Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

I've enjoyed most of the Marvel films I've seen, but I don't embrace them all equally.  The Iron Man films were all excellent, and my opinion of 'Guardians of the Galaxy' (2014) is identical to everybody else's opinion of 'Guardians of the Galaxy'.  I found 'Captain America' and 'Thor' (both 2011) to be flashy but ordinary, and 'Age of Ultron' shares one of the main issues I had with 'Thor' - in both cases, the central conflict looks to be morally complex, but the villain, after a short period of seeming to have an interesting motivation, decides to be entirely, overtly, evil.  Both films promised to be dramas, and both gave way to something less challenging.

'Avengers: Age of Ultron' is a film full of punching.  Iron Man is a very cool person, whom money and technology have blessed with super punching powers; he's better served by his own films, and the fact I'd seen the superlative 'Iron Man 3' (2013) so recently probably injured my opinion of this movie.  The Hulk is a very nice guy, with an interesting central conflict - the same as in the last Avengers film (2012), so it's hard to be quite so engaged by it this time around; technology has given him super punching powers too.  Captain America is an all-American hero, and a bit boring, and technology has given him super hitting-people-with-a-shield powers.  Thor is a Norse space-god, and space-magic indistinguishable from advanced technology has given him hitting-people-with-a-mallet powers.  Then there's Black Widow, who doesn't seem to have any technological advantage, and seems to kick people more than she punches, and Hawkeye, who's really good at shooting really good arrows.

They're all incredibly attractive, but in different ways.  They kick ass, and especially much they punch ass.  Most of them have had films of their own, showing that they're all individually capable of bringing down vast, blockbuster-sized enemies, so once they're all working together, the obvious problem is finding an enemy that takes them two hours to stop.  Thankfully the legion that confronts them this year is one that can be affected by punching, but one great enough in number that the punching can go on for at least twenty minutes unabated.

Ultron, whose age it is.

The side of evil is given a number of assets, making this Age of Ultron seem a relatively tricky case, but as more and more of the villain's forces defect to the side of good, a victory for the heroes looks ever more likely.  The film seems to keep promising that nobody is safe, that this fight will have a terrible cost - and so it should!  A villain as powerful as Ultron would seem more of a credible threat if his plot had a body count.  I was disappointed when 'The Return of the King' (2003) saw all its main heroes survive - I'd hoped for a bloody hobbit-massacre to show the extent of the threat Frodo faced, and when everybody lived it made the 9-hour struggle feel cheap and easy.  I didn't hold out any such hopes this time around - but I won't say any more, for fear of spoiling the film.

'Avengers: Age of Ultron' is pretty exciting to watch - explosions, set-pieces, familiar characters doing their thing, witty exchanges and reasonable angst - but as you may sense from the paragraphs above, I wasn't quite satisfied.  Part of the problem was that there were no ordinary people in the cast of characters.  All the major players are well-versed in superheroism and high-octane showdowns.  There's no young Steve Rogers, no Pepper Potts, no Foggy Nelson, and none of the heroes even need to pass for normal - these are heroes who have given up their secret double-lives.  I think I've really been spoiled by Marvel's other 2015 project, 'Daredevil', which has recently shown up on Netflix - a hugely satisfying masked vigilante story, with dozens of interesting, human characters to care about.  'Age of Ultron' tries to put Hawkeye at its emotional core, and shows him to be ordinary and American and handsome, but this doesn't make him especially interesting.  He's no Matt Murdock.

The only real people in this film, with lives as humdrum as our own, are the huge crowds of potential victims.  The Avengers work to save these hapless lemmings, and it makes ordinary humanity seem a real drag, a hindrance without merit.  I like that these superhero films spend time showing the heroes rescuing people - it worked well in the recent Batman movies, and it was a nice feature of 'The Avengers Assemble' (2012), but here I spent my time wishing the villain would do his thing, wipe out these troublesome extras, and move the narrative on a bit.

Check it out in cinemas now (or in cinemas next week, if you're American).  Despite my complaints, there's plenty to enjoy here.

Early films (1900-1904)

A film for each year from 1913 onwards!  It seemed a good, clear concept when I began the project, but now that 1913 is no longer exactly a century ago, it seems a rather arbitrary start-point.  Shall we go a little earlier?

The Enchanted Drawing (1900)

I’ve been aware of ‘The Enchanted Drawing’ for most of my life, as it garners a mention in ’The Rudiments of Wisdom’ by Tim Hunkin, an excellent book of illustrated facts that probably accounts for a very large part of my education.  The film combines live action and animation (though not in quite the way Hunkin remembers), as an artist is seen sketching, then plucking his illustrations from the paper, like Smarty Arty in ‘ZZZap!’ (1993-98).  He draws some wine, then picks it up from his drawing and drinks it, somewhat to the chagrin of the face he has rendered.  He cheers the face immeasurably by granting it a hat and a cigar.

It’s a short, satisfying film, augmenting J. Stuart Blackton’s pre-existing live performance piece with the cinematic innovation known as the stop trick, or locking off (stopping the camera, adding or removing elements, and starting the camera again, making the elements appear or disappear as if by magic).  These days we all know exactly how it's pulled off and have the resources to do so ourselves, but this remains a very lively and effective example of it, with a pleasing sense of humour behind it.  You can watch it here, and marvel at such a thing being produced during the reign of Victoria.

Stop Thief! (1901)

The first chase movie!  The film is short, and the plot simple: a vagabond steals some meat from a butcher, and is pursued by dogs.  He hides in a barrel, but they join him there, and eat the meat.  The man is then caught and belaboured about the head.  For its time it was pretty technically impressive, joining together a variety of consecutive shots to show the man’s route - though this very soon became the standard, and within a couple of years a film so simple would seem crude and obvious.

The film is enjoyably silly, but ends with more violent aggression than the crime, or the genre, seem to merit.  It's the earliest British film I've looked at, and you can watch it here, though I wouldn't really encourage you to do so.

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)

Georges Méliès was an amazingly dedicated early director, building his own film camera, and making several hundred films between 1896 and 1913.  He was also a stage-magician, with all the ingenuity for trickery that comes with such an occupation.  He invented the aforementioned stop-trick, and makes thorough use of it here.

