The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[Rayon Vert]

As much as I love this film, which is Top 10 material, this SNL spoof of the trailer is one of the funniest fake-trailers ever, and takes some fair shots at the film!

Thanks for the laughs!

Yeah those lines from the Amy character in the film, "I think anybody who falls in love is a freak. It's a crazy thing to do. It's kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity", were pretty good and dead-on from my perspective!

[therewillbeblus]

And at the same time, I’ve been saying something very similar for years- both personally and professionally- that entering into romantic relationships and becoming vulnerable with a person that inherently cannot align with our perspective/values completely, is insane, but we do it anyways (or some of us don’t sometimes!) because we weigh these objective truths that will lead to some hardship, against the invaluable individualized rewards. The other side though, is that to some people it’s invaluable to feel secure and not go through that agony. Stripped down to a ‘cerebral’ indie-movie line in the SNL sketch though is totally fair game!

[therewillbeblus]

The Bride of Frankenstein: It only took multiple watches over a significant portion of my life, but I'm finally on board with considering this film better than the original. Moreover, it's a film I consider more sci-fi than horror because instead of meditating on the terrors of foreign entities or the deadly consequences of creating aliens, the sequel is more purely interested in the drives towards, and away from, scientific progress. The bifurcated narrative holds dueling interests, with Frankenstein battling his desire to feed his ego and curiosity with Godlike scientific powers as Pretorius basks in these hedonistic pleasures, while the monster strives to move away from a sci-fi or horror plot to find belongingness, unsuccessfully returning to be trapped within another experiment. This happened in the original to an extent, but this iteration has more to share about the experience of the sci-fi device outside of the scientist's moral dilemma. As the humans move away from their mindfulness in the present in blind aloof dreaming, the monster moves toward safe spaces where he can explore his humanity. The title is a psyche-out joke because the creation of the bride is a short-lived disaster, the result crippled by the failure to consider the essence of true compassion between people, producing instead a warm body that the monster knows isn't authentic love while the real men don't seem to care. The irony lands in a place where sci-fi caves in on itself as meaningless when ignoring the core values of social existence, oddly comprehended more by the only nonhuman, and the final act by him literally destroys it to return all to zero for everyone else. The erasure renders all pointless, freeing the doctor but also eliminating the hope in the monster's observations of goodness. It's pretty nihilistic to think that the world is a vacuum for the love he sees, rather than simply that the monster can't coexist while others can attain it, but maybe that's too strong a reading.

[knives]

And here I thought it was about how miserable being gay in the ‘30s was and why that should induce one to try to have fun.

I intended that as just flippancy, but that ‘hedonism’ comment I think produces however accidentally a judgment call that the film resents. Whale wishes he could be Prestorius as he still has his Frankenstein’s to fight.

[therewillbeblus]

I've read up on the queer analyses, which I like a lot, but enough has been written on them and I went with what struck me the most. To your second point, I completely agree and was referring to hedonism as the judgment not only society unfairly uses to simplify a person's psychology, but one's own inner conflict, and often torment, in relation to their social context in giving in to that part without apology. I've never taken a class on deviance or hedonism that wasn't viewing them in the objective deconstruction you're putting forth, and I thought by now I'd made it perhaps too clear on this forum that I resent this kind of pathology- in fact, I believe you and I have had more than just a few friendly disagreements coming down on opposite sides of this pejorative usage of terms!- but if you read that descriptor at face value as my judgment, rather than an acknowledgement of an internal part of a person that they feel drawn to and repelled from for a variety of complex reasons inside and outside their mind, something was lost in translation as that was not my intention.

[Rayon Vert]

The Clone Returns to the Homeland (aka The Clone Returns Home) (Nakajima 2008). (1st viewing) Kohei is an astronaut who, before dying during an accident on a space station, agreed to have himself cloned by the agency to prepare for such circumstances. Very early in the film we’re given a very lengthy flashback to his childhood with his mother in the country where a tragedy befalls his twin brother, events that resonate strongly in the later narrative. That entire section is especially well done and poignant. There are further and intriguing plot developments and I felt the question of how other characters react to the clone is mirrored by the challenge presented to the viewer in sympathizing or not with the new protagonist(s). But the more the film progresses the more it trades in narrative for lyrical passages (plenty of long sequences of the protagonist walking alone on rainy countryside roads). The major influence, which becomes obvious the more the film goes on, is Tarkosvky, Solaris of course but the director’s work in a larger sense. It’s a meditative work on memory and identity, childhood and family, with a strongly felt but hard-to-pinpoint spiritual dimension. Throughout the film there’s a strong focus on nature as well, the constant sounds of wind rustling through the foliage, and water and rain, lots of it, which is maybe the strongest Tarkovskian element here. I felt the ending kind of petered out though. It’s not nearly as strong as something like Solaris but I’m guess many an art film buff on this board might find this one interesting.


