I checked out of Star Wars after The Force Awakens was just “meh” and everyone told me the sequels were much worse and Disney proceeded to screw every single pooch. But here’s a Star Wars movie I would totally watch:
Consider this your May the 4th post.
It’s been a while since I did one of these, and more than seven years since I did a Beach House song, so here’s “Space Song,” featuring footage of a science fiction film I bet you’re familiar with.
This is less a book than a weird art assemblage. Seeing this on Kickstarter, I figured that the overlapping Venn diagrams of crazy Stephen King fans and crazy Stanly Kubrick fans justified a purchase.
The loose sheets:
16 x typed replica sheets with All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy as discovered by Wendy in the film. 120 x one-page pieces analysing, exploring, and extrapolating the films ideas, themes, influences, contexts and critiques. 10 x original typewriter art portraits made using the same model of Adler typewriter used by Jack Torrance.
Some examples:
Plus “Contributor Booklets” (which are more like brochures):
9 x 8-page cultural contributor essays from a range of celebrated artists, musicians, authors, architects and curators designed to evoke the film’s intertitle cards.
Original and exclusive piece from actor Dan Lloyd (Danny Torrance), an extraordinarily rare opportunity to share memories, stories and insights from this usually private person, as well as the coup of a rare interview with Shelley Duvall (conducted by Ryan Obermeyer) shedding light on her performance and experience of the film.
Artist Gavin Turk examines myths, mirrors and mazes and looks at the film through art, whilst fashion designer Margaret Howell takes us through her iconic maroon jacket worn by Jack in the closing act of the film.
Artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti on sound and the unfolding domestic violence within the film. Architecture expert and writer John Grindrod on the role of The Overlook Hotel itself and the impact of such spaces on our behaviour.
Producer and Record Label head James Lavelle (UNKLE) tells of his enduring inspiration and love for Kubrick and his art whilst author Jen Calleja looks into Shelley Duvall, folklore and fairytales.
And BFI Curator and Author Michael Blyth cross-examines the character of Wendy as she appears in both the film and the original Stephen King novel.
3 x 16 page reproduced texts including essays from H.P. Lovecraft, Sigmund Freud, and a short story which was a key influence for Kubrick when developing the film.
H.P. Lovecraft — Supernatural Horror in Literature An extract from the seminal yet largely overlooked essay that significantly influenced decisions not to explain the horrors which unfold at The Overlook.
Stephen Crane — The Blue Hotel First serialised in 1898, the American author’s story was highlighted by Kubrick in interviews as similar to events unfolding in The Shining and offers an insight into the director’s read of the film.
Sigmund Freud — The Uncanny Diane Johnson (co-writer of The Shining) cited Freud’s influential 1919 essay “The Uncanny” as a key text in Kubrick’s research. Freud explores many ideas that are woven through the film: retracing steps, recurring numbers and motifs, and the significance of the double. We will re-publish an extract from the essay.
with:
Bought for £65 plus shipping through Kickstarter. You can buy them through their respective Amazon links above.
Another Amazon purchase, one that came in as a first edition and blessedly free of of damage!
Tarantino, Quentin. Cinema Speculation. HarperCollins, 2022. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Non-fiction book about the films Tarantino saw as a child in the 1970s, from Dirty Harry to Taxi Driver. Seems pretty interesting.
One interesting thing about the book physically is that the cover has that rough texture that’s been all the rage recently…except the black and white photo of Steve McQueen and Sam Peckinpah on the cover, which is smooth. I’d never seen a book with two different textures combined like that before.
Man tells an AI to generate visions of Hell. Here are the results:
Of course, AI Hell is different from Robot Hell. For one thing, there’s less singing:
There’s been a lot of talk lately about AI-generated art. Someone inputted the lyrics to King Crimson’s prog-rock classic “In the Court of the Crimson King” into Midjourney and the results are a lot better than I expected.
Sureal, nameless abominations are the sort of area I would expect AI art to excel in. Skilled painterly depictions of human faces? Not so much.
Not that it won’t try. Beware the Loab.
It being 2022, the year the movie is set in, we thought it was high time to finally watch Soylent Green in a not-chopped-up-for-TV version.
Title: Soylent Green
Director: Richard Fleischer
Writer: Stanley R. Greenberg (screenplay), Harry Harrison (for the novel Make Room! Make Room!)
