Month: June 2023

Top Line (1988) 

Top Line (1988) 

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 4.6 by 415 cinematizens. 

Genre: Sy Fy, hardly.

DNA: Italy.

Verdict: Blah.

Tagline: So bad, it’s bad. 

Hirsute and drunken stereotype Journalist stumbles across a UFO buried in a mountain in Columbia.  Oh hum.  It took him a long time to find out nothing about it.  No one believes him, but everyone is after him from the alphabet soup of impoverished screenwriters’ imaginations: KGB, CIA, MI6, DB, MsD, and a News Corp cyborg who has more personality than the leads.  

It is a mishmash of Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, Terminator, topped with some Erich von Däniken Swiss cheese fondue.  All that might sound like fun, but it isn’t. The director somehow got into childproof bottle of Prozac. The leads are bored and it shows. The sound is terrible. (Gravel-voiced George Kennedy is dubbed for reasons only know to god with a whiny German accent.) The editing is even more confusing than the story line. Dad jokes comprise the humour. Filmed on location in Columbia, it wallows in superficial stereotypes of that country.  The only way it could have been worse would have been to have in the cast Steven Seagal.  

Seeing it in a list of Sy Fy films with Franco Nero in the lead, I had high hopes that were quickly dashed.  

Dr Evans, sssh!

The Silence of Dr Evans (1974) Molchanige doktor Ivens

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 30 minutes, rated 6.2 by 172 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.

DNA: USSR.

Verdict: Treacle. 

Tagline:  Now Hiring Ventriloquists.

An airliner develops engine trouble and crashes…onto the top of an a cloaked alien space ship from which humanoid alien anthropologists are observing Earth. One of the survivors rescued by the aliens, violating the prime-time directive, is Martin Evans, aspirant Nobel Prize scientist, and he alone meets the aliens face-to-face.  The others have their memories blanked, but he is allowed to keep his, promising never to reveal what he has learned, as long as they don’t ask Evans (see below). See The Flight that Disappeared (1961) for a similar plot ploy; reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  

The aliens debate aborting the study now that there has been this unexpected contact, but they decide to stay. (Warning! They do a lot more debating.) While Evans tells no one, his behaviour becomes erratic as he tries to contact the aliens.  Eventually one of them succumbs to his blandishments and a romance of sorts develops which he pursues without a second thought for his wife.

Aliens in furious debate!

The police suspect there are illegal immigrants in the woodpile and are soon onto him, but he clams up.  He and the alien squeeze try to make a getaway but fail miserably. Car chases were not on the curriculum.

The ominous police, the paranoia of the authorities, the fear of the unknown are all deracinated, but the street signs are in English and his name is Martin Evans.  But the language, the manners and mores, the attitudes are Russian.  

The conclusion is that these Earthlings are not mature enough to make contact with aliens, because the authorities are clumsy oafs. The setting is supposed to be England, and the implication is that the aliens would do better to seek out peace-loving people…to the East.  Yet early on a red star marked Soviet MIG shot down one of the aliens on an away mission. Maybe I missed the point, again.

Since the aliens communicate by telepathy they are expressionless while debating. No one had to learn lines, just stare. That never works.  For further proof see Starship Invasions (1977), an Italian Sy Fy feature starring a silent Christopher Lee who at times seems to be thinking about lunch.     

It’s slow and talky, and I did not warm to any of the characters.  It is so serious, there is not a light moment in it. In this case there was no point in asking Evans.

The Hound, again.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Steve Canny and John Nicholson directed by Richard Cotter at the Genesian Theatre on Kent Street.

A rip-roaring, rip-snorting take on that damned dog!  Europe’s third greatest detective – ‘Sniff!’ – is hired to pick up after a gigantic hound at Grimpen Mire.  Yuck!  But a job is a job, and in doing it there will be vindication of the claim to being the first greatest detective in the world!  

The pace is fast and furious with stage props flying this way and that, but Act I draws to a close, and the entranced audience is free to move around, but then ‘Lo!’ when we returned to our seats after the interval Sherlock breaks the fourth wall…..   [To say more would be a spoiler…] 

Suffice it to say that the production won over one and all with its wit, its energy, its humour, and its joie de théâtre.

Evil television!

Accumulator 1 (1994) 

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 42 minutes rated  7.0 by 1600 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: doppelgänger.

DNA: Czech. 

 Verdict: Inventive.

Tagline: Refreshing but exhausting.

Fraternity Brothers Advisory: nudity.  

TV sucks the life-force from an unlucky few who respond to street interviews at certain times and places. That exposure creates an avatar who lives off the victim’s energy in a netherworld. The victim suffers complete enervation with no symptoms of a disease. Accordingly, there is no treatment so the victim is discharged from hospital. 

A naturopath gradually begins to see the common denominator among those afflicted. Once infected, to walk by a television set that is turned on is to be drained. One victim dies and with him his parasitical avatar. To save another the naturopath bends all efforts but true love and dentistry complicate things.

There are many amusing and clever scenes, like the shoot-out with the remoters and the dental gala with the high whine of drills. 

The actress in the left picture was last seen speaking English in an episode of Lovejoy, here she speaks Czech. By the way, it was not episode of Lovejoy set in Prague but in East Anglia.

For those easily offended this film has something for everyone.

