Thomas Edison was a dick

... but he made things happen. Including several of the foundations of modern movie-making.

Today's his birthday. Here's the version of Frankenstein shot over three days at the Edison Studios in the Bronx, New York City, 1910. Written and directed by J. Searle Dawley, it owes less to Mary Shelley's novel (already nearly 100 years old at the time) than to the very loose stage play adaptations that had been the craze for decades. (The same can be said for the famous 1931 version with Boris Karloff.) But it's pretty cool, with a "creation" scene that's a keeper.




The unbilled cast include Augustus Phillips as Dr. Frankenstein, Charles Ogle as the Monster, and Mary Fuller as the doctor's fiancée.

The rise of the Empire, the fall of Vader, and the victory of the Rebellion, as told by Charlie Chaplin

I love it when someone reminds us that movies exist not just as discrete, isolated things, but as elements of a single big continuum stretching back more than a century. Here we have footage from The Return of the Jedi and The Clone Wars, music from Inception, and audio from the big moment of Chaplin's 1940 The Great Dictator (I write about that one here).

At first I was skeptical about this, but as it went along I became surprisingly moved by it. It struck me that Chaplin's speech could also be used as the cri de coeur for a mashup of conscientiously chosen OWS footage. I posted such a remix, about the Arab Spring, last March.



(Via Big Shiny Robot)

"Sci-Fi Savant" — Now beaming to a nightstand near you

I've been a fan and regular reader of Glenn Erickson's DVD Savant column for going on ten years now. The habit started when I was a new staffer at DVD Journal and my editor there recommended Glenn's articles and commentary as an example of good new work by someone who knows what he's talking about and how to talk about it.

So I visited the site and knew right away that here was someone I wanted to be like. I wanted to be that smart when it comes to movies — new movies and (especially) those from earlier decades and social eras; famous classics as well as rarities as obscure as Grant Williams at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man. And I wanted to write like him, with that authoritative yet personable style, that relaxed and unforced sense of humor, and that way of making you think about — not just react to — movies and move-making in new ways.

I discovered that he's also an astute film historian and a contributor for Turner Classic Movies and is a go-to expert on Film Noir. His day job as a film and video editor has earned him an Emmy nomination. Glenn produced the restoration of the original "lost" ending to the Cold War sci-fi noir classic Kiss Me Deadly. Early in his career he worked behind the scenes on two Spielberg films, 1941 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. His coolness quotient just kept going up.

The Gulliver-like head of Glenn Erickson, summer 1977.

That stretch of road some months later.

Were I to rummage through my own pieces of film journalism from those early days, I know I'd spot myself aping Glenn's tone and style and cine-smarts, or at least trying to. But it worked. His was a bar to reach for and reading his stuff made me do mine better.

Plus, it turned out that he's just a hell of a nice guy. An erudite film buff who can write and a gentleman to boot.

Somewhere during all that, Glenn and I became friends. Well, in that Internet way at least. For years we've been emailing each other links and jokes and pictures and mutual appreciation of each other's work. When I was a producer-writer for Film.com, my first "get" was Glenn as a weekly contributor there. Our correspondence has continued to the point where I feel comfortable calling him a "friend" even though we haven't yet actually met in person. Next time I get down to L.A. or he makes it north to Seattle, we'll finally clink glasses in 3D space.

And twice a week his DVD Savant column remains a never-miss destination for me.

All that throat-clearing is by way of full disclosure. For this post isn't just a personal reminiscence. I'm here to beat the drum for Glenn's new book, Sci-Fi Savant (Wildside Press) and I acknowledge that I'm not exactly an unbiased critic when I say you should click over to Amazon right now and buy a copy before you leave Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL.

This "classic sci-fi review reader" collects his thoughts on 116 science fiction movies. It presents an entertaining thumbnail history of the genre in chronological order, from Fritz Lang's seminal Metropolis (up to date with the most recent restoration) through to Pixar's Wall-E and James Cameron's Avatar (where Glenn recognizes its cinema precursors as broader and deeper than just the obvious Dances With Wolves).

In between he covers decades of science fiction milestones (e.g., Things to Come, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey), not to mention some worthy millstones (rubber-monster and exploitation fare such as Gorgo, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Brain from Planet Arous, and Teenage Caveman). He treats grade-A major studio releases and B- to Z-grade giant-muto-slime-bug flicks as illustrative segments of the same continuum, as cultural snapshots that reveal as much about us in the audience as about whoever it was behind the camera.

He gives fresh perspectives to big-deal classics that have been written about to death over the years. For instance, his pieces on Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and Cameron's Avatar have refocused the way I view those films and those filmmakers.

Meanwhile he waves the flag for under-appreciated masterworks such as Val Guest's Enemy From Space, a.k.a. Quatermass 2, from Hammer Films in 1957. 

Cosmic Journey, USSR, 1936

His scope ranges beyond Hollywood and British titles to also provide perhaps our first exposure to films such as Abel Gance's "delirious misfire" of 1930, the apocalyptic epic La fin du monde (The End of the World); the startlingly sophisticated and almost wholly undocumented early Soviet moon adventure Kosmitcheskiy reys (Cosmic Journey); the East German/Polish Der Schweigende Stern (First Spaceship on Venus); and the extraordinary Czech space odyssey Ikarie XB 1.

"Catching up with Ikarie and and other Eastern Bloc films made during the Cold War," Glenn says in his thoughtful Introduction, "is like discovering a new wing in a favorite museum."

