Simulacra (2018)
IMDb meta-data is 13 minutes runtime, rated – by -.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Israel.
Verdict: Compelling.
Tagline: Gone is gone.
A scientist tries to recreate her dead daughter in a cyborg with mixed results, assisted reluctantly by another, surviving daughter. It is a slow process, and then it goes awry.
It is a short story of love-loss-love-and-loss…again. Not rated on the IMDb by any of the usual trolls. I came across it on You Tube (but not on Dust).
Ascension (2000) Death on Saturn’s Moon
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 4.5 by 98 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Noir.
DNA: Yankee.
Tagline: Here we go again.
Verdict: By the numbers.
A burned out police officer arrives at an isolated mining dome on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2057 to investigate the disappearance of the manager. Since no one can survive outside the dome, the missing man is presumed dead. Neither of the remaining two miners seems much bothered by or interested in the disappearance. They are as indifferent to the fate of the manager as managers usually are to the fate of underlings.
The pace is slow, the dialogue repetitive, but we all know the conventions. Officer has a backstory that emerges slowly and none too clearly. However muddled that is, it is more than we ever find out about the missing manager, or the two surviving miners.
Nothing is made of the locale. It could be in Alaska.
It is better than some I have seen— e.g., Music of the Spheres (1984) — but…, well, that is a left-handed compliment. However, it does not bristle with the ideas that Spheres had despite its amateurish execution.
Sial IV (1969)
IMDb meta-data is four episodes, each of 24 minutes, rated 5.4 by an unknown number of cinematizens.
DNA: Swiss.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: post Apocalypse.
Verdict: Molasses.
Tagline: Do electric sheep dream of androids?
By chance an engineer survives a nuclear war in 1970 and when he is unearthed and revived it is 2145, he awakens to a brave new world deep underground where the few remaining humans have created androids to do all the lifting. He finds that he prefers the honesty of the ‘droids who cannot tell a lie rather than the dishonesty of the people who can.
That summary makes it sound more interesting than it is. The acting is stilted; the direction worse, and it goes downhill from there.The Creation of the Humanoids (1962) is the same sort of story told a little better. It is reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
This future society is Sial and the sector is IV, ruled by…Machiavelli. Yep. This Machiavelli is played by the old hand Marcel Dalio (the croupier from Rick’s in Casablanca [1942], and many other films including Catch-22 [1970]). With that name Machiavelli in it, I had to watch it.
It is very high brow with quotations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Saint Just. Nothing is quoted from Machiavelli.
Those who are bored by freedom from want and work are treated as though they are sick and cured by drawing their emotions off onto androids who are then destroyed. Maybe that explains the bad hair. Among the sick are those who want to be sick. Who resist leisure and happiness. It is their right to be unhappy, to suffer, to fight, and to be killed! Yes, they are freedom fighters, who will fight freedom wherever they find it. Ayn Rand Libertarians all!
The whole thing is as absurd as an episode of the Avengers of the period but without either the humour or Mrs Peel. [Sigh]
It makes Australia’s own The Stranger (1964-1965) look snappy.
Dalio’s own backstory story as a Jew escaping from defeated France is far more compelling than this program.
Je t’aime, Je t’aime (1969)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 40 minutes of runtime, rated 7.2 by 3,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: France.
Verdict: Je suis perdu.
Tagline: Who cares.
Claude Rich gives a superb performance but it just doesn’t add up or hold interest. It is a series of tableaux, some repeated too often, with little momentum or coherence.
In sum, he is a rising man in a publishing house who marries a co-worker; she tells him that she likes him but doesn’t love him or care much about him or anything else. She is and remains clinically indifferent about anything and everything. (She would make a perfect manager.) It just gets worse when they move to Glasgow. Yep, just the cure for depression, a winter in damp, drizzly, dank, and dark Scotland. She dies. He feels responsible. He probably wasn’t responsible but it is ambiguous, and in any event that he feels responsible for her death makes it so.
He volunteers for a time-travel experiment, since he, too, is now clinically depressed (from reading the script). Seven scientists ensconce him sous vide in a bladder where he is to time travel to the past. What is the past but memory. The result is a shuffled mixtape of his memories, some on a loop, many feature Olga. It is vaguely implied that reliving these memories changes them somehow but that is only a speculation, not developed in the film.
Some of the memories are more likely to have been dreams with no basis in fact, like one where he is slaving away over copy late into the night when five of his superiors surround his desk and make disparaging comments on his work as he toils away. It may have felt like that but I doubt five senior executives stood around his desk at midnight. But then does dreaming it was so make it so in a memory? What is the membrane between memory and dream?
By the way, he is like many other celluloid time travellers in that he wants to go back in time, not forward. Wells’s eponymous time traveller went forward by mistake, I seem to recall.
Rich is in nearly every scene and carries the film with his impressive range of emotion, thought, confusion, loss, depression, and more. His last credit was in 2015.
I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 18 minutes, rated 6.3 by 2,900 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Yankee.
Verdict: Better than the title.
Tagline: I didn’t wanna do it!