Frogs (McCowan 1972). (1st viewing) A cranky Southern patriarch seems to be abusing the ecology of his island estate and his 4th of July family weekend gets ruined by the non-mammal inhabitants finally staging their moment of revolt. Photography-wise this looks pretty good for an AIP flick, but everything else - story, script, acting (even with Ray Milland and Sam Elliott on board) - is sub-par. The director also really isn’t the best at filming and editing those animal shots in a way to create menace or suspense. (And it gets a little hard to believe that a United States location could be home to so many species of lizard, snakes, etc., not to mention tarantulas and scorpions!) Despite all that, there’s still a little fun to be had in some of the animal slasher “kills”. 4.4 on IMDB seems a little harsh - maybe 5.7?

In any event, this made me realize that I can’t see any reason why The Birds can’t be a contender for this list, in terms of scientifically impossible and/or unexplainable animal behavior. The fact that the behavior of the animals in Frogs has a motivation, even if a realistically untenable one, illuminates by contrast at least one reason why the Hitchcock film is so much more frightening.


The Void (Kostanski & Gillespie 2016). (1st viewing) knives covered this earlier. This is very much The Thing in a hospital for a good chunk of it. A mediocre horror actioner for me, which becomes less than that with the more fantastical ending. I got fooled by, and disagree with, IMDB’s including the sci-fi tag on this one, as it perfectly fits the supernatural horror category. (Wiki and allmovie get this right.) I had a much better time with Frogs.


Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut 1966). (revisit) Watched this again to rank it, and I’m sticking to my write-up posted in an earlier list project:

Truffaut en anglais et en couleur! Truffaut’s Hitchcock book came out around this time and this film captures a lot of the famous director’s flavor. The strongly visual and “cinematic” nature of the movie, the color scheme (strong and striking forms and saturated colors, recalling the red-and-yellow scheme of Marnie mostly), the visual motifs (Montag’s Vertigo-like dream sequence, complete with a zoom-in track-out shot, though that had previously been used on the statue in Jules et Jim), even a score by Bernard Herrmann himself (although this certainly isn’t the best Herrmann score, though it’s strongly reminiscent of his Hitch work – there were scenes, like following the fire truck down the road, where I wondered if a more low-key, abstract and ominous score would have been more effective in rendering a sense of bleak, state-controlled society). It’s a compelling movie visually, including the well-chosen location shots and how they are used and decorated (this futuristic England is a bit of a precursor in some ways to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange five years later).

It’s also a book lovers’ movie and quite fitting for Truffaut, whose love of books is apparent through most of his films. The scenes involving books and the loving way in which they are shot are quite engaging. The choices of books are also often telling, for example the identity-less Montag choosing to first read David Copperfield (“I was born”) at the moment he is about to differentiate himself in this society that forces conformity, and the scene where the woman who decides to get burned among her books rather than be separated by them follows a shot of a Joan of Arc book just a few moments previously. As Annette Insdorf notes in her celebrated study of Truffaut, there is also an ambiguity that adds another layer to the film’s overt message. Many of the points that the fireman captain brings up do have some, however partial, merit, and one can’t help wonder if Truffaut the book & cinema recluse didn’t choose to make this film because he delighted in the irony or saw it as a bit of self-criticism in the way the book lovers “choose” books over people the way Montag refuses to choose his wife over his books and get criticized for it.

My fondness for this film was greater in initial viewings, but since then its faults balance out its qualities. It’s really a cinephile’s film for the reasons I've enumerated, because on the level of narrative (as it’s directed) it’s somewhat lifeless and we never become strongly emotionally engaged with the content – even in potentially and relatively more moving sequences like the ending with the wonderful conceit of the Book People.

Rollerball (Jewison 1975). (1st viewing) The corporate-run world theme is prescient and the conception of the rollerball game is original (kind of a cool idea for a sport, although I read that Jewison was appalled at the idea) and fun. But apart from the action in the game scenes, I thought the rest of the film hovered between OK to mediocre. The script doesn’t really deliver sufficiently in terms of interesting drama or suspense and a lot of the non-action scenes (like the elites’ decadent soirée) are just too pointlessly slow and seem to go on forever.


Prospect (Earl & Caldwell 2018). (1st viewing) Interesting enough indie debut. A man and his teenage daughter are traveling to an alien moon to mine gems when their landing pod malfunctions. Surprising rapid developments turn this into an outright western. The budget means the effects are minimal (the moon is recognizably terrestrial, but the photography and design manage to make it otherworldly enough) but the focus is more on the narrative and the characters anyway. There’s good acting by the leads. Overall a minor piece but well-executed and likeable - a recommended watch.

