Author: Michael W Jackson

La turbulence des fluides (2002)

IMDB meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 55 minutes, rated 6.8 by 1010 cinematizens.  

Genre: Rom w/o the Com.

DNA: Québécois.

Verdict: The Usual.

Tagline: Sincere.

Fraternity Brothers Advisory: nudity.

The worldly sophisticate reluctantly returning to the hometown of Drearyville is well trodden ground. It has few new flavours here. The sophisticate is in a high powered lab in Tokyo when the call from her birth place comes, that is Baie-Comeau in Quebec which she left as a child. She resists but the Japanese are honour-bound to send someone and she is the obvious choice. 

The prodigal seismologist with all her maximum tech gear (none of which is ever used) can see something strange is happening here but what is it and what is causing it? To get more data she advertises for reports of abnormalities. The locals comply and she is introduced to the quirks and oddballs who have coalesced in this back of beyond. The implication is that the aberrant hydrology of the Fleuve Saint Laurent is somehow connected with the odd behaviour of the residents. The unseasonal hot weather, is perhaps also related to the river. The oppressive heat and humidity is very well realised on film.  But none of these strands are brought together.

Seismologist is detached, distant, almost glacial even in the heat.  Get the job done and get out is her approach. She carries around a pocket shredder to demolish the business cards given to her. Figure that out, Mortimer, because I couldn’t.  

That is the build-up, but thereafter it descends into a conventional and inevitable climax where the star crossed lovers get to the nude scene. Mind you there are some nice touches along the way. The disappearing telephone-book pages, but then, wait, telephone books! Geneviève Bujold adds a touch of class as the proprietor of an all-night café.  The seismologist has a lively assistant, and there is some choral singing.  Moreover, there is loving cinematography of the foreshore of the mighty river. There is an ingenuous, though impossible, plot device and a big finish, but no spoiler on either one of those.

Now for the vinegar.  It is half an hour too long for the storyline, but more importantly it is broken-backed.  There are the anomalies and there is the love story and they are only coincidentally connected. It all comes to that old bittersweet song ‘You Can’t go Home Again’ by Heraclitus.

I came across it on a list of Sy Fy films and that provoked my interested.  There will be stern words for that lister one day because it is not that.  

Möbius (1996) Moebius

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 6.8 by 2,101 cinematizens

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Argentina.

Verdict: Olé!

Tagline: What goes around comes around, eventually.

Among the hundreds of trains and the millions of daily passengers at more than a hundred stations dotted along two hundred kilometres of tracks in tunnels beneath the city, one train with thirty or so passengers has not arrived…anywhere.  In such a closed system how can a ten-car train disappear?

Up the chain of command goes the report, received at each higher level with increasing incredulity.  No one believes the reports of subordinates, and so each has to see for himself, and they find there is nothing to see. There is no train UM86: Vanished.

McKinsey management clicks in and the responsibility, i.e., blame, is delegated downward to an intern at the construction firm that built the last line integrated into the system. No one wants to know what happened so much as they want the problem to go away…now.  

The intern visits the archives to examine the subway engineering plans, and that proves to be a scene from Franz Kafka’s The Castle.  Though the plans must never leave the archive, they have, and slowly he tracks them down, but — here I quibble — he examines them only briefly. 

The last metro station the Intern uses is called (Jorge Luis) Borges.  Hint! Hint! 

Through the compounding complications of repeated additions and tinkering the subway system has become such a labyrinth that no one any longer knows quite how the system works as a whole. That complication together with the fiction of the writer puts train UM86 into an eternal loop, moving so fast – at the speed of thought – it cannot be seen but only heard. This must be the M. C. Escher line.

The atmosphere is oppressive with a humid heat, and the need to keep the trains running. Though the intern wears a raincoat over his t-shirt throughout. Is there symbolism there?  

In a nice touch it ends where it began. The ghost train(s) just won’t go away.

A few of the reviews I read missed the point entirely but were nonetheless free with their opinions, as am I.  And the point is…?

Beneath the everyday surface of bustling Buenos Aires, are the catacombs of the living dead who disappeared between 1974 and 1983 in the Dirty War.  Argentines, doubtless, would see this point immediately.  

The intern discovers that, like the Dirty War, no one today wants to know what happened to the train and those missing passengers, they just want to forget about it. The missing passengers, well, nothing will bring the back anyway.  But it just won’t go away.  It’s there and it’s not there: unseen but ever present.  The janitor scrapes the posters of the missing off the stairwell walls every night and they reappear every morning. (A comparable fable is Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963) in which its subject — torture — is never mentioned yet is palpable.)

Even more impressive is that this is a film school project, all the players are students and staff and the funding was partly by the school and partly by the participants. At times the camera work loses focus, though overall it is compelling with nods to 2001.  The acting is fine, and the direction matches the material. By the way, some of the older men in the cast and crew were arrested, beaten, incarcerated, tortured, and imprisoned during the Dirty War for the crime of being students, of wearing a beret, of having a moustache, of having a red rose. Follow the link below to a monument to the Disappeared.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pir%C3%A1mide_de_Mayo_covered_with_photos_of_the_desaparecidos.jpg

There are hardly any women in the movie.  One is a lecturer who is asked for the address of her predecessor, and some of the silent passengers. The teenage neighbour comes and goes with few words and contributes little to the plot.  

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

La Antena (2007) The Aerial

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 39 minutes, rated 7.3 by 4327 cinematizens 

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Fairy tale.

DNA: Argentina.

Verdict: Olé!

Tagline: Vox populi.

In the dark city no one can speak for progressively their voices and words have been taken from them by an unscrupulous media mogul who uses television to drain the will of people. Sounds contemporary. 

Only two voices remain. A coerced singer whose siren song is used to squeeze out the residual words from citizens. She has made a Faustian bargain for her now seven year old son was born without eyes and the coercing magnate has promised her that if she sings to the end he will supply the boy with eyes and that mission is nearing completion.  The boy’s is the other voice heard later in the story.  

By mistake the package with the eyes is delivered to the wrong address, and this leads to the involvement of a tweenage girl next door and her estranged but ever silent parents, she a nurse and he an inventor. Their wonder when the boy speaks is memorable. 

Together the parents overcome their own differences and thwart Rupert but good.

It is a silent movie with a soundtrack, inter-title cards that become part of the action, and marvellous imagery.

Among the critics I read, one, while grudgingly admitting the film’s unique virtuosity, lays into it for privileging the nuclear family. Apart from that inanity, most reviewers see it as a metaphor for oppressive corporatism.

Maybe but it is more likely a metaphorical condemnation of the Dirty War (1976-1983) and the rule of the generals, allied with oligarchs,  who suppressed voices and destroyed families, coerced singular individuals to legitimate the regime, and covered up by murdering witnesses. The resonance with these Dark Years would be surely felt by many Argentines, if lost on smug and cosseted Anglo reviewers.