Abducted (2022)
IMDb runtime is 9 minutes and 34 seconds, rated 5.6 by 47 cinematizens.
Genre: Sly Sy Fy
Verdict: Atta Girl!
The internet date turned sour, but, well, there is more to this than originally met the eye. All those stories about disappearances gotta mean something, and they do.
A masterclass in plot and character in less than 10 minutes with a big finish.
From DUST via You Tube.
Expiration Date (2022)
IMDb is runtime of 6 minutes and 39 seconds with no ratings by anyone!
Genre: Sy Fy, Species: Comedy, Sub-species: realistic.
Verdict: amen!
The merciless bounty hunter spots his quarry looming in the distance and raises his sonic blaster to …. Good idea, cause its big and mean-looking brute. Hunter checks the wind, sights the alien, looks over his weapon, and….
As he turns on his really big gun, a screen appears announcing that a software update is required before it can murder anything. After many futile attempts to skip this update – Not Permitted! – delay it – Not Permitted! – reschedule it – Not Permitted! – the hunter sits down to wait for the update to download and install. Since he is on a distant planet after an alien, it takes times. But when it is complete the update requires a patch! Ugh!
In desperation, using his interstellar phone, he calls the help number for crisis situations. It rings the 800 times necessary and then a computer answers with a menu to direct the call about: planetary destruction, genocide, star demolition, personal weapons (for blaster press 4, for rifles press…) and then blasters (press 1 for disrupter, press 2 for neural,…. 5 for sonic). Then he has to key in his user name and number. Whoops only to discover his service contract for patch update care has lapsed and he is returned to the opening menu to renew his contact by keying in everything again with a Galactica credit card number of Google length, as the prey, now aware of his presence, targets him with a more primitive weapon. Poof!
War of the Worlds (2019+)
IMDb is 24 episodes of 49 minutes, rated 6.4 by 15,000 cinematizens and counting.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Yuk.
H. G. Welles is at it again. This time it is played as a disaster movie with scattered survivors trying to keep alive, and over the very long and slow story arc they come together for better and for worse. There are no Hollywood super heroes here. Nor is either Tom Midget or Tom Everywhere in it. That much is good.
It starts off in the French alps near Grenoble and cross cuts to Lille and London. It is scenic and there is much outdoor travelogue. I liked those scenes in the woodlands on the slopes of the Alps. The dialogue is bilingual and the acting is superb. The UHD is crisp even in the motion shots with depth of focus. In short, a first class international production.
That is the molasses, now the vinegar. The narrative is attenuated and repetitive, the latter being a function of the former over these episodes which amount to about 18 hours of screen time. Every character goes through the same experience of fear, dislocation, primacy of family, and confusion. The child is brought along only to be killed. Gratuitous. In the opening episode we get that played out six times. If you watch the war news from the Ukraine every night, by the end of the week it no longer registers, does it. Same here.
Yes, the characters are varied, but their situations and reactions are not. And in the crisis, too few of them are focussed on the crisis, and more on the last argument a wife had with a husband, or long standing grievances that seem as important as the end of the world. The crisis managers did not do their jobs. Hobbes’s state of nature became instantly the state of me and mine period. Yet when disaster struck the Ukraine many people stuck together and stayed on the job. Go figure.
Although I did rather like the unintended irony in that after the invaders killed 90% of the population, the remainder set about killing each other in suspicion and fear. That was Hobbes and the insanity of it seemed about right. The invaders were counting on not finding intelligent life on Earth and they were right.
The dog, birds, cats survived. As I only made it to episode 4 that may or may not be significant.
There is far too much blood and guts as a substitute for a story, character development, or even a sense of place. We are spared nothing – mutilation, rape, infanticide, incest, score settling, cannibalism, and worse along with countless exploding heads (but not one of the elite troops in the Alps musses his hair do with a helmet). And speaking of those troops at least they (mostly) stay on the job.
I quit after four bloodbaths. If I wanted to watch senseless slaughter I could watch the evening news on television.
Of course the invaders intel before the invasion was none too great either, as readers of Wells’s novella will remember. Maybe they should have watched the news.
Although it cannot compete with the production or the acting, I prefer The Great Martian War 1913-1917 (2013), but it is hard to find. It is inventive. Or even the 1953 Cold War version when the common cold saved the world when rockets couldn’t.
