IMDb meta-data is runtime of 17 minutes, rated 8.2 by 6 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Charming.
Somewhere in a Latvian potato field Aldis talks to the plants, commending them on their endurance, praising their versatility, luxuriating in their foliage, and cheering them on. This potato field is his canvas, his work, his mission, his wife, his dog, his life. Then one night he sleeps through the crash of an alien spaceship into his field of dreams! Well, farm work is tiring, making him a heavy sleeper and he missed the impact only to awaken to a loud knock at the door.
Next thing he knows the long arm of Riga has reached out and evacuated him from his property while the downed spacecraft, which he is told is a weather satellite, is secured. The government offical who moves him is Arn from Prince Valiant working a second job. Aldis plots with two friends, a married couple, that he stays with while his farm is fenced off for study, to get back among those tubers, because they cannot do without him, nor he without them. The trio try several ruses in good fun to get in, from movie making to a tourist walk through the potato field but the guards will not open the gate to either the costumed film crew or the ersatz tourist.
Desperate, Aldis goes in via a wormhole burrowing under the fence, and finds a great silver potato (looked like that bean in Chicago to me, but not that big, things in Chicago have to be too big). He politely knocks on the door and it opens wherein he finds an injured alien from Area 51. They communicate, sort of, a mutual goodwill. All Aldis has is a bag potatoes he just picked and he offers one to the alien. Offer accepted, and the alien bites in, and starts to feel better immediately. Aldis is surprised but he know his potatoes are good.
Aldis goes back to his potatoes and the alien takes off, disappointing Official Arn before he can use the alien technology to make Latvia great (again). After haranguing Aldis and his two co-conspirators…he asks for some potatoes to take home!
The slow smile from Aldis is charming, as is the whole deal.
P.S. We are left to infer that none of the officials bothered to knock.
IMDb meta-data is 8 episodes of 50 minutes rated 6.2 by 927 cinematizens.
Genre: Thriller.
Verdict: Exotic, preachy, and clichéd.
I gave it a look as my lunch time viewing because of the Greenland setting, and that is superbly realised with a drone and more. But I gave up when the cop-show clichés just kept coming, piled high. I gave up after 2 1/2 episodes.
Here are a few: Jurisdiction is more important than solution. The victims may be Swedes but it is Danish territory. Cooperation, no way. Yet a US helicopter is among the first to respond and no comments are made on that?
Head office pushes the locals out of the way, doing without local knowledge, and proves to be more interested in punishing subordinates than doing the job. Sure I know that is McKinsey Management 101, but it so tired that it creaks.
An officer has a personal connection for motivation and confusion. Back stories intrude, as if the front story isn’t enough.
Swedish Foreign Minister says it is time to overthrow governments because they are incapable to reaching agreements in a striking remark that, nonetheless, rings hollow. Meanwhile, we see the incompetence in the jurisdictional disputes that are more important than the crime, by the hierarchy that excludes anyone with local knowledge, the omission of any indigenous peoples from the Arctic Council but then which indigenous people? Or are all such people uniform across Canada, Russia, Alaska, Finland…?
The acting is superb but not enough to hold the interest of this jaded viewer.
I also did much tooth-grinding with the inane, repetitive TV commercials. Yes, I am fast with the mute, but not as fast as I would like to be. No FF for broadcast, more is the pity.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hr and 30 min, rated 5.7 by 7,3817 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: More!
In 1957 a passing alien travelling the wormhole takes the desert Southwest off ramp for a comfort stop on Earth, but in the rough landing the one-eyed, flesh-consuming Republican Senator on board escapes custody and sets about satisfying its hunger for dolts.
The opening scene mimics the Perseid meteor-watching start of It Came from Outer Space (1953) right down to Richard Carlson’s tweed jacket, heavy eye glasses, pipe, Rhode Island-size steaks on the grill, and the white picket fence between the prefabricated post-war ranch-style house and the sands of the Mojave Desert. Later scenes pay tribute to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Blob (1958). The reviews I scanned among the sixty-five pinned to the IMDb entry have trouble classifying the film, and that always rankles reviewers who after saying they want creativity then reject it. For my money, it is a tribute to those 1950s films that offered hope and inspiration in throes of the Atomic Age Cold War when a greasy spoon waitress and a pin-headed dope could save the world!