Red Planet Mars

Glenn also pokes around under a film's hood to see what sociological and ideological contexts, what themes and anxieties might be humming under the surface: anti-Communism, anti-Capitalism, religious revivalism, xenophobia, social paranoia.... Not surprisingly, the often boldly message-making films of the Atomic Age/Cold War 1950s receive hefty attention. Harry Horner (father of composer James Horner) raised that bar to opium-dream heights in 1952 with his debut, Red Planet Mars, "a pro-Christian anti-Communist melodrama, a politically radical film that advocates conversion of the United States to a Christian theocracy." In 1962, The Creation of the Humanoids may have been too talky and exposition-laden for anyone's good, but what it had to say about the humanity of its humanoid robot "Clickers" anticipated the deeper themes that later ran through Blade Runner.

He also reminds us that more modern films aren't immune to their own unspoken assumptions that, like the arrow in the FedEx logo, become unmissable once they're pointed out by someone paying attention. His pages on RoboCop and Starship Troopers, films I have dismissed with a disparaging wave of my hand, inspire me to give them a close rewatch for possible reappraisal.

This book is a casual sample platter, not an end-all or definitive final word on the subject. A conversational, non-academic read such as this should only be so thick, so editorial adjudication led to some omissions I'd love to see here just to get Glenn's take on them — e.g., Slaughterhouse Five, Sleeper, Brazil, Alien, 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Primer, and Moon. Of course, I can get all those and hundreds more at Glenn's site, plus enough farther-reaching articles and essays to fill a couple dozen books this size.

Besides, any arguable gaps are more than offset by the new material written exclusively for Sci-Fi Savant, and especially the chapters that have introduced me to films I'd previously never known about (and I'm no neophyte in this territory). I'm talking about the BBC's documentary-like post-nuke extrapolation The War Game from 1965; the Czech doomsday drama Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon (The End of August at the Hotel Ozone); Gorath, Ishiro Honda's Japanese angle on the apocalyptic "worlds in collision" scenario; and the Film Board of Canada's 1990 short animated To Be ("a gem of a film, a philosphic wonder in miniature").

That said, the "anti-2001" German agitprop film Der große Verhau (The Big Mess) from 1970 sounds so unwatchable I wonder if it's really worth the page space.

The President's Analyst

And I was pleased to find some familiar but less obvious choices, titles that aren't usually tagged with the label "science fiction" even though that's exactly what they are. Of these, regular readers here already know two of my favorites, The Man in the White Suit with Alec Guinness and The President’s Analyst with James Coburn, a couple of excellent films that fans of science fiction may not ordinarily consider but should.

Glenn deploys his sense of humor with a light touch. Good thing, too, because as he states in his Introduction, as with any genre "the overall appeal of sci-fi can't be judged by its finest works alone." So he takes several dips into some of the, let us say, less artistically sophisticated movies that represent the field. Even here, though, Glenn refreshingly doesn't resort to easy snark and insult humor. He is no fan of Mystery Science Theater spitball-shooting, so even when his opinion of a given movie is less than laudatory, his professional regard for the artisans and working stiffs behind the scenes never stoops to petty mockery. That's not to say he isn't averse to a nip from the sarcasm bottle now and then. Re Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea:

"Director Allen shows his opinion of [Barbara] Eden's acting talent by saving his only non-eye level, non-boring interior shot for a CinemaScope close-up of Eden's derrière gyrating to goldbrick Frankie Avalon's trumpet music. Eden's off-screen husband Michael Ansara wanders about cradling a puppy and mumbling deranged prophecies about the end of the world. The annoying radio announcer with the Jersey accent is none other than our producer Irwin, saving a buck." 

My favorite, though, is an isolated pullquote spoofing the colorful terminology we hear exclaimed in David Lynch's Dune: "For surely he IS the Cuisinart Hat Rack!"

Other points of interest include extended essays on 1953's Invaders from Mars ("a personal fascination since childhood") and the three-hour original European cut of Wim Wenders' 1991 Until the End of the World. His write-up on George Pal's The Time Machine takes a side-step into an aspect of the source novel that has nothing to do with the film, but it's an interesting digression nonetheless, one that has made me rethink and appreciate anew H.G. Wells' cleverness in his original story. I like that Glenn opened the fence wide enough to include Walt Disney in Space and Beyond, a three-hour collection of Tomorrowland-themed television "infotainment" programs that from 1955-59 sold America on the vision of space travel as a new Manifest Destiny.

For readers watching at home (which means pretty much all of us) entries also add information about their respective DVD or Blu-ray viewing options. As "DVD Savant" since the 1990s, Glenn has been championing movies' presentation on home video, so here he provides info on transfer quality, commentary tracks, featured extras, and so on as relevant. It's a handy addendum when it comes to avoiding inferior bargain-bin public domain DVD editions, or as a reference source for buffing up your own home cinema library.

While I'm placing Sci-Fi Savant on the shelf as a worthy companion to Bill Warren's essential Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties and Phil Hardy's The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction, Glenn's less formalized approach to the subject appeals to the casual movie-watcher as well as the already-bitten aficionado. Plus it has the advantage of being significantly cheaper than those coffee-table-crunchers and quite a bit easier to read in bed.

My only plaint is that the overall text could have used one more pass under an editor's eye to clear out the occasional typos and other infelicitous line-level mechanics. I'm a stickler for that sort of thing. (Insert Annie Hall quote: "...because I'm anal." Annie: "That's a polite word for what you are.")

Now, what was it I recommended way up there? Oh, yes — click over to Amazon right now and buy a copy.

Music: Philip Glass
Near at hand: Kai sleeping by my office door

Pic pick: Unnatural things alive or dead

Always sound advice...

(Can you name this movie?)

The Sci in our Fi, no. 2

As an addendum to this post, here's director Duncan Jones chatting with The High Bar's Warren Etheredge about his films Moon and Source Code, on the occasion of Source Code's preview screening. A self-described fan of hard science fiction, Jones discusses the use of scientific concepts ("hard," "soft" and "gray area" science fiction) in his two "out of the park" films so far. Also on the table are such topics as working with his screenplay writers, storytelling in the age of CGI and 3D, cutting-edge real-world sci-fi-like technologies, his recommendations for science fiction reading and "one great underrated sci-fi movie," and the prospects for his third film — including new technology he's hoping to use.