This is the source of that famous image of the moon with a rocket in its eye, though that shot makes up only a fraction of the wonders on display.  We follow a court of elderly wizards, or perhaps just wise old men who dress for a holiday, and climb into a capsule which is fired into space, where they witness several astounding phenomena, and tussle with exploding moon-men.  It's beautifully stylised, and feels like 'Mary Poppins' (1964) in ways that I can't quite pin down.

After the wizards' rocket arrives in the moon's angular marshlands, I worried about how they would take of again, since they lacked the telescoping launch contraption seen on Earth.  Clearly, I hadn’t grasped the charming naïveté of the science at play: the film seems to assume that all gravity comes from Earth, meaning one can land on the top of the moon, but make your return voyage by pushing the rocket off a cliff, and falling back to Earth.

It's certainly the best of the films I've watched for this entry.  At this point in history, Georges Méliès was the most exciting director on the planet, and it was quite a while before anybody caught up with his witty and surprising visuals, and genuinely attractive designs.  I can't think why you wouldn't look the film up on Youtube.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

I’ve already written about a film from 1903, ‘La Vie et Passion de Jesus Christ’, which was in colour - albeit of the crudest sort - was most of an hour long, and was filled with special effects.  Given how rarely 1900s movies are spoken of, and how crude and terrible films from later decades could often be, I was astounded to find such technical and artistic competence so early in the history of cinema.

Edwin S. Porter’s ‘The Great Train Robbery’, at a more modest twelve minutes, shares some of its ambition, using techniques of compositing and back-projection to bring trains into the studio.  It also features a fist-fight on a moving train - something I’d been impressed by in ‘Dr Nicholas og den Blaa Diamant’ a decade later in 1913.

The film is the more urgent of the two 1903 works, and (unusually for so early a film) never holds its shots too long.  It has two highlights: the first comes around the five minute mark, when Broncho Billy Anderson plays a man who is shot trying to escape the bandits.  The flailing death he gives us is wonderful to behold.  The second is the final shot, the film’s only close-up, in which Justus D. Barnes pulls out a gun, aims it at the camera, and so at the audience, and fires.  The End!  Watch it here, if you dare.

Welding the Big Ring (1904)

I was disappointed not to be able to source any fiction films for 1904, indeed, the only footage I could find from that year was ‘Welding the Big Ring’.  I dwell in Sheffield, so feel obliged to take some interest in the history of industrial metalcrafting, which may have made the piece a touch more approachable.

At first it seems like nothing will happen.  Muscle-men stand with an urgent sort of attention, surveying a huge metal ring.  Suddenly, it’s all go.  The ring is pulled out of the flames and the men descend on it with long-handled hammers.  The thing’s obviously red-hot, but they leap on it, attacking with a rhythm that makes them seem mechanical.  The work looks perilous, but the men have no fear.  They’re machines!  The ring, I assume, was later handed over to Sauron.

It was a little uninspiring, after the works of ingenuity and excitement further up the page.  It presents real working men, rather than schlock or frippery, which is commendable, but isn't what I tend to look for in a motion picture.  In the future, documentary footage tends to be coupled with innovative editing as in 'Man with a Movie Camera' (1929).  But these were early days, and no amount of perilous hammering can make 6 minutes of static footage hold the attention.  You can watch it here, but I'd stick with the first two minutes.  Your time is precious, dear reader.

Tune in at an undisclosed later point for some films from 1905 to 1912 -- and beyond!


P.S. I'm particularly delighted to add 'Stop Thief!' (1902) to the Penciltonian roster, as it joins 'Shaft's Big Score!' (1972) in that most unusual sub-genre, films with exclamation marks in their titles.

Starship Troopers (1997)

Rounding out the nineties, we have this excellent sci-fi satire, an anti-war-film disguised simply as a war film.  It drifted into my mind a couple of months ago when I watched 'All Quiet on the Western Front' (1930).  The stories follow similar patterns: in each, a school-teacher inspires our hero to join the army, the better to be a patriot, and both films show a gruelling period of training under a hostile drill-sergeant, which nonetheless leaves the cadets unprepared for the real horrors of battle.  The war drags on for far longer than expected, and the hero watches all his peers perish in agony.  I can believe there are plenty of other anti-war films that follow the same pattern, but these are the two I know, and despite their similarity in plot and purpose, they use very different methods.

'Starship Troopers' is subtler, or at least, it credits its viewer with more intelligence.  It drops the occasional hint that humanity are the real aggressors, and that the 'bugs' whose planets they are invading are only defending their territory, but it makes the aliens ugly enough, and the battles exciting enough, that one could watch the film without realising the cruelty of the heroes, the sarcasm of the jingoism.  'All Quiet on the Western Front' opens and closes with clear anti-war statements, and its hero loses faith in the struggle, speaking openly against its futility - but the horrors experienced by Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) in 'Starship Troopers' leave him all the more committed to the bugs' extermination.  He's a true citizen.  'All Quiet on the Western Front' makes its point with tragedy, but 'Starship Troopers' gives us a happy ending, a triumph for the surviving characters.  Its far more bitter, and terribly unfair.

Death!

It's an attractive, fun and thrilling film.  If you can put the grim moral aside, it's highly entertaining, something you can watch a lot of times.  The film was fortunate to be made at exactly the right time, in 1997 special effects had become so good that they still impress today, with CGI 'bugs' and ships looking both real and solid.  Made a few years earlier, I suspect this would have aged poorly.  Five years later, I doubt the film could have been made at all, as the extremely negative portrayals of propaganda and American-style extreme patriotism would, post-9/11, have rankled against the public mood.

I'm told the film is extremely different to Robert A. Heinlein's novel on which it was based, and that the book, published in 1959, plays the war far straighter, with the monsters utterly evil, the heroes justified in their crusade.  It sounds considerably less interesting than the motion picture; the world needs the occasional warning about the evils of imperialism.  I always prefer sci-fi that doesn't advocate for national churlishness.

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The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Lawnmower, man.

Do excuse my fortnight absence from writing up films for The Penciltonian; a blend of business and laziness left me indisposed, but I'm back with these words on 'Lawnmower Man', a serious-minded vision of a year 2000 in which VIRTUAL REALITY is credible, practical and nineties beautiful.  You can tell it's from the nineties, as the CGI sequences resemble 'ReBoot', and every important scene is lit wholly in blue.