The Ghota (that is, G-O-P to me), the monster, is loose and no one is safe. Not even that shape-sifting impervious meanie from Terminator II. Meanwhile astronomer Ed has incinerated the steaks while gawking at a bright light in the night sky that crashes conveniently close by…and he goes to investigate. [You know the rest.] The local plod is too lazy to climb the rocks to look around and returns to the coffee shop to harass the comely waitress. It is authentic to the 1950s to be sure.
Meanwhile, as townspeople disappear into puddles of brown sludge, the local GOP denies there is a problem. Just some libtard nonsense about alien climate change. After half dozen puddles, plod reluctantly leaves his counter stool and sets out to harass others who have telephoned about an intruder. End of plod, and not a moment too soon. We are now up to puddle seven.
The alien’s is name of Urp – remember that – and he pursues the escapee, Ghota (aka GOP), by taking over the consciousness of Dr Ted, which his wife notices, and attributes to too much reading. Ted-Urp teams up with the waitresses who is much faster on the uptake than anyone else in this low IQ town to corner Ghota. Yes, the climax is in a movie theatre (and involves a vacuum cleaner and some quick, lateral thinking by the waitress), and yes the coda is from the ramp of the space ship. But there is no pipe, because smoking is bad for Ted’s health. When the alien explains himself, he suggests he is a marshall taking a prisoner to the galactic slammer. Get it, Mortimer? (Probably not.)
Then there is the question of polarity. Tantalising.
I wondered why there was so much salt in the theatre closet and then I remembered the ice and snow that would be on the sidewalk three months a year. In the desert Southwest. Hum.
Loved it.
Sorry to say that Royal Danno (1922-1994) was not available to reprise his role as farmers Green from Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1984) or Wrenchmuller from Spaced Invaders (1990), but Tom McBeath earns his agricultural credentials as the first puddle and the dog survives as it should. Robert Patrick is true to life as the menacing, surly, and incompetent plod but no match for Richard Vernon from Killer Klowns for being despicable. The ensemble acting is firmly in-role as they say on the boards. No one breaks the fourth wall. Right down to the sheriff who was exhausted by answering the phone, once.
The Mojave Desert in British Columbia doesn’t work, despite the camera filters, but who cares. The cinematography is candy coloured and I got to like it as somehow of the time and place. The Prologue adds nothing, but, well, it made sense to someone but that was not me.
IMDb meta-data is 6 minutes, rated 6.2 by 60 cinematizens.
Genre: SciFi
Verdict: Coker.
Another winner from DUST.
A ‘Crop and Hop Circle Tour’ mini-bus with a half-dozen UFO enthusiasts on board roams the cornfields of southern England, while the cynical tour guide mouths the nonsense script about aliens with much eye-rolling and snide asides, but it is what the punters paid for. Then the vehicle breaks down as darkness falls, the real fun begins. Is this Jurassic Park? Are there agricultural Banksys? Will the tinfoil hat do any good? These and other questions emerge quick smart. Check it out on You Tube.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 23 minutes, rated 6.4 by 7,087 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Old Gold.
The Skyhook program of communication and weather (sure) satellites is not going well. Eleven Air Force rockets have gone up to deploy satellites and eleven have come crashing down. Low bid contractors indeed. Yet they should work, according to sweaty Hugh in the desert southwest. Well, try, try, try again he concludes and fires up number twelve. Some budget.
En route to hit the next red button his car is buzzed by a big optical illusion. Sure. He is not a man to jump to the conclusions of his own eyes. He proceeds to the red button.
While he is thus engaged a Big Optical Illusion (BOI is code for UFO) lands at the base and blasts it into special effects unbeknownst to bunkered Hugh who only has eyes for the red button. The redoubtable Morris Ankrum is carried off by the BOI for a session of scrambled Eggheads.
While the Illusionists had tried to contact Hugh earlier when their BOI buzzed his car to arrange a meeting, his cell phone battery was dead and he didn’t get the text. So when the Illusionists landed the immediate reaction is bang! Bang! Now that rings true. Intruder! Kill! Whereas I thought maybe they came to lend Hugh some batteries. It is all hot Cold War. There is no negotiation with the Illusionists, but a rush to prepare a new and more deadly weapon. This weapon involves projecting heavy metal music at the UFOs causing them to go all hysterical. Whoops. Just made that up. Do pay attention.
