IMDb meta-data is 1h and 30m, rated 4.4/10 by 240 generous cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: East Germany and Poland.
Tagline: Bland on bland.
Verdict: Painful.
In the middle of the Twenty-first Century a Red spaceship near Jupiter reports…alien radio contact, maybe, but then it goes dark. Another craft is dispatched with a hastily assembled crew to investigate.
That may sound promising.
What follows is…a slow, meandering trip without any sense of urgency as when the crew of the rescue vessel plays with a robot or makes home movies for fun.
Didn’t they read the script?
As the end of runtime draws near, they find the mangled remains of the first ship which was hit by the screenwriters old friend, the meteor shower, and rescue the crew who emerge from an elevator where they were stuck for just over an hour. None is comatose. None is mangled. None is on a stretcher. None is swathed in bandages. None has blast burns or collapsed lungs. None is dead, Jim.
The end.
There is no further mention of the alien contact.
***
Iron Curtain Sy Fy was always more cerebral and scientific, to be sure, than the Western counterpart of space cowboys but it was also usually more credible than this pleasure cruise. It does show its Red credentials in that everything is a team effort, from the very large group of survivors to the rescue ship. No impetuous individuals of the James Kirk ilk are to be found.
However – and this is a unique event – the captain of the rescue ship faints from the pressure of his duties. Yep. What is even more impossible to believe is that when he reappears on the bridge everyone obeys him, instead of pointing and laughing at him.
Can you picture Captain Kirk swooning from his weighty duties? Go on, just try.
Fortunately, when this captain swoons, everyone else just carries on, almost as if he were irrelevant.
Speaking of Star Trek, there is also an anticipation of Counsellor Troi here in that the medical doctor also monitors the mental health of the crew, but then doctors have always done that. Check out the Caine Mutiny.
IMDb metadata is 2h and 12m, rated 6.3 by 22,000 cinematizens.
DNA: Spain via UK.
Genre: Serio-comedy.
Verdict: Dreamy.
Tagline: The Life of Brian Quixote.
In the interest of making a film, a director convinces a shoemaker that he is Don Quixote! To some degree he also convinces other amateur actors in the village where he shoots the film that they are the characters they portray. When the film is done he leaves.
By coincidence returning ten years later he finds, during his absence, that the illusion has become reality or is it a fantasy, that he gets caught up in. Adventures follow.
***
I found it diverting, amusing, entertaining, touching, and puzzling, but many IMDbasers went nuclear on it, evidently because it is not the movie they would have made, if they had made a movie. Uh huh. Ditto some professional reviewers. It’s a love child of Terry Gilliam, hence the tagline above.
The village is ‘Los sueños’ and that says it all: The Dreams. I also found it far too long. Still it offers in addition to the list above a spectacle, with surprises along the way.
I read an abridgement of the first volume of Don Quixote in a Euro Lit class as an undergraduate and I have never been tempted to return to it. While I enjoyed this outing, I remain content with that situation.
Good Reads meta-data is 224 pages rated 3.63 by 369 litizens.
Genre: Krimi; Sub-species: Period piece.
DNA: Brit.
Verdict: More!
Tagline: That old trope again.
Hero writes murder mysteries in 1955 London. A demobbed soldier he tried investigative work immediately after the war with an army buddy but soon found writing about crime was easier and paid better than dealing with it, or dealing with wayward husbands or wives. In fact he found that he was good at writing and enjoyed it. Now forty years old and unattached (his wife was killed in the Blitz) he is as unsure with women as a pimply teen. Hard to credit that but there it is.
Then his agent needs some investigative work and some muscle applied and Hero enlists himself and his contacts from his own days on the street. What seems to be blackmail at first turns out to be far worse when the bodies start falling, and the way they fall.
The suicides, accidental deaths, and natural deaths of a series of British crime writers just like Hero prove to be murders. Moreover, a closer examination of each case reveals them to be bizarre and contrived. Then the murders become more explicit, and Hero realises there is something familiar about a couple of them.
Spoiler ahead! Read on only with your eyes closed.
Someone is murdering them in a manner described in their novels!
***
The characterisations of the several authors is delightful, and varied from aristocratic hauteur to wealthy bon vivant to deadpan drone to Cockney bantam and several steps between.
London 1955 is a faint background, but it is very credible, even if everyone drives a car and finds a parking place.
Warning though, I found the pace slow, very, but I kept going because it was so well done. I also found Hero’s hesitation and confusion about Marie Dupré artificial and likewise her patience with him. He had been married and survived combat. Surely he would have more salt, while she must have had many suitors. Still together they make a likeable duo. I will certainly read another in the series of nine. Later: Mission accomplished. Read all nine.
Murder at the Chase, Murder at the Loch, Murder Takes Three, Murder Takes A Turn, Murder Served Cold. Murder by the Numbers, Murder at the Standing Stone, and Murder Most Vile.