As usual with Warren's interviews, this casual chinwag is more spontaneous and enjoyable, and goes deeper, than your average press junket.


The High Bar w/ Warren Etheredge & Duncan Jones from The High Bar on Vimeo.

The Sci in our Fi

Mike Brotherton, University of Wyoming Associate Professor of Astronomy, speaks about science in movies at the Summer 2011 Saturday University event in Jackson. Does it matter if Hollywood gets the science right in movies? Entertainment informs opinions about science and scientists and is stealth education for better or worse. Good science is rare in the movies, but perhaps even bad science offers teachable moments. In this talk, he illustrates examples of good and bad science in cinema.

Mike organizes and teaches Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, with the goal of improving the portrayal of science in books and films. This clip is almost an hour long, but full of interesting perspectives.

As a former astronomy teacher/presenter and scriptwriter/producer for planetariums, as well as a movie lover and, like Mike, a member of SFWA, I love a science fiction movie or TV show that makes an effort to get the science right while honoring its paramount obligations to story and drama. Meanwhile, I grind my teeth when science is ignored simply out of laziness or willful ignorance, especially when the choice of respecting the science (and therefore our intelligence) could have honored and even enhanced the story and drama. And there are cases, such as Mike's example of the stars in Titanic, when getting it right is just as easy as getting it wrong, so why not get it right for those of us who notice? J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, as much as I love it, is a case in which my teeth-grinding could have been forestalled with a few pen strokes that simultaneously worked in service to the story's narrative and tension. Oh, if only he'd seen my Star Trek show produced in cooperation with Paramount.

Music: Miklós Rózsa
Near at hand: Oddly inscribed scabbarded short sword that, I swear, came with the house.

Eastwood & Aliens

The good, the bad, and the extraterrestrial. Via College Humor.

Remember John Carpenter's 'The Thing'?

Now get the story from the alien's point of view.

Peter Watts' The Things is available at Clarkesworld magazine in text and audio formats. Published in January 2010, it's currently a 2011 Hugo Award Nominee. It's also a 2010 BSFA Award Finalist, 2010 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee, and 2011 Locus Award Finalist for Best Short Story.

Seriously, it's good.

SIFF — Troll Hunter

Every year among the award-hopeful dramas, impassioned documentaries, and deep-feeling character studies steeped in cinéma melancholia, SIFF spices up the scheduling grid by slotting in a handful of no-apologies popcorn flicks. Within that group you can typically find at least one imported Scandinavian scare-'em debuting at a midnight showing. This year it's Troll Hunter, the kind of movie the film-snob in me won't touch with a ten-foot Twizzler; meanwhile my inner monster-kid rushes to be first in line. The monster-kid won, as usual, and Elizabeth and I joined friends at the theater early enough to secure primo balcony seats among an enthusiastic packed-house audience. That's how you should see a film like Troll Hunter. I'm glad we did.

Troll Hunter
Trolljegeren
Norway, 2010
SIFF's page
Official site



In recent years Norway and its border buddies Sweden and Finland sure have made moody, atmospheric horror movies a top popcult export — Villmark (2003), Cold Prey (2006), Frostbitten (2006), Let the Right One In (2008), Dead Snow (2009), Hidden (2009), Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010).... Hey, it's only natural from the moody, atmospheric land that gave us Beowulf, lutefisk, and Renee Zellweger.

Norway's entry in the "found footage" subgenre, Troll Hunter continues the trend with a Cloverfield-scale monster flick pitting flesh-eating behemoths against puny humans with night-vision cameras and modern weapons, plus a hush-hush secret government agency trying to keep the lid on the monsters' very existence.

What makes Troll Hunter stand out, though, is the welcome addition of a wry comic edge that makes the whole thing more at home under the Horror-Comedy label than Horror-Thriller.

Then Ole says to Sven, "Oh, I thought you said toll bridge."

What makes the formula work is director André Øvredal's straight-faced mockumentary style applied to a tongue-in-cheek premise: the trolls of fairy-tale lore, of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and Brian Froud illustrations, not only exist; lately they're breaking out of "their territory" to dine on livestock and the occasional unlucky tourist.

Oh, and they're big. Really, really big.

The description on SIFF's page is correct in pointing out the Scooby Doo vibe found in the three college students comprising the foolishly reckless camera crew ("Mystery, Inc.") that insists on discovering what the reclusive, surly stranger Hans is up to. Reputed to be a poacher shooting bears without a license, Hans instead is using the bear carcasses as a cover to explain the misdeeds of his true nocturnal prey. Hans is solitary and world-weary and hates his "shitty job," but he's the Troll Security Service's go-to expert when it comes to troll eradication, traveling into the deepest woods and near-arctic wastes in his foul-smelling, tricked out Range Rover (that's perforated with giant claw marks) and his troll-killing arsenal. As Hans, Otto Jespersen delivers flinty anti-heroicism like he's crossing Henrik Ibsen with Quint from Jaws. This lone gunman may be a pain in his bosses' side, but he knows and understands these brutes like he's the lead in Deadliest Catch: Grimm Reality!

After a surprise encounter with a three-headed "Tusseladd" — Hans expected it to be a "Ringlefinch"; Troll Hunter creates its own troll taxonomy — the man with the plan agrees to let those meddling kids follow him and record his activities. It isn't long before the three young filmmakers wish they'd stayed home and listened to Björk albums instead.

