Category Archives: SF

A Curious Editing Choice

Alien is one of the most influential science fiction horror films of all time. A credible argument can be made that Alien killed off the professional explorer style of sf movie, while military and semi-military people crewed spacecraft replacing with the ‘truckers in space.’ Scores of blatant rip-off movie followed in the Alien‘s staggering box office success with cheap direct to video production continuing to this day. Alien’s production design, direction, and cinematography are all presented with a ‘grounded’ realism. A more naturalistic ‘lived in look’ that Star Wars a few years earlier had pioneered in SF cinema.

Yet, in contrast to all this hard edged, grease covered realism Alien also boasts a singular edit that flies in the face of the rest of its choices.

For the most part editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherly employ a simple invisible approach to their craft, never drawing attention to their edits from shot to shot or scene to scene. A style that melds with the film’s ‘grounded’ approach drawing the audience into the screen’s reality. Except for one edit.

When Captain Dallas fatefully goes into the air shafts to hunt the alien in hopes of corralling it into the airlock the unintrusive editing style is maintained until the very end of the sequence. Dallas, fleeing from where he believed the alien to be instead heads directly into the creature, delivering a jump scare that would have made Val Lewton proud, as the creature suddenly reached out for him, and towards us. Then the scene cuts with a very brief shot of a badly tuned CRT screen, like a television switched to a dead channel with an accompanying burst of static.

There is nothing from any of the other characters points of view that supports a sudden cut to a CRT monitor. None could see Dallas as he fled, but instead listened to him and watched him as a phosphor dot on their crude trackers. The choice for that quick startling edit was made entirely for the audience’s point of view and it works.

I have never seen anyone watching this film react with anything other than emersion during this tense, horrific scene. Never has anyone suspension of disbelief ben damaged by that choice. It is a curious and genius bit of editing artistry that a lesser team would have never employed.

Share

Sunday Night Movie: Billion Dollar Brain

.

Billion Dollar Brain is the third and final film with the protagonist Harry Palmer following The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, but the first that I have watched.

Harry (Michael Caine) now retired from the British Intelligence service is scrapping by as a private investigator when a mysterious package arrives along with a promised of a substantial payment for delivering it to a location in Finland. Simultaneously Harry is recruited back in the United Artistsservice as they are aware of the job and its vital national concerns. After using a fluoroscope at a shoe store (People really did use to utilize X-ray machines unsupervised to get better fitting shoes.) and determining the package contains eggs, the method by which viruses are transported, Harry travels to Finland, worming his way into the mysterious and sinister private organization. What he discovers has the potential to spark a nuclear exchange between the world’s superpowers, and Harry must work hard to prevent the coming disaster.

I had heard of this film from one of my many movie podcasts though they made the plot sound more fantastic as though it dealt with artificial intelligence. While the massive computer from which the novel and the film took their title is impressive there is no hint of intelligence in the machine. Rather, it is being used and programmed to analyze and execute insurgency operations behind the Iron Curtain. For me, this vastly improved the nature of the film and its plot. Many technical details, such as using eggs to transport viruses or the use of a mount when attempting a long-range sniper shot, are quite accurate. There’s even a sub-plot where a member of the organization is feeding bad data into the billion dollar brain for his own greedy goals and the bad data produces bad analysis well before the term garbage in garbage out became widely known.

Ken Russel, working with a decent budget, assembled a very good cast and production team giving Billion Dollar Brain the quality that many of the 60s spy genre lacked. Filmed on location in Finland the movie captures the unique charm of that nation and its precarious geo-political position as it remained a free nation bordering directly on the USSR.

In addition of Michael Caine the cast included Karl Malden as Harry’s former friend that brought him into the clandestine organization, Francoise Dorleac as another operative, the film was released the same year she tragically died in a single car auto accident, and Ed Begley as the deranged Texan behind the entire plot.

All in all, this was a surprisingly good espionage flick, more akin to LeCarre than to Bond and that was very much my preferred taste.

Billion Dollar Brain is currently streaming on Pluto TV.

Share

Streaming Review: War-Gods of the Deep

.

1965 American International’s release War-Gods of the Deep (UK title City in the Sea)attempted to capitalize on the commercial and critical success of the Roger Corman Poe movies starring Vincent Price by hiring Price to star in this film very loosely inspired by a Poe poem.

Ben (Tab Hunter), an American working on the English coast, after discovering a corpse on the beach, becomes convince something is afoot, something unnatural. When the object of his

AIP

affections, Jill (Susan Hart) vanishes in the night, Ben and an eccentric artist, Harold, (David Tomlinson), along with the artist’s pet chicken (My sweetie-wife’s favorite part of the movie), go searching for the woman. By happenstance and the force of a plot-driven story they end up in an underwater city ruled over by a tyrannical smuggler, (Vincent Price.)

