Political theory and practice

Projet-M (2014) A 1000 Days in Space

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 4.7 by 403 cinematitizens.

Genre: Sy Fy, Species: Nuke and more. 

DNA: Québécois 

Verdict: A gripper with a double twist.

Tagline:  Did we do that?

Four astronauts are aboard ‘M’ a vast spaceship in a low Earth orbit to test it and themselves for a mission to far Europa, a moon of Jupiter.  Why Europa? Not for the Euros they may find there to fund a sequel but to find water since Earthlings have just about used all of theirs up. No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense but it is the kick-off.

The 1000 day mission is in Earth orbit, round and round, while they test all the equipment and endure each others’ company, bad jokes, personal hygiene, and airline food, though the catering was done in Québéc and therefore might be superior, well better than Qantas.  In the opening moments we see them smoothly cooperate to avoid the scriptwriter’s old friend: meteors.  

There follows some tedious backstories but not too much.  It is a work of fiction and in it Québec is a major power and Montréal is the centre of the civilised world, or so one might infer from the absence of mention of any place else. Jeez, you’d think in the eternal north, Québec would have plenty of snow and ice for their drinks, but evidently it is all gone, leaving just the Polar bears. Tabernac!

Cynical viewers know something has to go wrong by 20 minutes, and it is does, but nothing that I expected.  Indeed, for once I am hesitant to reveal what goes wrong, but it is necessary to make sense of the story.  

There are some tensions among the crew – two men and two women – but their time is finishing, when…observing the Earth – well, Montréal – wrapped in a mantle of clouds from their orbit they see flames of light erupting through the obscurity like flares, a number of them. It is beautiful for an instant. Neither they nor the viewer realises what they are at first. These are the strikes of a nuclear war and in seconds, even as they scramble to make contact with the Flight Centre more and more erupt around the globe.   

Now it becomes a study of individual and collective reactions to this singular event.  They have no further communication with Earth and know no more and neither does the viewer. There are others in orbit and the first problem is whether to contact them, the Germans, the Russians….   In the absence of either orders or knowledge the Captain wants radio silence for the time being.  This causes conflict with his three colleagues.

As the silence from the Earth extends for days and days, it is too much for one crew member who takes a one-way spacewalk.  Captain Queeg himself beaks down but with a dose of Prozac later recovers.  Bones, the medical officer, keeps her head while these two crack.  It is she who decides to permit a Russian to dock and enter, partly in the hope of learning more information.  

This Russki has been exposed to solar radiation and is dying, slowly, and he knows it but he knows nothing more than they do about the war below, but he does know something else that they do not know.  

Again came another big surprise to this jaded know-it-all. Their scans of Europa, when subjected to secondary analysis on Earth, have revealed more than water, a lot more….   Could that discovery have been what triggered the nuclear war is a question that arises but is not developed in the narrative.  

It is not often I get two whopping great surprises from a space opera but I got two here.  

The film was prepared as a You Tube series but was converted into a feature in the hope of a commercial release.  The acting by the two principal astronauts, Capn and Bones is superb, and the stage craft excellent, the more so when one reviewer estimates its cost was less than one day’s shooting in Hollywood.  

On the acting, I have seen Capn before playing farces and comedies, to see him here, ramrod stiff and serious took me aback, rather like seeing rubber face Rowan Atkinson as the repressed Maigret. The fourth crewman, the science officer, was one of the scriptwriters.   

Wir (1982) We

IMDb meta- data is a runtime of 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 6.1 by 118 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species Dystopia.

DNA: West Germany.

Verdict: Blah.

Tagline: Replicated in Florida!

Fraternity Brothers Advisory: repeated nudity.  

The united state of quadratic harmony and blue-grey conformity is über alles. Freedom has been eliminated in favour of one, oneness, sameness in the drab world where the number of chews of gruel is regulated.  

The population lives and works in transparent glass cubicles to warm the heart of Jeremy Bentham’s progeny in McKinsey managers. Privacy breeds freedom and freedom undermines order, ergo there shall be no privacy. Wait, it’s starting to sound like Florida where the state regulates the activities in bedrooms and bathrooms, libraries and bookstores, and everything else (except guns) in the name of small government.

