Ten Forward

During the TOS re-watch we wound up talking about 60s and 70s SF a lot, which got me on a kick of watching some old movies. So far, though, they've been mostly disappointing.

I caught the second half of The Andromeda Strain (my roommate was watching it) and mostly enjoyed it, but Silent Running I actually turned off after an hour. I've seen leftovers less stagnant! Then I watched Soylent Green, which utterly failed for me as a detective movie in addition to having a weird sex plot grafted right on top of it for no apparent reason.

So in summary: you've all disappointed me. I demand better recommendations!

Torie, I'd recommend The Omega Man, one of the many adaptations of Matheson's "I Am Legend." And have you ever seen Logan's Run?

I adore Andromeda Strain, but then I like my movies slow and brainy. 2001, of course. Doctor Strangelove is AWESOME, particularly the ending. A Clockwork Orange (but TW for the sexual violence). Westworld/Futureworld. Day of the Triffids (not GOOD sf, but it's based on John Wyndham, my very favourite sf author ever ever ever), plus (if you're looking for books) anything else by him. Close Encounters. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Alien. Time After Time.

Eugene: I haven't seen The Omega Man. I should give it a shot because I do really like I Am Legend (the novella; as for the movie, I loved the first 90 minutes of it, and loathed the last half hour).

I thought I didn't have to see Logan's Run until I turned 30!

Bob: I've seen Dr. Strangelove (love it) and Planet of the Apes (eh) but not the others. Should I add them to my queue?

Cait: I hate 2001. I've tried to watch it THREE TIMES. I always fall asleep after the first hour. I watched it a huge outdoor film screening thinking I can't possibly fall asleep here! But I did. I love Clockwork Orange, Close Encounters, Alien, and even Invasion is pretty fun. Haven't seen Day of the Triffids, Time After Time, or Westworld/Futurewold, so I'll add those to the list.

Glorbes: Planet of the Apes was interesting and worth watching but I wouldn't say it's good. I guess I haven't seen it in like a decade, though, so maybe it deserves a rewatch. Don't worry, I've seen Zardoz. It's like Barbarella, only not at all fun.

Tori: Yes I think you should add them to your queue. (Make sure the The Manchurian Candidate that it is the 60's movie and not the remake - the film that shall not be watched) Now I like Soylent Green, but I could imagine you growling throughout the 'furniture' business. If you have no seen Children Of The Damned, well that is I film I feel with confidence you will like. I showed it to a meeting of the San Diego Vintage SF club and we had our biggest turn out, most of the people had never seen the film and they fell right into it. (As Caitie undoubtedly knows it is based on a John Wyndom novel, and again see the 60's version for the 90's remake by John 'I have lost all my talent' Carpenter.

Forbidden Planet IS awesome. The effects still look amazing.

Quote from DemetriosX on November 23, 2011, 14:04
It also occurs to me, since Torie is an X-files fan, she ought to try to find the old Night Stalker series.

Kolchak is streaming on Netflix and I've been meaning to check it out. I'll bump it up in the queue.

Ooh, I'd forgotten Children of the Damned, though again I think the book is better (The Midwich Cuckoos): for women, I think, it's a real horror story, as it involves nonconsensual pregnancy in a rural and conservative area, with a great deal of slut-shaming and pressure. What I like about Wyndham is that he shows these things without glorying in them, and that he shows their different effects on the various women, while clearly writing in the first person as a man. Each of the women has a response to the different phenomena that suits her differing character.

This is a characteristic of Wyndham's writing that I find throughout his work, and it's so notable to me that it feels like a weird breath of fresh air, when set alongside the work of his male contemporaries. It's so mundane, but it's so important to making women readers feel part of the world we're reading.

/rant :D

Quote from bobsandiego on November 23, 2011, 17:00
Caitie: You mean surely Villiage of The Damned, as Children of The Damned was the god-awful sequel. (which I sadly own as itis a double DVD with Villiage Of The Damned.)

I surely do, thank you, yes. I've only seen the first, just got the names mixed up. :)

Ooh, (original) Day the Earth Stood Still! That is the bomb (irony intended).

Michael Rennie was there
In silver underwear...

Eugene: No need to see the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, unless you enjoy pain. Your enjoyment of John Carpenter's Village Of The Damned is likely to be lessened when you see the original. (really? A California town named Midwich?)
Caitie: A few weeks ago I watched Tarantula and completed my Science-Fiction Double Feature experience, I have now seen at least once every film mentioned in that song.