Much of the film's suspense and deadpan humor comes from coupling old Norwegian folk traditions to a modern-day monster movie. Because sunlight turns trolls to stone (when it doesn't cause them to explode outright), Hans' biggest weapon is a bazooka-like infrared flash gun. Trolls can sniff out "the blood of any Christian man," a verifiable fact after it's discovered that one of the students lied during Hans' questioning on this point. Some trolls do indeed dwell under bridges, so the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff gets a dark-funny shout-out along the way.

Troll Hunter is clever and imaginative and good fun. Almost alarmingly, the film never broke its delicate skin of verisimilitude, that make-believe authenticity on which everything else hangs. Its abundant visual FX mix a vérité style with just the proper piquant of Jarlsberg cheese. The handheld mock-doc approach isn't nearly as annoying as we've seen it in other films such as Blair Witch and Cloverfield. Ample use is made of spectacular Norwegian forests, lakes, and icy mountain ranges, including a climactic battle in the forbidding alpine Jotunheimen range, literally the "Home of the Giants" where Norse mythology places the abode of the Rock Giants and Frost Giants.

Troll Hunter is also draggy in spots and would benefit from a 15-minute trim. Still, stay with it until the final showdown with the Godzilla-sized "Rotnar" that has broken through the electric fence surrounding its deep-forest preserve — Norway's long-distance power grid gets a witty cameo role here — a climax that looks sensational and somehow avoids jumping any giant Norwegian sharks.

This morning Elizabeth and I punctuated our waking-up and getting-ready-for-the-day by randomly exclaiming "Troll!" at key moments. I predict we'll be doing it for weeks.

Music: Dvořák's Symphony No. 9
Near at hand: B.B. King concert poster 

SIFF — LOVE

One of three SIFF screenings of the day, the other two being Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff and Another Earth.

Alert: This movie made me uncharacteristically cranky.

LOVE
Presented by Angels & Airwaves
USA, 2011
SIFF's page




LOVE (all caps, ::teeth grating::) sure is glossy and technically impressive, alright. Writer-director William Eubank knows how to put great-looking images on a screen. (From the evidence here, if he directed a Civil War film I'd see it in a heartbeat as long as someone else wrote the screenplay.) The film's narrative premise — an astronaut, alone on the International Space Station in the year 2039, is cut off and abandoned by Earth after an unknown cataclysm wipes out human civilization below — is conceptually a strong one, and for the most part it's well presented (before it descends into disjointed, fatuous incoherence). I applaud that it's a 100% independent production, as Eubank mentioned in his opening remarks. A real labor of love, years in the making. No question.

But goddamn. What a load of tedious, baldly derivative (the ghost of Stanley Kubrick has already phoned his lawyer), vapid abstruseness that's "deep" only in quotation marks in the manner of a sophomore poetry major who can't stop bonging out to vintage '70s-'80s art-rock and yet still misses the finer points of the Alan Parsons Project, Rick Wakeman's concept spectacles, and Yes album cover art. (Not surprisingly then, LOVE emerged from a concept album by progressive rockers Angels & Airwaves. The film's Wikipedia page has that history.)

The plot, if that's what we can call it, opens with an extended Civil War sequence focusing on a captain in a doomed battle, then jumps forward to its near-future scenario with the astronaut. In the orbital station, the isolated space traveler discovers the captain's diary from 1864 (seriously?). The writer-director's intention behind this moment might have been to suggest some sort of metaphysical link between the captain and the astronaut, to kindle a sense of awe in the inexplicable joining of two doomed men across time and space.

Instead, it's a ridiculous, seemingly desperate moment, absurd and "mysterious" but not in any good way that's evocative or grabbing. I suspect quite strongly, based on the evidence presented on the screen, that Eubank shoehorned footage from an aborted Civil War film into an undeveloped and unworkable sci-fi premise, hoping that through some alchemy the two would fuse and transform shit into Shinola.

There's no Shinola here.

By the half-way mark, I wasn't so much watching it as simply staring at it, like an aquarium filled with pretty fish that I wished would do something, maybe interact with one another or eat fish flakes ... anything.

LOVE's attempts to shine a blacklight bulb on the wall-poster themes of Connection, Communication, and Love (rather, LOVE) — and then missing each target entirely — would be funny if the whole experience wasn't such a dreary exercise in wanky grandiloquence and clear but wasted talent.

Generally speaking, movies, particular indies, that hang their hats on being "ambiguous" or "narratively challenging" or "interpretive" are not a barrier to entry for me. As regular readers here know, I can appreciate a less-is-more approach or the challenge of filling in blanks myself. LOVE, though, just keeps piling on the more like potatoes and gravy at Country Kitchen, bloating the interpretive ambiguities until they practically sweat poseur grandstanding and ostentatious impenetrability. The result is pretty, yes, but also ultimately counter-productive and, in its final moments, LOL pretentious in the arch manner of creativity stuck in the notebook doodlings of adolescence.

The guy sitting next to me: twenty-something, pleasant, chatty, thrilled to have come all the way from Boston just for this screening because he's such a fan of Angels & Airwaves. As the lights came up at the end, I got up and wished him a good visit to Seattle. He just sat there, stony-faced, as if calculating a way to get his round-trip airfare back.

Oh, and the squad of logo-bearing "astronauts" positioned inside the theater like an FM radio "Morning Zoo" ribbon-cutting at the mall's new Apple Store — just don't.

Besides, while standing in line I received word that my friend Kij had just won her second Nebula Award. And I'm not going to let this sample of dull ponderousness harsh that buzz.

I mean, goddamn.

Music: Simone
Near at hand: A bumblebee the size of an Everlasting Gobstopper thumping against the inside of the window (what the?)

SIFF — Another Earth

One of three SIFF screenings of the day, the other two being Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff and LOVE.