War-Gods of the Deep was the final movie directed by the legendary Jacques Tourneur who gave us lasting classics such as the original Cat People, Night of the Demon, and the wonderful noir, Out of the Past. Sadly, this movie can’t match the quality of any single shot of any of those previous films. The script is a hodgepodge of ideas, scenes, and wildly incongruent elements. This story has, mystical caverns keeping people ageless for more than a century, reincarnated wives, gill-men living in the deep, and pseudo-ancient cults and practices. None of the actors, save Price, seem to have done anything more than memorize their lines and marks, giving lifeless, empty performances.

The editing of the film is terrible with long tedious underwater sequences that are supposed to contain tension and action but are, in reality, utterly confusing leaving the viewer unable to determine one character from another.

It’s 85-minute running time drags slower than nearly any other film I have watched including some Italian zombie flicks. There is little to nothing in this production that is worth recommending unless you are a Price completionist.

War-gods of the Deep is currently streaming on Amazon Prime in the US.

Share

Impressions The Mandalorian Season 3

.

I have to confess that so far Season 3 of The Mandalorian a space fantasy series set a few years after the downfall of the Empire in Star Wars has been less compelling than the preceding two.

In season one we had a clear narrative line, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) accepts a bounty to collect an asset and deliver it to remnants of Imperial Forces. The asset, an immature member of the same species of Yoda, wins his affections and the plot is about keeping the child safe.

Season two Din Djarin is tasked with returning the child to a Jedi who can complete its training while dealing with the powerful enemies still intent on collecting the child for their own schemes.

Both of these plots are clear and established early in each season with Din eventually sacrificing his commitment to his warrior religion to rescue the child.

The third season, with Din Djarin and the Child reunited, has so far displayed no narrative cohesion. Feeling much more like an adventure role playing game, the season has wandered from battle to battle, event to event, with very little plot connecting the various elements. Each week stuff happens but without revealing a goal that the characters are pursuing. The season seems to be comprised of side quests while forgetting to give a central one for the side ones to branch off from.

The show is still quite well produced and directed but lack cohesion to give it narrative gravitas making it by far the weakest season so far.

Share

Those Organians Doors

.

Errand of Mercy is the 26th episode of season one of the original series Star Trek, notable for the debut of the Klingon Empire and god-like Organians that prevented a disastrous galactic war.

In the episode Spock and Kirk end up trapped on the seemingly technologically stunted Organia, a critical star system on the Klingon Empire’s expected invasion route. The Klingons arrive and what follows is a series of captures, escape, and acts of sabotage as Kirk and Spock

CBS Home Video

do their duty while the Klingons as brutal occupiers seeming slaughter Organians by scores. At every turn the Organians are pacifistic and welcoming, seemingly untroubled but disgusted by the overt acts of violence. Everything resolves when the Organians, revealing themselves to be beings of ‘pure energy’ and unlimited powers, stop the war and force a peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire.

There is a subtly to this episode that I have admired for some time, and I can’t recall someone drawing attention to it.

Kirk and, along presumably the Klingon characters, have for all their lives known doors that operated automatically at their approach. It is a classic bit of blooper footage watching the actors of Star Trek slam into the set door when a stagehand missed the cue and they remained closed. The faux setting created by the Organians was one of a society which technologically had not yet advance beyond animal power with massive wooden doors bound with iron like some absurd D&D setting. It is revealed that the god-like aliens crafted all this to make it easier for the humans, Vulcans, and Klingons to interact with the Organians, presumably drawing inspiration from their own biases and preconceptions. Including the bias that doors open themselves.

Throughout the episode every ‘primitive’ wooden door swing open or closed without anyone touching it. Kirk, Spock, Kor, and everyone else simply walks towards the doors and they sweep aside for the characters without a single character every commenting or noting the anachronism.

Of course, for the production of the episode there are stagehands watching intently and pulling on ropes operating the set. Everyone is keenly aware of what is happening in these scenes but the characters, in a beautiful and subtle obliviousness, fail to notice because it is how door always work. The strange working of Organian doors is never brought directly to the viewer’s attention. Not cut away shot focusing on the effect is revealed. The magical doors are simply part of the environment left to be noticed if one is not fully engaged with the story as it unfolds.

When you do notice it, and think about it, its beauty is apparent. A tiny little story element without any direct effect on the plot but establishing the ‘reality’ of the characters and their preconceptions of their world.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempts to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

Share

World-Building is Revealing

.

