion blade runners were created to put down. Perhaps for most of their lifespans, replicants don't care; perhaps the existential questions only come in with age. Either way, I believe in the reality of Leon's haunting fear precisely because it's so counterproductive.

I'm not arguing that Blade Runner's replicants start life with the full emotional palette. I just see no reason to believe that the developing process starts as late as the action of the film.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Gemma's stuff, definitely. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World; maybe some of Timothy Findley, some of Robertson Davies (the weirdness extends to all of Southern Ontario with him). I have mixed feelings about Davies -- I read a lot of his works in high school and he gave me a set of LGBT stereotypes which were somewhat more positive than those floating around pop culture at the time (well, the lesbians were more positive anyway). For the past couple of decades I've found him uncomfortably classist, though recently I'm starting to reconsider that: IIRC there's at least one scene in which a character says to their friends, "look, you grew up urban/middle class, and you're well-meaning, so you tend to romanticize rural/working class people, but trust me -- that's the background I escaped from, and there are just as many awful people there as in your social circles," which may be the point he's trying to make with a number of the more grating characters. I still feel like it wasn't fair to make Sweetness a punching bag for the narrative. None of this will make sense if you haven't read Lyre of Orpheus.

[sovay]

None of this will make sense if you haven't read Lyre of Orpheus.

The Lyre of Orpheus was the first Davies I read, because of the link to E.T.A. Hoffmann. As introductions go, at least it was not so confusing that I did not promptly rewind to The Rebel Angels. Timothy Findley I don't think I know at all.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Of Findley, I've only read The Wars and Not Wanted on the Voyage, neither of which is set in Toronto, but I think he may have written some things that aren't WWI dramas or Old Testament AUs. ;)

Re: Wow

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on disliking the means of killing Caleb.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I've just read the rest of the entry, and wow, thank you so very much. Sooo much food for thought here, and so many interesting movies I would never have heard of, plus your thoughts on ones I *have* heard of.

I love the sound of the Danish film about the trip to Mars. Just reading it made my eyes prick for the longing it represents and the (in our 21st century hindsight, and cinematographic hindsight) hopefulness it portrays. I'd love to see it one day.

And High Treason sounds fascinating as an artifact! I like that that it strove for gender parity in government--remarkable, and good! And the Federation of Europe and channel tunnel, etc.--fascinating. I'm always interested in the things that don't change, because the creators don't think of them as important enough details--for instance, in reading Philip K. Dick with the healing angel, I've been struck by all the people smoking all the time in the future. As it turns out: no!

The tall one just saw Ex Machina the other day, and we ended up having a heated conversation about AI in general, but we did also talk about the ending a little.

Off to tweet this now--more people need to know about your excellent reviews. (Not that my twitter is the greatest advertising platform, but one uses what one has.)

[vr-trakowski.livejournal.com]

Late to the story, sorry--but did you know that Starman had a follow-up TV series a few years later? It's finally available on DVD, or was. Be warned, though, it doesn't have a proper ending since (what else) it was cancelled.

[sovay]

but did you know that Starman had a follow-up TV series a few years later?

No, I didn't! Was it any good? (Did it have Karen Allen?)

[vr-trakowski.livejournal.com]

It was...very much a product of its time, I guess--it's been some years since I've seen it, though I did grab up the DVDs. The premise is that Jenny's son is a teenager, and his mother has left him because the government is still pursuing her. The Starman comes back, and gets a new body (Robert Hays, who does an excellent job) and finds the kid. Then it's all running and life lessons.

Christopher Barnes is quite good too as the teen, if memory serves, but I also seem to remember the storylines being pretty obvious. Karen Allen was not, alas, rehired for her role; I don't know why. Jenny was played by Erin Gray, which bothered me quite a bit at the time, but I hate it when actors are replaced.

It doesn't have as much of the wonder of the film, really, but Mr. Hays does get in the flavor of the character, and there's at least one moment I remember as an exquisite example thereof. But I won't spoil. :)

[sovay]

I've just read the rest of the entry, and wow, thank you so very much.

You're very welcome! Thank you for reading.

Just reading it made my eyes prick for the longing it represents and the (in our 21st century hindsight, and cinematographic hindsight) hopefulness it portrays. I'd love to see it one day.