Another Earth
USA, 2011
SIFF's page
Official site



Another Earth is a film I utterly loved as I exited the theater. It moved me, impressed me as a modestly budgeted indie, and gave me a movie-going experience that flipped my expectations (which were admittedly few, as I went into the theater unspoiled by any word beyond the SIFF blurb). I came away certain that we'll be seeing more from director Mike Cahill — whose sculptor-sharp economy of editing and directing impressed me right out of the gate — and especially his lead player Brit Marling, who co-produced and co-wrote the script while also being photogenic like a marketing manager's dream.

Afterward, though, as I sit here writing this, I'm conflicted. Now that the immediate reaction has worn off, I'm not certain that watching Another Earth a second time wouldn't annoy the piss out of me.

It's a matter of a story that invites us to peer into its depths and folds and symbols, to give it a good deep-think, and hooray for that; but as I sit here peering into those folds and deep-thinkery, I'm coming up wondering how much of my initial thrill derived from factors outside the movie itself — a particularly pleasant breakfast a few hours earlier, or the sheer pleasure of seeing three previously unknown films in good company on a nice May day in Seattle.

Hmm.

After celebrating her acceptance into MIT in astrophysics at age 17, Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling in what I imagine will be a breakout performance) is responsible for a drunken car crash that destroys the family and therefore the life of John Burroughs (William Mapother) and sends her to prison for four years; meanwhile a mirror planet Earth has appeared in the sky, opening questions of what it represents if there's another you there too — perhaps a You who made different choices or for whom chance (or fate or destiny or whatever) dealt a different hand.

After Rhoda gets released from prison, she seeks out John. At the moment of their first meeting, what begins as an act of contrition and repentance is overpowered by the weight of her shame and remorse, twisting the moment into a new trajectory of lies and evasions. It's that trajectory which gradually opens a deeply fraught emotional relationship and co-dependency between Rhoda and John; meanwhile, he remains unaware of just who she is and how her life has already intersected his.

On the one hand...

Despite its distinctive high-concept science-fiction component, it does a disservice to describe this moody chamber piece as a "science fiction movie," a label that automatically barnacles a set of tropes and expectations onto the film that don't and shouldn't apply to what's actually here. That alternate Earth is more than a MacGuffin, not just another artificial Plot Device familiar in conventional science fiction. Although Isaac Asimov's Foundation books get a nice visual shout-out in the film, and the new Earth is treated as a thing of orbital mechanics and a physical place (a millionaire is sponsoring a contest to visit the planet in his private-venture shuttle, a contest Rhoda enters), there's more of Borges than Buck Rogers here.

Again: hooray for that.

Anyone who watches the film fretting about such things as orbital dynamics and Newtonian laws (where has it been and why is it here now? what about tidal forces?) is missing more than just the point. For one thing, worrying how a duplicate Earth could be there is trivial given the existence of a duplicate Earth at all.

On the other hand...

When it comes to that crucial suspension of disbelief, Earth 2's existence can't help but bring up nagging questions even if they are beside the point. Evidently it did for Cahill and Marling too, and the script stumbles when it tries fleetingly to address the issue. Yet instead of successfully lampshading Earth 2's more credulity-straining conundrums, the script compounds them with pseudo-science rubbish dialogue.

On the one hand...

The appearance of "Earth 2" is crucial to the twining of Rhoda and John's individually broken lives, providing a literally overhanging presence that adds a metaphorical layer onto Rhoda and John's intimate earthbound story, a layer that magnifies like a telescope lens the film's themes of human connection, communication, redemption, and the universal "what if?" questions of personal fate, choices, identity, and that thing T.S. Eliot said about "In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

On the other hand...

As a poetic metaphor it's as obvious and anvilicious as, well, as a big ol' planet hanging over your head.

On the one hand...

Brit Marling, who carries the film through nearly every frame, and Mapother deliver strong performances that are, like the look and feel of Another Earth as a whole, subdued and self-possessed.

Mike Cahill's cinematography is striking and atmospheric, and his directing and editing are spare and finely controlled. The narrative is communicated with welcome single-stroke economy as if the material had been chiseled down to core essences. He displays a keen sense of cinematic less-is-more, which I always appreciate.

On the other hand...

A subplot involving Rhoda's elderly, Indian co-worker Purdeep (Kumar Pallana), who has poured bleach into his ears — and during the film, his eyes — to deafen and blind him to his own life's tragic sorrows, jumps the tracks early on. He begins as a standard-issue cinematic Worldly Wisdom vending machine for Rhoda, and ends in a hospital scene built on sentimental clichés so hoary that I wanted to bleach my own eyes and ears. Given the strengths evident elsewhere in the script, I'm curious as to why this character remained in the final film at all.

Oh, and the essay contest, its sponsor, and Rhoda's entry: I'm not buying it, alas.

On the one hand...

I appreciate that the narrative's axis spins on Rhoda insinuating herself into John's life in ways that emerge from her own understandable, relatable damage and weakness and desire to somehow make amends.

On the other hand...

Her self-serving naivete grates. I predict that some critics will bash her kneecaps for being both duplicitous and clueless to the further devastation she's setting up for John. Now, this didn't bother me so much at the time as I was fully engaged with their story as I was watching it unfold. But in retrospect I find my feelings for her shifting from sympathy to annoyance at how superficially she's drawn as a character. I can retcon it by reminding myself that Rhoda is 21 years old and everyone at that age, especially someone so traumatized, is naive and clueless and superficial and flailing, but that does not necessarily make her actions palatable.

On the one hand...

A great deal here really worked for me as I watched it. Another Earth is not "riveting" in the way the word usually gets applied to a movie, and yet there I was, knuckle-chewing riveted like I haven't felt in a long time. And then that final button in the final scene — I tell you, it left me wanting to high-five the screen.

