Movies: The Future Revisited
Turan, Kenneth
MOVIES The Future Revisited KENNETH TURAN For reasons that are probably best left unexamined, a man named Walt Lee has spent a good part of his life compiling a three-volume Reference Guide to...
...The news business is one of the very few that is actually in a position to practice what's often called corporate social responsibility, but can we...
...The bad guys, in the form of a nasty military-industrial combine, thwart him at the last minute and Newton seems destined to end his days as a homesick spaceman forever bound to planet Earth...
...That's not what it's all about for Mayor Young, who had a shoofly fit...
...Forced, self-indulgent, and quite definitely minor Polanski...
...All in all, not a bad day's work...
...The News Business Some revealing news out of Detroit: An internal memo to the staff from Michael McCormick, an editor on the Detroit News, got itself leaked to the public...
...That's what it's all about...
...Tell the news, and tell it fairly," the Mayor implored, but he obviously defines news as a public service, not as a product, not as a business...
...K.T...
...Already here are two of the summer's bigger attractions, Logan's Run and The Man Who Fell to Earth, science fiction films which manage to demonstrate both the attractions and the pitfalls of the genre...
...We see or hear nothing we haven't seen or heard somewhere before, and while this devotion to tradition may be touching, it quickly becomes quite tedious as well...
...Even Steve Spielberg, after Jaws the hottest director going, is now working on a big-budget item called Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
...If we get them talking about our product, our circulation will pop up...
...For the other side of the coin of Roeg's marvelous visual imagination is, perhaps inevitably, an absolute inability to handle narration, to tell a simple story...
...Detroit Mayor Coleman Young heard about it, and there have been many feathers and much fuss as a result...
...At their best, these films seem privileged hints at what we are destined never to know...
...Keep a look out for and play well the stories the city desk develops and aim at this group...
...Bowie is also helped by his director's quirky, hard-edged camerawork, which gives everything a slightly off-center, decidedly alien feeling...
...Occasional nice touches notwithstanding, Bill is too pokey and pseudo-folksy to succeed, a movie that loses track of where it wants to goSilent Movie—this is funnier than you'd think a subtitled Mel Brooks comedy with but a single word of spoken dialogue would be, but not by much...
...After a number of fallow years, science fiction films are making a comeback of sorts...
...Much harder to grasp is The Man Who Fell to Earth, which promises to join the first film by its director, Nicholas Roeg—Performance—as a cult object of the highest order...
...Long stretches of time pass when nothing seems to happen or when whatever is happening is plainly incomprehensible...
...It has 20,000 entries covering .seventy-five years of filmmaking in fifty countries and is so godawfully inclusive that the Australian Film Index called it "worth at least four times the asking price...
...He plays Thomas Jerome Newton, a quiet alien who comes to earth armed only with "nine basic patents," whatever they are...
...He builds himself an enormous scientific empire, apparently with the hope of returning to the wife and children he left back home in the stratosphere on an odd-looking planet that suffers from terminal drought...
...That's Entertainment, Part Two—more of the same and, if possible, more amusing than the first...
...Earth's star is also a rock celebrity, in this case David Bowie...
...If nothing else, the Guide is a concrete indication of the irrepressible popularity of the science fiction film...
...MOVIES The Future Revisited KENNETH TURAN For reasons that are probably best left unexamined, a man named Walt Lee has spent a good part of his life compiling a three-volume Reference Guide to Fantastic Films...
...Their boundaries are circumscribed only by the imaginative powers of the people making them...
...And if we get by that sticky little question, what do we do if the public doesn't want to know what it ought to know...
...The memo says in part, "We are aiming our product at the people who make more than $18,000 a year and are in the twenty-eight to forty-year-old age group...
...Fitfully funny, but not as good as it should be...
...Still, problems and all, one only has to take a peek at Logan's Run to gain an immediate appreciation of what The Man Who Fell to Earth has accomplished...
...Anyone trying to recount the plot in detail is faced with an enormous number of unanswered questions which Roeg apparently feels it is unnecessary or perhaps even silly to attempt to resolve...
...a staff member of The Washington Post, reviews movies regularly for The Progressive...