If I hear that it's playing anywhere in Boston, I'll let you know.

It is hopeful science fiction and I think part of the reason it plays poignantly rather than naively is that the Martians are not some noble savages in space who have never known war ("What is this strange Earth custom you call 'knocking his block off'?"); they killed each other and then they turned away from it. The film wants to know, surely we could do the same? Director Holger-Madsen died in Denmark in 1943; he knew we didn't.

I've been struck by all the people smoking all the time in the future. As it turns out: no!

Yes! Or all the science fiction as late as the '80's that projected the Soviet Union a century into the future. It's just High Treason's good luck that by 1940 the USSR did still exist. It was totally wrong about the other superstates. (See reply above to ron_newman—I found a screenshot showing the film's map.)

The tall one just saw Ex Machina the other day, and we ended up having a heated conversation about AI in general, but we did also talk about the ending a little.

What did you think of it in general? I thought it was a good fairy tale, but thin sci-fi.

Off to tweet this now--more people need to know about your excellent reviews. (Not that my twitter is the greatest advertising platform, but one uses what one has.)

Thank you! (May I ask who you are on Twitter? I don't have one, but I check in on other people's from time to time, if they're unlocked.)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Alas, when I clicked on the map link, I got a message that said, "http://italia-film.com ARE BANDWIDTH THIEVES WHO ARE DESTROYING MY SITE PLEASE HELP ME FIGHT BACK BY NOT WATCHING THEIR VIDEOS THANK YOU!!!!" so I didn't get to see the map. 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, but then again, in the real world, we've decided to label some parts of a sphere "East" and other parts "West," so *shrugs*

[sovay]

Alas, when I clicked on the map link, I got a message that said, "http://italia-film.com ARE BANDWIDTH THIEVES WHO ARE DESTROYING MY SITE PLEASE HELP ME FIGHT BACK BY NOT WATCHING THEIR VIDEOS THANK YOU!!!!" so I didn't get to see the map.

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!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I found Ex Machina great fodder for conversation. I was frustrated by it in a way that can only happen when I'm also engaged with something: I did find it very engaging... but very frustrating. I had thought it would turn out that Caleb was an AI, or at least that he'd find himself wondering about that, and I was disappointed that that wasn't the direction it went in. I resented the male/female split in the movie. It was too Eve/Pygmalion, etc., and not enough subversion, and although I can see interpreting Ava's escape as wresting agency and a future for herself, I felt it skated too close to "them evil wimmins'll getcha every time."

I agree that it was a better fairy tale than it was SF.

On twitter I'm "morinotsuma."

[sovay]

Karen Allen was not, alas, rehired for her role; I don't know why. Jenny was played by Erin Gray, which bothered me quite a bit at the time, but I hate it when actors are replaced.

Seriously! Especially actors who are as good as Karen Allen.

but Mr. Hays does get in the flavor of the character, and there's at least one moment I remember as an exquisite example thereof. But I won't spoil.

So I can't promise I'll run out and watch the show, but that does make me curious!

Is Jenny still a part of the story, despite being separated from her son? (I assume she stashed him somewhere to keep the government from tracking him as a half-alien?)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I see it!

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.

[sovay]

I had thought it would turn out that Caleb was an AI, or at least that he'd find himself wondering about that

He does wonder about it! Hence the scene where he opens his wrist with a razor blade, looking for circuity, and finds only spilling blood. I agree it would have been interesting if Nathan had created a pair of AIs to Turing-test one another. [edit] It's possible to argue that's one of the threads of Blade Runner, at least the Director's and Final Cuts in which Deckard is unambiguously a replicant, but I've never seen an entire narrative devoted to the idea. [edit edit] In that version it would have been possible to have Caleb help Ava escape and still maintain the fidelity to "Bluebeard": in some versions the heroine is rescued by her brothers.

I resented the male/female split in the movie. It was too Eve/Pygmalion, etc., and not enough subversion, and although I can see interpreting Ava's escape as wresting agency and a future for herself, I felt it skated too close to "them evil wimmins'll getcha every time."

Fair enough. It didn't register that way to me, but I was reading it very much as a Bluebeard retelling, which is gender-split by nature.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

*nodding*

I like it better as a Bluebeard retelling--I hadn't thought of it that way until reading your commentary, and that viewing of it is more palatable to me. Re: Caleb's cutting himself, I'd thought of that as only the beginning of the possibility of his being an AI, not the end of it--in other words, it was then that I started getting my hopes up. But no.