The night before his wedding strapping Youth is body swapped with an alien (the monster of the title) who has come to Earth on a mission. The females of his world, we learn later, are infertile, and the mission is to determine if his kind can mate with earthlings to renew their species. Now in a semi-zombie state Youth goes ahead with the wedding but … well, his anatomy is new to him and there were no sex education lessons on the 1950s flight to Earth and he doesn’t know what to do.
His newly wed wife, true to the 1950s, concludes his frigidity and confusion is her fault and tries her wiles to seduce him. No sale. Meanwhile, his fellow aliens are body swapping with other young men and soon they effectively seal off the town. While most of the other aliens are as lost as Youth, one or two take out their frustrations with ray guns. A shoot out ensues.
Wife figures out that the problem is Youth, not her, and he confesses his extraterrestrial identity to her. She tries to tell others — a doctor, a police officer, a Republican — who, true to the 1950s, dismiss her reports as female hysteria. Cringe but true.
We never get to the mating, much to the disappointment of the Fraternity Brothers.
In hindsight much of it seems an unwitting commentary on the gender stereotypes and roles of the time and place. The condescending doctor was particularly irritating. It blends several Sy Fy tropes: alien invasion albeit low key, body snatching, isolated locale, disbelieving soon-to-be victims, and so on.
True to the 1950s, Youth was himself driven out of Hollywood as a homosexual shortly after this film. He took up a second career as a writer with success. Wife went into television with about a hundred credits. This seems to have been her only feature film leading role.
Melody Skylark & the Cosmic Soup
IMDB meta-data is ——- [not there]
Runtime of 14 m and 24 s from Sozo Bear Films
Daydreaming during a zoom meeting with the boss Melody gets a message in her lunch time bowl of alphabet soup! No, she doesn’t believe it either…she soon has reason to do so.
The earth is under attack by aliens, starting with her!
Fortunately for us she still has her blue guitar borrowed from Wallace Stevens for ‘things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.’ Pretty good poetry for an insurance agent.
It is one hoot and holler, ending with the promise of Melody’s further adventures! Yes, please.
Róise and Frank (2022)
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 30 minutes, rated 7.1 by 131 cinematizens.
DNA: Ireland.
Genre: drama.
Verdict: hooray.
Tagline: When the dog takes over control…
In a village in west Ireland near the sea live Róise and Frank, who is Mr Hurling in those parts. But before the film begins, Frank has suddenly died, catching Róise unprepared and leaving her bereft. Her portrayal of grief is relentless and moving. Very purposefully a lurcher (that is a dog) makes its way through the fields, down country roads, and along lanes to her yard where he takes up a watching post. When she notices him, yes it is a him, she is, at first indifferent, then slightly bothered, and later alarmed when he insists on accompanying her grim walks to the bottle shop, and when upon her return, he pushes into the house. She takes fright and shooed him away…she thinks.
This dog is made of sterner stuff and persists and persists. And again once in the house, the mystery begins and ends. The dog takes up the deceased Frank’s chair and when hurling comes on the TV while she mopes in the kitchen with another bottle, the dog stares at the televised hurling game and barks when the home team scores. Just like Frank. His favourite meal is the same as Frank’s. And so it goes.
During one of her mopes, the dog drives her out the house and herds her on a walk to … the vista she and Frank almost always went to after tea (that is dinner to you) on nice evenings. There is more but – spoiler alert – she becomes convinced that this dog is Frank returned to her!
The dog herds a local boy into ever more hurling practice to sharpened his reflexes, hone his eye, and build his sadly lacking confidence.
It is charming blarney and the dog steals the show.
The acting is superb all the way around. Her confused grown son the doctor is, well, confused by her mania. The local pub-bound layabouts are bemused by the insinuation of the dog into village life as the hurling team’s mascot, and the widower neighbour is jealous of her affection for the dog. There is some choral singing to spice it up!
Love the sign that said ‘No Dogs Allowed…Except Frank’ at the hurling pitch.
Not my usual fare but it came up as a choice during the long flight to Honolulu in July, and since I had been reading krimis set in Ireland, I pursued the Irish connection.
Interstellar (2014)
IMDb meta-data is an excruciating runtime of 2 hours and 45 minutes, rated an incredible 8.7 by 1,934,705 of the credulous.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Yankee.
Verdict: Alas.
Tagline: It’s the end of the world, again, and only one man can save us, no not James Bond (sigh, I wish) but….
It is the same old connect the dots plot. Our heroic pilot ferries the scientists to their deaths one-by-one with his trick reverse parks. Hundreds, thousands have been trained but he is the only one who can do that. Though twelve did go first. Sure that makes sense. Tarkovsky is not the only director who treats audiences with contempt.
Watching this was the first time I have even felt bored by the representation of space, though plenty of high priced weightlessness. There was much talk of gravity that reminded of the superb film of that name with another good ole boy in it.
‘They’? Didn’t find out and didn’t care. Liked the domino robot computer
Exhaustingly researched by watching other movies it seems. The claim is also made that it is based on S C I E N C E. Sure. Whatever. Based on science, the science of speculation. All the hallmarks of this director’s work. A serial disaster movie as the action moves from one to another.