Starring: Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Edward G. Robinson, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters, Lincoln Kilpatrick
IMDB entry
A Neo-Malthusian dystopia, Soylent Green starts off by telling us that New York City now has a population of 40 million, and almost all of them look sweaty (Greenhouse Effect), depressed and desperate. Charlton Heston plays Detective Thorn, a cop more pissed off than depressed, sharing an apartment with his “book” Sol (Edward G. Robinson, in his last role; he died six days after principle photography wrapped), who does research for him. Their tiny, dingy apartment is crammed with books, no running water, and electricity so reliably unreliable that every now and then they need to climb aboard an exercise bike to keep their single bulb lit. When Thorn leaves for work, he has to step over dozens of homeless people sleeping in the stairwell of his building
Thorn works two shifts to make ends meet, and he’s assigned to the murder case of rich businessman William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotton) high in his swanky apartment. There he interviews Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), Simonson’s “furniture,” the beautiful young woman provided with the apartment, who seems to take a shine to Thorn, as well as assistant Tab Fielding (Chuck Connors), upon whom his suspicion for being the inside man falls.
The interesting thing about these scenes, despite the stark contrast between rich Simonson and the horrible grinding poverty, is how Heston’s Thorn, presented as a good cop working within a corrupt system, feels absolutely no compunction about stealing everything he can lay his hands on in the dead man’s apartment, including such unthinkable luxury goods as “soap” and “beef.” The body disposal guy also offers Thorn an agreed upon percentage for the body, and later Thorn tells his chief (Brock Peters) that the fee will come out of his share. Thorn’s also not above using his fists to beat answers out of people, and he knows how to project an air of menace.
It turns out that Simonson worked for the powerful Soylent corporation, and Thorn’s chief tells him to drop the case. “There’s been 137 reported murders since then, and we won’t solve them either.” Assuming a 24-hour period, that works out to around 50,000 murders a year, a blood-drenched total not even pre-Guiliani New York City or modern Chicago can match. Naturally Thorn refuses.
Thorn also gets assigned riot duty, and a riot breaks out when a Soylent outlet runs out of food. They bring in “The Scoops,” which are the dump trucks on the movie poster that unceremoniously scoop rioters up into the bed. What happens to them there is unclear, but given the state of the world, you can bet it’s not pleasant.
All institutions seem corrupt, dysfunctional, and most often both. Thorn gets shot in the leg, and he refuses to take time off to heal. “If I’m gone 48 hours they’ll replace me.”
Soylent Green lends itself to Neo-Marxist analysis more than most movies, but one thing that cuts against that is religion is the only institution that isn’t corrupt, but it’s still breaking under the strain. After taking a baby previously roped to the dead, knifed mother into a church filled to overflowing with homeless people, Thorn interviews the priest (Lincoln Kilpatrick) who heard Simonson’s last confession, and he’s so far beyond burnout that he has the dead stare of a PTSD sufferer who has numbed himself to the world for his own sanity.
Priest: Forgive me. It’s destroying me.
Thorn: What is?
Priest: The truth.
Thorn: The truth Simonson told you?
Priest: All truth.
Eventually Sol decides to kill himself in a suicide theater showing the lost wonders of the natural world, and shortly thereafter Thorn learns the dark secret of Soylent Green that I assume just about every reader of this review is already aware of.
There are a few memes floating around listing the similarities between the 2022 of Soylent Green and our own, so let’s list a few:
All that said, with all our problems, the world we’re living in is markedly better than the one depicted here, war notwithstanding, largely thanks to the green revolution in agriculture. Harrison’s novel depicted the world collapsing with 7 billion people, but this year population is scheduled to hit 8 billion (though I’m not sure if that includes China overcounting their population by some 100 million people or not), and we still don’t have widespread famine. (With the agricultural output destroyed in the Russo-Ukrainian War, next year may be different.) New York City’s population is closer to 8.5 million than 40 million, and appears to be shrinking.
Director Richard Fleischer had an interesting career in the 1970s, with his most prominent films being Tora! Tora! Tora!, Charles Bronson action film Mr. Majestyk, Soylent Green… and Mandingo.
The 1970s were a weird decade.
Soylent Green has something of a mixed reputation, partially based on them changing Harry Harrison’s original ending. But I found it a very effective film, one that uses it’s obviously limited budget to good effect and succeeds on its own terms. Heston is very good, as always, and Edward G. Robinson nails his final role. All in all, I’d place it as the second-best SF dystopia of the 1970s, behind only Rollerball.
Several PS Publishing titles that arrived in January, one via a dealer order and the others via a discounted sale.
Lifeforce
Directed by Tobe Hooper
Written by Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby, based on Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires
Starring Steve Railsback, Mathilda May, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Patrick Stewart
I avoided Lifeforce when it came out because the reviews were considerably less than positive, it was a Golan-Globus production (two names that did not spell quality), and the whole thing had a whiff of cheesiness about it. But with Halloween approaching, we thought it was time to give it a try.
I actually enjoyed it a bit more than I expected, despite the fact that it steals generously from just about every successful 1979-1984 science fiction/fantasy/horror film, from Alien (O’Bannon) to Poltergeist (Hooper) to Dawn of the Dead to The Hunger to The Keep, plus a big helping of Quartermass and the Pit.