Our hero is a scientist played by young, dark-haired Pierce Brosnan, a couple of years before he became Bond.  At this point in his career he's just Some Guy and accordingly gives a less subtle, more theatrical performance than I've become accustomed to.  In looks and manner, he's a cross between Gaius Baltar and Dr Lucian Sanchez.  He works with the most colourful screen-savers, and is making breakthroughs in either brain chemistry or software.

The future of computing.

When his chimp dies of science, he recruits Jobe (who has extreme learning difficulties, but whose performance in no way resembles any of the learning-disabled people I work with), treating him with all the sciences combined in order to increase his brain, and the prominence of his naked torso.  Poor Jobe soon abandons his lazily-worn dungarees and takes to driving, sex and catastrophic mental spasms.  'Awesome dudical!'

What follows is a cyberspace horror, as Jobe's mind becomes inseparable from the Day-Glo CGI that dwells inside all computers, and he goes on a rampage of embarrassing character.  The special effects aren't what I'd describe as good enough for Youtube, and are probably the least impressive that I've seen during my century of film-watching.  The visual effects from 'Orphée' (1950), for instance, would stand up far better today than these do, and it's a great pity that the point where this film ought to turn from sci-fi to horror, it in fact loses its credibility and becomes 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace'

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The Island of Lost Souls (1932)

At the start of the thirties, with the arrival of audible dialogue, films seem suddenly more basic, less ambitious and altogether less impressive - or at least, the English-language ones do.  Fritz Lang somehow got away with the transition, making his talking pictures more grounded than his silents, but no less exciting.  But then, he was one of the best silent directors, so naturally he still had talent and a sharp mind in the age of the talkies.

This, though, is an American film at a time when that didn't portend slickness or coolness.  Not that it's a bad film, it simply doesn't inspire in the same way as those hectic twenties.  It's an early horror film, but less horrific than 'Nosferatu' a decade earlier, its moral less memorable than that of 'Häxan' (1922), for instance.

The Speaker of the Law (Béla Lugosi)

So what is there to recommend the film?  Well, there are scenes on ships and in the sea, things one couldn't see on stage (which is surely the major rival to the talking pictures).  Everybody speaks clearly, and the set-up for the story is interesting and memorable, the story itself being H.G. Wells' 'The Island of Dr Moreau'.

Moreau joins Doctors Mabuse, Caligari and Nicholson in being a wretched villain with a twisted mind (doctors in the films I've been watching are, it seems, wholly malign until 1965 gave us the double-whammy of Who and Zhivago), but at least Dr Moreau is only tampering with nature, operating on animals to turn them into humans (which makes less sense the more you think about it), rather than murdering, hypnotising, stealing diamonds or working as a psychiatrist.  His beasts have exciting prosthetic heads, the hairiest of which is Béla Lugosi (the first screen Dracula, an actor now best known as a historical figure, as played by Martin Landau in Tim Burton's 1994 biopic 'Ed Wood').  The beasts are all male, except The Panther Woman, who is far less exciting than one might expect from her name, and who doesn't have fancy prosthetics or make-up at all.  Perhaps she's there to titillate the audience, but this would surely be more novel, less boring, if she had a head like Lugosi's all-over beard.  Or am I expecting the wrong things from actresses?

Even after a good restoration, 30s films tend to look rather grainy.

There's a human drama played out amidst this tale of monstrous science, but within a few days I've forgotten all its details.  I suspect it, and the moral dimension, had a greater depth and emphasis in the original novel - the film is all about spectacle.  Still, it's short and it isn't dull, but it doesn't delight me.

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Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

This sequel to 1968's sci-fi classic 'Planet of the Apes' spends its first half telling the same story again with a different astronaut, but in the second half moves unexpectedly to an underground realm of skinless psychics who sing hymns to a gigantic bomb.

Like the earlier film, it starts eerily, with wide empty spaces, perils of nature and troubling mysteries even before we reach the Apes.  Here, too, there's a lengthy sequence where our hero isn't permitted to speak, but must nonetheless get things done - it's always good, in this visual medium, to have a respite from talking.  We then get the same exposition and capture-and-escape antics as last time, before the new mystery and fresh ideas are allowed to take hold.

The Apes look pretty good here, riding to war.  When they get there their
lack of numbers and weapons makes the conflict seem terribly small-scale.
It isn't very clear why they go to war, nor who they expect to fight.

Charlton Heston has opted out, so his character, Taylor, is written out at the start (once we've seen a reprise of the earlier film's famous ending) and only returns in the dying minutes, to have an excellently exciting mace fight with this film's Taylor-substitute, Brent (James Franciscus).  There's a rare thrill to seeing the hero of a film you're watching fight to the death with the hero of an earlier, better movie.  We're torn over which we want to win, or we're meant to be.  Brent has the advantage that we've spent an hour getting to like him, but Charlton Heston is Charlton Heston, and though he fights the more savagely, he seems the more original of the two.  Perhaps if Brent hadn't been so clearly a Heston-lite it would seem a fairer competition.

Charlton Heston turns up, eventually.

There was a brief period when the outlandish bomb-worship and the film's excessively destructive climax made this my favourite of the five classic Apes movies.  I came round, in the end, to the greater merits of the '68 original, but think I would claim the third film, 'Escape from the Planet of the Apes' (1971) as the best of the bunch, a weird fish-out of water comedy in modern-day America which very slowly darkens into a bleak and unfair tragedy, its villain genuinely trying to save humanity, and its dearth of Charlton Heston made up for by the presence of Ricardo Montalban.

They're appealing films, each one more utterly miserable in its findings than the one before.  The first is about how human appetite for destruction never ceases, the second about how we cause the end of the world, and it somehow gets even worse as the series goes on, with films about killing babies and smashing people's heads in as borderline-legitimate ways to make the world better.  The movies have the most paranoid soundtracks, an alarming and unusual set of noises for an orchestra, at the time - and they're attractive to look upon.  I always envy Taylor's linen mace-fighting jacket in this instalment, and if I hadn't broken my sewing machine I would  surely have replicated some of the Apes' garments by now, pleasing designs which look like no human culture I could name.