[bottled spider]

Good write-up of Fahrenheit 451. I feel much the same way. There are a lot of visual pleasures, and the oddity of its 'mild' brand of authoritarianism is intriguing, but it doesn't quite add up to a successful movie.

I hadn't considered The Birds as sci-fi before either. Something to mull over.

[colinr0380]

I quite like The Void (with some reservations) but would agree that it is much more Lovecraftian other worldly than sci-fi other worldy, if that is a good distinction to make.

Rollerball (Jewison 1975). (1st viewing) The corporate-run world theme is prescient and the conception of the rollerball game is original (kind of a cool idea for a sport, although I read that Jewison was appalled at the idea) and fun. But apart from the action in the game scenes, I thought the rest of the film hovered between OK to mediocre. The script doesn’t really deliver sufficiently in terms of interesting drama or suspense and a lot of the non-action scenes (like the elites’ decadent soirée) are just too pointlessly slow and seem to go on forever.

The soirée is the part of the film that is most seared into my memory years after last seeing it, as it was amusing that their very anti-environmentalist idea of fun is going outside and instead of a hunting party they instead take it in turns to explode (the last remaining?) trees into flames one by one! I presume that Jewison was influenced by some of the absurdities of Buñuel's discreet bourgeoisies there!

[therewillbeblus]

In any event, this made me realize that I can’t see any reason why The Birds can’t be a contender for this list, in terms of scientifically impossible and/or unexplainable animal behavior. The fact that the behavior of the animals in Frogs has a motivation, even if a realistically untenable one, illuminates by contrast at least one reason why the Hitchcock film is so much more frightening.

Who are you, me in the Horror thread? In all seriousness, I appreciate the flexing of genre-parameters and was planning to revisit The Birds again sometime soon anyways, so I'll be glad to look at it through a novel lens after so many revisits. Still, it feels more distinctly horror due to how inexplicable the power shift is in disrupting safety from expected grounded laws of coexistence. We could go through countless horrors and look at how common creatures function against their normative behavior when possessed by other forces (I'm sure there are better examples than the rams in The Witch or the dog in Hereditary) and even if the birds are more prevalent beyond background details, would we call Satanic-possession films sci-fi when they change how humans function, or is this only sci-fi because we are unclear about the source of their malfunctioning alternative behaviors? And if mystery is the rationale for considering it, where is the science involved in the hypothesis of 'what if'? I suppose 'what if birds started deviating from their reliable biological drives' counts, though that seems a bit broad and applicable to many a horror film that would stretch the boundaries a bit far and wide.

Obviously I've counted films on genre lists, including this one, that have and will seem totally illogical to others - but for the sake of playing devil's advocate I'm wondering out loud if there are more concrete sci-fi roots at play, and there very well may be!

[Rayon Vert]

So many great sci-fi films are sci-fi horror films (Alien, The Thing, a lot of the great apocalyptic 50s films, etc.), I mean they often converge. Personally I won't be thinking about including films or ranking them based on trying to decide what genre they most belong to, just my overall liking of the film if they include sci-fi elements, so there will definitely be some strong overlap with my horror list. (Though I won't include a film where the horror so much predominates that the sci-fi element I feel is an aside, like Carrie, although here of course there's a lot of subjective evaluation. Plus in the case of Carrie the "sci fi" element is something that is an object of scientific, if controversial, study.)

In the case of animals where the behavior is Satanic/demonic, I think that's usually clearly established as belonging to the realm of the supernatural (which is what The Void is was the point I was belaboring), and therefore usually counted as supernatural horror (or demonic horror as a subgenre within that one). The Birds, or more obviously a film like Frogs (which is given a sci-fi tag by IMDB in addition to a horror one), are cases where the behavior is unexplained or impossible but not caused by demonic forces (as far as we know!). (Other films like Long Weekend would fit this bill.) Films where animals attack but do so within their normative behavior, even if there is exaggeration (Jaws, Cujo), are clearly not. (A film where a shark is genetically engineered, Deep Blue Sea, clearly is.) In any event, that's where my thinking is about this.

[Rayon Vert]

Thinking specifically about The Birds again, it clearly has that apocalyptic dimension (that classic ending) that also relates it to other classic horror sci-fi films.

[therewillbeblus]

Oh I agree that sci-fi and horror sync up, where even the broader reasons (i.e. sci-fi that evokes unsettling philosophical horrors, or horror films that evoke deep-seeded philosophical questions about sci-fi implications) fit the bill. I was merely musing on how using the spectrum of clarity vs. mystery in the sourced condition for the abnormality, as the independent variable responsible for swinging the categorization from potential sci-fi to totally horror-heavy, is vague enough to dig deeper, though obviously by focusing on Suvin's hypothesis myself I'm making room for that to be fair game- I'm just wondering if that condition is "enough" on its own terms, or if we can pull more reasons from the film. To your apocalyptic point I def agree, though I feel like I argued that in the Horror thread tirelessly as a lone voice, but maybe my examples were too esoteric or I picked the wrong genre!