On the other hand...

I'm not finding that Another Earth maintains its gravitational hold on me as I distance myself from it. Too much of its surface crumbles at a touch.

Another Earth received a standing O at its Sundance premiere, where Fox Searchlight won distribution rights in a bidding war that included Focus Features and The Weinstein Company. I just hope the new marketing attention does not not not try to sell it as a Science Fiction Movie. It is that, yes, but it lies so far outside that generic label that to sell it as such, especially in a summer packed with sci-fi wheezes such as Transformers and aliens and superheroes, does a disservice to the movie and to its potential audience.

Music: Tom Waits
Near at hand: Coffee cup from the Shipping Dock Theatre Co., Rochester, NY

For your consideration — the "Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'" edition

I've been traveling lately, while also tending to other writing, so for that and other excuses reasons I'm behind on the "mostly movies" blogging. But I have a (smallish) feature post nearly completed and I'll hit the Publish button on that before I head out the door here again soon. In the meantime, here are some "mostly movies" items that caught my attention lately.

Killing Orson Welles at Midnight — Christian Marclay's The Clock reviewed by Zadie Smith. This sounds fascinating. Can a movie that's 24 hours long make it to home video somehow? On Blu-ray maybe? I suspect the clip-rights issues alone would be a formidable hurdle, though I sure would love to have my own copy to watch in pieces at my own leisure.

10 Sci-Fi Films You Should See (But Probably Haven't) — One of those articles that accidentally finds its higher purpose in generating a more-interesting discussion in the comments section.

It's now a Jack in the Box drive-thru. But in 1914 Chaplin filmed the opening scene of his first movie there. This sort of thing could actually make me visit a Jack in the Box drive-thru.

"Your order, please?"
"Oh, nothing, I just wanted to imagine being on this spot with Charlie Chaplin in 1914."
"Would you like fries with that?"

Elisabeth Sladen — Doctor Who's "Sarah Jane Smith" since the 1970s — died this week. She looms large in my youthful memories, and apparently I'm far from the only one. I'm heartened that her passing has received such loving reactions as here, here, here, here, and here.

Of lighthouses and foghorns and beasts from evocative fathoms

I live within walking distance of a lighthouse (Google Maps). Okay, it's not a casual walk like a stroll to a neighborhood coffee shop as an excuse to procrastinate stretch my legs after hours here in this chair. But it's a doable walk when the mood strikes to shut down this laptop and head out for an afternoon outside these four walls.

At 98 years old, it's a working Coast Guard lighthouse, one that's open to the public only a few weekends each summer. As far as picturesque lighthouses go, it's a modest structure, but as a walking destination nearby it beats the colossal hole in the ground where the Whole Foods was supposed to go three years ago.

Any lighthouse is inherently romantic. Perhaps especially during the lingering gray of a Seattle winter, such as the one that ended (officially) yesterday.

From my home office window, I can hear the foghorn, invariably evoking images of a lonely sea creature rising from Puget Sound to seek the source of the baleful call and hump woo it.

Which brings to mind, every time, the forlorn and frustrated creature from Ray Bradbury's Saturday Evening Post story "The Foghorn," and particularly its atmospheric visualization in Ray Harryhausen's seminal The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

This enjoyable "B" popcorn cruncher from 1953 is noteworthy not just for establishing a template for the Atomic Age Behemoth flicks that followed. Its giant dinosaur was the first solo project by upcoming stop-motion talent Harryhausen, a protégé of Willis O'Brien of King Kong fame. For the first time, Beast allowed Harryhausen complete special-effects control of a feature-length film.

It opens in the white Arctic wastes, where a nuclear bomb test rouses a "rhedosaurus," an immense dinosaur suspended in the ice for a hundred million years. Driven by its primitive instincts, the giant reptile heads for its ancient breeding grounds — which are now occupied by New York City. The ensuing Wall Street walloping remains archetypal (and, lately, extra soul-satisfying), with automobiles crushed beneath reptilian claws and policemen gobbled like Jell-O shots.

After military bazookas only wound it, the stricken brute makes its climactic last stand at the Coney Island rollercoaster. There marksman Lee Van Cleef and scientist Paul Hubschmid (billed as Paul Christian) aim for the soft spot with a grenade spiked with radioactive isotopes. (A well-timed all-consuming conflagration helps too.) Every great monster movie needs a kindly professor, and that service is ably provided by Cecil Kellaway, the only standout among the cast until he's swallowed whole in his bathysphere. Genre fans will recognize The Thing From Another World's Kenneth Tobey as Col. Jack Evans.

Lacking the personality of O'Brien's Kong or Harryhausen's later creations, the rhedosaurus is just a big dumb animal eliciting little sympathy from the audience. But it's true that Harryhausen monsters die like operatic tenors, and it's a tradition that begins here.

Harryhausen and production designer-turned-director Eugene Lourie made Beast independently as a private project for $200,000. Warner Brothers then snapped it up for a song compared to the millions it raked in for the studio. Because Beast was one of 1953's biggest box-office successes, a new subgenre was born, showcasing irradiated and/or gigantized reptiles, ants, spiders, crabs, bugs, scorpions, leeches, lieutenant colonels, and Allison Hayes. It also proved that quickly-made, inexpensive monster movies could be profitable even if all the stuff surrounding the special-effects scenes (e.g., the acting of purest knotty pine, a suspiciously stagebound "Arctic," the slow and tin-ear script) failed to rise to the level of Harryhausen's tabletop creations.

After Beast, Harryhausen signed on to do it again for It Came From Beneath the Sea ('55), which substituted the rampaging rhedosaurus with an enormous radioactive octopus.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms is slow and stodgy today, and its comparatively primitive visuals are impressive more for their pioneering history than their technical polish. That said, the opening twilight lighthouse scene and the closing Coney Island assault remain moody mile-markers in effective genre cinema.

