At least it was better than the last Bond offering. Entertaining for the time it lasted. But extremely bad special effects, a really bad Bond song (shoot Madonna) and credits, and the directing was really dull.

Thankfully Rosamund Pike was really good looking

great film; even greater score by Friedhofer (available on CD, in stereo, from BYU).

is this movie on DVD? gotta look that up.

So all in all, I still found Soderbergh's Solaris interesting. The new ending (nothing that happens in the last fifteen minutes of the movie is in the book) serves to make a better climax than a direct adaptation of the book would. Your comparison of the perspectives of the two films seems to me to be able to work when comparing the book with Soderbergh's film as well.

Now, I still haven't seen Tarkovsky's version, but I'm very interested in it. I really liked the book, and I know for a fact that Lem made it clear on a number of occassions that he hated it.

I watched this, 23 years to the day that it came out (and yeah, I was in the theater for the first showing).

Even though the movie had its faults, the whole experience was a joy to behold. It was an "event." We fans hadn't seen our heroes for 10 years, and here they were on the big screen.

Watching it again today, some of those feelings are still there. The sort of rush of anticipating adrenaline when the words "Star Trek" come up on the screen (the cheers were the same as in the future with Star Wars); the first time you saw the Klingons fight V'Ger; the first time you saw Kirk in the door of the shuttlecraft. They all evoke memories that stand the test of time.

Granted, it's not the best Trek movie, but it was the first. And that is what makes it special.

John Frizzell's score is quite solid, but it sounds an awful lot like other scores not written by John Frizzell.

GHOST SHIP (USA 2002)

Directed by Steve Beck
Screenplay by Mark Hanlon and John Pogue
Photography by Gale Tattersall
Music by John Frizzell

Directed by Fernando León de Aranoa
Screenplay by Fernando León de Aranoa and Ignacio del Moral
Photography by Alfredo Mayo
Music by Lucio Godoy

Main Cast: Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar, Nieve de Medina, José Ángel Egido, Celso Bugallo, Enrique Villén

Unemployed shipyard workers bemoan their fate.

This critically-acclaimed award winner is on its way to the Oscars via the Sundance festival, so you'll get to hear of it. I must say, I didn't see what all the fuss is about. Bardem is excellent as usual, but the whole thing is far too tepid in its sense of social anger, as if the makers had suddenly been filled with outrage at the plight of the unemployed after a hard night's watching FULL MONTY (to which the direct references are plentiful).

David Arnold never seemed to get out of second gear either, but that's maybe just the drink talking.

CHANGING LANES (USA 2002)

Directed by Roger Michell
Screenplay by Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin
Photography by Salvatore Totino
Music by David Arnold

Graham, I don't think David Arnold even made it into second gear with Changing Lanes.

I bought the movie to see Sam Jackson smash that computer. He doesn't seem to have much luck with computers, first in Jurassic Park, and now nearly ten years later in Changing Lanes he's still having problems with "hacker crap."

The Tarkovsky got more of the philosophy in just by nature of the talk on board ship. Also, the set design of the film included a lot of mirrors and mirrored images that helped to get across the ideas of "Observer-created reality" and such. Just the act of looking into a mirror means to examine and/or question your identity and the Tarkovsky version is more rooted in this.

The Soderbergh version seems more interested in the story than the implications and in using the basics of the story to get to his leap of faith climax. And while it is true that Lem's novel pre-dates Star Trek, I was talking about Tarkovsky's film. Of course, it's unlikely that Star Trek ever played in Russia so that in 1971 Tarkovsky's Solaris was probably the biggest Sci-fi concept to hit Russia in years. Still, it was old hat in the US.

Tarkovsky supposedly made Solaris as a reaction to 2001 and one scene, the drive to town through all these tunnels and overpasses, seems like a parody of Bowman's psychedelic trip through the stargate. Also, there is a discussion about a naked child that could refer to the 2001 Star Child except that I think it's in Lem's novel.