The End of Eternity (1987)
Konets vechnosti
IMDb runtime of 2 hours and 17 minutes, rated 6.0 by 242 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Red; Sub-species: Asimov.
Verdict: Excellent!
Harlan works at the AllWhen Council with the Eternals who regulate TIME to ensure smooth sailing from Past to Future to Past again for the Timers who live and die there. Dr Who is a stringer for this organisation.
Viewers gradually piece this puzzle together because there is no numbing exposition at the beginning. Hurrah! It just goes…..
Harlan is so inexperienced, so cloistered, so innocent, so naive that of course he thinks he knows everything until Woman. The first one he sees drains all the blood from his head and sends him over the edge. Adam when he saw Eve was sober and restrained compared to Harlan whose drool is embarrassing. She is a Timer who somehow works for the Council, too, and together….they do what men and women have done since time began. This is strictly forbidden twice over, once because Eternals cannot do this period, and they certainly cannot do this with a Timer. I heard an echo of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four here about waist down rebellion.
It was made in the USSR in 1987. Yet much of it seems criticism of a regimented society so dedicated to good that it makes things bad in its clumsy efforts. The AllWhen Council parallels, it would seem, the Politburo, removed from reality, devoid of empathy or sympathy, and in reality dedicated more to preserving itself than doing any good. In the Council zone, which looks like a giant factory, there are black-uniformed police frowning every hundred meters. Informers work among the time-tinkering Technicians to be sure discipline remains perfect. Creativity is stamped out as dangerous. Iron discipline, sacrifice for the greater good, and pitiless discipline are the watchwords of the Eternals. The only thing lacking is an external enemy in the evil capitalist west.
The Eternals are just that and so have an eternity of committee meetings, budget reports, and cantankerous colleagues with which to contend. One of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, perhaps Green Mars, is really good on this trade-off, more and more life….with more and more meetings with the same irritating people doing that same damn dumb things for centuries.
What follows is part mystery and part science fiction as the coupling couple takes flight and discover the corruption endemic in the all-powerful and unaccountable AllWhen Council, read Politburo. For those that want the Cliff’s Notes version, eternity ended for Harlan when he fell in lust. In that emotional state he could not longer be an eternal – cold, detached, judicious, uninvolved, disinterested – and all those qualities of a Platonic philosopher-monarch. Although it might be remarked that Dr Who seldom manifested these qualities.
In the film three distinct periods are presented, first, is the timeless AllWhen Council zone, then the 48th Century where music emanates from wine in glasses, and the Twentieth Century. Each was done very effectively even if the sets are small and repetitive. What matters is that they are distinctive and resonate of what they are supposed to be. There is no big budget in sight. Better, no Anderson fashions or toys.
This film is on You Tube in poor quality video (in two parts) and I cannot find it anywhere else. Perhaps because of the rush of history in 1989 this movie may never have been shown at the Moscow Film Fesitval, or the one in East Berlin, and so was not seen by Western producers looking for cheap fodder, because this would surely have been snapped up. Maybe glasnost killed it. Irony check.
There is also an earlier Hungarian version on You Tube but it does not have subtitles and our three days in Budapest a few years ago did not leave any Magyar behind.
The film derives from, but doubtless paid no royalties for, the eponymous 1955 novel by Isaac Asimov. While I have read many of his works since a teenager, this title was unknown so I did what we evil western capitalist do and went shopping. Lo, I could not find it for the Kindle and I tried, believe me. Yes, I know it listed as Kindle on the Amazon US web site but with a sidebar that says Unavailable. Very few of his titles are available for Kindle. Odd that for future man to find his books in the past format alone.
In the end I gave up.
Solaris (1972)
IMDb meta-data is Hollywood runtime of 2 hours and 47 minutes, rated an astounding 8.0 by 92,000 victims of the Stockholm syndrome.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Endurance.
Verdict: Ho hum.
Tag line: Are we there yet?
The prolific Pole Stanislaw Lem wrote the novel (which I have read more than once, I seem to recall) but this production is from the USSR. It seems largely faithful to the novel apart from wisely cutting all the background about Solaristics, i.e., the study of the watery planet called Solaris somewhere off in deep space. (In the novel this ‘ology’ allows Lem much sardonic commentary for many pages on the ways of academics which is mildly amusing but turgid.)