[brundlefly]

Prospect (Earl & Caldwell 2018). (1st viewing) Interesting enough indie debut. A man and his teenage daughter are traveling to an alien moon to mine gems when their landing pod malfunctions. Surprising rapid developments turn this into an outright western. The budget means the effects are minimal (the moon is recognizably terrestrial, but the photography and design manage to make it otherworldly enough) but the focus is more on the narrative and the characters anyway. There’s good acting by the leads. Overall a minor piece but well-executed and likeable - a recommended watch.

A lot of what I liked about this was how the production's pragmatism lends the movie an honest, professional modesty. Which can make it feel more like an accomplishment than an achievement, but I'm inclined to root for a movie made by a bunch of production designers who wanted to do some world-building in and around Hoh Rain Forest. And it's not an empty exercise: Saw this in a woodsy back-to-back with 'Leave No Trace' (obvs not sf), and while that one spends more time exploring support networks and exposing real concerns, both have daughters picking and choosing what they have to learn and un-learn from father figures. 'Prospect' also has the joy of watching Pedro Pascal loll his head about inside a too-big helmet while his performance nods toward Nathan Fillion.

The Void (Kostanski & Gillespie 2016). (1st viewing) knives covered this earlier. This is very much The Thing in a hospital for a good chunk of it. A mediocre horror actioner for me, which becomes less than that with the more fantastical ending. I got fooled by, and disagree with, IMDB’s including the sci-fi tag on this one, as it perfectly fits the supernatural horror category. (Wiki and allmovie get this right.) I had a much better time with Frogs.

I've rooted for the Astron-6 (RIP) boys, as well, who've stumbled over their own limitations while cobbling together second-hand stuff in the Canuck prairies. They're definitely inclined toward horror: Their best full-length is still their first, the very nasty, ugly, disgusting (and sometimes funny) serial killer flick 'Father's Day,' which won me over by going, "Why the hell not?" in convincing fashion. 'The Editor' was a giallo homage (with a splash of Cronenberg) and, though it has a following, it landed around the same time as artsier stuff from Cattet & Forzani and Strickland's far superior 'Berber Sound Studio.' Their best material may be their shorts, which marry "Everything is Terrible!" aesthetics with 'Family Viewing'-era Egoyan video/reality breakdowns. 'The Void' was their most polished-looking, least personal effort and I have forgotten most everything about it. I think the math I'd done on that went something like 'Assault on Precinct 13'+Lovecraft with a Fulci epilogue? But yeah, meh.

[bottled spider]

Slaughterhouse-Five (George Hill, 1972). I haven't read the novel since my early teens. As best as I can remember, the difference between the book and the movie is this: reading the book, what you are immersed in at any given moment is the prose itself, the Vonnegut style, the Vonnegut attitude. So it's not that disorientating jumping around from one time frame to another, because wherever you are you're in Vonnegutland. Watching the movie, you are necessarily immersed in each scene as it's happening, so the disjointedness of the narrative is much more jarring. That greater feeling of being suddenly wrenched out of some cozy moment and thrust back into the distressing war is an advantage the movie has over the book. I think humour is generally funnier on screen than it was in writing, the reverse of the humour in Catch-22. But in both cases I'm comparing more recent viewings to faded memories of the novels.

[Rayon Vert]

Aniara (Kågerman and Lilja 2018). (1st viewing) Written up earlier by senseabove. So am I really supposed to care about humans leaving the planet they destroyed behind so they can find shelter on another one?... OK, so this mines the same fears as in Passengers, but is much bleaker, relentlessly so, and appropriately for the country of its makers (Bergman in space). That’s the aspect I liked the most, and the way we get those large time intervals in between the different sequences. At the same time, akin to some of the comments in the film’s dedicated thread, I think the net result of that doesn’t translate to as effective drama as there could be. I definitely felt that starting mid-way through the film, and some of those narrative developments were a bit much (like the cults), dimming a bit what was up to then quite a strong enthusiasm on my part. Still an interesting film.


No Blade of Grass (Wilde 1970). (1st viewing) Pollution creates a virus wiping out the food supply, leading to widespread famine and anarchy, and we follow a small group leaving London and trying to find refuge up north (a bit like 28 Days Later minus the zombies). The film gets established with a marked, serious-minded environmental conscience so it’s surprising to see it devolve pretty rapidly into a very exploitative, apocalyptic-survival sex-and-violence thriller (including a long mother and daughter rape scene). The focus ends up being on the power plays between the group members and the western-style violence (which at least the film knowingly references) with the other communities encountered. Even with all that, it’s not a completely bad story, but it is terribly directed - I haven’t seen any of Cornel Wilde’s other films as director (including The Naked Prey) but if they’re like this it doesn’t bode well; this is just one bad, overwrought choice after another, in terms of montages, editing, sometimes shots themselves. And despite the presence of somebody like Nigel Davenport, the acting is really on the level of exploitation flicks.