Whether we are speaking of writing, or gaming, world-building, the process of laying out a fictional environment and how it functions is reveals aspects of the creator’s implicit assumptions about reality.

I noticed this most clearly in Role Playing Games where the world-builder in question is the person who ‘runs’ the game. They established the history, sociology, and politics of their campaign setting and then through the players’ interaction with the world and its peoples reveal their own ideas about how our world really works.

One gamemaster ran campaigns where it was never possible to ‘get ahead’ while obeying the law. For the players to not fall into endless crippling debt, they always resorted to criminality. That person also believed that the world we live in was rigged and that cutthroat selfishness was required to triumph over others.

Another rana Dungeons and Dragons campaign where every evil human had at some point in their backstory had been broken. Evil wasn’t something someone chose but the result of someone ‘snapping.’  This gamemaster sees people as innately good and that evil also has a reason, a cause.

This I think applies to authors as well. There is a well-regarded, award-winning SF author and in every one of the novels they wrote at the heart lies a conspiracy. A cabal of people working in close collaboration for their own benefit and to the harm of the general population. Do I think that this author, whom I have met and is a fine and generous person, believes in whack-a-doodle ideas like ancient aliens, Q-Anon, or that Finland isn’t real? No, but I do suspect that they think that there is coordinated effort where there may simply be convergent goals and methods.

I am sure a careful reading of my own work and games would reveal aspect of myself that I am unaware I had put there. This is an unavoidable effect of world-building. Another author I know works very diligently to not be ‘political’ in their writings and yet their politics are on clear display in the way they craft and utilize their characters. When we create we must draw from ourselves and what we think is real so we cannot but help to have our works reflects some aspect of our true selves.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempts to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

Share

Movie Review: 65

 

Movie Review: 65

Adam Driver plays a pilot from an alien civilization that crashes on Earth 65 million years ago at the end of cretaceous period and must save himself and his sole surviving passenger while fighting off dinosaurs.

That single sentence description far more action and entertainment than the delivers. I went into the auditorium expecting a fun, mindless, ‘popcorn movie’ but discovered that 65 failed to deliver anything approaching even the barest minimums of engagement. It would be difficult for me to remember a screening that had left me as bored as this one.

Driver’s character, Mills, is given a perfunctory and cliche backstory, presumably to create emotional engagement and to misdirect the audience as to the exact nature of his emotional distress. After encountering another tired, worn, and idiotic cinematic cliche from bad 50’s Sci-Fi films, the ‘uncharted meteor storm,’ his ship is disabled and crashes on cretaceous Earth, an equally ‘uncharted’ planet. The passengers, all in some sort of hibernating sleep capsules, are killed save for the one that will have emotional resonance with Mills. However, this star-faring race with faster than light travel apparently never invented a manifest and so he has no idea who she is, where she’s from, or even which languages she might possibly be familiar with. Now this ersatz father-daughter duo must transverse on foot less than 10 miles to escape this deadly planet.

What should have been a sequence of set pieces with thrills, tension, and scares quickly becomes a tedious pattern of nothing exciting. Oh, Mills and the girl do face danger at every turn but nothing that was supposed to be tense ever possessed the least amount of actual tension. Mills has advanced technology to assist, except for when the scrip requires it to fail, which it does just long enough to cause trouble and then the tech resumes proper function. There is a piece with a waterfall that I honestly thought. “Oh, they ripped this off from the Universal Studio’s ride, and the ride did it better.”

The third act bring in the Chicxulub impactor, the asteroid hypnotized to have cause the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, as an additional ‘ticking clock’ and a futile attempt to inject tension into the flaccid fairytale.

Nothing that happens in 65 is in the least bit surprising, original, or even entertaining. It is a movie constructed of bit and bobs from better films and wasted 90 minutes of my limited time on the planet.

Share

I don’t Normally Comment on The Oscars

 

It’s not that I have some great animosity towards the Academy Awards nor is my silence a protest over to whom the awards are presented. There are a great many overlooked films and persons involved in film production with many unjustly not considered for these elaborate peer group affirmations. That’s what all awards are, peer-groups reflecting the pride and prejudices of their times and members expressing collective opinions about what they approved of. These are not objective measures but as with everything associated with the arts subjective impressions and reactions.

A24 Studios

With all that said, it warms my awards cold heart that Everything Everywhere All at Once took home so many of those little golden funny men this year.