The immediate response is shoot to kill.
Aside: When wondering why no aliens have contacted us, ponder that. Maybe they have been watching our historical tapes, and knowing what to expect by way of reception and so have steered well clear of this rock where the rule is shoot first and read the script later.
Back to the action! We soon discover by tapping their telephones that the Illusionists did not come for the fast food, but rather to conquer, but only after we have killed at least one, though we find out nothing about them except that they are fragile, few, and past retirement age. Are they fleeing from a world ruined by Republicans? By climate change? By Hillary Clinton? The Mendoza Line? All of the above?
Now if Sy Fy stalwart Richard Carlson had been the lead, there would have doubts, questions, very scientific head scratching, tweed jackets, debates, pipes, and – oh hum. Or if it had been John Agar, well, we would have all fallen asleep. But Hugh is a gung-ho soldier-scientist whose wife salutes him before and after. See, I did it again: made something up. The ever grumpy Hugh Marlowe was an odd choice for the hero, but he played the material well enough. He is better, however, as a sinister but cowardly villain, in say The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) or Seven Days in May (1964).
6 January
But there were four masters of the crafts at work here, the aforementioned actor, the cadaverous Morris Ankrum, Curt Siodmak is credited as writer, technical effects by wizard Ray Harryhausen, and ventriloquist Paul Frees does the narration and the alien-speak. These four all have well-earned Sy Fy credentials. Harryhausen’s flying saucers set the mould for those BOIs (UFOs) to come. Siodmak’s aliens, though undeveloped, stayed with this viewer, as did Frees’s cadence. And Morris, well, he has become an old friend.
I came across an HD coloured version on You Tube and watched it again. When reading about it, there is a rumour of a re-make with Midget Tom playing himself, an alien. That informative and reliable Finnish web site Scifist has not yet got to it, but I hope it will one of these days.
I saw it first in Lexington (KY) with cousin Don about 1956, and remember those spacesuits vividly. And, yes, I have commented on this before. See the 2 November 2017 post for an even more detailed discussion.
IMDb meta-data is 5 minutes 39 seconds runtime, rated by 6.5 by 59 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Droll.
Another Kiwi winner on DUST. In a little over five minutes Shelved establishes character(s), context, and leads to a denouement. Nice. There are also some superb animations that are integral to the story rather than substitutes for it, as is very often the case on DUST where the means becomes the end. The result in Shelved is a kind of anti-Real Humans, the Swedish sy fy series reviewed earlier on this very blog, which also featured a warehouse crew.
IMDb meta-data is 11 minutes, rated 6.6 by 63 cinemtizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Charming.
In Appalachia an eleven-year old Gene dreams of the stars on the 1938 autumn evening when on the radio Orson Welles broadcasted The War of the Worlds. Gene’s share-cropper father, beset by the Depression, struggling to eke a living from a hard scrabble farm, aided by his emaciated wife, hounded by a foreclosing bank, all of them stunted by malnutrition, encourages Gene to dream of the stars. Touching.
‘I got all misty,’ Dobie. If there is an explanation for the title, I’d be glad to learn it.
The parents stepped straight out of the photographs in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), once read never forgotten. Yes, I know this book has been subjected to a pygmy attack of late. It is never too late for pygmies to sup on the dead.
TVDB meta-data is runtime 90 minutes each in 42 episodes, rated 7.4 by 4232 cinematizens.
Genre: Police procedural.
Verdict: Low key.
Peter Haber as Martin Beck
Good cop, bad cop, and many others. Martin Beck is slow and careful while his off-sider is mercurial and trigger happy. Sounds clichéd because it is, but it works in small doses in this long-running series from Sweden. How many Swedes are left after the body count in each episode? The first I watched had six deaths, and a lot of guns. More violent and gruesome than I like, but low key in that the characters to do not yell at each other, as is so common in Yankee krimis, mistaking noise and guns for drama.
