Tag Archives: 1987

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LILAC BALL (1987)

Лиловый шар

Liloviy shar, AKA Purple Ball

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DIRECTED BY: Pavel Arsenov

FEATURING: Natalya Guseva, Vyacheslav Nevinnyy, Vyacheslav Baranov, Boris Shcherbakov

PLOT: In the year 2087, a research spacecraft discovers the wreck of “The Dark Wanderer,” a legendary doomed ship containing mysterious purple spheres.

COMMENTS: Enmity is nasty business, and were it not for one plucky little girl, the future of mankind would fall to self-destruction. So we learn in Arsenov’s science-fiction/fantasy outing, Lilac Ball. It covers a span in time from a century into mankind’s future—when computerized intelligence facilitates deep-space exploration—to the ancient past, the time of Legends, wherein man and myth coexisted (if not in harmony, then at least side by side). In those days, myriad dangers arose for the common peasant by way of the dark sorcery of Baba Yaga and her three sons.

Events kick off in grand future style. Captain Green, the commander of the Pegasus who speaks nearly as mechanically as the ship’s computer, is tasked with escorting Professor Seleznyov and his daughter Alice to a research vacation. All of a sudden, the ship’s sensors detect an anomaly: a craft too large and too strange to be found in the database. Behold, it is The Dark Wanderer, and its floating ruins contain dispiriting records of the crew’s fate, a fair number of vitreous spheres, and the lovable four-armed archaeologist, Gromozeka. The spheres contain a horrible doom, but little Alice knows just where on Earth to find the purple ball secreted—thousands of years in the past—by the Dark Wanderer’s crew to destroy humankind at just the right time.

This movie is not without its charm, and its seventy-odd-minutes breeze by on the winds of adventure and whimsy. The first act, very much typical science fiction, is well executed; the filmmakers push their skills and budget to the limit. The Pegasus’ interior design is refreshingly dissimilar from most outings of the genre, with an open-plan cockpit/convening area (tea is served often) featuring computer consoles, greenery, short staircases, and a central table for four. Zipping back thousands of years into the past—I had had no inkling of a time machine until Alice mentions it for the purposes of returning to the “Era of Legends”—is rather less satisfying, albeit involving some endearing puppetry. (The baby roc is cute—and wholly undeserving of its fate at the hands of the Wanderer’s evil crew.)

Arsenov appears to aim for an all-the-young-adult-adventure-tropes experience, but his reach, alas, exceeds his grasp. Still, it is impossible to feel hostile toward such winsome narrative meanderings of future and past.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Curious mash-up of fantasy and science-fiction from the Soviet Union…  a strange mixture of mythologies, to be sure; part Sinbad, part fairytale, part Wizard of Oz. All in a film whose first act was straight science-fiction! There’s nothing wrong with blending genres, of course, but it’s a tricky business, and the disconnect between the two aspects of the story here is a little jarring, to say the least.” — Mark David Welsh

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan after seeing some clips and remarking that they “resemble something that AI watched in its early stages and picked up on.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

 

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KING LEAR (1987)

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William Shakespeare, Jr. V: “Just what are you aiming at, Professor?”
Professor Pluggy: [farts]
Goblin maid: “When the professor farts, the moon things are trembling.”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Jean-Luc Godard, ,

PLOT: After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster destroys all world culture, William Shakespeare Jr. V, descendant of the famous playwright, seeks to rediscover and re[Lear]n his ancestor’s works; simultaneously, Professor Pluggy investigates the phenomenon of cinema.

COMMENTS: Godard and the cinema – what more can possibly be said? To begin at the end: his 1967 film Weekend concludes with Godard [in]famously declaring the end of cinema. The enfant terrible of the French New Wave returned twenty years later with a post-apocalyptic adaptation of a Shakespeare tragedy in which he equates the non-existence of cinema with Cordelia’s poignant “nothing.” Godard details how this all came about within the film through metanarrative threads woven among scenes adapted from the titular play plus digressions into his many cinematic obsessions.

Godard’s Lear takes place “after Chernobyl.” Despite this premise, the film isn’t convincing as science fiction. It never explains how exactly Chernobyl managed to wipe out the arts beyond a one-sentence statement. Godard isn’t interested in hard science; he has other things on his mind, “no things” to be c[Lear] (or not).

Despite being structured around absence and loss, there’s a lot to unpack in this dense palimpsest of sound, text, and image. Among many literary references besides Shakespeare’s King Lear, details of famous paintings from art history frequently interrupt the action. Intermittent title cards define the film’s “Approach” through a variety of terms (“King Lear: A Clearing”, “King Lear: A cLearing”, “King Lear: Fear and Loathing”, “No Thing”). The chaotic sound mix consists of Beethoven sonatas distorted, slowed down, and overlaid with intrusive Buñuelian noise (seagulls, slurping soup, ocean waves, pigs snorting). Two competing voiceovers, reciting lines from Shakespeare, even drown out the dialogue of the (in-movie) actors.

