Category: Film Review

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.

Ruusujen aika (A Time of Roses) (1969)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 6.0 by 244 cinematizens.

Genre:  Sy Fy.

DNA: Finland.

Verdict: Ambitious. 

Tagline:  Vertigo.

It is set in the future of 2011 and anticipates cell phones, the internet, and the pestilential persistence of flared trousers. It features transparent inflated furniture used in one noteworthy scene as a prism.

Fictional Finland 2011 is all glass and steel modern where all social and economic problems have been solved. Everything is state owned and our protagonist is a film maker assigned to make a documentary tracing the evolution of this idyllic state from its origins in the dark days of 1968.

He has a Twiggy assistant with spider eye make up and hot pants who follows/leads him around. With her subtle nudging, protagonist decides to use the life of an individual to narrate the transformation, a particular individual for in visiting an art exhibition, as arranged by Twiggy, he sees a 1968 photomontage of model that captivates him, and just by chance, again arranged by Twiggy, he comes across the photograph of a contemporary woman who is the doppelgänger of the 1968 model, he decides to recruit her to act out the story in mockumentry style.

What the sap doesn’t realise is …. SPOILER ALERT…that the doppelgänger has her own agenda and Twiggy is in on it. 

The look-alike is an engineer in a nuclear power plant where the workers are about to strike!  With Twiggy’s assistance, this engineer wants to use the documentary to get across their story and demands which are never articulated. 

Love confuses everyone and everything and it does not go well for any of them. By the way, the title is explained in the dialogue and it is not the obvious but refers to an idyllic time, a time of roses.  No, not under the sign of the rose, sub rosa, I.e., a secret.

The doppelgänger reminds me of Vertigo (1958), and the cinematography of Alphaville in the daylight. 

Perhaps because of the poor subtitles, or my inattention, I could not fathom the climax.

A Mere Mortal (1991) Simple Mortel

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour 25 minutes, rated 6.5 by 253 cinematizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy 

DNA: France. 

Verdict: Effective. 

Tagline: Who is calling, please?

A library rat whose speciality is very dead, very obscure languages from Meso-America neglects his girlfriend and ignores his only friend as he toils away in Paris. Then he starts hearing things. At first it just static on radios in the apartment or car but it slowly come into tune though only briefly.  It is an androgynous voice speaking a very ancient obscure dead language which he has lately been studying for he is one of the few in the world familiar with this tongue.  

These messages in Mayan, let’s call it that to keep it simple, come on a car radio, a stereo, a telephone answering machine, a Walkman and so on always when only he can hear them. He begins to think he is going mad and is unable to tell anyone for fear of ridicule or worse. The messages tell him to do this or that with the threat that if he does not a catastrophe will occur. Escalation ensues. When he hesitates a catastrophe does occur, so he then complies to avert another. 

By the way the Mayan dialogue has French subtitles and English ones overlaid on top of them. The result is by Georges Braque.  

The atmosphere of confusion, dread, and paranoia is nicely done without any gimmicks. Bruce Campbell does not leap from the shadows. Is it really happening or is he going nuts? Or both.

Moreover, there is a resolution of sorts at end. Think Tron.

 Mishen (Target) (2011) 

IMDb meta-data has a bladder-challenging runtime of 2 hours and 45 minutes, rated 5.7 by 661 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy (sort of).

DNA: Russia.

Tagline: An Eternal Putin!  

Verdict: The elephant brought forth the mouse.  

The fraternity brothers advise that it includes sex and violence, and violent sex, for those who like that.

In distant 2020 a small group of ageing, ultra-rich Moscow oligarchs find a fountain of youth and are…rejuvenated.  The magic elixir collects in an abandoned facility of the Soviet space program called Target. Only lately have its properties been understood, but it was too late for Ponce de Leon.  

These plutocrats are none too nice, and rejuvenation does not improve them. Does the astral mineral stop ageing or slow it, the subtitles weren’t sure. Whatever, bathing in radiation after Chernobyl did not seem very attractive but they do it.  

Billy Wilder once said he started screenplays with the last scene and then worked back to how it all got there. He made that explicit in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and then topped it with another. Too often screenwriters and directors have no end in mind, no resolution, no summation, no direction on which to conclude, and this movie is an example of that. Like a student writing a thesis without a purpose who stops when the word limit is reached, it ends when they ran out of film not when the story concluded because it didn’t, perhaps, because it couldn’t, having no conclusion. 

The science fiction trigger of the magic substance and some futuristic gadgets are minor accoutrements, not central to the story of what a few people would do if eternal youth were possible. Pretty much the same old stuff as they do now. Egads, more unbearable budget committee meetings!  