Things are bad on the research space station in orbit around Solaris, very bad. Most of the crew of eighty have decamped and clammed up about why. Well, I guess, though that and much else is not made clear. There remain three persons on board: Snaut, Sartorius, and Gribarayn. However, we first meet Pilot Berton testifying to an inquiry into the earlier death of one of the researchers scouting the planet. It is a superb performance that adds nothing to the film…. Well, there is an echo of it at the end, but very faint.
The planet is a single, roiling ocean and there is some nice footage of its currents and tides. If they are studying it, [spoiler ahead] it seems the ocean is also studying them. It does so by producing from their memories the most vivid person in their past. This selection is made clear in the book, the most vivid memory, but not in the film. This drives the crew members nuts for some reason.
Pop quiz! Who would that be in your memory? Answers below.
To deal with the problem a psychologist comes to investigate and report. He arrives – poof – to find the station in rack and ruin. No one has swept the floor in a long time. It looks like the frat house. Nor does anyone greet him. Turns out his old buddy Gribarayn who evidently owed him money has committed suicide rather than wait for him and pay up but he has left an incomprehensible video of warning to get even.
In no time at all Psychologist’s dead wife is holding his hand and he accepts this far too quickly and easily. Yes, I know the first time he tries to dispatch her, but he never seems shocked, surprised, revolted, repulsed, repelled, or disturbed by this simulacrum usurping and desecrating his deceased wife. He wanders around the derelict station for about three hours with her – the end. The sleeper awoke, or did he?
A wonderful special effects scene occurs when the station’s orbit is adjusted for 30 seconds and 0 g follows, but it adds nothing to either character or plot. Well, it could not add to the plot since there is not one there to begin with. And the psychologist, despite all the screen time and accolades from critics, never comes alive to this viewer.
It is has some of the qualities of post-modern philosophy. The narrative is oblique, reflexive, unreliable, disjointed, and pointless. Trying to understand it is the mistake. It is another turkey from Tartovsky, Andrei whose contempt for the audience is palpable. The more he reviles the viewers and reviewers, the more they laud him in a Stockholm Syndrome. Even that doyen Roger Ebert succumbed to this abusive treatment and praises the film to the skies. I re-read his essay on this film after I watched it on You Tube. Intransigent I remain.
Yes, I know it is supposed to be a mediation on reality and identity with the ghostly wife, on what it means to exist for her, on what we love in another person, what they are, or what we think they are, and so on; and also how would we react to an alien intelligence so different from our own as to be unintelligible. But little, if any, of that is conveyed in this montage. That is all post hoc intellectual justification for sitting through this three hour film.
I saw this version at the Sydney Film Fesitval shortly after I got to Australia, and found it as unpalatable then, as I do now. In comparison, Last Year at Marienbad is fast moving and exciting, ahh… [thinks of Delphine Seyrig] with eye candy. However, seeing Solaris the first time introduced me to Stanislaw Lem and I read a number of his novels later. When I noticed that the local Dendy was screening a 35 millimetre print on Wednesday night I was tempted, but upon remembering that runtime decided I would settle for the You Tube version because I could sit in the recliner, shoes off, with a glass in hand and tap out caustic comments on the iPad, stopping and starting as needed. Watching it for three hours in a chilled theatre unable to move was out of the question.
One mystery is how a committee of comrades invested in this film in the first place in the early 1970s. What did they think they were getting? Better, what did they think of what they got?
By the way, there are at least three films based on this Lem novel. There is an earlier one made for Soviet television in black and white (1968) of 2 and 1/2 hours (available on You Tube) and the American remake of 2002 which is a merciful 95 minutes. Take your pick.
P.S. At least I could tell what Last Year at Marienbad (1961) was about, even if it was boring. The characters all have rich and luxurious but empty lives, so empty that there is nothing worth doing, still less remembering and certainly not love or sex. It was a common theme in post war Western European movies about the vacuous idle rich. Without the evil Nazis to contend with, there was nothing to do but self-indulgence. See a host of especially Italian movies like L’Avventura (1960). This nihilist self indulgent ennui was one response to the absurdity of life. Another response was to commit to the cause de jour vide Sartre. A third was to take up golf.