Primer (Carruth 2004). (1st viewing) Even with the detailed Wiki plot description and time travel mechanics drawing at my side, it was hard to follow this - I can’t imagine anyone getting most of it during an isolated, first-time sitting. That’s not a criticism though, as I enjoyed how the film demanded very close attention, even during the more “normal”, less opaque dialogue scenes. I really liked the build-up and the discovery and all the tension involved. In the end for me though it stayed too much at the level of an extreme brain puzzle to provoke much more beyond that.


Oblivion (Kosinski 2013). (1st viewing) A pretty engrossing spectacular, that as Dr Amicus wrote earlier has a reflective, moody beginning before progressing eventually to all-out action. You can view it as suffering a bit from its overly ambitious, everything but the kitchen sink approach, but on the other hand the multiple twists and changes in the plot, the scenery and reveals keep it stimulating and fresh. It’s got impressive, epic-scale and sometimes beautiful visuals and is more than effective as entertainment. And while it recycles a lot of stuff from other films, especially Star Wars cumulatively (Luke on a desert planet with sand people watching, drones=TIE fighter pursuits, the rebellion against the empire, Tet=Death Star), it still manages to be its own thing. I wouldn’t call this a great film but I nevertheless liked it quite a bit. Is this a little underrated? (Of course Ramble On is not the opening cut on any side of Led Zep II, so that was a bit of a goof.)

This one was set in 2077. Watching many of these films that take place at specific dates, often enough the nerdy idea occurs to me to imagine gathering all the sci-fi films that are set in the future at a specific enough time that I could get my hands on, and then watching them all chronologically on that basis and attempting to see them as all part of one giant narrative and seeing if it makes any sense!


The Satan Bug (Sturges 1965). (1st viewing) The title can lead you to think this is cooler than what it is. A weaponized virus that can kill all life gets stolen from the California laboratory where it was created. The film’s focus is on the mystery and investigation to find the criminals before they put their doomsday plan into action. Richard Basehart and Dana Andrews are some of the actors here. Nothing too bad but on the other hand there’s pretty much nothing original or very compelling about the plot, and the suspense is also middling. Unfortunately, based on my experience so far, kind of what I expected from a John Sturges film.


Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace 1982). (revisit) I didn’t remember it at all, which given that it’s been nearly 40 years shouldn’t be surprising. I liked it well enough, but probably somewhere near the degree that domino was intimating. There’s definitely sci-fi (the robots and all the technology), but mixed in with the supernatural/fantastic. The Charlie and the Chocolate factory analogy is a good call. It’s a clever story and it’s pretty suspenseful even if it ends up being a little silly at the same time. I think the film takes a bit of a dip near the end with, to throw in another parallel, the reveal of the wizard behind Oz and especially of the mechanics behind the whole thing (not to mention that some of the less interesting action at the factory near the end borrows from the ‘78 Body Snatchers) - there was something more threatening when things remained mysterious and unknown until then, and wondering who were those superhuman murders. But there’s enough here to make this likeable, including that nice, collective apocalyptic feeling too that’s added to the notion of the holiday itself.

[colinr0380]

If you liked Oblivion I would certainly recommend going back to Kosinki's previous, debut, film Tron: Legacy which does a similar fusion of sci-fi tropes with a fantastic score, in that case Daft Punk rather than M83 with Oblivion. I always liked the original Tron but Tron: Legacy is probably in the running for one of my favourite films of the 2010s overall for the way in which is updates and deepens its themes. It was a little sad to hear the rumour that it was going to be the first in a trilogy of films that never came to be (which explains why the character of Tron himself only appears in flashback and briefly in the final flying sequence at the end, seeming to die but instead his suit colour changes to show he is out from under the bad guy's thumb and back to being a good guy again. Presumably in the trilogy that never came to be he would be fighting the revolution from within the computer itself as an autonomous A.I.? And I had never really picked up on it before the Red Letter Media video pointed it out (showing how little emphasis he is given in his brief cameo) but Cillian Murphy turns up in a single boardroom scene early on as the son of the David Warner bad guy character from the first film. Presumably again he was there because he might have been due to play a bigger role in future entries in the series?), but I am happy enough with the single film that we got.

The lead is a bit bland and impactless (as seems to be standard for current sci-fi fantastical fare from the Marvel films to Godzilla 2014 and Avatar) but he's not so bland as to be a complete sucking black hole void of anti-charisma (as in Godzilla 2014), so its easy enough to manage, and of course there are so many other interesting characters surrounding him (from Bruce Boxleitner's character in the real world at the opening to Jeff Bridges and the new girlfriend Quorra in the computer) that he does not really have to do much except experience the world as the viewer's avatar anyway.