The late Eric Brown was one of those one-man industries with a list of books so long I grew weary reading it. He published about sixty novels, 150 short stories, and another trove of chapters in anthologies.
Gosti iz galaksije (1982) Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy
IMDb meta-data is 1h and 22m runtime, rated 5.9 by 555 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Croatia.
Tagline: Watch out for Mumu!
Verdict: Mixed messages.
Hotel reception desk clerk by night, and aspiring science fiction writer by day, Hero gets into the mood by donning a pretend space helmet while pounding the typewriter or dictating into a walkman (remember that?). His obsession with the story he is trying to compose and the helmet annoy his girlfriend no end, and she enlists his mother to talk some sense into him; to no avail.
After a row with those two he sulks around the apartment, when….a voice from the walkman calls to him. It is Andra, the protagonist of his story, who says she is on the island just off the coast! Zounds!Off he goes to find the characters from his story have come alive from his brow and are impatient for him to finish the story. Oh, and they also brought along Mumu. Not good.
***
This sounds kinda like fun but the message is mixed. There is shoot ‘em up with corpses, enough nudity to give Mike Pence apoplexy, and dead-end subplots. Still the direction is brisk and there are sight-gags along the way, and some spicy sarcasm, as when Hero warns the aliens not to show themselves because the townspeople would tear them apart for souvenirs.
A writer becomes so obsessed with his characters that they blot out the reality and people around is a theme in films, like Les Créatures (1966) and Le Magnifique (1973).
This film was produced in 1981 by two countries which no longer exist, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in Dubrovnik, hence Croatian.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 29m, rated 5.8 by 113 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Yankee.
Verdict: Goofy fun.
Tagline: Follow your dream (over the cliff).
A twenty-something computer whiz, a physics major, and an MBA team up to run a business: Global Unidentified Flying Object Research and Services in Flat Rock on the Mojave desert of the USA. They soon become a magnet for all manner of nut cases and comic relief for the townsfolk.
Japanese lanterns, balloons, mirror reflections, cloud, and vapour, all are dutifully examined, while the testimony of a string of people who have sighted aliens, swapped recipes with them, been abducted and rejected, parade before their video camera.
Misadventures follow as they try to deal with a vexatious landlord, romance some local girls, deal with smog-mouth (figure it out), puzzle over the string of code that appears on the computer attached to their satellite dish. Oh, and watch the sky day-and-night.
***
I found it diverting with likeable players, and some fine moments, e.g., when Bo talks about the telephone call that was never made.
A Gen-X version of OVNI(s) from France, reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
Good Reads meta-data is 1000 (!) pages rated 4.29 by 412 raters litizens.
DNA: Nazi Germany.
Genre: War.
Verdict: Glacial.
Tagline: Ideology über alles.
Somewhere in 1944 Thuringia* is an Wehrmacht officers’s school preparing a new crop for the Eastern Front. Supervising and training these candidates are veterans, most of whom seem to be intact in January of 1944. The instructors work under the baleful eye of the General who is commandant of the installation.
The routine of this army base is upset by the death of one of the instructors, which is where the story begins. The death is treated as an accident. In a mine-setting demonstration a defective fuse ignited and killed the officer. Ranks seem to have closed over that explanation.
But as with such an artificial environment there are wheels within wheels, personal and petty rivalries abound. Beneath the ordered surface is a disordered reality.
Spoiler.
But no, not everyone accepts that account. In part this satire is also a detective story. And an informal but sanctioned investigation follows. It opens a can of many worms, and the disciplined and ordered facade of the school is shattered to reveal the corruption within it.
***
The opening scene at the funeral is superbly rendered, and the characterisation of the General then, and later is memorable. He is an honest man in a dishonest world.
However, I found it hard going. The combination of painstaking detail and doomed irreverence of the central character and some others seemed out of place, unless it was intended to be gallows humour, and it left me confused.
Moreover, the insertion of backstories of the many characters as CVs disrupts the momentum, and adds little. I read the first few CVs and found they added nothing to my appreciation of the characters or plot and flipped over the remainder. No doubt my loss in there somewhere.
Vice triumphs over virtue both during the war and after on this telling. It is indeed negative.
Finally, it was a torte too rich in that it is over-plotted: there is just so much going on that I lost the thread more than once. Life, of course, is like that, but stories must abstract from that to allow concentration, and in this novel my concentration was fractured. It is as long as War and Peace but without the epic dimensions.
Yet it remains that it is superbly written, rigorously developed, and compelling despite these qualifications. I am tempted to try one of the four novels in his Gunner Asch sequence.