There is usually a lot of out and about in Stockholm for eye candy, and a lot of use of drones. My two brief visits to Stockholm consisted mainly of hotel rooms, conference tables, meetings, and reports, leaving me with little idea of its geography of the many islands and bridges.
The plots involve biker gangs, Russian mafia, immigrant vendettas, corporate corruption, and the usual vices of screenwriters: drugs, money, and prostitution. That dearth of narrative originality is offset by the production that makes much use of expensive location shooting (from public parks, pleasure boats, old churches, bars clubs, glitzy corporations, and more) and nearly everyone in Sweden appears on camera as an extra. However, the repertoire company of leading actors from Sveriges TV is so small I recognised a good many of them from other roles. Still, the acting is superb, especially from the inner circle of coppers. A flicker in eye, a purse of the lip, a twitch of the shoulder tells much in these intense productions. No Yankee yelling is needed, nor any of the sanctimonious speeches common in Brit TV. Instead Beck sighs, and moves on.
Beck and Mikael Persbrandt as Gunvald Larsson
There is some light relief from Beck’s intrusive, genial, and persistent neighbour, Grannen who gives Beck the benefit of his advice on alcohol, women, sports, dining, travel, and more when they meet in the elevator, hallway, lobby, or adjacent balconies of the apartment building. As part of a mandatory staff development exercise, Beck was once required to write down the names of three people who mean a lot to him. The first two were easy: his daughter, and grandson, but it took him all day to realise the third was Grannen – the look on Beck’s face when he wrote that down is a treasured memory. Grannen is a Beck-opposite: extravagant, thoughtless, carefree, flamboyant, intrusive, daring….
Ingvar Hirdwall as Grannen
Beck is played so low key at times he seems to be catatonic, whereas the hyperactive Gunvald is always ready, willing, and able to kick in a door, even if it leads to the toilet in police HQ. The man knows how to make an entrance. Beck, on the other hand, seems to suffer from low blood pressure and move ever so slowly. Indeed he has brandished a weapon only once in the ten episodes I have seen to date. He didn’t shoot…because Gunvald did it first — no surprise there.
Beck’s talents lie in managing the team of detectives and in interrogation where he is a hard man to fool. Don’t play poker with this man. He reads the tells very quickly. (If you don’t know what a ‘tell’ is, then don’t play poker with anyone.)
The stories are interesting but the resolution is often magic, making it more trip than arrival. However, they are strong on the motivations of characters and what a mystery that makes us to each other.
Some of the earlier episodes come from one of the ten-novel sequence of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (1965-1975) whence Beck originated (though many other characters from the novels are omitted, notably Lennart Kollberg). But many of the episodes are not derived from that source, just as well, because I found the last five or six Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels suffocatingly preachy with ideology supplanting humanity as the soapbox came out and human interest waned. But speaking of soap, I have to say that the episodes after Gunvald was written out have tended toward soap operas with the backstories taking over in continuing and endless, pointless melodramas: Will Emma leave Oscar? Will quiet Jenny get a new hair style? Will work-alcoholic Ayda take a day off? Will loquacious Claes ever shut up? Stay tuned for these and other equally trivial problems.
Equally, in the latter episodes the boy toys get bigger and more prominent. Every five minutes Beck calls out the SWAT team to knock down doors, blow up rooms, and swarm over a place, usually too late to find anything. But the SWAT members put on a choreographed show.
Other films have been made from the novels, including an earlier Sveriges production Beck (1993) in nine episodes with a different cast, and also the feature films The Laughing Policeman (1973), The Man on the Roof (1976), The Man Who Went up in Smoke (1980), and Roseanna (1967). This last film was based was the first novel of the series and is a personal favourite out of the ten books. The film version of The Laughing Policeman is set in San Francisco with Walter Matthau as the Beck substitute and loses everything in the transition, while The Man Who Went up in Smoke is an English production with a woefully miscast Derek Jacobi as Beck.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.4 by 1,853 cinematizens.
Genre: PI.
Verdict: Enticing.
Set in contemporary Switzerland with nary a cowbell in sight, the depressed, dreary, downcast, and dull Aloys goes about his business of spying on people. Jealous wives hire him to videotape their husbands’ suspicious activities. Worried parents put him onto adolescents who may be using drugs. Insurance companies wanted evidence of deceits about disabilities. Deans want dirt to lighten the payroll. (Well, they do.) The work sounds more interesting than it is.