The cinematography is superb both of the future in urban Moscow and in the wilderness near Mongolia where Target was located. It is a treat for the eyes, and the acting is fine. The whole, however, is less than these parts. Nor is it diverting.  The film is as shallow and self-indulgent as the characters it portrays, rather like the remakes of The Great Gatsby (1974 and 2013). There is much emphasis on China and Chinese but it adds nothing to plot or character. And, why would such a future world continue to rely on semi-trailer road transportation that looks just like the 1950s.  

Curiously one of the leads is a bilingual Anglo among all those Russkie names in the credits.  

Anon (2018)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 23 minutes, rated 6.1 by 46234 cinematizens.  

Genre: Sy fy; Subspecies: krimi.

Tag: Seeing isn’t believing, Dagwood!

DNA: Anglo-Atlantic.  

Verdict:  Nice trip, no arrival. 

World weary flick passes a stranger in the street who puzzles him. Later he begins to investigate a series of murders. It is a real whodunnit. The first in a century…because in this world there is no privacy — our mind-eyes are open books to the authorities. Everything we see and do is recorded in this dreamworld of a Big Brother McKinsey manager.  All of this is deftly conveyed in the first act.

In Act II someone has hacked into this hive mind with a private agenda. Bang! The falling bodies belong to the social elite and that pressures Weary Cop to use himself as bait by going undercover. It seems to work but there are wheels within wheels.

Spoiler alert.

Act III: An even more-super hacker is the puppet master though quite what the motivation was remains a mystery to me, despite a garbled explanation near the denouncement.  

Nice touches: close your eyes and the hacker too is now in the dark. Though it is labeled a thriller, much of the action is a group of men, yes all men, sitting around a table, often in silence. That is punctuated by the actors staring into space to access the mental net.  Daring that is in these days when the audience is pimply boys wanting blow-em ups in this genre, although they get comprehension in gratuitous sex. 

If all records are digital and they are altered then there is no external evidence, no baseline of veracity, like those libraries that microfiched back-runs of newspapers to save space and then pulped them only to discover twenty years later that microfiche has quietly degraded to fly specks just as the data stored on CDs is doing now. Those newspapers, many of them unique local records are gone forever.   

This film conjures more effectively than Dark City (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) a world where we cannot believe what we see with our own eyes. However, in common with many other films, since it has no resolution it just goes on and on.  It’s too long and then dribbles away in an unresolved ending where there is a promising reference to personal autonomy that comes from and goes nowhere.  

Worst of all the schoolboy villain is neither convincing nor comprehensible. Nor is the intermediate hacker’s response to him credible, she of the nickel-plated revolver, goes to water too fast.  But the acting is nonetheless noteworthy all around. These stereotypes are vividly rendered, one-dimensional though they be.  

Cosmos (2019)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 8 minutes rated 6.0 by 6067 cinematizens. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.

DNA: England. 

Verdict: Compelling.  

Tagline: It’s really happening!

Three young men sit in a Volvo station wagon and talk. The result is a far better movie than Blade Runner (1982), Avatar (2009), The Arrival (2016), and much else.

These three are amateur astronomers, an astrophysicist, aerospace engineer, and a radio telescope technician who together drive to a hill top in Sherwood Forest away from light and other interference one night a month to star gaze each in his own way with the gear crammed into the car. These are the self-styled Astro-Nuts.   

Though cold, it promises to be an especially good night with no atmospheric disturbances. The weather inside the car is chilly, too, because there are tensions among them that (very) slowly emerge. The pace is deliberate, leisurely even, but that makes a nice change from Hollywood harm scarum tempo used to conceal shallow characters and plot holes. 

As they banter, doze, take leg-stretching and bladder-emptying breaks and drink more tea, amid the static the radio technician is scanning appears an anomaly. Well that happens and he tries to correct it while being teased about his past mistakes.  Earlier a routine image of a weather satellite disappeared for a minute or two and then returned. That had never happened before. Later there is shadow detected by the (barely) portable telescope they have set up. One, two, three something is up the tree!  

When scrubbed the radio signal persists. Huh? How can that be? Good question, Galileo. The satellite image loss recurs. Using infrared settings on the telescope the shadow look like…. [no one says it but we all think it]. 

Is ET calling? Just maybe. Better to be sure than sorry, so they pick up….  It ends on an upward positive note!  

A recent Brit film I watched had a big name cast, location shooting in Wales, sex, and some flashy special effects with kindergarten science. Only a brave person or a fool watched to the end as I did. Hmmm. 

This film has none of those things but it has a script and the car interior, two first-time film actors, and no special effects apart the grandeur of the night sky. The result is a far, far better thing than most I watch. The film school graduates who produced it could not find anyone to fund it, so they did it themselves. Chapeaux!   

It is too long. The car chase at the end seemed needlessly attenuated, and there was just too much of the bromance.  A producer not emotionally invested in it would have cut it by 30 minutes and improved it to get focus on the really big picture. Really BIG.