This is probably the only Apes movie where you could take the Apes out
and the plot would still more-or-less work.  Nice costumes, though.

The things that most date the film to 1970 (or more properly to the late sixties when it was written and filmed) are the use of wild camera zooms and the fact that the only notable African American character is simply credited as 'Negro', which any later would surely have seemed questionable.  The film is also quite Vietnam-flavoured, with the Gorillas going into battle, but first breaking up ineffectual anti-war protests by the Chimpanzees.  On the day I viewed this film I went along to an unfortunately unpeopled anti-fascist rally, so I was rather relieved to see this film present an even smaller and less effective protest by which I could make some happier comparison.


P.S. Brent spends the film looking for Taylor, but never expresses an interest in the three astronauts who travelled with him.  Presumably he knows which of the four was played by Charlton Heston.

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The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

This popped up on BBC iPlayer (and presumably on real live BBC television too, but it's some while since I last watched anything as it was broadcast, for this is the 21st Century), and since I always check out their monochrome films (it being a cheap way to fill Penciltonian gaps), naturally I investigated this one's year, and was glad that it fit.  I've a natural interest in Quatermass, it being classic British sci-fi, a rather different proposition to classic American sci-fi.  The three Quatermass serials were so heavily plagiarised by early 'Doctor Who' that it's nice to finally see where all those story ideas originally came from.  Ideally I'd be watching the TV original from 1953, but it's largely lost from the archive, and besides would not fit with my own Penciltonian Xperiment.

The film is set around London, no longer the war-torn London it was a decade before, but not yet the swinging London of the sixties.  It's an interesting and lesser-acknowledged gap, and well suits Nigel Kneale's penchant for dark, pessimistic, xenophobic tales about how, though we're a nation of ingenious innovators, the universe is utterly malign and is coming to kill us for no reason we can comprehend.

Of course, back in those days we all wore our coats all the time,
to show how serious we were.

Bernard Quatermass is not a Briton, as he was in the TV version, but the American Brian Donlevy, who gives a stiff and uncharismatic performance that's very hard to like.  He's meant to be an anti-hero, a man of science with serious business to attend to and little time for the media - but even so, I've rarely seen somebody so dull in the lead.  It's doubtless deliberate, and he's paired with a lively policeman, the good-humoured Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner, who went on to be Dixon of Dock Green).  A returning rocket - a great novelty in these early days of the space-age - presents them with a mystery, a crime, and an unknown form of life, prompting them to launch the two interlinked investigations, with Quatermass in pursuit of scientific facts and Lomax keen to determine whether a murder has been committed by Victor Carroon, the surviving astronaut.

Victor Carroon is played by the scary-faced Richard Wordsworth.  While all around him jabber in the polite accents we might see in 50s pastiches, Carroon is sweatily silent.  While talk of rocket-ships and paperwork makes this sound a sci-fi procedural, the film is a horror at heart - the first Hammer horror, indeed - with Victor Carroon is its monster.  It's a horrible performance, murderous and implacable, with the astronaut infected by something he cannot resist, compelled to smash and to drain life, leaving behind wizened husks which are still unpleasant to look upon today.

The infected Carroon approaches a cactus.

P.S. The film features an amazing one-scene cameo from Thora Hird as a gin fiend.  Despite an attempt to watch many films of diverse kinds, my century of cinema (of which I have now completed three-quarters) has somehow managed to include two films with Thora Hird, but none with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kevin Bacon.  I'd never really thought of her as a movie star.

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Casino Royale (1967)

He wanted to be James Bond.  They wanted him to be Peter Sellers.

1967 gave us 'Casino Royale', a bizarre and extremely uneven psychedelic comedy.  It suffered under five directors seemingly unaware that they were making the same movie, and its star Peter Sellers walked out half-way through after realising the film was a comedy, meaning the remainder had to be substantially reworked to fill the gap left by the main character.  The thing's a wild mess, a terrible film brimming with excellent moments.  It's also one of my favourite films, though I hardly feel I can defend it.

So Sir James Bond (a magnificent David Niven, in a lead role that was meant to be a cameo) has turned his back on the world, but the combined intelligence forces of the international community try to persuade him out of retirement, and when he refuses they blow up his house for some reason.  There follows an interminable half hour in Scotland before we get to either the plot or the memorably funny parts.

Mata Bond in East Germany, with a young Ronnie Corbett.

What ensues is an increasingly trippy series of antics and escapades in which many agents, all of them dubbed James Bond 007, adventure around the world.  I particularly like the sequence in East Germany, which is shot to resemble expressionist cinema with its extreme angles and outlandish lighting, and the all-too-brief part of the film starring Sellers, even his awkward encounter with Orson Welles and his card-tricks.

The first time I saw 'Casino Royale' I genuinely thought I'd fallen asleep and was dreaming. It was about the time the horse gallops onto the spaceship in Trafalgar Square, though my brain had been struggling to keep up with the pictures ever since Le Chiffre's torture of the mind, a sequence in which Peter Sellers is bombarded by hundreds of illusory bagpipers, one of whom is Peter O'Toole but doesn't know it.  Peter Sellers tries to cry for help but the only thing to come from his mouth is an animated speech-bubble.  I tend to assume that this is what hallucinogenic drugs are like.  If it isn't, then they aren't worth taking.

Sir James Bond escapes from one of the great sixties evil lairs.

I'm sorry to have missed 1967, but I was years too late.  To think that in Britain this and 'The Prisoner' and 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' were all in simultaneous production boggles the mind.  We won Eurovision, too.

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Akira (1988)

I've had 'Akira' recommended to me twice, once by a poster and once by a person.  The first case was at university, on the wall of a friend called Neil.  Now, he and I disagreed significantly on some key issues (crucially he did not hold back on branding my Christianity, anybody's indeed, 'stupidity', with an agitated regularity), but it was apparent that his aesthetic suggestions were greater and more generous than his theological ones.  It's thanks to him that I discovered Peter Greenaway, Michael Nyman, Apple Macintoshes,  'MacGyver', 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace' and port (the beverage, not the nautical direction) all of which have brightened my life this last decade.  So I was always confident that 'Akira', which he advocated from his wall, would be worth my attention.  I never sought it out until a rather more recent friend, a young filmmaker named Charlie, suggested it as anime worth the watching when I commented that The Penciltonian hadn't yet touched the cinema of Asia.  As you may recall (clue: you probably won't) I once expressed a desire to watch a film from every continent.  It really shouldn't have taken me this long.