Aloys is robotic, though Robby had more personality than does he. His only friend, his father, just died, and he is now even more lonely, but, no, he does not vicariously live on his subjects. Indeed, he is strictly professional in his all his dealings. He is all but silent as he mopes around the tower residences where many of his subjects live, and where he himself lives when he is not riding buses through the Alpine mists.
He does catalogue and review his vast collection of surveillance tapes, and that seems to be his only pastime when not out filming more. He doesn’t enjoy it or do it for pleasure, but he does it obsessively, because there is nothing else to do. This is not a man looking for human contact, quite the reverse. In an elevator car at his residential tower Aloys pretends not to be there, or shrinks in on himself, when someone else enters.
This ordered, monotone world is interrupted with a suicide attempt by one of his neighbours, and then begins a game of telephone tag with a woman who is neither client nor subject.
It doesn’t sound like much but it works.
The actors are so ordinary, the set is so drab, the weather is so miserable that almost anything would be a relief. Yet in a way it is uplifting and positive by the end. I came across it by chance on SBS On-Demand when I was looking for, but not finding, Real Humans Season 2. Films from Switzerland are scarce and I had just read a solid krimi set there so I was primed, and I liked the enigmatic summary, so I took a look.
I found the four commercial breaks annoying, and they put me off further viewing on SBS On-Demand for a while.
IMDb meta-data is twenty episodes of 60m, each rated 7.9 by 6,067
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Cogent.
In a contemporary Sweden android Hubots are the norm for simple repetitive jobs, companions for the elderly, and counter staff to deal with the idiocracy. The Hubots are very, and I mean very, life-like but their programming is limited, however, there are hackers who for a price can breach those limits. Got it? Even the Asimov Laws can be hacked down!
(Think of this marketing pitch: Get your own Hubot look-alike and program it to attend budget meetings with the dean, insufferable training courses on nuclear waste disposal and playground safety for professors, and Department boards dominated by the least productive individuals. Where do I get mine?!)
Some people ignore the Hubots, others object to them, and still others find them threatening, while most happily benefit from the services they provide without a second thought. In this world we meet several individuals and families who cope with and react in different ways to the Hubots they encounter. A warehouse store-man fears losing his job to a doll, an estranged wife finds a Hubot a better companion than her alcoholic and volatile husband, a career woman finds a Hubot has unlimited energy and patience in dealing with her children, a teenage boy wonders if the Hubot maid is fully functional, an elderly man finds the Hubot carer assigned to him is a nag about diet and medication and with which he cannot bargain, a pensioner grows so emotionally dependent on his old model Hubot that when it breaks down he grieves without end, a pastor sees them as another example of God’s children but her flock does not…. While others despise these PacMen and Women.
We also meet, and we meet them first, a band of ferrel Hubots with their leader Leo, who judging by his Hollywood shadow, is a human. We also encounter two police officers who specialise in recovering erratic Hubots, tracking down ferrel ones, and arresting illegal hackers who re-program legal Hubots to satisfy paying customers in a thriving blackmarket. There is not much of a problem and the police work is slow and methodical.
Juice break at the warehouse.
The Real Humans are a loose group of anti-Hubots who stick decals on windows, shout slogans, wear red hats (oops just made that up!), and some arm themselves with rocket launchers and automatic rifles against the day when….? Well, who knows, but it is always comforting to have a bazooka under the bed in case agents of the deep state come to haul one back to the looney bin.
And all is not what it at first seemed to be.
It is uncompromising in presentation, so pay attention. Unlike painfully didactic Yankee television designed for the attention-deficit audience of Pox News, there are no internal summaries when one character explains to another what is happening, nor any labels of time and place, or title cards to focus, or recaps with each new episode. Nor is there any of the sanctimonious preaching so predictable on Brit TV. Little is explained as the narrative unfolds, but it seems that in due course all questions will be answered for those with the eyes to see.
I have seen the ten episodes of season one but cannot lay hands on the next ten from season two with English subtitles. Little help, please.