A multinational expedition is sent to Hailey’s Comet, where they discover a huge, 100+ mile long derelict spaceship. Exploration reveals dead giant bat-like creatures…and three naked, perfect human beings in suspended animation inside crystalline coffins. Naturally they take them on board.
You can guess how well that works out for them.
Soon the female (Mathilda May) is wandering around London naked, sucking the lifeforce (via swirly blue beams) out of people, who in turn become lifeforce vampires themselves. And the race is on to track her down, lead by the captain and sole mission survivor (Steve Railsback) who has a deep psychic bond with her, along with an SAS colonel (Peter Firth). And they soon find out that their quarry can switch bodies…
Despite it’s reputation, Lifeforce has a lot going for it. Hooper keeps things moving along at a steady clip, the disparate elements mostly make sense together, the John Dykstra special effects are generally more than passable, and the movie (budgeted at a then-pretty-hefty $25 million) avoids the usual Golan-Globus cheapness. There’s an excellent cast of British character actors (including a post-Equus Firth and a pre-Star Trek Patrick Stewart) in supporting roles. Plus it hales from The 1980s Golden Age of Mainstream Female Movie Nudity, and a 20-year old Mathilda May is very easy on the eyes.
Also, it may be the first use of “body hoping psychic vampire” idea, which I didn’t encounter until Stephen Gallagher’s Valley of Lights (1987). I assume that (and many other elements) are taken directly from the Colin Wilson novel, which I own but haven’t read yet.
Not everything makes sense, but usually the movie moves quickly enough that you don’t have time to think about it. The “London goes crazy” scenes are good, but probably go on too long, and look more like an attack of zombies than vampires. The special effects for the “real form” of the vampires seen near the climax looks pretty cheesy. Oh, and you get possibly Patient Zero of the now ubiquitous “glowing blue space beam” trope.
Here’s the (R-rated) trailer:
It isn’t so great that you should pay $80 bucks for the Shout Factory Blu-ray of it. But if you’re looking for a gory-but-not-really-scary science fiction horror action film for the Halloween season, you could certainly do a lot worse.
The great comedian Norm Macdonald has died:
Norm Macdonald, who has died at 61, was a comedic genius whose irreverence and inimitable delivery made millions of people laugh harder than almost anyone else could make them do—whether he was taking shots at mainstream figures (O. J. Simpson, the Clintons), constructing elaborate setups for impossibly simple punchlines (depressed moths, massacres in Vietnam), or saving dull affairs by subverting expectations (celebrity roasts and awards events, big and small). A private man who kept his nine-year battle with cancer out of the public eye, Macdonald occasionally showed flashes of a deep seriousness, expressing frustration with an increasingly intolerant popular culture and offering genuine insights in interviews and in an uproarious pseudo-memoir. But in the final analysis, he was a pure aesthete of jokes and one of the funniest people around.
Born and raised in Canada, Macdonald began his comedy career in the late 1980s. He was a frequent guest of late-night shows throughout the 1990s, with his appearances on Conan O’Brien in particular being the stuff of legend. His apogee of fame probably came between 1994 and 1998, when he hosted Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment—typically a stepping stone to a late-night show of one’s own—only to be fired by NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer for joking too much about O. J. Simpson, Ohlmeyer’s personal friend. Immediately afterward, Macdonald went on David Letterman, who asked how he had reacted to getting canned. “I said, ‘Oh, that’s not good,’” said Macdonald. “And I said, ‘Why is that, now? And [Ohlmeyer] goes, ‘Well, you’re not funny.’ And I said, ‘Holy Lord, that’s even worse news!’”
When I go looking for random YouTube comedy videos, Macdonald and Bill Burr are the two comedians watch most often.
There’s no shortage of great Macdonald clips out there:
Here's another clip of how great Norm Macdonald was at taking the most awkward comedy and making it so funny you couldn't help but laugh.
Norm is doing a bit about Steve Irwin (Crocodile Hunter) dying… 10 days after it happened. pic.twitter.com/bSP83bqQrg
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) September 14, 2021
His standup routine on the last episode of Letterman:
The “I’m not sure if you’re a history buff…” intro gets me every time.
His sendoff to Conan O’Brien:
Bob Dole offers a classy tribute:
“Norm @normmacdonald was a great talent, and I loved laughing with him on SNL. *Bob Dole* will miss Norm Macdonald.” pic.twitter.com/gPsdyJ5tS9
— Senator Bob Dole (@SenatorDole) September 14, 2021
And Norm would have loved this tribute:
RIP Norm Macdonald pic.twitter.com/yVunOgXRQU
— Bruce In Key West (@BCinKW) September 14, 2021