Oddly enough, for a country that was big into space travel, Solaris seems an odd choice for a media event since the story seems to be anti-space travel in that encountering the Other in space makes a mess out of everyone. I mean this is hardly a heroic space saga with its screwed up scientists and trashed-out space station. The message of the Tarkovsky seems to be better to stay at home on the farm. So much for Russian hopes in space.

The Soderbergh version isn't as interested in ecology and home, although the official Solaris web site mentions that the reason it is raining on Earth in all the scenes that take place there is that the environmental conditions in the future have eroded (though not as much as portrayed in, say, AI).

AFTERGLOW (USA 1997)

Directed by Alan Rudolph
Screenplay by Alan Rudolph
Photography by Toyomichi Kurita
Music by Mark Isham

Main Cast: Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Lara Flynn Boyle, Jonny Lee Miller

Serious upheaval is caused by the philandering of two frustrated married couples.

I liked this very much. In a way it put me in mind of AMERICAN BEAUTY, but AFTERGLOW, as befits its title, is a much slower burner. Curiously though, it doesn't seem that brilliant while it's actually on, but by the end it's almost completely satisfying, with enough material to keep you thinking for days. Honest, amusing, tough, but ultimately compassionate towards its excellently drawn characters, I'd give high marks to all the AFTERGLOW crew except Nick Nolte's hairdresser.

Directed by Joseph Losey
Screenplay by Hugo Butler and Evan Jones, from the novel by James Hadley Chase
Photography by Gianni di Venanzo
Music by Michel Legrand

Main Cast: Stanley Baker, Jeanne Moreau, Virna Lisi, James Villiers

Wearisome Welsh windbag meets tobacco-faced French strumpet in Italy.

There's also a toffee-nosed English twat in there, so it's all very European, and the characters pick up masks a lot, and there are a large quantity of shots where people are seen in mirrors. I think it's about humiliation and self-deception in Babylon.

Unavoidably interesting ideas, and evocatively photographed, but also a bit of a stodgy and annoying wallow.

Directed by Budd Boetticher
Screenplay by Steve Fisher and D.D. Beauchamp
Photography by Russell Metty
Music by Frank Skinner

Main Cast: Glenn Ford, Victor Jory, Julia Adams, Hugh O'Brien

A man is mistakenly thought to have cowardly deserted the Alamo.

For the first twenty minutes or so, this looked quite promising. But it soon settles down into what I feared it might be - just another blandly colourful 50s western.

What an amusing little film. Boozer Walter Eckland (Cary Grant) is isolated during WWII and eventually ends up caring for a woman and group of school girls. I guess you could call it a "romantic comedy," but I emphasize comedy here.

Wow, at 60, Cary Grant still had it. His great subtle, and not so subtle, physical humor is all around. I've seen three Cary Grant films now and with every additional one I see, the more I enjoy watching this guy act. Sufficient score by Cy Coleman, but it was poorly recorded and often sounded like it came from horribly aged master tapes. They even looped Walter Eckland whistling a few notes of the theme(s) from the film into the picture.

I didn't like Greta Garbo the first few times I saw her on screen--too skinny, her accent too foreign. But critics often referred to her as a Goddess and to be looked upon with favor by Garbo was to confront something bigger than human. Yeah, whatever.

Still, the more I see her films, the more she grows on me. She's still not my ideal of a sex symbol, but she's able to communicate both romantic longing and romantic joy and so you root for her to be happy.

Spoilers:

INSPIRATION reflects a Victorian/Prohibition-era morality that does nothing but foul up the basic romance. Like the Bette Davis film DANGEROUS, in the end, the woman sacrifices her love to allow her man to live a more socially-accepted life and to make amends for mistakes of the past.

It's hard to imagine someone doing that today because we know being so noble just ends up ruining everyone's lives. But in 1930, it's still taken somewhat seriously that without living by certain moral standards everyone would be miserable anyway. That viewpoint is 'morality as essential to love' while today's viewpoint has become 'love is morality'.

