The Man with the Objective Lens (1961) Der Mann mit am Objektiv
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 6.0 by 13 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Time traveller: Sub-species: musical.
DNA: DDR.
Verdict: A curiosity.
Tagline: they lived happily ever after until 1989.
In the year 2222 scientists have invented a Time Beam that allows the future to look back at the past through a Time Wall like MST3K projections. During one of these living history lessons the inept Os falls through the Time Wall into 1961. (Yes the year the Berlin Wall went up, but before the Beatles.)
He has with him an earbud that allows him to tune into the thoughts of others around him, and that helps him navigate this strange old world. For a historian he knows very little about the past of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik and flounders around a bit in a good natured sort of way.
Riding an S-Bahn Os he secretly eavesdrops on the thoughts of his fellow passengers in a scene that anticipates a like one in Der Himmel über Berlin (1987). The scene is trivial in Os’s case but compassionate in Himmel.
Os meets his own grandparents and, well, there are repeated instances of mistaken identity that Shakespeare could have made amusing but here they are just annoying. At times Os lectures the 1961ers on the bright future of Communism which has transcended their current Socialism. He even sings a tune or two to prove it.
Surprisingly, to both Os and me, he finds evidence of corruption and incompetence in a 1961 state industry about which he does nothing, as far as I could tell. Even more surprising, no one refers to ‘comrade’ but rather ‘colleague.’
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour 45 minutes, rated 5.2 by 98 generous cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: France.
Verdict: Ponderous.
Tagline: Reality TV aborn(t)ing.
A scientific institute combines with a television network to place an actor in dangerous situations where his emotional reactions, multiplied by his thespian ability, will provoke a frightened response in the viewing audience, and the combined emotional energies discharged will be captured and stored in the Time Dome to fuel time travel. Sure.
They want an expendable Terence Stamp for the job and only one man can play Terence Stamp – Terence Stamp. He and his stringy mullet are plunged into the ocean. Dropped near a lava flow. Hike over an avalanche prone glacier. All this was done for real, by the way. Some of the images are spectacular, though most go on well past their view-by-date.
Stamp mugs and shouts but projects no emotion. Still the show is a success, as the producer boasts: ‘A great reaction! We even had a suicide!’ That brutal cynicism was a realistic touch.
Stamp wants to go back in time when he was happy, but will enough energy be accumulated for that. [And who cares?] The scientists want him to go to the future to see if their grant applications have been successful. The television producer wants more suicides to boost ratings.
By the way temporal retrogression is a common theme in time travel stories per Marcel Proust. When the prospect of time travel arises protagonists want to recover lost time rather than plunge ahead into the unknown in two marvellous films – La Jetée (1962) and Je t’aime (1968). Few time travellers are all the that keen to go into the unknown future.
Stamp proves once again that he cannot act. It is also apparent that the director has no interest in the actors, including, by the way, the eternal Jeanne Moreau. The scenery and the soundtrack offer some diversion, but not enough.
It was such a bomb that it disappeared from view for fifty years, and only recently has it come to light. Tant pis. That 5.2 seems way too high. By the way this was the first and last foray into drama by the director who went back to TV commercials.
Deathwatch (1980) is a far superior harbinger of Reality TV. As for the expression of emotion, almost anyone else would be better than stone-face Stamp. Well, not Steven Seagal.
Death and the Compass from Cuentos de Borges (1992).
IMDb meta-data is a runtime is 1 hour and 22 minutes, rated 5.9 by 512 cinematizens.
Genre: Strange; Species: (Jorge Luis) Borges.
DNA: Hispanic.
Verdict: Odd.
Tagline: To begin is to end.
A jeu with the classic trench-coated detective set in an unpleasant future Mexico City where police and criminals comprise most of the population, battling each other. Peter Boyle is under the fedora with a Dr Who in tow. Borges’s recurrent metaphor for life, the labyrinth, explains events insofar as they have explanations.
The copper seeks his own murder(er) and he finds it (him). For a parallel conceit read Alain Robbe-Grillet’s krimi Les Gommes (The Erasers) (1953). Boyle brings nothing to the part which is written more like a cartoon character than a person.
Striking theatrical sets and costumes combine with weak acting and directing, e.g., a couple of long pauses suggest missed lines. A very attenuated conclusion in which Dr Who thinks he is doing Shakespeare. Much padding with an internal narration that adds nothing but time, stretching the 55 minute television program to feature film length.
This was the final episode of six made for television, derived from the elliptical stories by the Jorge Luis Borges. It appeared with praise on a previously reliable website about Sy Fy. Not so. Not so. And no longer reliable.