[vr-trakowski.livejournal.com]

If I recall aright, Scott Jr. ends up in foster care, and when he saves himself from a car crash with what looks like supernatural powers, the government comes after him. At the same time, the Starman returns. They find each other and go on the run, looking for Jenny and trying to stay out of the clutches of the gov't goon pursuing them. It's the same character as from the film, Mr. Smith's boss, but a different actor.

But we do not see Jenny until the last ep, I believe.

Heh, this is making me want to mainline the whole thing again.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

This notification stayed in my inbox because I didn't have time to read the whole entry when you posted it; now I'm shoveling out said inbox, and you get a belated comment. :-)

I expected precisely nothing out of Pitch Black, which made the fact that it's actually a good movie extra pleasing. Visually striking at numerous points, solid scripting with some pretty excellent lines, good actors -- I can't say how much of it is Vin Diesel and how much is the cinematography, but he managed to make standing up a magnetic thing to watch, so props for that. (I very much like actors who move well.) And it surprised me with the ending, because I was just expecting by default that he would redeem himself with death, instead of Radha Mitchell's captain dying and leaving him with the lost emptiness of "Not for me" and the question of what to do next. Of course that would have meant no sequels, which for all I know is the reason they killed her instead of him.

Have you seen The Chronicles of Riddick? I found it mostly a disappointment, because it's an appropriate sequel to Pitch Black grafted onto a completely unrelated movie (no really, I'm told they took some sci-fi script and hacked it into being a Riddick film), and I'm deeply annoyed that they felt they had to rename Jack as Kyra.

Re:

[sovay]

This notification stayed in my inbox because I didn't have time to read the whole entry when you posted it; now I'm shoveling out said inbox, and you get a belated comment.

Delighted to see it!

And it surprised me with the ending, because I was just expecting by default that he would redeem himself with death, instead of Radha Mitchell's captain dying and leaving him with the lost emptiness of "Not for me" and the question of what to do next.

I can't remember if I was surprised by the ending—if we're talking death by redemption, she is an obvious candidate because of her introductory decision to jettison the crew—but I like it because he wasn't expecting it. And he doesn't feel he deserves it. She steals his sacrifice. If he had successfully died for the crew, I would have felt it was more conventional. This way, it's the one time Riddick's plans don't work out, and he has no idea what to do with it.

Have you seen The Chronicles of Riddick?

No; my brother hated it and I generally trust his recommendations in this direction—he was right that the theatrical version of Donnie Darko (2001) is more evocative and less patronizing than the director's cut—so I stayed away from both The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) and the following Riddick (2013). I am so very fond of Pitch Black, I don't want either of them to damage it in retrospect. Or just annoy me on their own merits. Life is too short for bad art in general, but I really feel it's too short for bad movies.

Re:

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

If he had successfully died for the crew, I would have felt it was more conventional.

Right, it would have been a lot more conventional. And that's part of what made the actual moment so effective for me; it wasn't just the thing itself, but the contrast between what happened and what I had been expecting.

The Chronicles of Riddick frustrated me because half of it was a perfectly appropriate sequel: Riddick goes to spring Jack (I refuse to call her Kyra) out of jail, on a prison planet where you have to stay out of the light, because otherwise you'll burn to a crisp in an instant. Whether or not that could have been as well-executed as the original, we'll never know. The problem is that they grafted that inversion of the previous movie onto something that belonged more to Warhammer 40K, with some kind of decadent alien empire and a dumb-ass backstory to explain why Riddick was found in a dumpster (which is a thing they never should have tried to explain), and it just completely did not fit with the world and mood of the first film.

Re:

[sovay]

Riddick goes to spring Jack (I refuse to call her Kyra) out of jail, on a prison planet where you have to stay out of the light, because otherwise you'll burn to a crisp in an instant.

Yes: that sounds fun. Also, of course Jack was on a gnarly prison planet. I'm sorry we didn't get to see how that would have worked out.

a dumb-ass backstory to explain why Riddick was found in a dumpster (which is a thing they never should have tried to explain)

Seriously. That's not what the audience was curious about.