Per aspera ad Astra (1981) (To The Stars the Hard Way) (Cherez ternii k zvyozdam)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 2 hours and 28 minutes, rated 5.9 by 1,400 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Endurance
Verdict: TMI
The several titles above seems appropriate when considering the sprawling and disconnected stories in this endurance test of Hollywood proportions.
It has a marvellous start when Red cosmonauts find a damaged spaceship in yon ether. The special effects of this encounter are indeed special. Dead bodies, humanoid but not human, float inside the gravity-less ship. Then they find one such body in a transparent protective capsule and as they shine lights on it, the creature within slowly opens its eyes! Nice.
The humanoids and the survivor are paper-thin and elongated with bug eyes and army haircuts. They look something like those pictures of POWs in Japanese prison camp with bones protruding. Or Tilda Swinton on a good day. The sole survivor is carefully brought to Earth. Hum, was any thought given to disease, oxygen, or gravity on Earth? None that I detected. One minute the crewmen are moving her onto their spaceship and the next she is on Earth.
The survivor is (barely) a woman and seems catatonic. Well, what are we going to do with a catatonic alienness? Why take her home to mama who will know what to do with her. Leaving the scientists behind temporary Male Lead takes Alienness home, a very nice two-story one in a warm climate on a lake, much like all the Soviet Union. Little thought is given to how strange, threatening, and frightening all this must be the the Alienness. The good natured family banter was enough to put anyone’s teeth on edge.
It soon becomes apparent she has some super powers and they call Stan Lee for advice. She can teleport herself and has telekinetic abilities. Be careful. To touch her is not advised. They struggle to communicate and then one day she speaks Russian. No that is not a revelation in the story line, the mute just now starts talking. Nothing is made of the transition from mute to jabber box. Who lost the script pages? But that is only the first of the breaks in the storyline. More are to come for its seems the script was written by a changing committee, each new member of which wanted to get something in.
While she was mute and skittish the problem she presented was interesting and had much promise; once she started talking, well the sound was the air leaving the balloon. The Universal Script Writers Union panacea is applied: amnesia.
She has no memory of what happened but soon lifelike dreams take her back to her creation for that is one theme, is she a biological being or an android of some kind. (’Cut me, do I not bleed?’ you might think but no one did in this story.) In any event it is not a theme continued. She has a mission which gradually comes back to her, like a forgotten shopping list.
It also seems a redundant mission since she only finally remembers it when she sees representatives of her planet on television news asking for Earth’s help to prevent a climatic catastrophe. She was supposed to do that, but forget in the trauma of whatever happened to the starship she was on. Which we never find out. These other agents from Dessa, her home world, look nothing like this stick figure. Huh? Maybe she is a droid.
It is a neat scene at the spaceport Domodeldovo (airport) with Lost & Found, Baggage Collection signs just like any and all large international airports today with bilingual Russian and English signs. But the flight boards list planets, asteroids, space stations, wormholes, and such. We went though this airport when we left Russia in 2017.
Then we have half a movie as she stows away on the spaceship taken by these other Dessans, which is diverting to take a doctoral octopus home. You read that right. This is all very Three Stooges.
Then the third film takes place on the planet Dessa where Alienness and the crew of the ship try to save the planet from the mean dwarves of the Lord of the Rings. Yes, this planet is being destroyed by dwarves smoking cigars bigger than they are. They are rude and crude, and so is story at this point. They are despicable capitalists who are destroying Lake Baikal for profit before leaving the toiling masses behind and taking a spaceship they alone can afford to a new planet to despoil. (Looks like these Reds were Green before the Greens.) The hammer blows come one after another.
By this time the intriguing and puzzling start has been discarded and forgotten along with that temporary male lead.
The intel on IMDb is that it was originally given the Latin title above until someone realised that was the motto of the US Apollo program, and then it was changed. It means ‘Through (or despite) hardships to the stars’ to strike a note consonant with President Kennedy’s speech launching what became the Apollo program.
If you have the patience and endurance for it, check it out on You Tube. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
El Planeta de las mujeres invasoras (1966) (Planet of the Invading Women)
IMDb is runtime 1 hour and 26 minutes, rated 5.0 by 109 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Mexican
Verdict: Planet of the Dolls, again
Tag line: Mexican sci-fi at its best!