IMDB meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 55 minutes, rated 6.8 by 1010 cinematizens.
Genre: Rom w/o the Com.
DNA: Québécois.
Verdict: The Usual.
Tagline: Sincere.
Fraternity Brothers Advisory: nudity.
The worldly sophisticate reluctantly returning to the hometown of Drearyville is well trodden ground. It has few new flavours here. The sophisticate is in a high powered lab in Tokyo when the call from her birth place comes, that is Baie-Comeau in Quebec which she left as a child. She resists but the Japanese are honour-bound to send someone and she is the obvious choice.
The prodigal seismologist with all her maximum tech gear (none of which is ever used) can see something strange is happening here but what is it and what is causing it? To get more data she advertises for reports of abnormalities. The locals comply and she is introduced to the quirks and oddballs who have coalesced in this back of beyond. The implication is that the aberrant hydrology of the Fleuve Saint Laurent is somehow connected with the odd behaviour of the residents. The unseasonal hot weather, is perhaps also related to the river. The oppressive heat and humidity is very well realised on film. But none of these strands are brought together.
Seismologist is detached, distant, almost glacial even in the heat. Get the job done and get out is her approach. She carries around a pocket shredder to demolish the business cards given to her. Figure that out, Mortimer, because I couldn’t.
That is the build-up, but thereafter it descends into a conventional and inevitable climax where the star crossed lovers get to the nude scene. Mind you there are some nice touches along the way. The disappearing telephone-book pages, but then, wait, telephone books! Geneviève Bujold adds a touch of class as the proprietor of an all-night café. The seismologist has a lively assistant, and there is some choral singing. Moreover, there is loving cinematography of the foreshore of the mighty river. There is an ingenuous, though impossible, plot device and a big finish, but no spoiler on either one of those.
Now for the vinegar. It is half an hour too long for the storyline, but more importantly it is broken-backed. There are the anomalies and there is the love story and they are only coincidentally connected. It all comes to that old bittersweet song ‘You Can’t go Home Again’ by Heraclitus.
I came across it on a list of Sy Fy films and that provoked my interested. There will be stern words for that lister one day because it is not that.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 6.8 by 2,101 cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Argentina.
Verdict: Olé!
Tagline: What goes around comes around, eventually.
Among the hundreds of trains and the millions of daily passengers at more than a hundred stations dotted along two hundred kilometres of tracks in tunnels beneath the city, one train with thirty or so passengers has not arrived…anywhere. In such a closed system how can a ten-car train disappear?
Up the chain of command goes the report, received at each higher level with increasing incredulity. No one believes the reports of subordinates, and so each has to see for himself, and they find there is nothing to see. There is no train UM86: Vanished.
McKinsey management clicks in and the responsibility, i.e., blame, is delegated downward to an intern at the construction firm that built the last line integrated into the system. No one wants to know what happened so much as they want the problem to go away…now.
The intern visits the archives to examine the subway engineering plans, and that proves to be a scene from Franz Kafka’s The Castle. Though the plans must never leave the archive, they have, and slowly he tracks them down, but — here I quibble — he examines them only briefly.
The last metro station the Intern uses is called (Jorge Luis) Borges. Hint! Hint!
Through the compounding complications of repeated additions and tinkering the subway system has become such a labyrinth that no one any longer knows quite how the system works as a whole. That complication together with the fiction of the writer puts train UM86 into an eternal loop, moving so fast – at the speed of thought – it cannot be seen but only heard. This must be the M. C. Escher line.
The atmosphere is oppressive with a humid heat, and the need to keep the trains running. Though the intern wears a raincoat over his t-shirt throughout. Is there symbolism there?
In a nice touch it ends where it began. The ghost train(s) just won’t go away.
A few of the reviews I read missed the point entirely but were nonetheless free with their opinions, as am I. And the point is…?
Beneath the everyday surface of bustling Buenos Aires, are the catacombs of the living dead who disappeared between 1974 and 1983 in the Dirty War. Argentines, doubtless, would see this point immediately.
The intern discovers that, like the Dirty War, no one today wants to know what happened to the train and those missing passengers, they just want to forget about it. The missing passengers, well, nothing will bring the back anyway. But it just won’t go away. It’s there and it’s not there: unseen but ever present. The janitor scrapes the posters of the missing off the stairwell walls every night and they reappear every morning. (A comparable fable is Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963) in which its subject — torture — is never mentioned yet is palpable.)