And having watched Casshern recently I have my suspicions that Tron: Legacy may have 'homaged' (i.e. nicked) that (beautiful and perfect in this context) final shot of Quorra hugging Sam on the bike from a shot from the opening of that film!

Since Oblivion Kosinski has gone on to Only The Brave, which is a tragic true story film about firefighters, which is fine and has that same 'older man wrestling with being unable to completely fulfil his legacy/younger man coming to recognise his responsibilities and need to pick up the torch' sense from Tron: Legacy in the Josh Brolin and Miles Teller relationship (in Oblivion its just Tom Cruise handing his legacy over to himself! ). Plus Jeff Bridges is in there too. But its not the kind of film where you can have a wonderful bespoke sci-fi style soundtrack like the previous films. And then of course he has directed the Top Gun sequel which has been pushed back to next year (which really should have the addition of a great soundtrack to underscore all of the flying/shirtless volleyball sequences, so I am kind of looking forward to that one!)

[colinr0380]

Also, I don't know if it classes as sci-fi or not, but I absolutely love the day-glo candy coloured aesthetics of the Wachowski's Speed Racer film from 2008. That transcendent sequence in the (spoiler) final race where the CGI goes into overdrive and the entire track melts away is perhaps the best use of CGI in recent cinema (and its kind of obviously intentionally pushing things further into abstraction than even the sequence at the end of Matrix Reloaded had). Its worth sticking through the sections with the hyperactive kid and monkey pal companion for!

(Although our hero does seemingly kill those final two drivers in order to win!)

[knives]

A lot of my Sci-fi attempts lately haven't really felt for the genre despite having some markers. At least they've been mostly enjoyable though.

The Nutty Professor (dir. Lewis)
As I’m sure is true of most my age I’m intimately familiar with the Eddie Murphy movie, but only now have gotten to Lewis’ original. The big surprise is how much of the structure and character arcs are duplicated all the while being totally different beasts which is just a long winded way of calling this a Lewis film with a million gags a minute and any pathos being underlying and delivered in a way to make Lewis seem like an undergrown child. Even the typical Lewis pathos at the end seems ready for a Maex Bros film by way of comparison with the Murphy.

The battle between the two figures seems a really pronounced discussion on Lewis’ own star if I were to assume more then what’s funny was being thought of. Buddy Love is such a awful person and Kelp so pathetic that any commentary seems like a lose lose situation. If it weren’t so funny it would be kind of sad.

Mrs. Hyde (dir. Bozon)
Guess I’m doubling up on Jekyll and Hyde teaching films. This ones not as good as the Lewis because of how heavily the film focuses on Huppert’s incompetence early on in addition to a sense of racism that I can’t tell if it is genuine or just a result of showing Huppert’s racism.

The film is quite beautiful as a pastel knockoff of Chabrol’s use of colour though that just makes me wonder what he could have done with this silly and fun premise.

The film is at its best, oddly like the Lewis, when it lets itself fall down to a bunch of quirks like the mustache growing debate or everything with the Jason Schwartzman like principal. All of its French insistence on purpose makes it less interesting. Also her big speech at the end nearly made me turn completely on the film it is so bad.

New Rose Hotel (dir. Ferrara)
This gives off heavy Boarding Gate and Femme Fatale vibes even though it obviously predates those and has a sticky other dimension by having us sit with Dafoe’s character while Argento’s remains somewhat more mysterious.

Godard’s essay films feels like a more clear precedent especially with the way Walken is often used as an angrily phrased and passively voiced narrator to rough video imagery.

The great trick of the film is that it strips Gibson’s storytelling of its clothes laying bare as text the subtext that these problems are now and that the future is just a gateway for the authors’ escape not entirely unlike S&H’s Class Relations. If it weren’t for the world’s insistence that this is sci-fi I doubt anyone would call it such as it seems so in tune with Ferrara’s other grime of the city films.

[Rayon Vert]

If you liked Oblivion I would certainly recommend going back to Kosinki's previous, debut, film Tron: Legacy which does a similar fusion of sci-fi tropes with a fantastic score, in that case Daft Punk rather than M83 with Oblivion. I always liked the original Tron but Tron: Legacy is probably in the running for one of my favourite films of the 2010s overall for the way in which is updates and deepens its themes.

Thanks for the recommendation colin. I saw the original in the theater at an age when I should have been most receptive but remember even then being a bit bored by the end, and not really loving that video game-like world. Are there ways in which Legacy stands out from the original?