EEAO won the Best Picture, Best Director, Supporting Actor and Actress, Lead Actress, Original Screenplay, and Editing. That is an impressive sweep and for a genre film that sways from the deeply profound about the existential dread that can lie at the heart of human existence to very silly gags about butt-plug powered martial arts, those wins are ever more impressive and less likely.

It is no secret that in the arts, stage, screen, television, and publishing, genre material, science-fiction, fantasy, and horror is often cast out to a ghetto. All too often the entity of the genre is judged as no better than its worst example. For EEAO to overcome that bias is a true achievement. EEAOwore its genre proudly on its sleeve. There was no fuzziness about its categorization with terms like, ‘elevated horror’ or ‘psychological thriller’ deployed to justify celebrating a horror film such as The Silence of the Lambs. This movie shouted its geekiness and its absurdity while pulling tears from our eyes with the truth that merely living is simultaneously both joy and agony.

We can quibble and debate which person should have won this or that award but for the moment let’s just celebrate that for this brief shining moment genre is seen as equally worthy of respect as any ‘normal’ dramatic tale.

Share

My Strange Relationship with The Last of Us

 

A new prestige television series from the creator of the fantastic Chernobyl? You would think that I would be right there every Sunday evening, devouring the newest episodes.

The truth is that zombies of all stripes have worn rather thin for me, particularly the setting of the zombie apocalypse. Yes, I know that these are not technically zombies, they are not magically reanimated corpses but aggressive, disease-infected individuals. The cast looks

HBO

fantastic and there’s no doubt that the series is winning praise from both within and without of the genre communities. And yet I really am not interested in watching it. I never played the game. Games with prolonged story arcs are less appealing to me due to their intense commitment in time. I play first person shooters, never completing their ‘campaigns’ but simply enjoying the on-line matches against hyper-competent players who nearly always leave me beaten and broken.

So, it sounds like I have no relationship with TLOU, but that’s not accurate either.

Craig Mazin, the principal writer and showrunner, co-hosts a fantastic podcast on screenwriting called Scriptnotes. For Chernobyl he launched a companion podcast for the limited series to help illuminate the history and where the show explored fiction. The podcast was a success and helped promote the series and naturally HBO wanted another for The Last of Us.

So, without watching a single episode of the series, or having played the game one second, I am a devoted listener to the series’ companion podcast.

The podcast features Mazin, Druckman ho was the creative force behind the game and co-runs the series with Mazin, and the voice actor who first gave life to one the game’s and show’s principal characters, Joel. Episodes by episode they break down what happens, why they made the creative decisions that they did in staying true to the game or driving far afield from it, and expounding on, in their view, what makes foe compelling stories.

While I may not be interested in fungal zombies overrunning the world, I am thoroughly and utterly fascinated by the process by which that premise becomes so compelling to so many and the secrets of the story telling craft these men so clearly understand.

Share

Movie: Review M3gan

When the trailers for M3gan dropped I was far from impressed and planned not to see the movie. However, as reports came in from both the horror community and non-horror community that this was actually an entertaining film, I became curious enough to see it. I held my expectations in check though, having remembered that the horror community lost its mind over X, and I found that slasher far from coherent.

M3gan worked and I quite enjoyed myself at last night’s screening. Instead of pursuing a serious realistic tone this screenplay and movie leaned more into camp and irony, leaping to playfulness rather than seriousness to achieve its entertainment.

Cady (Violet McGraw) after becoming orphaned goes to live with her Aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) who is a genius at artificial intelligence and robots creating robotic toys. Gemma, thrust suddenly into the role of parent, and utterly at a loss as to how to help Cady process her grief, adapts her robot toy project M3gan to assist, imprinting the android on Cady with the directive to protect Cady from harm. Harm having a wide definition and M3gan with a capacity to learn, adapt, and self-program leads to the expected horrific outcomes.

M3gan can be closely compared to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina another film that deals with the complexities of artificial intelligence and androids that develop their own agendas. Where Garland’s film is a serious mediation on the subject, and quite excellent, M3gan utilizes a far less serious tenor to achieve a similar story. Of course, both stories owe a deep debt to Shelly’s Frankenstein as both ex-Machina and M3gan explore in their own manner the responsibility that creators owe their creations.

A quite pleasant surprise in the movie was Ronnie Chang as Gemma’s boss playing a role that while it had comedic elements was not principally devoted to laughter.

Director Gerard Johnstone and writer Akela Cooper managed to violate a few screenplay ‘rules’ about who and what you can kill in a film and not lose the audience, displaying a confidence and skill that elevated the project.

M3gan is fun, campy, and entertaining and is currently still in theaters and available on VOD at ‘theater at home’ pricing.

Share