There are dissidents even in this crushing world, and a secret passage through a wardrobe (cf C S Lewis) that gets through the Green Wall that separates this Oneness from untamed nature including that Édouard Manet painting, Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863).

The story centres on D-503 who starts as a happy citizen, joyfully denouncing his freedom, happily slaving on a major project to release others from dreadful freedom, who begins to have, well not second, but the first thoughts of his own. This ignition is kindled by sexual love pace Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  But he readily and happily submits to a lobotomy to have his pesky conscience removed while condemning his paramour to torture and death with a Gestapo smile.

In this 1982 television production there are some nice touches as when D-503 dictates to a Siri selectric typewriter (remember those?) that types out the text.  

The screenplay is talkie and the direction is theatrical and expository rather than dramatic. It is a long time since I (re-)read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1921) so I cannot say how closely it resembles this source material. By the way, its shelf-mate has to be Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938).   

I usually ignore dystopian films because they are so simple-minded and repetitive that they show little or no imagination, even less than the typical SyFy film.  ‘The world went to hell because of … [name the villains].’  Zamyatin is an exception because of the time and place of his novel and his own personal backstory. There is a French short film based on Zamyatin’s novel that I will try to track down – Glass Fortress 2016 France 29 minutes.

The glass cells in which everyone lives and works reminded me of the new social science building. The rallies and oaths spouted must have echoed much of Nazism for German viewers in 1982.  They certainly did for me.

Invasión (1969)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 3 minutes, rated 7.2 by 919 cinematizens

DNA: Argentina

Genre: Spy Fy more than Sy Fy, Species: Jorge Luis Borges

Verdict: All style. 

Tagline: On and on it goes.

In a fictional city of Aquileia a number of men and women, middle class and working stiffs, young and old, men and women respond to the enigmatic signal from an old man – ‘It’s today.’  There are discrete nods, weapons are secretly passed from a woman to a man, a group of men playing cards in a cafe seem to be talking in code, some impatient youths lash out, these are members of the resistance who are pursued by men in light coloured suits. Most of the resistance members wear black.  

The invasion has already started and most of the population either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care, and gets on with life, but not these resistors. Like a communist cell, each member of the resistance only knows a small part of the puzzle. Those apprehended by the Lights are beaten and tortured with cattle prods in the ear (off camera).  The Darks murder prisoners on camera. 

One by one the resistors are killed, but eager new recruits replace them, and it goes on and on.  The old man from the beginning makes new plans.    

There is little dialogue, and what there is mostly is clipped and coded.

I came across it on a list of Science Fiction films and the description there implied that the invaders were otherworldly in some way. Not so. Yet the IMDb tags it as Sci-Fi but I can’t see why. Moreover, it had that magic name associated with it – Jorge Luis Borges.  Superb acting by one and all.

So it goes without much rhyme or reason, just like the latest war reported in the evening news.  It prefigures a good part of Argentine history, as the Montonero terrorism precipitated the Dirty War and on to the Falklands War.

Irene and her husband Herrera are both resistors but only she knows that. Herrera thinks she is a stay at home wife. They both have assignments independent of each other. How little husbands and wives know of each other is the stuff of drama, comedy, and life.

Perhaps its contemporary resonance caused it to disappear like so much else in Argentina.  The prints and negatives were seized and destroyed during the Dirty War. Or more likely, it was a mindless act of destruction. This version was reconstituted from four different sets of partly burned prints and negatives in 2007.  That explains the oddities on the soundtrack.  

It is as enigmatic as L’armée des ombres (1969) and has the pace of Compartiment tueurs (1965). That is good company. At two plus hours, it is way too long for the story it offers. The reconstructors may have wanted to include everything they found, but a producer could easily have cut thirty minutes.  

The Ninth Gate (1999)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 13 minutes, rated 6.7 by 189,000 cinematizens. 

Genre: Thriller.

DNA: Pan European.

Verdict: 

Tagline: The Eighth Gate was closed. 

The unscrupulous bookman takes a commission with a blank cheque to examine some very rare books for a languid Langella.  Heretofore, reading the reactions of others and playing to them have been Bookman’s tools of the trade on the principle that he only cheats the cheaters.  

