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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
