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Attended a party last night where each person brought clips from 3-5 science fiction films, each cued to a specific scene of up to 10 minutes. One could introduce the clips or not, and no one knew what anyone else was bringing. It was kind of fascinating to see the range, and that there was no duplication. (The 1970s predominated, however.) Food and booze were consumed. Below is each person's list, captioned by theme rather than the individual's name:

Sports Theme.
Rollerball (1975). James Caan explains the importance of using your ears and humiliates a cocky new team member.
Death Race 2000 (1975). David Carradine: "It's euthanasia day at the geriatrics ward. They do this every year."
Tron (1982). Light cycle race.
Bonus: An mpeg of hardcore role-players, in medieval costumes, calling out their powers and hurling tinfoil lightning bolts at each other.

Design Theme. Clips emphazing design and art direction.
Brazil (1985). The sliding desk scene.
The Fifth Element (1997). Leeloo drops into Bruce Willis's cab and a race through the multilevel city ensues.
Andromeda Strain (1971). Scientists are ritually humiliated as they descend through a succession of color coded "clean rooms."
Existenz (1999). Jude Law assembles the gristle gun in the Chinese restaurant.
Alien (1979). Opening scenes of the Nostromo chittering back to life.

Science Fiction is a State of Mind.
Land of the Lost (1974). Cute stop motion dinosaurs Grumpy and Alice menace kids in this Sid & Marty Krofft Saturday morning adventure.*
Waiting for Guffman (1996). Eugene Levy in a papier mache Martian costume.
Rushmore (1998). In a parallel universe, the Vietnam war is reenacted on a middle school stage.
Sleeper (1973). Miles Monroe escapes from the cops with an intermittently functioning helicopter pack.

John Carpenter is God; Going Crazy in Space; Forest Themes
Silent Running (1971). Bruce Dern plays poker with the maintenance drones Huey and Dewey.
Dark Star (1974). Talby breaks the communications laser and the bomb countdown begins.
They Live (1988). Rowdy Roddy Piper puts on special sunglasses and sees reality for the first time.
Castle in the Sky (1986). Sheeta and Pazu meet the forest keeper robot on Laputa.

*Script by Norman Spinrad (Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream). Other scripts in the series were by Larry Niven and Theodore Sturgeon. Who knew?

- tom moody 10-02-2003 9:43 pm [link] [add a comment]



Hmmm. Whether to see Olivier Assayas' art film Demonlover. In the plus column, Roger Ebert pronounces it "completely amoral" and means it as a criticism (this from the screenwriter of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls!) On the other hand, a thumbs-up from Charles "I Love Actresses" Taylor in Salon signals the camera will probably be making love to the stars for the better part of two hours (Connie Nielsen, Chloë Sevigny, Gina Gershon). Well, maybe that's okay. So I went.

Report: Paul Virilio and half the regulars at Index magazine seemingly served as script consultants, but the movie's not so bad. Mulholland Drive for cyber-wankers. The score a too-busy encyclopedia of art-noise moves from the past 20 years, too much damn electric guitar trying to put the punk in the cyber (when the credits come up at the end: "Oh, of course, Sonic Youth.") Lots of topical references to anime, vidgames, and the Internet. Not so topical regurgitation of Videodrome. And geez, the pixel-bleeping of penetration shots from nasty hentai cartoons just to get an R-rating lacks a certain...courage. But then there's that scene of Sevigny lying on her stomach on a hotel bed, nude, playing an ultraviolent wireframe kungfu game. *heart melts*

One would be tempted to think this is a dot-com relic arriving late after being held up in some petty distribution tiff. The sense of indispensability and edginess it tries to give the Internet often feels tacked on. The last shot is brilliant, though, keeping the film humble and positioning it squarely in the here and now of diminished expectations. At least for me. And Connie Nielsen, the thinking dude's Jennifer Connelly, does have a lot of screen time. Even though she's really too nice to be noir. Sorry if this is breezy; I'm out.

- tom moody 10-01-2003 5:04 pm [link] [5 comments]