It's a handsome film, its animation far above what little anime I've seen on television.  At times it can almost look real - but heightened, with the lights of fast motorbikes blearing and ghosting long after the vehicles have left the screen.  The pseudo-realism of the animation style gives director Katsuhiro Otomo greater control over framing and lighting, and on when, to the split second, characters or objects enter the screen.  The style allows for calculated depictions of violence - bullets hitting dogs, or gang-members falling from bikes - slow or fast, but perfectly rendered, things that would be too horrid or simply unconvincing using actors and special effects.  Rumours have abounded for a decade about a proposed live-action remake, but I don't think it would retain the visceral flair.  It would divide the world into real and CGI - two things that still don't quite blend, one always knows which is which - rather than the single, consistent but visually beautiful style presented here.

Urghh!  There's some of that blood right there.  There's quite a bit of it.  And explosions.

I feel at a disadvantage, talking about 'Akira', as I know almost nothing about the culture of Japan, ancient or modern.  Films, especially science-fantasy like this, often draw on a society's deep-rooted preoccupations, folk traditions and enduring fiction of previous ages.  'Miracle on 34th Street' (1947) or 'Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD' (1966) would make far less sense to a viewer without a knowledge of the countries and cultures concerned, and for much of 'Akira', though I enjoyed the film moment by moment, I felt I lacked any grasp on its references and allusions, whether consciously or unconsciously included, so was missing the bigger picture.  It's the same uncomfortable detachment I felt when watching 'Spirited Away' (2001), and may have led me to misread the films.  For the first half of this movie I'd assumed the third world war (which struck on the day after St Swithin's in 1988 and wiped out Tokyo) was a nuclear one, since Hiroshima is the only recent Japanese history that I really know - and I assumed a growing sphere of sci-fi destruction to be a cloud of nuclear mushroom.  This was not, as I'd supposed, a film of angst for the forties, nor were the aged and elusive children tragic nuclear ghosts.  This was something newer, quite a different set of ideas.  I'm glad, I think, or the film might have been far heavier than it was.

I don't want to say too much about the film.  As I've mentioned, it was commended to me without any clue as to its contents, and I feel you'd do well to go in without too much of its plot spoiled for you.  What's more, I hardly feel I've absorbed the film on my one viewing.  Since I was offered the option to watch it dubbed or subtitled (I chose the latter) I'd like to see it again, taking the other option, before I'll really feel confident about what I've seen.  The only other things I'll note are (firstly) that I'm always thrown by anime's habit of putting comedic lead characters, prone to all manner of slapstick, in otherwise fairly humourless films, and (secondly) that the film's climax is physically disgusting, but attractively so, and was unlike anything else I've seen in the year's viewing.

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Battlefield Earth (2000)

Forest Whitaker and John Travolta as the campy villains.
The whole film is shot at these outlandish angles.  It sort-of works.

So many words of scorn have already been poured upon 'Battlefield Earth' that I shall keep my comments short.  This is an adaptation of the first half of a novel by L Ron Hubbard, the sci-fi author who went on to invent Scientology, perhaps the most easily derided of the Western religions.  His 'L' stands for 'lasers', by the way.  Like 'Xanadu' (1980), this motion-picture has merited a place on Wikipedia's 'List of films considered the worst', and while it's easier to sit through it than through many films which are technically or artistically better, there are stretches of 'Battlefield Earth' - exciting and colourful stretches - where boredom somehow sets in, where the fizzy adventuring fails to stimulate, the epic conflict elicits too late interest, and one wonders how soon the film might end.

By accident or design this failed blockbuster resembles obscure B-movie 'America 3000' (1986); each depicts an apocalyptically dusty America in the year 3,000, in which hairy men are oppressed, but find, though education, the key to revolution.  Incredibly, women get the better role in the earlier film, in which they're horrible jerks who ought never to have gained power, rather than here where they're almost wholly absent, except in a brief cameo as a possible bearer of the hero's child.  Not for them the guns, the adventuring or the declaration of independence.

An outrageous transition from one scene to the next.  There's a lot of these.

The former film had a humility of sorts: despite its flaws it knew it was ridiculous.  John Travolta, star and producer of 'Battlefield Earth', however, seems to have believed utterly in the merits of his film and its capacity to dazzle and impress its audience, and to attract them in the first place.  In interviews he compared it favourably to 'Star Wars' (1977) and 'Planet of the Apes' (1968), which is always a mistake.  He, or rather director Roger Christian under his enthusiastic tutelage, found ways to give these classics visual tributes in the new film, borrowing from the Apes the image of our hero in prison being sprayed with a hosepipe - which isn't especially striking here - and from 'Star Wars' the absurd, curtain-like wipes which mark the transition from one scene to the next.  These were a curious novelty in 1977, but an unwelcome and unbeautiful distraction in the year 2000.  Like 'Space Camp' (1986), 'Battlefield Earth' does itself a disservice by reminding its audience about 'Star Wars' every few minutes, emphasising the gulf in merit between the one sci-fi and the other.

The film isn't without merit, but I found no good reason to care for the heroes, or for the future of humanity, that male and American race.  John Travolta and Forest Whitaker, as the very villainous aliens, are highly watchable but too ridiculous to seem legitimately threatening.  The film might have made a fun and visually innovative half-hour of television if all the scenes with humans in were removed - but it seems rather extreme to wish such a fate on any movie.

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Why would you even want to watch it after my comments?  Because it sounds 'so-bad-it's-good'?  Oh, ok.  Enjoy yourselves how you will, but you might get more out of 'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988).

Super 8 (2011)

The guys survey the wreckage of a CGI explosion

When somebody presses a DVD into your hands, it's probably a movie they really think you should watch, and really think you should watch.  Ian, a photographer of my acquaintance (whose name seems to appear alongside Pencilton's in the name of this blog) recommended 'Super 8' to me and passed me a copy.  He and I help to run a holiday camp each Summer, at which, among other things, the young people get to make their own motion-pictures.  I'm a great advocate of amateur movies, and tend to be heavily involved in the holiday's video activity, so I've naturally harboured a curiousity toward this recent blockbuster, which begins with five youngsters trying to make a short film.