[colinr0380]

The soundtrack mostly (some of Daft Punk's best work) and the world is a bit more coherent. The characters have a bit more to do as well, even if it is all tried and tested father and son, evil villain wanting to rule the world, love story between human and computer world character stuff. It is kind of amazing that a 28 years later sequel actually tries to be an actual sequel to a lot of the concepts of the original film (for instance you don't really get it stated over again in Tron: Legacy that the suits change colour if you have been enslaved by the opposing team, which was one of the main plot points of the original film), when they could have been forgiven for going back to do a total reboot of the story without even acknowledging the original film at all.

(EDIT: Oh and apparently on that Red Letter Media video there is a comment from one of the crew people who created some of the costumes and weapons for the film who clarifies that it was not meant to be part of a new trilogy. Which is a shame because I would have loved to have seen them do more with that universe)

[colinr0380]

Starflight One (Jerry Jameson, 1983)

This is a TV movie about a new kind of super-speedy plane that (rather unwisely) uses rockets to boost into the upper layer of the atmosphere allowing it to travel from Los Angeles to Sydney in just two hours. However on its maiden flight some foolish individual (who just so happens to coincidentally be on board Starflight One!) gets his Australian counterpart at a rocket testing laboratory (who has a very dodgy accent!) to launch his rocket early, otherwise he will go bankrupt due to the delay, or something. The rocket is almost on a path to hit Starflight One, and then after it is self-destructed into a thousand pieces of shrapnel it definitely hits Starflight One! Despite the craft taking evasive manoeuvres by gaining altitude to dodge the debris, a piece hits the ship right in the piece of electronic wiring that stops the rockets from turning off and so instead of going up and over the wreckage instead Starflight One heads straight up for a couple of minutes until the rocket fuel dries up, leaving them stranded weightlessly in low orbit!

Can our heroes fight against time before the air inside the pressurised craft runs out, or before they start to fall back to Earth again? And just how many times can the Columbia spacecraft be used in a single film?

This is not an entry in the official series but it is obviously very indebted to the Airport series of films, which were already getting rather silly and contrived in their set ups even after the first one! It even, as with Airport, expends a lot of time and energy on our pilot (played by Lee Majors) in a loveless marriage and having an affair with the head of P.R. for the Starflight One project (played by Lauren Hutton) who has her own problems with a bratty (at least at first) pre-teen suspicious that mom has forgotten about her estranged father and angry that she is 'cheating' on him with a pilot! (Hutton even sadly describes things as being a "love quadrangle" at one point!). Which I am sure that everyone wanting to see a sci-fi thriller was really thrilled about sitting through! But, again taking its cues from Airport, it does treat the potentially adulterous couple sympathetically and has the loveless wife still concerned for her husband's safety but already mourning the loss of their relationship whether the plane returns to Earth in one piece or not.

Similarly to the Airport films there is a large ensemble cast of passengers on the plane who all have their own issues quickly sketched in. Along with Hutton's daughter there is a kindly elderly lady, a plane engineer who for some reason so hates flying that he spends much of the first half of the film drunk (until he is forced to sober up after running out of booze and gets to do a heroic final act spacewalk to fix the rocket propellers. He's kind of the equivalent of the blue collar George Kennedy figure), and not one but two complete bastards who are begging to have some form of comeuppance visited upon them! One of the bad guys is the chap who got the rocket to launch early from Australia and caused all of this mess in the first place, so he naturally has to die in the funniest/most tragic scene of the film where the Columbia hooks up a flimsy space tube between their airlock and that of the airplane and gets groups of passengers to bounce their way down it from one end to the other! This is kind of the equivalent to the chairlift in The Towering Inferno with after the first group getting through successfully the next group of five (including our bad guy Richard Chamberlain equivalent and amusingly the elderly lady) die when the tube gets too close to the exposed damaged and sparking wiring on the side of the plane and explodes!

The other shifty bad guy is part of the funniest and most bizarre subplot of the film where he initially seems to be part of a happy honeymooning couple, with the wife having won tickets to the maiden flight to Australia on a gameshow, but it turns out that he had only gotten interested in her after she won the tickets and used a quickie romance and marriage with her to get onto the flight so that he could embezzle the company that he works for and make off for a distant country with millions of dollars as fast as humanly possible! Which take the form of dozens of actual gold bars stuffed into the cargo hold that end up floating off into space after the cargo hold gets damaged whilst all the passengers look wistfully out of the windows at all this wealth just drifting off for nobody to own! That bad guy does not die but he is part of the first group through the bouncy tunnel providing the tense suggestion that he might do so. But instead despite begging his newlywed wife to take her place as the first to get back to Earth because he "needs the head start" he still gets arrested by the police as soon as they land anyway and is last seen being led off in handcuffs!