...Of course, who's to say what the public ought to know...
...Look for sex, comedy, and tragedy...
...Once again we see the future as a lot of blinking lights with people dressed in flimsy Flash Gordon costumes inhabiting what look supiciously like ritzy Singles Only condominiums...
...Surprisingly, the best thing The Man Who Fell to Earth has going for it is David Bowie, who, with his orange hair, dead eyes, tall angular body, and soft voice, looks and acts uncannily like a man from outer space, thus in one master stroke giving the entire film a bizarre plausibility that it would otherwise lack...
...Logan's 1984 theme of one lone human fighting technological totalitarianism is a terribly hackneyed one that such features as TEX 1138 have attempted with much greater success, and this lack of imagination and reliance on tired science fiction cliches are the film's basic problems...
...It takes place in the Twenty-third Century, when whatever people are left after the ravages of war, overpopulation, and other disasters spend their time having fun, fun, fun...
...It's got to sell papers or it'll die, just as I have to try and keep you listening or I'm outta business...
...Despite splendid images and moments, Earth tends to drag when it shouldn't, to dawdle and meander all over the place...
...Yet one has to be careful when dealing with The Man Who Fell to Earth and not let the pleasant recounting of its virtues blot out its equally overwhelming faults...
...Murder by De.ath—a superb concept—five of the world's greatest fictional detectives called upon to solve a perfect murder in a crumbling old mansion— that ends up as an irritating waste of talent...
...If they try to escape or "run," a group of special police Kenneth Turan...
...Trying to titillate suburban cocktail parties with front-page horror stories," is how the Mayor characterized what the Detroit News calls its product...
...Keep trying and eventually file for bankruptcy...
...One of the ways we sell our product is by trying to persuade potential customers that we have a new, extra-added, miracle ingredient called truth that's better for you than fluorides in the toothpaste...
...At their worst, they show how much our supposedly lofty visions are really prisoners of everyday reality...
...The opening titles alone are better than most current attractions...
...Let's hope so, but in the meantime don't be too hard on the Detroit News...
...That's the good news...
...It is obvious they won't have a damn thing to do with Detroit and its internal problems...
...Determining what the product should be in the news industry is extremely difficult...
...These are things readers will talk about the next day and that's what I want...
...Like Performance, which had Mick Jag-ger...
...You can't blame him for that...
...The Logan of the title is a Sandman himself, but special circumstances combine to make him run, too, and by the end of the film he has not only escaped but somehow created a brighter future for the entire human race...
...Buffalo Bill and the Indians—a new film by Robert Altman is always worthwhile, but this one is less worthwhile than most...
...It's in the competitive battle of its life against the Detroit Free Press...
...The bad news is that once they reach age thirty they are killed in an elaborate ritual called Carousel...
...Except, perhaps, for the western, it is the sturdiest of film genres, with a noble lineage extending back at least to film's earliest pioneer, Georges Melies, and his comical 1902 Voyage to the Moon, where an errant rocket gives the Man an enormous black eye...
...NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN (Nicholas von Hoffman is a regular commentator on the CBS Radio "Spectrum" series...
...An idea whose time has not quite come again...
...Logan's Run is the easier and the less satisfying of the pair to deal with...
...The firm hand that should have been guiding things was apparently too busy fooling around with the camera to notice that anything was wrong...
...called Sandmen search them out for destruction...
...Hits and Misses The Tenant—Roman Polanski repeating himself in a nightmare copy of Repulsion with a man—the director himself—as the victim instead of a woman...
...Whether dealing with earthmen going to space or spacemen coming to earth, the unknown future or the hidden past, science fiction films all have the built-in advantage of dealing with things which by definition are unknown and perhaps even unknowable...
...If it's sex, comedy, and tragedy you folks want to buy, I guess we'll keep on selling it to you...
...Baffling or not, this is at least a film that has tried for resonance, that in its strangeness touches in all of us the odd chord that says, as the lights dim and the darkness encroaches, "You know (shudder) I'll bet it could happen just that way...
...There is a general feeling that we have an obligation to tell the public what it ought to know whether it wants to know it or not...
Vol. 40 • September 1976 • No. 9