They have a film-camera, (which, in our age of video, is a beautiful technological inconvenience I've never had the chance to use) a very short script (which is absolutely the best kind for an amateur work), and a visionary young director keen to get good production values without spending any money.  They're making a zombie crime film with models, prosthetics, make-up and a period setting, and extremely varied acting ability.  It's exactly what I wanted to be doing at that age (which seems to say, early teens), and exactly what I do too little these days - and the film has left me gagging to fire up my camcorder, round up a few friends and a dozen hats and cry 'action' and 'havoc'.

I can't help feeling that the film might have carried on just fine had the film-making plot not been derailed at the twenty minute mark by the sudden arrival of a CGI train full of mysterious and terrifying cargo.  Once this mystery becomes the main plot, and special effects the majority of the draw, the kids-make-movies story falls away, and I felt we'd lost sight of the film's most interesting facet.  Perhaps I wanted to be watching 'Son of Rambow' (2007) instead.

A still from 'The Case', the film the kids are making on Super 8.
Gabriel Basso as Martin as Detective Hathaway and Elle Fanning as Alice as his wife.

The gang of kids at the centre of the film are a fun and likeable bunch, and reminded my of 'The Goonies' (1985), except here we only get one girl in a gang of five, while the earlier film was marginally more balanced with two out of six.  It's disheartening to see that adventure-movie gender-balance hasn't improved at all over the twenty-eight years of my life, and has in fact got worse; adventure is still a club for boys, unless you're a feel-good love interest.

The film is amply exciting, and ends well enough.  It being Spielberg-produced, the story is well-told, though pondering it over the last day or so parts of it begin to make less sense, and the heroes seem to have had too many strokes of luck.  Either way, the CGI (well animated but, being animated, rather insubstantial and unreal) goes away and the film ends immediately.  I'd count this as a bit of a pity, as I wanted it to get back to the more important business of the eponymous Super 8, the film being shot by the kids.  As I hoped, their movie plays during the end credits.  I'faith, it's the best bit!


P.S. The antagonists are all male, and so are the major allies, and so are all the parents, except the dead ones.  The only girl among the heroes gets captured, is helpless and has to be rescued.  Will films still be like this when I'm old and dead, I wonder?

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The film on disc, if you yearn for it.

Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town (1989)

Another horror, courtesy of Opai who screened this in a triple bill with 'America 3000' (1986) and a classic episode of 'Knightmare'.  Its big selling-point, according to the DVD box, is the presence of Billy Bob Thornton, who was so excellent as 'The Man Who Wasn't There' (2001) and so Republican in 'Love Actually' (2003), but who's in this so briefly (and at so comparatively young an age) that I didn't notice him at all.  Thankfully the film was mis-selling itself on this point, and had boons in other areas.

I mentioned the film to my friend Rob Reed, who lectures in film and delights in zombies - so, really, his opinions ought to be more valid than mine on this whole topic - and he condemned it as very terrible, to my mind unduly.  Now, admittedly I only saw it because Opai was screening some wilfully shonky B-movies, but I feel there are merits to this film that could be missed by anybody watching it with senor Reed's eye for the undead.  I'd venture that 'Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town' is not really a zombie movie, but a biker movie which happens to feature a zombie attack, and that only briefly.  This is a film about a gang of strong, independent women who have left their lives behind for whatever reasons and decided to tear across America rockin' and a-rollin', and what happens when they inadvertently drive into the old home-town of one of their members.

A midget undertaker manually updates the town's population.
Rural America is still a Western, y'see.

So, there's a gang of bikers, who call themselves the Cycle Sluts.  They reason that's what they'll be called anyway, so they pre-emptively reclaim the phrase.  Their travels may happen to include 'some reeaaal good coitus' (as it's here termed), but it's by no means their raison d'être, and this being a drama and a comedy, rather than a sexy film, it's implied rather than shown.  They roll into the town of Zariah where it so happens that a popular scientist at the centre of the community is arranging murders and reanimating the corpses in an abandoned mine.  I forget quite why he's doing this, but it all seemed relatively sensible and innocent.

The zombies, when they emerge, move authentically slowly, and take most of an hour to shamble the ten or so miles from the mine to the town, meaning the real story of the gang and the people of Zariah can play out with the corpses as a time-bomb, rather than an immediate threat.  And whenever we cut to the stumbling zombies, the incidental music strikes up a comedic accordion rendition of Danse Macabre, which I found to be as enjoyable as it was ridiculous.

I can't remember the character names, but she's the boss.
Wikipedia manages to give a lengthy plot summary with no names in it.

A complication arises when we discover that, half-way between the town and the mine, is a home for blind orphans, fer goodness' sake.  I suppose, in an in-bred town full of murder, such a thing isn't inconceivable.  Endogamous marriage is the primary cause of blindness in Egypt, or so I've heard, oh fact-seekers.  Anyway, the orphans deport themselves well, not being the weepy woobies one might fear in a film of this level of crudeness, but taking up firearms against the invisible menace.  Says one orphan, with an excellent dead-pan: 'Blind, no parents, and now this.'

It's a fun film, and not heartless.  I can see why an advocate of zombies may find that this fails as a zombie horror, and anybody believing the cover and watching for the sake of Billy Bob Thornton would likewise be thrown by the film they get.  The film's about the chopper chicks.  It seems relatively unusual to see a horror film based around female heroes without obviously being geared to a male audience.  It's still a genre I know little, though I seem to be catching up on it this last month or so.


P.S. This is the last Troma film to reach the cinemas.  They made low-budget trash movies before they were cool, and for that they deserve some kind of salute.

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Here it is on DVD, if you fancy it.

Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965)

So close you can feel their fire!

In the mid-sixties, Amicus Productions (whose 'Madhouse' I reviewed for 1974) made two thrilling and exceedingly full-colour films based on a sci-fi TV show called 'Doctor Who', which had been on our screens for less than two years at the time.  By the time I came to be aware of films, these two were being screened at least once annually on television, and though they weren't 'proper' Doctor Who, they were, until 2005, the most ubiquitous stories on British television.  They're the perfect Sunday afternoon films - bright, exciting family adventures, starring Peter Cushing, not as the Doctor, but as eccentric inventor Dr. Who.