As far as I know, the Alki Point Light Station has not yet been ravaged by a passionate saurian from the Mesozoic. Nonetheless, I often recall that poor beast when I see our local lighthouse, especially on those gunmetal-and-charcoal overcast days when nature gets as close as it ever does to vintage black-and-white.


Music: Sharon Isbin
Near at hand: Duck Dodgers figure

E.T. - The Sequel

Snort.

Hat tip: Phil Plait

Forbidden Planet (1956) — such stuff as...

I can't let the confluence of Leslie Nielsen's death and tomorrow's opening of Julie Taymor's The Tempest go by without at least a nod to the film that starred the young Nielsen in the most well-known (albeit very loose) screen interpretation of Shakespeare's swansong play.

It's also one of my "desert island" films. Three various Robby the Robot figurines on my office shelves look upon me as I type this. Recently I traded in my old DVD edition for the new Blu-ray disc. A poster, framed, looms large in my movie room. I have visited Seattle's Science Fiction Museum and stood before their life-sized talking Robby and gone "Wow!" That's also where I spotted one of Anne Francis' costumes from the film and exclaimed, "Holy cow, she was tiny."

It's the classic that, although more than fifty years old, is still my favorite spaceships-rayguns-and-alien-worlds movie to come out of Hollywood. Them's fightin' words in some quarters, but I'm standing by them.



In 1956 with Forbidden Planet, MGM did for pulp science fiction yarns what it had done for musicals four years earlier with another personal fave, Singin' in the Rain. The studio took the stuff audiences loved, gave it that high-polish MGM razzle-dazzle, and produced an enduring best-of-breed favorite, a CinemaScope spectacle that's terrifically entertaining, smartly written, memorably cast, briskly paced, and production-designed to the hilt.

Instead of Gene Kelly's tap shoes or Debbie Reynolds' pertness, here we get Nielsen as a proto-Captain Kirk, plot points lifted with an Amazing Stories spin from Shakespeare's The Tempest, special effects photography that still knocks our socks off, Hollywood's most famous robot before Star Wars' less interesting droids, and (the stuff space kids' dreams are made on) leggy Anne Francis ably modeling miniskirts a decade early.

It has aged remarkably well, and any dated elements — that great flying-saucer design of the starship, the crew's baseball-cap uniforms, the terrific "electronic tonalities" score, the opening narrator ballyhooing mankind's "conquest" of space, the casual Rat Pack-era sexism — add a quaint yesteryear charm to the film's robust retro-future vibe.

The contact points with The Tempest are at best cursory, but they're not immaterial. Shakespeare's Prospero becomes Walter Pidgeon's Prof. Morbius, stranded on an island (planet Altair 4) that he has shaped into his own private dominion. With him is his beautiful and educated yet "terribly ignorant" daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) — obviously Shakespeare's Miranda given a glossy fan-mag update. Having known no human beings besides her father, she delivers a rewrite of Miranda's lines upon encountering her first other humans:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!

Altaira turns the analogous moment into a breathy, purring approbation:

"I've always so terribly wanted to meet a young man, and now three at once.... You're lovely, Doctor. Of course, the two end ones are unbelievable." (TCM clip)

Rounding out the dramatis personae, quasi-magical Robby takes the position of Prospero's servant spirit Ariel. Shakespeare's antagonist "monster," the native Caliban, gets supersized here into the murderous Monster from the Id, whose power literally emanates from the planet itself. Earl Holliman's "Cookie," the ship's lowbrow, conniving cook and connoisseur of genuine Kansas City bourbon, stands in for Shakespeare's drunkard clowns Stephano and Trinculo.

Nielsen's by-the-book space skipper is an analog for The Tempest's young Ferdinand in only one way — he falls hard for Morbius-Prospero's daughter, sailing away with her at the end of the tale — but it's a big enough point of contact to carry us through. Unlike the shipwrecked survivors in The Tempest, the "unbelievable" men aboard United Planets Cruiser C-57D arrive at Morbius' planet with purpose and under orders, not tempest toss'd by Morbius-Propero's willful magicks. However, later in the story, the Id Monster — a manifestation of Morbius' psyche — smashes vital equipment aboard the ship, effectively marooning the crew until repairs are made (meanwhile, several crewmen are slaughtered). So that's something.

MGM's top brass never considered Forbidden Planet an A-list project. Nonetheless, the art department (headed by the mighty Cedric Gibbons), in cohoots with the film's writers (Cyril Hume from a story by Irving Block and blacklistee Allen Adler) and director (Fred M. Wilcox), treated the material and their potential audiences with respect, all in the name of creating something better than the zipperback monster fare so common at the time. Ten years before Star Trek used Forbidden Planet as a template for an entire franchise of boldly-goingness, and 21 years before Star Wars microwaved Joseph Campbell and Saturday matinee shoot-em-ups, here's a movie that proved you can do good things with "that outer space stuff" without dishing up more invading aliens or other fast-turnaround juvenilia.

The down side of that extra effort was a budget that made a big busting kaboom! sound at nearly $2 million during a year that already saw plenty of red ink in the studio's balance books. Add the fact that Forbidden Planet didn't come close to, say, Singin' in the Rain's boffo box office, and you can see why the film stands out as a uniquely lavish one-off for science fiction at the time.

Today, after two post-Star Wars generations that have seen science-fiction become as mainstream as westerns in the '50s, this one continues to rank in the top tier of Hollywood's contributions, arguably besting other period watersheds such as The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing from Another World. It impresses us with its scale, its relatively grownup plot, and its determination to employ its wall-to-wall visuals and sure-footed cast to the service of crackerjack storytelling. Forbidden Planet balances the tawdry with the sublime, mixing its color-comics gee-whiz sci-fi tropes with aspirations more thoughtful and engaging than most "sci fi" films before or after.