Oh, also Ray Milland appears in that standard role of the 'grumpy mogul' character who is bankrolling Starflight One and has to watch on helplessly as it runs into trouble (he's kind of a proto-Elon Musk or Richard Branson figure!). He is kind of the equivalent of the James Stewart character in Airport '77 (which makes sense as Jerry Jameson also directed the 'trapped undersea' Airport '77 along with this one! So he appears to be director who most liked taking airplane disaster films into more extreme environments!) as being the figure that everyone can turn to and complain that he was 'playing God' too much by trying to get to and from different places ever faster and 'didn't you ever consider the consequences of overextending yourself?' questions about his hubris in even doing such a project in the first place, especially when Milland gets annoyed that he has to accept help from his greatest business rival in getting the airplane back to Earth. But this is not really the kind of situation where the old white guy heading things has been doing things like cutting corners or employing feckless son-in-laws who will do the dirty work for him as with the William Holden character in Towering Inferno (in fact Milland's son is the one getting into this debate with him in their confrontation scene!), so the scene of standing up to the boss man is kind of in this film just because its something that all films of this disaster movie subgenre have to have for extra drama whether it makes logical sense or not to do so!

The film does rely a bit too heavily on a couple of ideas. One is that everyone relies so much on the Columbia being able to save the day in its back and forth commutes that it comes to seem like an advert for how great that one particular spaceship is, with nothing else even being considered as being able to help out! And the other is that structurally the film relies far to much on the 'revelation moment' where the head designer (who at one point has to get spacewalked out of Starflight in an (almost) airtight coffin that provides an almost inadvertently weird 2001-style image of two spacemen flanking the rectangular object) has to have at least three, and maybe four, separate scenes of being despairing and upset that he cannot come up with a solution only for another character to say something mundane that gives him a sudden flash of inspiration! Two moments of that are already too much, but three or more is getting ridiculous and diluting the exciting rarity of a eureka moment into just being something that happens every ten minutes or so!

Whilst a lot of the material in this film was already close to parody even back when it was new (and already had been parodied by films such as The Big Bus and of course Airplane! and its sequel. Arguably the fourth Airport film was a parody too! It was certainly dumb enough to play like one!) Starflight One adds the new wrinkle of space to the proceedings (cue a lot of weightless acting and objects floating around!) and whilst it is not particularly outstanding I do think that it works pretty well as a capstone to that entire subgenre of 'airplane disaster' films, even playing the parodies at their own game! So take this as a complimentary post to the one I did about the Airport series a few years back!

Also it is strange to think that until Apollo 13 came out this was one of only a handful of films showing people trying to desperately makeshift up stopgap solutions to getting a spacecraft safely back to Earth! I would hazard a guess that the real Apollo 13 events bore some influence on some of the action in this (of course far sillier!) film that spends so much time with characters in meeting rooms poring over schematics.

Anyway (spoiler!) everything all turns out for the best (apart from those passengers and members of the crew who die! This film has a surprisingly high body count for a TV movie!). Though a warning that this is definitely not the film to watch if you get jealous of seeing unbelievably luxurious amounts of leg room on aircraft! The aircraft even has room for a little lounge area in the centre of one of the cabins!

[bottled spider]

The Adventures of Tintin (Bernasconi, 1992)
Destination Moon
Explorers on the Moon
Considering that the original Hergé albums were written about twenty years before the moon landing, the science in these is remarkably good, concerned with what the moon is really like, what rocket travel would really be like, and avoiding the fantastical. The books are better, but these are still charming.

Serial Experiments Lain (Nakamura, 1998). Rather inscrutable. I liked the graphics though.

[Michael Kerpan]

Lain was my first anime series (along with Vampire Princess Miyu, which I never finished) -- seen on grainy rented VHS. I was totally mystified but totally impressed. And I instantly began a fan of the art of Yoshitoshi Abe (character designer here -- who went on to play bigger roles in a few other shows, including my favorite Haibane Renmei). i had to watch it again to begin feeling I comprehended (even partially) what was going on. I found that viewing the technobabble as simply part of the soundtrack helped a lot. Like the best of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, I felt this was more centered on emotional response than rational comprehension. The upgraded (reconstructed from almost scratch) version now on Blu-ray was a stunning improvement -- not only visually but aurally. Unfortunately Nakamura's reconstruction of Lain was his last project, he died (far too young) before he and Abe could make a planned new series.

[bottled spider]

I watched a DVD rental that only had the first four episodes, which doesn't help. I don't have the vocabulary to describe what I liked about it visually, I can only say I like the drawing style. Interesting that you mention Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I was reminded of the one feature of his I've seen, Pulse, not for the similar subject matter alone, but the atmosphere and tone, despite the difference in medium.

[Michael Kerpan]

Abe's character designs for Lain really were quite distinctive for the era. The series gets better and better -- and the very end is utterly overwhelming (for me). The depiction of the wired world is dated in some externals -- but really amazingly quite prescient in most.