Still, I can understand the basic trouble--what if you discovered the person you loved had been a prostitute, could you trust that she or he could have proper feelings for you enough to make your romance work or that you could face your friends if they found out.

The guy has problems with this but when he finally comes to terms with them, the girl still doesn't think he could live a happy life with her so she sacrifices their love and happiness to this greater possibility. I don't know how the guy's going to be happy without her even if he can live and work without being ridiculed, but she doesn't see it that way and she goes out the door.

Directed by Jack Smight
Screenplay by Donald S. Sandford
Photography by Harry Stradling Jr.
Music by John Williams

Main Cast: Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Glenn Ford, Edward Albert, James Coburn, Hal Holbrook, Toshiro Mifune, James Shigeta, Robert Wagner, Robert Webber

The battle of Midway.

Not so great. Big stars dressed like Action Man look silly when all jostling for space in the same shot, especially when they have nothing to do. And Mifune looks like he's impersonating Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu (eyes darting inscrutibly from side to side, lower jaw going from side to side too as if chewing toffees). And James Shigeta looks like he's impersonating Patrick McGoohan as THE PRISONER (and why has he got a piece of sellotape stretched across his top lip?)

Potentially interesting ideas of luck and chance are squandered - the script goes mostly for the mechanics of the events - but really puts its foot in it with an absolutely pathetic subplot about Heston's doubts regarding his son's girlfriend (she's Japanese). That was really shoe-horned in.

Star power fails here, and the spectacle ain't that good either. Spliced together real footage, model shots, and clips from TORA TORA TORA. Where's John Winfrey to tell us that those Airfix battleships didn't actually come into existence until August 26, 1945?

Caught a few films since last post.

FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN--A documentary about the army infantry division made up of skiers and mountain climbers. They trained from 1940-44 and were sent into Italy to take a mountain position away from the Germans. Then after the war, many of its members started the ski industry in Aspen and Vail. Not great cinema but an interesting and informative documentary.

FELLINI-SATRYICON---I'd seen this before but wanted to give it another shot. It's still as perplexing to me as it was before--just what is going on here? Obviously, it's a triumph of set design, if nothing else. But it's like an modern art version of an ancient myth what with its people in loincloths and it's electronic sound effects.

For certain, it's not a very pretty view of mankind, mostly lust and gluttony and murderous violence. Unless, it's meant to be a celebration of Man's earthy side, an attack on post-Roman morality. But I doubt that somehow. It's a hard film to get "into". It is more fascinating than emotionally engaging.

The whole time I kept thinking that this was as close as Fellini would get to Pasolini who is the king of taking bawdy myth and putting it on screen in a repulsive way.

With Fellini, we share his perspective, a fascination with the spectacle of the past, that we still can't penetrate because it is the past, a fragmented myth. At certain moments the narrative brings you in by the sheer power of narrative, but just as soon as you feel you're watching a regular movie, the odd visual or someone staring into a camera throws you out again.

I also thought a good part of it was allegorical. Perhaps some things are in the original text, but when the poet accuses another of being rich off of stealing other's verses, all I can think of was which film director did Fellini have in mind with this hidden jab.

In any case, I have to assume the connections between the mythic vision of the past and our own culture are deliberate since another Fellini film, ROMA, makes that connection clearly and without any doubt.

It's a film in two parts, each a seperate story by R. Tagore, who won a Nobel prize for literature.

Amazingly good humanist stuff, very real, very on the money. And funny too although that's just icing on a film with this much heart and understanding of things.

The first part involves a city boy who has come to a country village to be their postmaster. There is some very funny stuff as he goes to take a bath and is deterred by seeing a shed snake skin or when he tries to read a book when the local loco comes past the post office. But the real meat of the story involves the relationship between the post master and the 10 year old girl who does his chores. She makes it easy for him to live in these "dangerous" surroundings and he in turn treats her like a sister and better than she ever has been treated before. I can't give away the payoff moment--it's just too good.