To track down the books a travelogue takes us from New York City to Portugal, Spain, and France where we meet book collectors: Twin brothers in Portugal, a donnish recluse in Spain, and a bitter, one-armed, wheelchair-bound Grande Dame in France. His negotiations with each are handled well both by Bookman and the director. There are no cardboard fools here.  

The underlying question that finally comes to the surface is whether to believe what is in these books of the occult.  Speaking of fools, Heinrich Himmler nodded in agreement.  

These books have self-appointed acolytes and some of them are murderous fools like Himmler.  But they also have henchmen who begin to hench on Bookman.  A guardian angel comes to his rescue and the two form an uneasy partnership.  

From this point the film descends into a mixed buddy road movie until it gets to the sex scene. Much of the mystery is boiled away.

As a series of tableaux it is masterful, from the opening suicide, though I wondered what was written in the note and never found out, to the lip-licking of the those conned, the clenched hands of the silent seller, to Langella who stole every scene but none more so than when he said ‘Boo!’  Lena Olin was a succubus to remember. John Depp disappears into his role as usual.

Travelogue and tableaux were delivered, but the air went out of the mystery about half-way through. By the way, the ‘gates’ of the title are drawing, not the number of airport gates Bookman went through on his travels. Since he got where he was going he must not have chosen Qantas. 

Derived from the prolific Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel The Club Dumas (1993) but changed a lot in the last third to accommodate that angel. Apart from that variation, it put me in mind of Mikkel Birkegaard’s novel The Library of Shadows (2009).  

I came across it in my collection by accident and watched it again, while reading a selection of reviews. These days when the power of books has frightened so many people, it is timely to see how books are portrayed in film. The books in this film have not been banned in Florida or Texas. 

L’invenzione di Morel  (1974) Morel’s Invention.  

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 46 minutes, rated 6.7 by 419 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy. 

DNA: Italy.

Verdict: an original. 

Tagline: Seeing is not believing.

A fugitive castaway washes up on a rocky Mediterranean island that seems uninhabited. Exploring the island, he is surprised to discover an elaborate art deco hotel in the mode of Italian futurism of the later 1920s, perfectly intact yet empty. 

Driven by the search for drinking water he turns on all the Krill machinery he finds in the hotel basement to be later shocked to see people on the patio and elsewhere. His reaction is fear, and he hides and watches them. They repeat the same actions and words again and again. Strange. Moreover, they dance in the rain without getting wet.  Stranger still, indeed, and this deepens his fear.  Later when he stumbles across a couple of them by accident they ignore him, as though he were an invisible ghost.  Although it turns out he is not the ghost. 

This is a brilliant take on Jules Verne’s The Island of Dr Moreau (which is usually an excuse for a freak show). Morel’s invention has captured a perfect week in a perfect place. (Psst its on Malta.) The cinematography is likewise brilliant. It is so gorgeous to look at that it upstages L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961) and its baroque hotel.

SPOILER alert.

The people that Fugitive sees are long dead, and these are holographic projections we might say today, but in 1974 that concept was not available to the screenwriter updating a 1940 novel. These beautiful people in their gorgeous 1920s fashions, against blue sea and cerulean sky repeat their week again and again like a film on a loop. In time the fugitive realises some of this and, having no alternative, holographs himself into a kind of eternal life, or eternal purgatory.

Is it a commentary on the living death of movie actors, who die, and yet whose images continue to repeat their film performances?  Maybe.  As a clue to the cinema references, Morel’s muse is Anna Karina who a decade earlier was the proclaimed muse of Jean Luc Godard.  And, yes, her name is Faustina.  Hint, hint. Or, given the novel’s date, is it a comment on the Italian fascist proclivity to send dissidents into exile, admonishing the locals to shun them, e.g., Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945).

It is a daring production that has no dialogue for the first 30+ minutes, and very little after that, and much of it is repetition.  Yet it works with neither the offensive pretension nor defensive arrogance of a Tarkovsky film. The scenery, the sound of the water and wind, and the fugitive’s desperation and then realisation are all done without a word, nonetheless achieve impact. The fugitive conveys a great deal with hardly a word, for talking to ghosts is pointless.  