An assortment of thrill seekers get more than their five pesos worth when they are abducted by young women in high hats and heels carrying big Anubis sticks. The fairground flying saucer ride turns out to be the real thing! Whoosh, off they go! (Nice idea and I have seen it before in something. If you know, tell me.)
After a couple of uncooperative abductees are killed with those sticks, the remainder have to work together to survive. Meanwhile, Prof back on Earth powers up his personal rocket to rescue them. (Handy that but what a big garage it takes.) If he can’t join them he will beat them at their own game! (Huh?) He has a foolproof plan to insinuate himself with the bad girls by pretending to be a fugitive from justice. That cover might work on fools but not on these spacelings who see through it.
These women want Terrans for lung grafts to enable them to live on Earth. They are just hapless immigrants, or are they? Ha! Their real nefarious plan is to conquer Earth because it is much nicer than the Planeta (not just Costa) del Sol on which they live deep underground to avoid that Sol. (Did anyone get the symbolism here? No? Neither did I.) On this planet there are only women and that seems to work, contrary to the law of biology. No one makes a fuss about it. Whereas in a Yankee sexploitation film of that era that absence of men would have aroused … much attention (see for proof, if you must, Queen of Outer Space [1958]). The community of women without men is a tired trope in this genre. See my comments on parenthetical Queenie above for some other titles in this category that I lack the will to repeat here.
Not all lungs are equal, and these women soon reject smokers. This word must have leaked out and soon everyone in Mexico over five years old is puffing on fags. No matter, these señorita villains set their sights on children! Children! (That word is shrieked about a dozens times.) These are some mean madres! (Well, someone had to be.)
The sets were cardboard, the costumes were on loan from Buck Rogers, and a ferris wheel would have been a better special effect than those used here. However, the evil queen Lorena Velázquez plays herself and her simpering, do-good identical twin sister. They are identical twins, one bad, very bad, and one good but inept. There is a hint of an interesting idea here about how each needs the other because good and bad feed off one another. See Max Weber for the exposition, seriously: ‘It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant’ (Politics as a Vocation [1919]). Say it Brother Max! But that hint is lost in the aimless to’ing and fro’ing of all these invasive women. (Don’t ask.)
The director was in lust with Lorena for in her two manifestations (usually in the same attire) she gets about 50% of the screen time, and all the close-ups. She stares blankly, she pouts, she stares blankly again, she snarls (quite good snarl), she stands up only to sit down, she simpers, she placates, she stares blankly, she walks, she walks some more, she mows down extras with a ray gun, she sits down to stand up, she stares blankly.… That’s the way it goes…on and on. It is all deadly serious and boring for it. Best to do a crossword puzzle while sort of watching it.
There is a subtitled version on You Tube for those that have to see for themselves.
Ikarie XB 1 (1963) aka Voyage to the End of the Universe (1964)
IMDB runtime is 1 hour and 21 minutes, rated 6.9 by 2,500 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Czechoslovak
Verdict: Geriatrics in space.
Having concluded there is none on Earth, in 2163 the search for intelligent life turns to the planets around Alpha Centauri. Slovakczech may be the label but the story is from the prolific Pole Stanislaw Lem.
Space flight is routine in the Solar System but this mission goes well beyond that limit, however not to the hyperbole of the English title above. With a crew of 40 men and women it is as much a colony as a ship. So said the narration, though why that is does not get explained. It is made clear that it is a round-trip not one-way. Why so many comrades? By the way, they do not address each other with that word, according to my hearing and reading (of subtitles). Note that the woman are not receptionist but scientists and engineers in this 1963 production. That was not done in Yankee SF in 1963.
The usual hazards of movie space travel follow. The low bid contractors strike with mechanical and technical failures, followed by hurtling objects, while among the carefully selected and highly trained crew we see tensions, lassitude, jealousies, and ennui (Hear! Hear!). Even more noteworthy is the anti-ageism so that several geriatrics included in the crew. As an equal opportunity employer Slovak/Czech Spaceways also hired Robbie the robot from Forbidden Planet, who contributes nothing to plot or action but is conspicuously present. Rather like the fraternity brothers, always there, always inert.