The second part was also solid though it didn't have quite the same impact as the first. It deals with very typical issues in Indian society as a man whose mother wants him to marry rejects the woman she has arranged for him. He wants a poorer, wilder, spunkier, yet uneducated girl. She marries him, but only because her family really can't refuse his offer. She herself doesn't want to be married and that's where the conflict comes in. I can't give away the ending of this one either.

What astounded me, besides the understanding of human nature in these tales, was how well rendered to film they were. Ray's eye for things is just perfect. Shot mostly out in nature with the utmost realism, you just get a sense of the entire landscape where these stories are set and then when the dramas kick in, his camera is always in the right place.

One moment in the first part when the post master comes down with malaria at night. He's lying in the bed in the foreground and the girl comes into the room in the background. A light from the other room strikes her across the face and we see her expression of horror as she looks at the post master in the bed. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

Mike Clark in the USA TODAY called SOLARIS one of the 10 worst films of the year. I know you can call it a slow, dreary film, but it doesn't rate that kind of slam.

Caught CELINE. This is a 1992 French film by director Jean-Claude Brisseau. I've seen 2 other Brisseau films, DE BRUIT ET DE FEURER and NOCE BLANCHES. It's difficult to describe these. They are off-kilter worlds that dip into moments of fantasy. Like those films, CELINE is slow and odd. The two female leads are sexy, though that's not really what it's about.

A woman, Celine, tries to kill herself after the death of her famous father and is saved by a nurse, Genevieve. Celine puts Genevieve up at her estate. G teaches C yoga and meditation. Then C spends entire days sitting and then strange things begin to happen. A friend stops by to take them to the movies, C feels she shouldn't go and keeps G from going too. Later C & G find that the friend died in an accident driving to the movie. But that's just the start. G starts to see weird stuff: C levitating off the floor a la THE EXORCIST in some trance and C appearing inside the house and outside in the lawn at the same time. C starts healing all the long term patients that G was treating. Lastly, things come full circle when C's apparition saves G's life.

And, what's great is that the film ends and C still has all her powers, the conflict isn't solved by her dying or losing the powers at the end like Hollywood would do it along the lines of PHENOMENON or POWDER. Of course, C joins a Chinese monastery at the end, which keeps her out of everyone's hair and returns things to a normal world I suppose.

I haven't seen similar-themed films like RESURRECTION but I assume the basic metaphor working here is that what seems a completely despairing situation can turn in a miraculous way for the positive. I mean, you can't take it on the literal level that a few yoga lessons are going to instantly turn you into a healer/saint/magician of some kind. Even CELINE itself makes that point when G tries to pratice her yoga harder in order to catch up to the progress C is having and she simply can't get to the same place. Just the same, the miraculous enters her life any way.

CELINE was the first "upbeat" Brisseau I've seen. DE BRUIT ET DE FUREUR dealt with teen street gangs and NOCE BLANCHES with a May-December teacher-student romance. Both those films had 'DOOM' stamped in large letters on them from the first frame. But CELINE, even though it is a more positive vision, shares the same atmosphere that these other films do: languid, fantastic, prone to danger, a world where its people find sanctuary in the strangest ways and places.

MIDWAY held me too as to the logistics of the battles, but dramatically it was a snooze. A good documentary would have done the trick, I think. As regards the Wentworth re-recording of the score, well, I know what you mean. I too heard negative comments about that Strawbwrry track, but as I heard the Varese before hearing it in the film... you know, the old story.

COUNT YORGA VAMPIRE (USA 1970)

Directed by Bob Kelljan
Screenplay by Bob Kelljan
Photography by Arch Archambault
Music by William Marx

Main Cast: Robert Quarry, Roger Perry, Michael Murphy, Michael Macready, Donna Anders, Judith Long

In present-day Los Angeles, a vampire puts women under his spell by hypnosis.