Belief has to be suspended a lot, because Fugitive never eats, though he seeks water once, never food.  Moreover, even in the rain storm he never takes shelter in some part of the vast hotel.  Hotel staff are seen once but never explained.These are nits that drive some reviewers to prolix expostulations.  Moreover he never tries the obvious, a touch.

Gdzie Jestes, Luizo (1964) Where are you, Louise?

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 29 minutes, rated 6.1 by 29 cinematizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Poland. 

Verdict: Huh?

Tagline: not Stanislav Lem.

‘Mysterious creatures that have landed on the ground in a flying saucer, encourage the people they meet to undergo experimental research in exchange for gaining youth and immortality.’  That is the IMDb summary.

This is what I saw: A young woman who needs a shave, introduces the aliens. Blinking lights from a mini flying saucer offer four men eternal life in return for some beta-testing.  Suspecting colossal anal probes, they decline.

No reviews of any kind are attached to the IMDb entry.  

With the static direction and reliance on camera tricks, it looks like it was made for television.  The acting is good, but the whole is not.

The English title comes from a pop song on the car radio when the confrontation starts.

Egymilliárd évvel a világvége elött (TV Movie 1983) [see below]

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour 2 minutes, rated 6.0 by 15 cinematizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy

DNA: Magyar 

Verdict: Meh

Tagline: Meh 

A number of loosely acquainted scientists find their work running into the sand.  Each has a different story – family quarrels, equipment failure, annoying intrusions, constantly ringing telephones, split infinitives, but all have the same effect of stopping their work. As a couple of them whinge about that they realise several others are likewise affected and they begin to see a pattern in it. The Universe is delaying their discoveries to save humanity from itself. 

The production is lugubrious and the staging and acting soap opera level. Now my judgement is based on some very erratic subtitles so there is a considerable margin of error.

From a Russian novel but made and set in contemporary Hungary, though at one point a passport is visible with the CCCP cover. The title, according to Google Translate is Hungarian for ‘One Billion Years before the End of the World.’  

There is not a single review on IMDb!  The trolls missed this one, but I didn’t!

The Last Rider (2022)

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 42 minutes.

Genre: Documentary; Species: Sports; Sub-species: Autobiography.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: Whew!

Tagline: Alpe d’Huez pales.

Greg Lemond (1961+) wanted to be a ski instructor near his mountain home because it was a way to meet girls and get paid (and laid).  To qualify for that work he had to train on a bicycle during the off season, and soon discovered (1) a girl to keep and (2) that he liked being on the bike (which is well explained later).  Thereafter he was never off a bike voluntarily.  

Despite the outward appearance of this blond adonis, he was star-crossed.  On that, more in a moment.

First his achievements were many, including three wins at THE Tour de France.  In one of the victories he did something no other rider had ever done before nor has anyone even in chemically-enhanced race done it.  In that sense he was The Last Rider. 

In 1987 he had ridden dead last, Lanterne Rouge in French Bike-speak.  He finished 198th out of 198 ridders. In this sense, too, he was the last rider.  But he finished, and vowed to come back.  He did. 

To gain the second Mailot Jaune he won the race on the Champs Elysee in a time trial. Bikers who know what a time trial is will realise how hard that must have been.  He went into that time trial of 25-kilometres trailing his arch rival by 50-seconds over the previous 2,500+ kilometres.  On the sofa 50-seconds doesn’t seem like much but to meet and surpass that in a short time trial, intended more for show than go, was deemed impossible.  

Moreover, Lemond was carrying long-term injuries, for he had been shot in a hunting accident (due to which he missed the 1988 Tour) and that would cut into his stamina.  Still he went on and on, and on.  Why? Partly perhaps because it was all he knew how to do.  He knew how to race, but he did not know how to quit and certainly not on the day before the finish.  