Hans Hellmut Kirst joined the Wehrmacht in 1933 and became a lieutenant and political commissar (Führungsoffizier) who soldiered in Poland and France. Only slowly did he realise that he ‘was in a club of murderers.’ He published forty-six books, most novels, and many of those about honest men trying to remain human in a sea of corrupt criminality. None of them survive, just as the General and his agent do not in the book discussed above.
The most famous of his books in The Night of the Generals. After the war he was a persistent publicist for German war guilt, especially in Poland.
Ben Pastor cited him as the inspiration for the Martin von Bora series.
*Thuringia has a claim to be being the birthplace of Nazism.
Good Reads meta-data is 416 pages, rated 4.0 by 2 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Italian.
Tagline: The end of days.
Verdict: A head spinner.
This is Wehrmacht Colonel Martin von Bora’s eighth outing and his steps are weary and sometimes dreary as he tries hold onto this integrity in the cauldron of madness. He is assigned to the fantasy world of the Italian Social Republic (of Salò) in October 1944. For those who cut that class, this republic was the rump of northern Italy where in late September 1943 Hitler installed the recently rescued Ben Mussolini as dictator for an encore. It is a bizarre world, seemingly run by Italians with Germans monitoring everything. Yes, it is a puppet state, if it is a state in anything but name. And it dissolved in late April 1945.
Its ministries and offices were housed in the many luxury hotels, palaces, and grand houses in Brescia along the lakes, some in Salò but also scattered further along the Lemon Coast, as it was once called. Lake Garda was the most well-known feature.
This limbo world is ending with the Allied armies progressing up the spine of Italy day-by-day, the residents of this never-never-land go about their business as usual. The industrialist does industry. The art restorer restores art. The police officer hands out traffic tickets. The gardener gardens. All seeming in ignorance, or defiance, of the fact that the end of their world is nigh and that a night of retribution will follow.
Into this twilight world come the diplomatic representatives of Germany, Japan, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Thailand along with the client states of Croatia, Slovakia, and even Manchukuo. Embassy receptions are the social high point. Although by late 1944 when Bora arrived, the representatives of Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary were marooned with no homeland to which to return.
Well, not quite in ignorance since partisan raids, bombings, assassinations are weekly, and the flow of retreating and battered Germans northward is obvious, even as the rhetoric of final victory is turned up to deafening. Despite Mussolini’s personal appeals to Hitler, the fate of Italian soldiers, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, disarmed and interned by the Germans was often terminal. But the residents of Salò seem blind to these signals of the coming apocalypse.
On the surface the lakeside town where Bora is assigned is calm and attractive. Many days the war is far away, even if U.S. bombers overfly it en route to or from Turin or Milan. A valuable painting has been stolen from the local German army headquarters and Bora is to find it, and the culprit(s). In the chaos of murder, Jewish round ups, reprisals, and violence he is to find a painting. Then a series of murders cuts across his investigation, and he is off on the scent.
***
It is very well done, though I do find Bora’s hangdog depression repetitive. His problems seem small in the context, and I finished the book wondering about the fate of those he left behind when he was evacuated. The plot is a braid of many strands and left me with a spinning head as above.
By the way the author is…..Maria Verbena Volpi (1950+) who has two other series. Whew!
N.B. This telling has nothing in common with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s nauseating film ‘Salò’ (1975) with its graphic and explicit violence of branding, hanging, and scalping; torture of the tongue, genitals, and eye balls; rape of both men and women, and murder in the same milieu. Enough.
Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart (1972) by H. R. F. Keating
GoodReads meta-data is 201 pages, rated 3.65 by 100 litizns.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Indian; sub-species: Anglo-Indian.
Tagline: High and Low.
Verdict: Diverting.
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The ever reliable, though painfully diffident, Inspector Ganesh Ghote does it again with slow and steady perseverance.
A very rich man’s son is kidnapped and a gigantic ransom is demanded. But wait! It is not the rich man’s son but his playmate in a case of mistaken identity. Nonetheless, the kidnappers press their demands.
The rich man would certainly have paid anything for his own son, but for the son of an underling who happened to be playing with his boy, well, that is different, or is it? That is the question.
H R F Keatings
As usual, Ghote’s approach is compromised and hampered by a bumptious superior. Nor is Ghote aided by the imperious, if confused, father who thinks he knows better than anyone else, including this nondescript police officer.
While the others turn this way and that, Ghote sees what is in plain sight, and follows up on it to discover the plot is nearly home-grown, but…..
***
The portrayal of Indian urban life is rich and provides a crucial context for the story. As well done as it is, I could not help but think of the Akira Kurosawa film High and Low (1963) on the same theme played out with Shakespearean intensity and irony.
The Martian Menace (The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) (2020) by Eric Brown.
GoodReads meta-data is 352 pages, rated 3.72 by 75 litizens.
Genre: Holmes; Sub-species: SciFi.
DNA: Brit.
Tagline: They’re Back!
Verdict: Capital!