Bladder-busting length, mountainous clichés, solitary heroism of a unique genius, and a gargantuan production in which no expense was spared. What was spared was intelligence, insight, and imagination. The acting is fine. I was surprised by MM’s credibility, but honours go to John Lithgow who delivers a fine supporting performance. Michael Caine was sleepwalking, at best, but then he didn’t write the lines, one of which posits is, by implication, that the solution to an intractable mathematical problem is simply more time, like learning conjugations. Goldbach conjecture and Riemann hypothesis are next! Anne Hathaway’s part was underwritten, leaving her little to do.
Thought they chose MM for his previous experience with aliens in Contact (1997).
These people have never seen a dust bowl and evidently did no research on the subject since the representation of a dust storm here is nothing like as ominous or ferocious and seemingly endless as the real thing. DUST BOWL PICTURES. Instead we have a long pointless scene of MM staring at the dust on the floor. Get a broom! Sweep it up man! There are a lot of those, long and pointless scenes.
There is a far better description of a dust storm in Sidney Courtier, Softly Dust the Corpse (1960), a marvellous krimi.
Gigantic wave over 12 inches of water is not possible. Check the science on that. Not even on a strange new world, about which no curiosity is ever shown. Check with your local science advisor.
We know the daughter is smart because when she left the house window open to the known threat of the elements, we see that her room have floor-to-ceiling fully loaded book shelves. Who needs a computer or Kindle when you have these tomes gathering dust. Yet she is supposed to be a tweenage wizard. While on tech, there are a lot of computer screens on display but whenever anything important comes up, it’s on a whiteboard, blackboard, or piece of paper..
My finger was never far from the fast forward button.
Maybe those who rated it highly haven’t yet seen these clichés as often as I have, but they will, I am sure.
Albeit, less preachy than I expected given the plot kickoff.
Magellan (2017)
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 43 minutes, rated 5.2 by 1694 members of the producers’ extended families.
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Yankee
Verdict: Meh
Tagline: Me, myself, and I.
In sum, the one-man crew sets off on a ten-year mission and talks to the camera in close-up for about half the runtime. There are actors who could make that engaging, but none of them were available for this film. The only explanation for the one-man crew is the producers’ budget. Why the mission must take ten years is anyone’s guess.
Here is the set-up: SETI has received and tracked three radio signals. (See, overkill. One would be enough. And overkill leads to boring repetition in lieu of development.) Off Hero goes, leaving behind for those ten years a wife and child after five-minutes of thought. No one will go with him but he loves his own company, so fine.
Like the audience, he passes much of the time asleep, repeats three searches on three heavenly bodies – two moons and a dwarf planet. We see each wake-up call. We see each search. Each time he finds an opaque glass orb tennis-ball size that seems to the origin of the signal. He reports this by instantaneous communication from Neptune. Sure. But he himself shows little interest in them since he is a pilot not a scientist. Yep, perfect man for the job. When he touches a ball with his bare hand, he has LSD visions of the cosmos which he does not report, least somebody tell him not to play with the specimens, I guess. (Confession, finding the dialogue so trite I turned down the volume for a lot of the runtime, especially when I hit fast-forward.)
In his communication things seem to be changing at Mission Control, but that hint is not developed. His spiffy controller slowly deteriorates into a ragged and haggard man. Ditto he seems to lose internet in wife and home.
It goes on, and on.
On the plus side, I am always intrigued by first contact that isn’t a shoot ‘em up. And the glass balls were a surprise but the novelty wore off by the third time. The Space Odyssey visions of the cosmos were fun but had no meaning and might just as well have been drug-induced.
On the other side, with a one-man crew there is no interaction, no second opinion, no tension, no teamwork, just sleep and awake. By the way, in the ten years his hair did not need to be cut, since there was no other member of the crew to do it, apart from Siri and Alexa. The repetition of searching for and finding the balls was a killer. Someone should have introduced him to his wife: in their few scenes and interactions before departure, they seemed to be strangers.
Some reviewers excuse its faults because of its low budget but the problems are in the story not the colour of the walls of the space ship.
Helga: A Human Requiem (2022)
Meta-data is a runtime of 20 minutes, unrated because it is not listed on the IMDb. (Strange but true.)
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Brazil.
Verdict: Olé!
Tagline: A Love Story.
Amadeus Klein is a robotics genius, fated to live in a brutal military dictatorship, who takes army funding to develop mechanical warriors and diverts it into making a robotic simulacra of the women he loved, until soldiers killed her.
Nearly silent, it conveys great emotion without a word. But it does make demands on the viewer to stick with it. Doing so certainly pays off. The sound track is, yep, a requiem from the enfant terrible Mozart.
Helga is derived from Metropolis with a touch of Frankenstein thrown in. Tin face CGI though she is, she, too, has feelings.
A marvellous short film from Caio Alves and Gabriel Gadiman for Kinelux Studios. It is on DUST and that is widely available. A one-minute trailer can also be found on the Kinelux Studios (São Paulo) website. I could not find many graphics in my two-minute search.