On the day he melded with his bike, and as one they blazed a path into the record books no other mortal could follow on the day.  Perhaps it was lady Athena who made time stop for him while he pedalled on as she did for Odysseus on the beach at Troy to talk to his men.  He not only made up the 50-seconds to erase his lag but added 8-seconds on top, as it turned out.  His adversary, himself carrying a more recent injury, was bigger and stronger and more technically proficient, but none of that was enough. No other rider has ever won on the Champs Élysées. Phil Leggett, the doyen of bicycle lore, has said it was the greatest finish to the greatest race.  

It was pretty much a single-handed victory for the only team that would contract him after that 198-finish was a scratch team that participated more to advertise a product than to race.  There were no domestiques to bring him water, no pacers to create a tailwind, no guardians to shelter him cross winds, and it was in the day before radios and ear pieces. 

There is more to the story, a lot more.  Suffice it to say he found riding therapeutic for the shame, embarrassment, difficulty of life.  In it he found a pure world where he got affirmation, self-expression, and a disciplined freedom.  He was then and has remained a scourge against drug use in cycling and was one of Lance Armstrong’s earliest and most persistent critics, who was at last vindicated.  

A modest champion, he dedicated this documentary to that arch rival whom he beat that day on the cobblestones.  

It take a lot to get me out after dark but I went to see it on half-price Tuesdays at the Dendy which sits between home and man-cave because of the legend and it was worth it.  

Swiss Made (1968) 

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 45 minutes, rated 6.7 by 35 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy. Species: Contact.

DNA: Swiss.

 Verdict: Satire.

Tagline: McKinsey Management Rules!

The managers manage the Brain Centre World State which has everything and everyone under control in an alpine Eden. The few dissidents who remain are confined to picturesque care centres far away.  Integrated citizens have a 1968 computer chip in their brains that link them individually to THE BRAIN CENTRE (TBC).  (But not to each other.)

TBC plans and regulates everything from the food each person consumes, to the colour of clothes to wear on Tuesday, to the work to do today, to sexual partners, and more.  This is the paradise of Florida small government where everything is controlled…by the will of all, or at least a majority.  The border is closely guarded to keep out others because the boat is full.

Should an individual face a decision – take the train or the bus, have sex with that one or this one, turn left or right, buy new shoes, pat the dog, or go to church – there is a Brain Box on every corner with direct contact to TBC. No need to take personal responsibility for anything in this Super Nanny State, just push a button and ask for instructions.

Into this world comes an alien in a life-support suit to interview people who explain to the alien’s fish-eye view the wonders of the TBC. Many do so, each with the undead monotone of a zombie as they mouth the words ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ without meaning, words without music. It is indeed a total state.

Fail to use a crosswalk, toss an apple core on the ground, think lustful thoughts, improperly sort the trash, and the omniscient TBC knows and files it away for your report with reprimands, corrections, and directions at the end of the week.  It is worse than a private residential school or a nagging Fit-Bit wristwatch.

Citizens are advised by TBC to take soma regularly, and they do.     

At the time it was a satire on the xenophobic Swiss fetish for order, but now it fits the omnivorous appetite of McKinsey management to control everything.  

Music of the Spheres (1984)

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Contact.

IMDB meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 6.8 by 102 cinematizens.  

DNA: O Canada.

Verdict: Garbled.

Tagline:  Pythagoras now and forever

In distant 2017 super computers interface with receptive humans, like Melody. She and her super computer, nicknamed the Beast, are on a spaceship doing an important job. Things go fine and then….

She starts having strange dreams, and Beast experiences power surges.  Since this is impossible, the managers shrug it off.  She is sure there is a hacker in Beast, but no diagnostic finds it.

The project involves changing the orbits of asteroids, and this change upsets the music of the spheres, i.e., the radio waves generated by celestial bodies. The homework is Pythagoras. This has led aliens to hack Beast to stop the project. First they try negotiating through Beast to Melody, but there is an ‘or else’ behind that.  She is unable to convince Bureaucrat to whom she reports.  

The stilted acting fits with the idea of that humanity is degrading through reliance on and integration with computers. And it certainly is stilted.  

Much of it is incomprehensible and the effects are zero budget. The reprise at the end is padding.  It is bilingual with some German and Russian in the background.  Some of it was filmed in a Toronto car park for the space ship.  It doesn’t work. 

Yet overall, unlike so much science fiction, it is full of ideas.