The Martians — remember them? — are back: this time speaking softly. After their failed invasion, a decade later the Martians have returned, this time ‘They came in peace.’ A small mission lands in England and offers cooperation. Access to their advanced technology sweetens the rapprochement. With this exercise of soft power the Martians soon have an hegemony which extends around the world. All this seems too good to be true,…because it is.
Even in the first days of the reconciliation, there were humans who opposed it, and in time there are intimations that they were right. A leader of this underground surreptitiously contacts Dr Watson as a conduit to Holmes. It seems the Martians are playing a long and deep game that will end in the conquest and destruction of humanity. Yikes!
The underground has purloined intel from the Martian embassy and has enough evidence to convince Holmes to act and act he does.
What follows is quite a ride, involving androids, interplanetary escapades, Martian treks, jail breaks, and – wait for it! – Professor Moriarty! Holy neutrons!
It is great fun to read. The more so for those who need a Holmes-fix.
Executive Summary: ‘A niece and her uncle sit in a small room; he smokes a pipe, while she knits. An unwelcome boarder sits with them every night, but they never speak to him, though he talks of his love of music, admiration for French literature, and hope for a united Europe.’
Not exactly a sales pitch to win financial backing in 1946 France, now is it, but it sums up 90% of the film. The putative director, screenwriter, and producer had never made a feature film, nor had he served an apprenticeship in the movie industry and knew nothing of the technicalities of film-making. Yet he went ahead….
It is the fall of 1941 in rural France and the boarder is an artillery officer billeted with them. He is young, educated, polite, and German with perfect French. As he talks, the uncle and niece sit in silence without eye contact. Uncle puffs his pipe; niece sticks to her knitting.
There is a remarkable scene at the local Kommandatura in which nothing is said, and much is reflected in a mirror. Silence and more silence.
In this sea of silence the French pair learn that not all Germans are beasts, and the German learns — when he goes on leave to occupied Paris — that Germans are beasts. His erstwhile army friends, listening to sentimental love songs, talk of reprisals, executions, extermination, and more with enthusiasm. Now is the time to crush France and the French.
Surprise, shock, disgust, these are some of his reactions to his colleagues. And none is more adamant than a friend with whom he went to the music Conservatorium in his home town.
When he returns to the billet after two weeks he is a changed man: depressed, forlorn, disconsolate, bereft in a marvellous scene. He confesses his mistake to the silent jury of two and announces his departure for the Eastern Front. He has sentenced himself to death.
The niece has grown to love this earnest dreamer and as he takes his leave she says one word, her only word, to him: ‘Adieu.’ It is the only word she speaks in the film.
***
The niece is played by Nicole Stéphane (1924-2007) who was Jewish and survived the war in the Resistance before escaping to England where she joined the France Libre. She funded much of the film.
It makes a counterpoint to Le Corbeau (1942) discussed in a recent post.
There is a Belgian version shot in colour in 2004 that is not nearly as austere, and not as focussed. But it gets high praise on the IMDb.
Making of ….
It is characteristic of Jean-Pierre Melville, the director, to concentrate on images rather than dialogue. Little is said but much is conveyed as only film can convey it.
That a novel composed in Occupied France presented an innocent German army officer is a surprise. It was written and clandestinely published in 1942 by Jean Bruller under the nom de guerre Vercors. The book itself, by the way, is shown among others early in the film.
Melville both wrote the screenplay and directed, carried the film stock around and did not much of the heavy lifting himself. He had to apply his interest in judo to this project, that is, to make weakness a strength.
There was no money for a sound engineer so he resolved to use a spare voice over narration by the uncle. That increased the ‘silence’ the German experiences.
There was no money for more than an absolute minimum of location or outdoor shooting so he used stock footage and integrated the German in it with some clever cutting.
There was no money for first rate film stock, so he used old, cheap stock and let the black voids indicate the distances and uncertainties among the characters. The German in particular at the start is filmed in the manner of German expressionist films of the 1920s.
BTW, Jean-Pierre Melville was a pseudonym of the Alsatian Jew Jean-Pierre Grumbach (1917-1973) who took the code name Melville, after the American author, while in the French resistance. Earlier he had been evacuated from Dunkerque. Like 100,000+ other poilus within a fortnight he was repatriated to Bordeaux, as it turns out, just prior to the Capitulation. Rather than march into captivity with more than a million other French solders to be held hostage, he fled and later he and his brother tried to get to England to continue the fight. His brother was killed en route, but Melville made it and joined the Free French Army in the Italian campaign. The rest of his family perished after the Vél d’Hiver Roundup. (Look it up.) All of this left a very dark stain on him, and though he was exuberant in private life, his films are, to say the least, noir.
Finally…
Reading some of the disparaging reviews on the IMDb is a reminder that a hundred and fifty years of free public education is not enough.