The thrill, here, is Daleks IN COLOUR.  They are, if you're curious, silver, blue, red, black, gold, and then some more silver.  The Dalek city is a horrid combination of silver, salmon and pastel blue - not by any means my favourite colour-scheme.  Despite horrid choices of tincture, I love the design of the set, especially the big rotating control panel, and the sliding doors which swing open triagonally with a swoosh and a clash.  They stuck in my mind as a child, and I was glad to see and hear them again

Roberta Tovey and the Lava-lamps of the Daleks!

The Thals, too, are in colour.  These ineffectual aryan pacifists are rendered here as blond, eye-shadowed fellows with waistcoats designed to show off the bare and hairless chests.  I'm tempted to say it's an effeminate look, with elfin boots, tight trousers and well-tended eyelashes, but it's probably truer to say Thal culture dresses its men and women equally, with everybody's curvature given equal acknowledgement.

It seems reasonable enough to inspect the pictures rather than the story.  The plot, after all, had been on telly just two years previously.  The Daleks (who are a bit rubbish here, despite their big budget sheen) do the things they did (and don't yet shout 'exterminate'), and the heroes go through an array of adventurous set-pieces.  Peter Cushing's Dr Who is extremely enjoyable, despite being entirely unlike Hartnell and equally unlike Cushing's usual display.  Ian, in this version, is played by ROY CASTLE, a performer I admire extremely vocally, and gets all the comedy scenes - sitting on the wrong things, leaning on the wrong things, falling over and being affably flabbergasted in a way that continues to amuse me.

Arghhh!  It's a... a Magnedon?  They never really tell us.

It's a broader comedy than in television version, but doesn't undermine the drama, such as it is.  I love the scene where Ian tries (which much in the way of hilarious antics) to open a door which closes every time he approaches it, intercut with Barbara venturing into the city as, silently and unnoticed, panels slide down to cut off her retreat.  Sliding doors and CCTV cameras ("Every move you make, they can see!  Every sound you utter, they can hear!") are the bizarre innovations of the future, set against the ordinary travelling phone-booth of the present.

Here, as in the original, the most exciting scene is the one where everybody jumps over the Very Deep Chasm.  It's wonderfully exciting in both TV and film versions, without being quite believable in either.  In short, Ian, Barbara and two Thals have to jump over a ravine.  It's just about possible, and for safety, as one person jumps, they do so with a rope around their waist connected to one of their fellows, lest they should fall.  Ian, Barbara and Ganatus jump across safely, but the cowardly Antodus, who is terrified that he'll never make it, lands badly and topples into the ravine, his rope dragging Ian over the brink of disaster.  On television, Antodus finally grows brave, and cuts the rope, letting himself fall to his death that Ian might be saved.  He seems to do the same here, except that a short few seconds later we discover that he hasn't given up his life to save a stranger - rather he has fallen onto a ledge, and is perfectly fine.  This film version which can never let itself be horrific or unsettling, and where all is colourful and safe.  It's a pity, as the best Dalek stories are full of death, with victory coming at a miserably high cost.  At least it all ends with a big explosion!


P.S. Says Dr. Who: 'The Daleks have the entire city surrounded by electronic instruments'.  I envisaged the place haloed by keytars, a Bontempi organ and perhaps the odd Roland Electric Piano.

P.P.S. I'm sure I'll get to the far more exciting sequel in a few weeks.

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Now out on Blu-ray, and the second film, at least, is just amazing.

Two very eighties post-Nuke movies with years in their titles (1983, 1986)

So far as I can ascertain, the peoples of the world spent the late fifties and all of the sixties alarmed by the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation  and made many colourful films about how we were all going to die, but, after making 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes' in 1970, they forgot all about The Bomb until the early eighties, when a new breed of nuclear terror emerged, reigning until the end of the Cold War.  Here are two eighties films about what life would be like after the forthcoming nuclear apocalypse.

2019, After the Fall of New York (1983)

'Big Ape', who dresses like a prince of pumpkins.

It's 2019, which is now closer than I'm quite comfortable with, and in front of an obvious model of ruined New York humanity is playing out its final adventures.  Men drive aggressively, fight dustily, and mutate into people very slightly hairier than is generally considered acceptable.  Our hero Parsifal is commissioned by the President of the Pan-American Confederacy to seek out and recover the only fertile woman on Earth, who has been in suspended animation, and guarded by dwarves (presumably seven of them) since before the Nuke.

The story of Sleeping Beauty is only charming so long as nobody impregnates her while she is sleeping.  Alas, a charismatic mutant by the name of Big Ape, who claims to be the most virile man alive, is implied to do just that, though it mercifully occurs off-screen.  This isn't one of those sexy films, you know.  Nonetheless, it's hinted at and never really addressed, and seems horribly out of place in a lively adventure film.  People rightly complain about female characters whose sole merits are their fertility, but this seems to take the problem up to the next level, since the slumbering begetter never so much as speaks.  She sleeps, she carries humanity's future in her loins, and eventually wakes to smile beautifully and silently, as if she were the Duchess of Cambridge.

'They baked the Big Apple'

It's remarkably eighties, and makes the bold promise that a mere six years from now, people will be able to wear absolutely whatever they want and get away with it.  Indian head-dresses, pied top-hats, pumpkin costumes, you name it.  On that basis, it's a future I look forward to, with the only real problems being radioactive waste, the hordes of fluffy, flesh-hungry rats, and the decent chance of being shot with a flare-gun and burning to death while flailing around.

The film is Italian, but is generally shown dubbed into English.  Its script is enjoyable enough, occasionally delivering a memorable line or two.  But the whole thing fails in its mission to be 'Star Wars'.  It's the same year as 'Return of the Jedi', so a sci-fi runaround like this is surely chasing the same crowd.  Despite ambition, enjoyable design and a cross-breed of Chewbacca and Han Solo in the form of Big Ape, the film doesn't pull it off.  Part of the problem is probably a lack of money, part is in the direction - not that the film is sloppilyy directed, but I couldn't grasp which location led to which, and why each was important - something always clear in that famouser trilogy.  Here, a swift drive down a corridor could be a triumph, a retreat, an advance towards a prize or a journey back to the President and to safety, and I could never be sure which was which.