I shudder to think what Pox News would make of a first contact. The movies Contact (1997) and Arrival (2016) got the reception right – Madness times N.  Panic, denial, fear, nukes would be round one though the image of a President Trump meeting an alien to sell state secrets sprang to mind. 

Die Delegation (1970)  

IMDb meta-data is a runtime 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 7.5 by 131 cinematizens. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: UFO.

DNA: West Germany.

Verdict: Imaginative.

Tagline: Move over Orson Wells.

In this mockumentary Intrepid, a television journalist, during a routine story gets drawn into a tale of UFOs.  Shifting through the nutcases he finds some of the witnesses credible, the real evidence, though sparse, is intriguing. He follows the threads around the world, losing his job but not his camera and sound man, in so doing.  The visas in his passport are many: Canada (where it started), USA, Peru, Italy, and so many more I lost track.  

Intrepid tries everything to disprove the evidence he keeps finding, to no avail.  He has one Canadian witness tested by psychologists, brain scans, and hypnosis but she continues to offer a low key but consistent account of meeting the titular delegation.  He follows asides and descriptions in her recitations to find other clues. Project Blue Book gets a look-in.  One clue leads to another, and so on. He is Indiana Jones in a suit and tie with a microphone.  

Intrepid is dead when the story starts, that is disappeared and presumed dead, incinerated in a car crash. The movie is pieced together from the footage he had shot on his investigations.  Much of it is cinéma vérité style from the field, because there are the mandatory crop circles. 

It is all played dead straight, none of the nods and winks so unnecessary and so common in Hollywood productions. The commitment of the players to their parts is complete, and there are a lot of them.  Ergo this was not a cheap production.  Moreover, the travelogue must have been pricey. 

It is steadfastly measured with cross cuts to the journalist sitting at a desk who found Intrepid’s footage and has assembled it.  He is matter of fact about it all and leaves it to the viewer to decide.  There is no world-ending hysteria.  (I was reminded of the way German television reported on the 1999 East Timor crisis: cool and methodical, in vivid contrast to the feverish, panicked, judgemental reporting of the ABC.)

Some German viewers mistakenly thought this TV film was a factual report, hence the reference to the Wunderkind above, and not a drama. Today many viewers make the same mistake in taking Pox News for factual. 

By the way the Canadian encounter took place near Sudbury, which is where I had my first teaching appointment with a college of Laurentian University. 

A for Andromeda (2006)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 30 minutes, rated 5.2 by 712 generous cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: UK (Wales).

Verdict: Oh Hum.

Tagline: B for boring.

We know they are scientists by their white coats which protect their clothes from stains while monitoring a radio telescope.  Photons leave such a mess. These astronomers are bullied by a cartoon paymaster general who never wears a uniform and has uniformed military police (Red Caps) to open doors for him. 

They get an SMS from Andromeda (and none of them has seen The Andromeda Strain [1971]) so they click on the link which gives them the directions to build, evidently from materials lying around, a super deluxe super computer in return for their banking passwords. (No they haven’t seen The Forbin Project [1970] either.) Even as this Lego project is going on the number of white coats is being reduced by deaths.  Get it!

The computer they have built wants company and before you can say STUPID these astronomers have cultivated a humanoid in a bento box who looks just one of them, now dead. 

Enough! It gets worse without getting better. There is a gratuitous side plot about the evil CIA. What would screenwriters do without this straw villain.

Just as the scriptwriters and director know nothing about armies they seem to know even less about science. Surprisingly, that is common after a hundred and fifty years of free public education.

I longed for some convoluted but amusing AI subtitles as relief from the pompous but trivial dialogue.  The solution was to turn the sound down…a lot. Some of the photography of Wales is good but has nothing to do with the plot. Yes, I know the plot puts it in the Yorkshire Dales, but shooting location credits says Wales, so there!

Otherwise the camera work is monotonous with one headshot after another, so close up that one sees inverted hairs, acne spots galore, cocaine spots, and some pores that need purgation. At other times it is cinéma vérité jerky or even freeze frame, very distracting in many cases. Most film-school projects have better camera work. 

Apart from so many unnatural deaths there is some ambiguity about what is going on, but that is obliterated by the persistent cartoonish representation of the mufti general.  And of course the male lead is a high school stereotype: so brilliant that others abide his adolescent irresponsibility, so unorthodox that no one knows what he is doing, so handsome beneath the designer (get a new designer!) peach fuzz all the women fall before his myopic gaze, and so underwritten as to be a cipher.

The best thing about it is that it does not have Stephen Seagal in it. Admittedly, that is always a major plus. Sorry Fred, but that’s the truth. The 1961 television series was far more interesting. but does not now seem available. The reconstruction is, well, a poor thing.