Two major incidents occur. First, way out there where no one has gone, they find a derelict spaceship. It looks battered and it is unresponsive to WhatsApp texts. Very tentatively two red shirts from the crew (both men) are dispatched to board it. The entry is slow and careful. They find all the many occupants dead. The deceased are human and — get this! — the men are besuited with neckties while the ladies are bejewelled, all sitting around a gaming table with US dollars on it. This ship, which seems to have been a secret by the unnamed, but hint, hint, you know who I mean, evil capitalists as it is armed with poison gas and nuclear missiles. While the two investigators are clopping around they inadvertently trigger the self-destruct bomb and…. no more them. Why did evil capitalists go half-way to Alpha Centauri with all those weapons to play cards is never explained. Did they take a wrong turn on the way to Vega? Apart from shedding two red shirts, the only point of this episode is to denounce the West for it corruption (gaming), wastefulness (dress), and aggression (weapons). Oh, and they killed each other in their insatiable greed.
Back on the mother ship there is a moment of silence for the departed red shirts before everyone goes dancing. Yes, there is another one of those strange dance sequences choreographed to keep everyone on their floor marks for the camera focus. Mostly the dancers stand and stare at each other. Wow! Little did I know that I could dance.
The second incident is more insidious and produces radiation sickness among the crew and the worst case goes nuts. They decide to sleep it off. The fraternity brothers were ahead on that. Good idea. Me, too.
It has a nice ending when they are saved by the unseen but unmistakable intervention of benign beings from Alpha Centauri who wrap the ship up in a force field to stop the radiation. It ends on this positive note. The surviving 37 and Robbie can start planning for the return trip! That is, after they swap the complete works of Lenin for souvenir T-shirts from Alpha Centauri.
The slow start was almost worth this upbeat ending, almost. It is on You Tube with subtitles in English. This is the original version. According to the scribes, there is a dubbed and edited Yankee version that makes considerable changes at the end. Sounds like Roger Corman at work. Beware.
The Index, A History ( 2022) by Dennis Duncan
Good Reads meta-data is 340 pages rated 3.71 by 1,086 literatizens.
Genre: nonfiction
Verdict: a nerd’s delight
Tag line: You say indices and he says indexes.
No (nonfiction) book is complete without one, and I have been disappointed by its occasional absence. We’ve used many of them without a thought to origin or evolution. We assume many things about the index, and each has a long and vexed evolution.
We assume these things. Works of fiction do not have an index. Well, some times they have had. Now they don’t. Why not?
We assume the index is much shorter than the text it navigates. Concordances from whence the chrysalis of the index emerged were sometimes longer than the texts they recorded. At least one index grew so large at 100,000 words that it was preceded by an index to the index.
We assume an index is a truthful and accurate reference to the text. Believe it or not that has not always been the case. Novelists have added indexes to their novels to imitate nonfiction in some cases. In other cases critics of nonfiction texts have taken the time, trouble, and expense to create a fake index to discredit the work itself. Finally, there are incompetent indexes.
We assume the index is at the back of the book. They are now, but they started at the front. Once they were a selling point and put first to catch the buyer-reader to show how easy and useful this book is. They migrated to the back but left a shadow at the front in The Table of Contents. Oops. French and Italian books have both, and both at the back. German publishers have the table of contents in the front and the index in back like English ones.
We assume the index is arranged in alphabetical order yet an index to a Roman text might have been hierarchical in order of importance. There is an index to the poems of Emily Dickinson which is based on the shape and size of the paper on which the verse was scrawled. Even when the alphabet applies, is it to be word order or letter order? It makes a difference.
We assume an index is an aid to finding topics in the text but not a substitute for the text. Yet some indexes have appeared without a text. Others have hived off from the parental text and continued shelf life on their own.
We assume a Biblical index is made by human intelligence (HI) that will locate the fable of the prodigal son, though the text of the fable does not use the word ‘prodigal.’ To show just how important that humanity is, this book itself has two indexes, one done by AI software and one done by HI software of one Paula Clarke. The difference is obvious.
Each of these verities has emerged from a kaleidoscope of false starts, rivals, dead ends, pitfalls, and more. Along the way other navigational tools were spawned like the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature on which I suckled.