Even more impressive is that this is a film school project, all the players are students and staff and the funding was partly by the school and partly by the participants. At times the camera work loses focus, though overall it is compelling with nods to 2001. The acting is fine, and the direction matches the material. By the way, some of the older men in the cast and crew were arrested, beaten, incarcerated, tortured, and imprisoned during the Dirty War for the crime of being students, of wearing a beret, of having a moustache, of having a red rose. Follow the link below to a monument to the Disappeared.
There are hardly any women in the movie. One is a lecturer who is asked for the address of her predecessor, and some of the silent passengers. The teenage neighbour comes and goes with few words and contributes little to the plot.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 4.6 by 415 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy, hardly.
DNA: Italy.
Verdict: Blah.
Tagline: So bad, it’s bad.
Hirsute and drunken stereotype Journalist stumbles across a UFO buried in a mountain in Columbia. Oh hum. It took him a long time to find out nothing about it. No one believes him, but everyone is after him from the alphabet soup of impoverished screenwriters’ imaginations: KGB, CIA, MI6, DB, MsD, and a News Corp cyborg who has more personality than the leads.
It is a mishmash of Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, Terminator, topped with some Erich von Däniken Swiss cheese fondue. All that might sound like fun, but it isn’t. The director somehow got into childproof bottle of Prozac. The leads are bored and it shows. The sound is terrible. (Gravel-voiced George Kennedy is dubbed for reasons only know to god with a whiny German accent.) The editing is even more confusing than the story line. Dad jokes comprise the humour. Filmed on location in Columbia, it wallows in superficial stereotypes of that country. The only way it could have been worse would have been to have in the cast Steven Seagal.
Seeing it in a list of Sy Fy films with Franco Nero in the lead, I had high hopes that were quickly dashed.
The Silence of Dr Evans (1974) Molchanige doktor Ivens
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 30 minutes, rated 6.2 by 172 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.
DNA: USSR.
Verdict: Treacle.
Tagline: Now Hiring Ventriloquists.
An airliner develops engine trouble and crashes…onto the top of an a cloaked alien space ship from which humanoid alien anthropologists are observing Earth. One of the survivors rescued by the aliens, violating the prime-time directive, is Martin Evans, aspirant Nobel Prize scientist, and he alone meets the aliens face-to-face. The others have their memories blanked, but he is allowed to keep his, promising never to reveal what he has learned, as long as they don’t ask Evans (see below). See The Flight that Disappeared (1961) for a similar plot ploy; reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
The aliens debate aborting the study now that there has been this unexpected contact, but they decide to stay. (Warning! They do a lot more debating.) While Evans tells no one, his behaviour becomes erratic as he tries to contact the aliens. Eventually one of them succumbs to his blandishments and a romance of sorts develops which he pursues without a second thought for his wife.
Aliens in furious debate!
The police suspect there are illegal immigrants in the woodpile and are soon onto him, but he clams up. He and the alien squeeze try to make a getaway but fail miserably. Car chases were not on the curriculum.
The ominous police, the paranoia of the authorities, the fear of the unknown are all deracinated, but the street signs are in English and his name is Martin Evans. But the language, the manners and mores, the attitudes are Russian.
The conclusion is that these Earthlings are not mature enough to make contact with aliens, because the authorities are clumsy oafs. The setting is supposed to be England, and the implication is that the aliens would do better to seek out peace-loving people…to the East. Yet early on a red star marked Soviet MIG shot down one of the aliens on an away mission. Maybe I missed the point, again.
Since the aliens communicate by telepathy they are expressionless while debating. No one had to learn lines, just stare. That never works. For further proof see Starship Invasions (1977), an Italian Sy Fy feature starring a silent Christopher Lee who at times seems to be thinking about lunch.
It’s slow and talky, and I did not warm to any of the characters. It is so serious, there is not a light moment in it. In this case there was no point in asking Evans.
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Steve Canny and John Nicholson directed by Richard Cotter at the Genesian Theatre on Kent Street.
A rip-roaring, rip-snorting take on that damned dog! Europe’s third greatest detective – ‘Sniff!’ – is hired to pick up after a gigantic hound at Grimpen Mire. Yuck! But a job is a job, and in doing it there will be vindication of the claim to being the first greatest detective in the world!
The pace is fast and furious with stage props flying this way and that, but Act I draws to a close, and the entranced audience is free to move around, but then ‘Lo!’ when we returned to our seats after the interval Sherlock breaks the fourth wall….. [To say more would be a spoiler…]
Suffice it to say that the production won over one and all with its wit, its energy, its humour, and its joie de théâtre.
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.
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.