America 3000 (1986)

The Tiara of Frisco meets the PRESIDENT

In the year 3000, the consequences of nuclear disaster are even more significant.  It's one of those stories where women rule the Earth, and where this is obviously a Bad Thing.  The film has nothing particularly novel or profound to say about gender politics, except that if men were ever subjected to the oppression women have been under for the last 6,000 years, they'd be able to turn the tables in half a week.  The men are the heroes, you see.

This is an America where men are subjugated, used as 'machos', who do the hard labour, and 'Seeders', who do the sex.  Coitus is as messed up here as in the earlier film: women (or 'Fralls', as they're known) accept childbearing as a duty, and at a certain age they're tied down by their peers and impregnated by an anonymous man in a burqa.  This is far more horrible than sex ought to be, or so I'm told.  Since this too is not a sexy film, we never see the above occur, as the seeder is (perhaps rudely) interrupted by explosions and adventures.

The darker the eighties hair, the more villainous.

The sexual revolution starts when some guy (Chuck Wagner) finds a book of ABCs, using it to learn speech.  Naturally, this leads in no time at all to full conversation, sophisticated turns of phrase, rhetoric and wisecracking.  He's fortunate enough to fall down a hole, where he discovers the long-lost survival chamber of the President of America.  Since 'PRES-I-DENT' is still looked to as a god in the year 3000, Chuck gets to dress in a jazzy gold space suit and pretend to be the almighty commander in chief, the only man that the army of women would ever listen to.

The film seems to be on the same page as the equivalent era's 'Doctor Who', with its crude village of slang-spouting females seeming like a cross between 'Paradise Towers' (1987) and 'The Mysterious Planet' (1988).  'Plugots got neggy smarts for tricking nobody,' and, 'Nukin' Fralls gets us nothing but nuked Fralls,' are lines I can well imagine spouting from the former story's Bin Liner or Fire Escape.  I suspect they're leaning on the same sources - or at least that their bizarre flavour and look is likewise an attempt to put the style of eighties comics and graphic novels on the screen.

Mercifully, 'Paradise Towers' and 1988's 'The Happiness Patrol' spared us the ending we find here, as the armies face up against one another, but, seeing their leaders making out, discover within themselves the urge for romance, though whether this is love winning the day or hormones inflaming a long overdue season of lust, who can say?  The film's incessant, sarcastic narration flares up, and we cut away to follow Aargh the Awful, this film's Chewbacca-analogue, dancing into the sunset with a getto-blaster.

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'America 3000' is only available on VHS, which seems entirely appropriate.

Metropolis (1927)

The film looks better than this: I photographed my TV to get screen-caps
Still, what a wonderfully symmetrical city.

When I first told people about this hundred-films-from-a-hundred-years project, quite a lot of them told me I ought to watch this.  I almost didn't, so stubborn am I - but I remembered having liked it when I first saw it a few years ago, and didn't fancy my chances of finding a better or more interesting film to represent 1927 (though 'Napoleon' might have been exciting).  You probably all know about 'Metropolis', even if you haven't seen it, so I'm a mite concerned you will have heard it all before.  I'll try to be brief, though I may not succeed.

Freder sees somebody more beautiful

Freder, the wealthy, handsome and oblivious son of the master of Metropolis, accidentally discovers that his garden paradise is built over a vast dystopian undercity of oppressed, exhausted workers, whose whole grey lives are dedicated to their tedious labour.  The film is an allegory, by the way.  He falls in love with Maria, who offers a particularly Christian hope to the workers, persuading them not to despair or revolt, but to wait for the Mittler - the mediator, or Messiah.  As it happens, Freder is that Mittler, and pretty much gets to be Jesus and Moses at the same time, and defy the modern Tower of Babel.  It's a bit like 'The Matrix' (1999), if you can imagine the film without the computers.

Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who I'd so enjoyed as King Etzel (you know, Atilla the Hun) in 'Die Nibelungen' (1924) appears here as Rotwang, the archetypal mad scientist, whose science seems to made primarily of magic.  Rotwang has created a maschinenmensch, a mechanical version of Freder's dead mother, but chooses to model her face on Maria.  Thus, Brigitte Helm gives the film's most amazing performances, playing both the incarnation of charity and humility, and the sultry robotic succubus who makes the tuxedoed upper crust pant with uncontrollable lusts.

The Maschinenmensch and Rotwang.
His name, in German, denotes rosy cheeks, not a rotten wang, by the way.

So, it's an opulent sci-fi epic, of Biblical character, and it's set in a huge futurist city of extreme angles and stark lighting.  Fritz Lang pulls out all the stops to make the thing look magnificent, even filling the model-shots of the city with working cars, trains and aeroplanes.  Even the intertitles are bolder than usual, as they gleam with light, or drip with blood, or scroll up or down between shots of elevators.  The editing, too, is far more advanced than I've come to expect from the silent era.  Lang takes the montage technique we saw two years earlier in 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925) and does it faster, less literally and more psychedelically, if one can be psychedelic in monochrome.  Clue: one certainly can.

Silent films never looked better.  I don't think that's overstating matters: this film is the absolute peak of the silent era.  This is much more ambitious than anything made in the next decade, as the advent of sound, which began in earnest with the same year's 'The Jazz Singer', set back cinema's visuals significantly.  By the time studios and audiences had adjusted to the change, colour and widescreen had sent the movie in completely different directions. There could never again be anything like 'Metropolis', and it could never be challenged on its home ground.

The most exciting intertitle.

P.S. I seem to have failed to give you any screen-shots of the larger sets or more beautiful parts of the city, mainly because my photos all looked very terrible indeed.  Here's the trailer, then, which may knock your socks off.

P.P.S Since I've managed to post about a 1910s film followed by a 1920s film, I'll see if I can get through ten consecutive decades like this.  The next two films are from 1935 and 1944, and at least one of them is excellent.

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Once more, the film looks nicer than my screen-caps suggest.  Screen-capping a blu-ray is a tricky thing, so I ended up photographing my CRT's screen with a cell-phone camera.  The real film looks beautiful - except the recently recovered scenes, of course, which can only be properly described using the Bristol Stool Scale.  Discover for yourself!