There are many anecdotes and stories. One stands out. A Berkeley professor’s lifework was to make a concordance to John Dryden poetry. Prof plodded away at this filling 63 shoe boxes with 3 by 5 inch index (!) cards and then he died in 1951. To salvage the work another member of the department took it on to find that among the million or so entries many were garbled, incomplete, water stained to illegibility, disordered, inconsistent in terminology, chewed by some creature(s) great and small, incomplete, while still others were sun-bleached. Hercules paled at the labour but not Josephine Miles. After some years of effort, she described the problem to an electrical engineer while canoodling, and – cutting to the end – the index cards were converted to machine readable punch cards. Just don’t drop the box! Machine readable came to the rescue by reducing the effort for human reading so that she could concentrate on solving the problems.
Being a reader and writer has given me some experience and interest in the subject of navigating books and using indexes.
Pedants note. ‘Indices’ are for scientists, he says, while indexes are for readers. No he does not mention in my consciousness the eponymous index cards but refers often to slips of paper in describing the making of indexes. By the way indexes exclude function words like ‘if,’ ‘but,’ and, ‘and.’ They also exclude adjectives and adverbs and pronouns, and concentrate on nouns. Then there are subheadings and cross references…but not now.
A Dream Come True (Mechte navstrechu) (1963)
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 6.4 by 240 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Red; subspecies: musical.
Verdict: pedantic eye candy.
A space happy comrade croons a tune to woo a comradess and inadvertently beams it to the cosmos. It tops the charts in far away Alpha Centauri wherefrom Colonel Tom with two assistants to proclaim his genius blasts off for Earth to find those tonsils and sign them up for life ever after. In his haste to go the colonel forgot to tank up with dilithium crystals and his spaceship conked out near Mars. Not good. Earth is a lot closer than home, so they vlog an SOS to the Pacific Ocean whence it is recovered and a Beta video machine is found in a museum to play the tape of the star-seeking star-travellers. Yes, the technologies are compatible, as are the shoe sizes. Just read on.
So help me, Marx! That is the plot.
Comrades to the rescue of these Marsrooned aliens! Not as easy as it sounded in the script conference. The aliens may travel the stars but they do so without light bulbs. The vlog is dark and shadowy. All the self-appointed rescuers know is that the message came from Mars. Off they go! Boom! Zoom! The space ship is called Ocean I, because there is an Ocean II. These details add verisimilitude, right? Wrong.
The going is hard. The seats aren’t padded, but when comrades weaken they rouse each other with stirring songs. Yes they do. Repeatedly. While the first song was crooned to woo a lady, these others are belted out marching band style. Moreover, they are preceded, or followed, or both by a ponderous narration that celebrates the unity of Earthlings, despite some rocket dragging by those with Anglo names, in hastening to offer salvation to these illegal immigrants.
All that strident singing, all the insistent narration, all those set-piece announcements by authority figures, when all of these sidebars are combined with the short runtime of barely more than an hour there is zero time for character development. The cosmonauts start and end as ciphers. But then they were none too bright to begin with for when they do find a surviving alien (a humanoid woman) they realise they have no room for survivors on their twenty-room space ship and to save her, one of them must stay behind, while Ocean II gears up. (As if.) Needless to say after all that stirring music they all volunteer for certain death while waiting for Ocean II.
Ciphers yes, but let it noted that in this 1963 film one of the cosmonauts is a woman who blasts off and does her job. This is at a time when it was routine in Yankee SF to include a woman only for the men in the crew to fight over, and for the smooth male lead to marvel that a woman could pull a switch or identify a dick head. Chalk this one up for the comrades.
There were originally three aliens in the murk. One died in the crash, and two survivors wandered around in a daze. The comrades find one, and silently we all agreed to forgot the third one. Singing seems to have impaired counting. Since they sport some kind of wire rabbits ears it is hard to take these aliens seriously. They need to go wireless and soon!
By the way, during the flight to Mars we see a comrade cosmonaut whiling away the light-speed by reading…a hardback book. Could it be the 900-hundred page volume two of Das Capital?
The visuals of the alien ship and Mars are extraordinary. The sets are much more ambitious than the story line in the compressed runtime. It is no wonder Roger Corman bought its US rights and recut it into … what was it, oh yes, Queen of Blood (1965). I have immortalised it on the blog elsewhere, click away. It has some good moments.
Did I mention shoe sizes? Yes, well that was a tease to get a reader to continue. Gotcha.
The version I found on You Tube has English subtitles that were done in East Germany, and it shows in some of the disconnected and convoluted renderings. Still they are adequate for the material and the price.