The Spacewalker

Age of Pioneers (2017) The Spacewalker

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 17 minutes, rated 7.2 by 4679 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.  

DNA: Russia.

Verdict: Riveting!

Tagline: Good to go!

A superb account of the Soviet space mission for the first human EVA in 1965. For those who do not know what EVA means….tough!

Two flyboys get a chance and they take it. Needless to say, the timetable is changed because of political circumstances but off they go beyond the wild blue yonder to punch a hole in the sky. Sure enough things go wrong and they have to fly the tin can with the Right Stuff.   

Meanwhile the flight director battles the technicians who are willing to sacrifice the flyers for the data from the flight, the general who prefers dead heroes rather than admit failure, and his own self doubts to bring his men back. They went with jaunty smiles for the camera, while the Flight Director promised them that he would bring them back for a drink.

There is a subplot with a ham radio operator that escaped both me and the subtitles. By the way the film Leonid Brezhnev is watching is the Planet of Storms (1962).   

Superb performances all around from the actors with crisp direction. 

The ingenuity, the persistence, and the courage to go where no one had gone before is breathtakingly brought home with astounding cinematography.  The moment when Alexi releases the handhold is wonderful. Truly it was a gesture for our kind.  

As to the period and setting, I note that no one smoked.  No one. And the many staff members at Mission Control all looked pressed, ironed, and clean despite 72 hours or more of continuous duty in high tension.  There seemed to be no second or third shift.  

The few women in the cast stand around and look worried, or serve the tea.

Grey Eminence

Aldous Huxley, Grey Eminence (1941)

Good Reads meta-data is 297 pages rated 4.12 by 320 litizens.  

Genre: Biography in fiction.

Verdict:   A god botherer.  

Tagline: Curses!   

François Leclerc du Trembly (1577-1638), alias Père Joseph, was the original éminence grise to Cardinal Armand Richelieu (1585-1642), l’Éminence rouge who dominated French politics for thirty years or so. Richelieu was much in evidence with ostentatious tastes, loquacious, a know-it-all busybody, and always in red. Deep in the shadows behind him stood Joseph.  

Huxley found Joseph an odd combination of a self-abnegating, pious Christian mystic and an uncompromising, unremitting bloodthirsty warlord against French Protestants, much of the French nobility, Catholic Austria, and even more Catholic Spain, and Protestants everywhere. He is presented as one of the main architects of the Thirty Years War that destroyed most of German-speaking Mitteleuropa. Every time a compromise loomed, every time the prospect of peace occurred, every time a local armistice began to spread, he opposed it. While Richelieu, ever the Sybaritic  realist, was ready to accept compromise not Père Joseph and he swayed the Red Eminence to his way of thinking and acting, again and again. Murderous taxes on peasants and piles of dead bodies were his divine KPIs.  

Me, I see no paradox in this combination of mass murderer and pious sky pilot. The religious are always stirring up conflict and then urging others to fight to the death for their causes, while declaiming on peace, that is, the peace of the grave.  Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) put it this way: ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it in god’s name.’

After his own extensive drug us Huxley also found the mysticism of Joseph’s Catholicism intriguing. He certainly brings that to life.  The book is exceptionally well written with surgical metaphors, striking comparisons, penetrating insights into motivations, and richly detailed of the mental interior and surrounding exterior context of the time and place. The prose is sinuous and and yet almost transparent.    

After I had encountered more than one novelist who offers a fictional biography of Niccolò Machiavelli, I wondered what Huxley, the accomplished novelist, would offer in a fictional biography, so I read it. 

Spaghetti

Spaghetti Dinner (1955) by Giuseppe Prezzolini

Good Reads Meta-data is 149 pages, rated 0.0 by 0 litizens who have missed a chance to spout off.  

Genre: History and cooking

Verdict:  A Curiosity only. 

About half of this short book is a social history of the development pasta (‘spaghetti’ is used as a generic term for pasta) and its importation to the United States.  The other half is made up of recipes, some historical and some contemporary to the original publication date above.  

The first half consists of short, illustrated chapters of 8-10 pages or less on the happy discovery of the hard wheat, the early use of the word ‘macaroni’ for all pasta, the wrong and right ways to eat pasta, the stereotypes of pasta eaters and eating through the ages, and so on.  

It explains that odd line in the tune Yankee Doodle, ‘he stuck a feather in his hat and called in macaroni.’ In the 18th Century macaroni was brought back to England by grand tourists who had their cooks cook it (badly), and so eating macaroni was the mark of a toff, a dandy, a fad-following aristocrat.  A macaroni was a rich layabout.

He also suggests that macaroni went from being a immigrant food in the United States with Prohibition when Italians discovered a new source of income by selling their home-made wine to the thirsty anglos, who might like a meal to go with this sly grog.  

The author published not one but two biographies of Niccolò Machiavelli, both of which I have acquired and read. The first was Machiavelli, The Florentine (1929) and the second was Machiavelli (1967). In Italian the latter’s title was Machiavelli, Anticristo (1954). That stimulated me to find out a little about him, and there were two things of note. First, was the above book. The second was that in 1930s he taught Italian literature at Columbia University and was perceived by some as an apologist for the Mussolini regime until 1941. He weathered that storm in the academic tea cup and remained there.