Forbidden Planet sure has served its duty as an inspiration to fifty years' worth of subsequent filmmakers. It's a safe bet that if Forbidden Planet had never been made, there would be no Star Trek, any generation. And without the Star Trek pop phenomenon to prove that voyages to "strange new worlds" had audience appeal, would Star Wars have ever seen frame one? Robby became the standard-bearer for screen robots for decades, and he (or at least big pieces of him) was a recognizable touchstone for a generation of TV-addled genre junkies. No Robby, no C-3PO?

Trivia that makes me go boing!: According to his Wikipedia page, the voice talent who "spoke" for Robby, Marvin Miller, is the voice of the film's trailer, was Narrator for the Oscar-winning cartoon Gerald McBoing-Boing, a PA Announcer in Robert Altman's MASH, and the Narrator in the 1982 TV comedy Police Squad, which starred — boing! — Leslie Nielsen in his first outing as Detective Frank Drebin.

The movie's plot hangs on a simplistic but effective interpretation of Freud's theory of the Id, the primal brute we all carry inside us no matter how evolved our so-called civilization has become. Soon after Commander Adams plants his ship on planet Altair 4 — the most beautiful spaceship landing ever filmed, by the way — what's supposed to be a routine rescue mission turns into a nightmare of destruction and murder. The cause is an all-powerful monster, a giant roaring beast that's visible only when engulfed in a force-field blaze and the energy bolts from the crew's ineffectual blaster guns.

At the center of the mystery stands Dr. Morbius, one of the lone survivors of an expedition decimated by the malevolent force twenty years earlier. Imperious, arrogant, and relishing his solitude on "his" world, Morbius lives alone on the planet with his robot manservant, Robby, whom Morbius "tinkered together" like "child's play" with knowledge far beyond "Earth's combined sciences."

Also sharing his isolation is his daughter, Altaira.

Altaira is beautiful and brilliant, but socially inexperienced. So her naiveté on matters of "basic biology" is more than just a pheromonal attractor for the spacemen suddenly surrounding her. And it's clear that after being "locked up in hyperspace for three hundred and seventy-eight days," these "eighteen competitively selected, super-fit physical specimens with an average age of 24.6" step out of the ship a mite horny. Hey, seriously, after more than a year who wouldn't be?

Naturally, after some token resistance a romance develops between the protective, virile commander and Altaira.

To a degree that would have Freud himself reaching for his pipe, her heretofore innocent maturity is also the catalyst for subconscious energies Morbius is teasing from the vast subterranean machines left behind by the alien Krell, an enigmatic super-race whose miles-wide cavernous machines apparently contributed to their overnight annihilation thousands of centuries ago. (TCM clip)

Morbius' testimonial for his "beloved Krell" is worth repeating:

"In times long past, this planet was the home of a mighty and noble race of beings which called themselves the Krell. Ethically, as well as technologically, they were a million years ahead of humankind. For, in unlocking the mysteries of nature, they had conquered even their baser selves. And when, in the course of eons, they had abolished sickness and insanity and crime and all injustice, they turned, still with high benevolence outward toward space. Long before the dawn of man’s history, they had walked our Earth, and brought back many biological specimens."

That bit about how they "conquered even their baser selves" stands out. Not to go all Post-Colonial Theory or anything — but let's just say that the whole plot turns on how even the mighty Krell's "baser selves" refused to stay "conquered" once the Krell "instrumentality" set them free. 

The exemplar of Morbius' own hubris is that he, even with his artificially boosted intellect, can't recognize (or at least consciously accept) the bald truth — that his own baser self, his subconscious possessiveness of his own "little egomaniac empire" that includes Altaira, has given form to things unknown. His "twin self" has reincarnated the Krell's destroyer, "sly and irresistible and only waiting to be re-invoked for murder." Morbius can't accept the reality even when it's literally burning down his door. Only Commander Adams sees clearly enough to explain to Morbius, in his most Shatneresque moment, that he may have high benevolence piled to the adamantine steel rafters, but that means exactly diddly-squat to the "mindless primitive" that's "more enraged and more inflamed with each new frustration" to the point of killing even his daughter to "punish her for her disloyalty and disobedience."

Adams' words sink in. Morbius submits to the evidence. "Guilty! Guilty!" he cries. "My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it!" That is to say, as Prospero says of Caliban, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine."

Hoo boy. So much for 'Take Your Daughter to Work' Day. 

In the film as we've known it for years, Altaira's alluring influence on Adams and his crewmen — not to mention on her father — is handled with precisely tuned between-the-lines understatement.

However, the deleted footage available on the DVD and Blu-ray discs makes it clear that originally the undiscovered country of her virginal womanhood received more direct attention. Snipped from the final release print was dialogue between Doc Ostrow (Warren Stevens) and Capt. Adams, with the good Doc trying to explain Alta's seemingly magical rapport with her animal friends on Altair 4. He references the myth of the unicorn and the girl's "maiden purity." Well.

Later, Doc points out that she possesses an "exceptionally fine human brain in a totally unawakened female body." Adams replies, "Of course, it'll be a pity when the time comes that she has to lose a gift like that." Gift schmift. Were it not for the editor's scissors, the tropes of Fifties-era female "virtue" would have collided with the hormonal imaginations of every male in the audience already picturing the "awakening" of that female body.

Suddenly the film's sense of wonder takes on a whole new prurient vividness. Had those lines remained, Forbidden Planet might have ushered in a generation's puberty — or boosted enrollment in the space program — years before America was ready.

Music: John Lee Hooker
Near at hand: A gift for Wendy.