In the version I saw, this was actually called THE LOVES OF COUNT IORGA, VAMPIRE. The film did tepidly exploit that aspect with ironic humour, but ended up being cheap-looking ('cos it was cheap) unatmospheric, and stultifyingly lethargic. Where was the raw energy of the semi-professional NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD? Different crew.

Robert Quarry as Yorga has the snooty distance, but only Christopher Lee can get away with looking so pompous (and even he had problems in DRAC A.D. 1972, surrounded by all those people in modern dress. Quarry as the Halloween Drac does look a bit silly too in his red-lined cape, considering the environment).

1}Open a set of curtains
2]Hold a couple of Candlesticks in your face
3]Cast a windmill's shadow over you
4]Throw a bit of water over you

In "Taste the Blood of......." Dracula even manages to KILL HIMSELF by climbing up the Gallery of a church, standing in front of a stained glassed window and developing Vertigo at the wrong time!

In "Dracula A.D. 1972" not only does Dracula manage to impale himself on the broken wheel of a Stagecoach (clumsy or what?] but at the end once again he manages to clumsily lose his balance again (after having water thrown on him) and fall into a ditch full of sharp pieces of wood. I ask you now?

These weak and often ridiculous demises of Dracula (and Count Yorga)were recently satirised quite nicely by Steve Coogan in the Lesbian Vampire episode of "Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible". In it, the antagonist vampire is disposed of by being impaled with the legs of an "occasional chair" and just to make sure Coogan gently pops a Bulb of Garlic into the screaming vampire's wide-open mouth!!

Gae

Gae - it is such a shame about those rubbishy endings in the Hammer Dracs. Only (HORROR OF) DRACULA really works, but, as you say, it's only someone tearing a set of curtains down then making a cross with two candlesticks. But it works up a good old frenzy in the actual film, because it's so tightly directed and performed. Apparently that was Peter Cushing's idea to have Van Helsing run along the table and pull the curtains down. He wanted an almost Errol Flynn-like touch of heroic action for that scene.

DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS was a solid movie, and the ending is attractively shot, but it's too easy again. Mind you, the "running water" idea reached truly pathetic extremes in DRAC A.D. 1972, when Johnny Alucard (I think) was pushed into a bath and someone turns the shower on. Poor ending for Chris Lee too in that modern-day disaster, as you mention.

I think we've covered most of the Hammer Dracs except perhaps SCARS OF. Oh right, that's when a lightning bolt hits him at the crucial moment. Deary me. Oh, and how does he die in TASTE THE BLOOD OF? I can't remember, but it'll come to me.

I pulled out an old video last night - THE OUTER LIMITS (original series): THE SIXTH SENSE. That's the one with David McCallum who evolves genetically by millions of years due to Edward Mulhare's experiments. Egg-headed McCallum is one of the most enduring images from the classic series, and this episode had its frissons, but it also had me laughing out loud at times. Apart from the the unintentional humour (the man in the monkey suit, the depiction of Welsh miners, McCallums increasingly expansive bald-caps) it was never quite convincing in its central idea. His disdain for human puniness doesn't seem the result of very evolved thinking (only when his bald-cap gets really stretched near the end does he become really benign) - or maybe it's just a bleak view of the future.

Looks like this may indeed be my last post for about a month. Who's going to start the January thread? No fighting about it please.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Graham Watt:
I pulled out an old video last night - THE OUTER LIMITS (original series): THE SIXTH SENSE.

---

"Oh, and how does he die in TASTE THE BLOOD OF? I can't remember, but it'll come to me."

Gae said previously:-

"In "Taste the Blood of......." Dracula even manages to KILL HIMSELF by climbing up the Gallery of a church, standing in front of a stained glassed window and developing Vertigo at the wrong time!"

Graham, I think I've only ever seen part of "Scars of Dracula" once on British T.V. For some reason, it doesn't seem to be played very often compared to the others mentioned above. Cant remember how good or bad it was!!

Gae