In Godard’s hands, adaptation turns into an exercise in free association. The seagulls represent Chekov; the waves, Virginia Woolf. “L’Image“, by surrealist poet Paul Reverdy, quoted at length, describes “the image” as “a pure creation of the soul. It cannot be born of a comparison but of a reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart. The more the connection between these two realities [birds squawking loudly] are distanced and true, the stronger the image will be, the more it will have emotive power.”

Reverdy’s two realities reflect the conflict between Lear and Cordelia, the dual missions of William and Pluggy to rescue the world’s culture from oblivion, and Godard’s real life struggles with his producers to get the film made. Only two scenes from the actual play make it into the final cut. The entire film explores the opening scene with Lear and Cordelia’s argument. The tragic finale ends up distilled into a single frame.

Fresh off the string of John Hughes films which made her famous, Ringwald portrays Cordelia with patience and melancholy. As “Don Learo,” Meredith recounts the lives of famous gangsters and his own accomplishments with crotchety zeal and professional pride. He tells his daughter with conviction that loss of character is worse than losing money. She remains silent after this anecdote and when he angrily demands a response from her, she utters the famous “Nothing” which exemplifies the loss at the heart of the tragedy.

The rest of the film consists of William scribbling in a notebook while trying to regain his ancestor’s brilliance, and Godard himself as the enigmatic Professor Pluggy, a recluse who spent twenty years in his “editing room” trying to rediscover “the image.” So what exactly is Godard aiming at, amid all this audiovisual clutter? Pluggy serves as a narrator of sorts, yet he consistently mumbles his lines through one side of his mouth like he’s suffered a stroke (I turned on the disc’s closed captioning to make sure I understood what he said, but sometimes the captions simply read “[speaking indistinctly]”).

This muddled “approach” perplexed the few contemporary critics who saw it (many being weirded out by Pluggy’s wig of A/V cables). After the film’s premier at Cannes, the production company didn’t know what to do with it. Lear saw an extremely limited release in Los Angeles and New York then it sank without a trace before being released in France for the first time in 2002.

Nearly forty years later, it can be seen on physical media. In an era witness to the actual death of film stock and the transition to digital video technologies, Godard’s concerns about the future of cinema, and the power and virtue of film makers, remain eerily prescient. An unsatisfactory experience as a Shakespeare adaptation, Godard’s Lear intrigues as the very type of cinematic artifact of the late twentieth century his characters endeavor to excavate within the movie, an ongoing quest to find the image pure and true.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Daylight surrealism at its finest. Goddard is using this meta-textual dreamscape to lull you into an emotional place to explore one of the greatest moments in literary and artistic history. . .”–Andrew J. Eisenman, Elements of Madness [Blu-ray]

(This movie was nominated for review by Deadly Serious Andy, who remarked “I’d love to see the reaction of a roomful of people expecting a ‘normal’ take on the story.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

28*. WALKER (1987)

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“I was seriously off the rails here.”–screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, on Walker‘s commentary

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , , Peter Boyle,  Marlee Matlin

PLOT: Shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt hires William Walker, a mercenary and adventurer fresh off a failed campaign to establish an independent state in Mexico, to take a small army to Nicaragua to join their civil war on the side of the Democrats. Assembling a ragtag band of disreputable men lacking better prospects, Walker takes his army to Nicaragua, where he has unexpected success, driving back the Legitimist army and arriving in the capital of Grenada as a liberator. Initially accepting a position leading the army, Walker grows power mad and seizes the country’s Presidency.

Still from Walker (1987)

BACKGROUND:

  • William Walker was a real historical figure and, ridiculous anachronisms and obvious fantasy scenes aside, Walker describes the general direction of his career. Many scenes were drawn from his diaries and letters and other historical sources. (One major change was the role of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who did not sponsor Walker’s original expedition, but was involved in his downfall.)
  • The practice of American adventurers invading Latin American countries with private armies was surprisingly common in the 19th century, so much so that it earned its own name: filibustering. William Walker was the most successful filibusterer of all time. He somehow took control of Nicaragua with an army initially comprised of a mere 60 men.
  • Rudy Wurlitzer’s previous screenplays included the bizarre post-apocalyptic Glen and Randa (1971), ‘s cult film Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and the Western Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973).
  • Cox made Walker in the same year as Straight to Hell, a quickie scraped together after plans to film a punk rock concert in Nicaragua fell apart.
  • The movie was filmed while the C.I.A..-backed Contras were waging a guerilla war against the ruling Sandinistas. Cox filmed corpses from a Contra massacre and included the footage in the film’s end credits.
  • Universal Studios gave Cox his largest budget ever, six million dollars, to make what they hoped might be a prestige biopic, or even a hit. They did not expect the deranged, anachronistic, incendiary film Cox delivered, and after poorly-received test screenings they buried the film. Cox never directed in Hollywood again.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It’s tempting to cite one of the many iconic scenes of Walker, rifle in hand, striding confidently in the foreground in his smart Puritan-black suit while mayhem erupts in the background. We instead selected the surreal image of Walker striding confidently across the beach in the background, while in the foreground two of his men are being punished by being buried up to their necks in the sand with a tarantula crawling over one’s head, while their overseer enjoys a Marlboro and Coke.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Smoking during tarantula torture; 19th century helicopter evacuation

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Imagine Aguirre, the Wrath of God directed by (if he was obsessed with politics instead of sex and Catholicism). That’s Walker in a nutshell.


Original trailer for Walker

COMMENTS: Walker drops its strangeness on its viewers gradually. Continue reading 28*. WALKER (1987)

CAPSULE: ROBOT CARNIVAL (1987)

Robotto kânibaru

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: , Atsuko Fukushima, Kôji Morimoto, Hiroyuki Kitazume, Manabu Ôhashi, Hidetoshi Ômori, Yasuomi Umetsu, Hiroyuki Kitakubo, Takashi Nakamura

FEATURING: N/A

PLOT: Robot-themed animated shorts are assembled under the banner of a traveling “Robot Carnival.”

COMMENTS:

What do you call a robot made out of all kinds of things?

A Smörgåsborg!

It’s a dark day when the “Robot Carnival” comes to town. In a windswept desert, a young boy finds the torn remains of a poster. Who can say what the year is? All that is on display is a little village peopled by survivors: survivors who immediately suss the danger of the coming attraction. They flee to their homes, nail jagged bits of wood across doors and windows, and wait out the menace. The menace is in the form a gargantuan machine chuffing its way to the center of town; chuffing and crushing, leveling half the homes before the true fireworks begin. Yes, the Robot Carnival is here: featuring a full band, with rocket trombones; bomb-dropping ballerina-droids; and a fireworks display that will leave you flattened.

This dark whimsicality is Robot Carnival‘s opening salvo. Among the collection’s attractions is the nebulous “Clouds” segment (dir. Manabu Ôhashi), the most non-traditional of the spectacles. A series of old-photograph sections come to life, as a robot boy travels ever leftwards with meditative, and possibly mythic, imagery playing in the background. “Presence” (dir. Yasuomi Umetsu) is the longest of the bunch, and starts off with a gang of hooligans severing the head of a passing toff to use as a football; rest assured, the decapitated automaton minces no words about his displeasure at being kicked around by these young jackanapes. The tone shifts to tell the story of a steampunk toy maker who crafts a robotic companion, and who then makes an immediately regrettable decision which haunts him the rest of his days.

The crème-de-la-crème (or whatever a robot-preferred dessert substance may be) is “Nightmare” (dir. Takashi Nakamura), a beautifully eerie fantasia with a cartoonishly comic undercurrent. A strange ‘bot astride a hovering mono-cycle travels the night, zapping power transformers, vehicles—anything electrical—to summon therefrom smiling prowlers. (The sight of dozens of jaggedly lithe metal gremlins springing from an earth-mover will happily haunt my memory for years to come.) This eldritch summoner, whose manner and appearance suggest the fabled Pied Piper, is interrupted by a drunk, who espies the massing mechanical monsters and tries to hie to safety on his scooter—only to zip headlong into the massive puppet-master-bot for a sequence worthy of “Merry Melodies.”

As with any mixture, the quality varies from section to section. However, considering these anime shorts were produced by the director/animator team behind Akira, there is much comfort—and much robot—to be taken in the fact that they are one talented team among many involved in this cavalcade of clankinous and creepy contraptions . Across the seven short films, flanked by Katsuhiro Ôtomo and Atsuko Fukushima’s paired intro and outro, Robot Carnival clatters along at an occasionally uneven, but never dull, shambling of hisses, humor, gears, and grandeur.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If you’re a core anime fan, these shorts may be a little too alien and unfamiliar, but if you have a soft spot for creative animation then there’s plenty to love here… The animation is exemplary, the art styles wildly original and the stories support the madness.” -Niels Matthijs, Onderhond