Marooned, The Day the Earth Stood Still (original version), Village of the Damned - good films all.
I couldn't watch 'Dr Strangelove', but it's one of those 'love it or hate it' films, I think, and Peter Sellers' antics always leave me cold.
Haven't seen 'Capricorn One' mentioned - it's been a long time since I saw this, but I remember enjoying it the first time I saw it on TV.

Another film that I just thought of is the 70s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It isn't bad. It doesn't hold a candle to the original, but it's far superior to any other remake. Plus it acknowledges the original with Kevin McCarthy by having him running around San Francisco shouting out his warning in the opening. Of course, it's also proof that Leonard Nimoy is a better actor when he's being stiff and emotionless.

DemetriosX; I just recently watched The Invasion and I thought that was a quite good remake of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. different enough that it is its own film, yet clearly inspired by the same source material.
Doctor X really isn't mentioned in Science-Fiction double feature, but that's my own personal opinion. (Doctor X did NOT build a creature in the movie Doctor X.) However if you get a chance to see Night of the Demon/Curse of The Demon (one is the US title the other the UK title.) it's worth the watching.

DemetriosX: There no creature building of any kind on Doctor X. There's artifical flesh and it plays a part in the murder mystey, but no creaures. In the song we here about Doctor X building a creature during the chorus when we are also hearing about Brad and Janet, not other clsssic films get mentioned during the Chorus and Dr X is kind of a forgoten film and was never a classic of SF filmdom. Hense my thought mr. O'Brien was not really referencing it in the song, but I'm an odd thinker and I knwo that.
The remake you are thinking of is The Body Snatchers and was pretty horrid, so horrid it kept me away from The Invasion which turned out to be a mistake.

My BROTHA! Lay some elbow-action on me. :D

And during the mid 80's I was doing Riff-Raff every weekend at the Ken Theater in San Diego!!

:)
:D

The participation, for me, was like this site: about the people I met. The first friend I ever had with a Newfoundlander accent was one of the people in the revue, for instance, and the first openly gay man who became a friend of mine (this was 1981, to be fair), and a lot of others, people I'd never have met without Rocky. Similarly here, I suspect that many of you are of a political bent that would mean we'd likely never meet or exchange views in any civil way - without Trek.

All shared media, for me, is about meeting people who aren't me, people who aren't like me, except that we like $PROPERTY. Music, books, plays, movies, TV, it's all about finding other people who like it, and are different from me. I am and always have been a committed xenophile - I'm the character in Close Encounters who chooses to go with the aliens, because they're alien. I learned six languages because I like people From Away, and that's a good way to meet them. Well, and a bit of aptitude, maybe (three of them I learned at the same time: DE, RU, and JP). I want to be able to go anywhere in the world and speak a language that at least some people there might speak. I still need to collect Hindi, Arabic, and Mandarin. It's like a Pokelanguage thing.

Torie: Well, you had said that the problems you had with both Silent Running and 2001 had to do with the slow pacing. Marooned has a lot in common with both of those films in terms of cinematics, though not story. If Silent Running puts you to sleep, Marooned will have you out cold before the couch cushions are warm. You know that longish sequence in 2001 between HAL refusing to open the pod bay doors and Bowman making his daring, helmetless leap through the vacuum of space to get back into the ship? That's most of Marooned.

As for the Stepford Wives, it wasn't really supposed to be creepy. It's social commentary, but it may be past its sell-by date, like a lot of the progressive stuff in TOS that made you shake your head at their treatment of women. The Night Stalker series never quite lived up to what it wanted to do, but the original TV movie, the one set in Vegas, is pretty darn scary. Not least because it's in Vegas and most of the movie takes place in the bright sunshine. You must see Forbidden Planet, though you should probably prepare yourself for the sight of Leslie Nielsen as the romantic lead.

Caitie: I get the importance of the participation, but I suppose you could say I don't grok it. It's an intellectual understanding and nothing more. I saw it the first time at the LASFS con in 1978, so participation was limited to shouting, and again a few months later at the Rialto in Pasadena. But that was before the audience show became such a big part of the experience. A few people dressed up, but that's about it beyond cards, toast, lighters, rice and commentary. I'm pretty slow to relax and open up to people and I was even more uptight back then. The kind of stuff they started doing a few years later to get more reserved audience members involved would have had me flailing my arms to get people away from me as I beat a hasty retreat for the exit.

But I see what you get out of it. That quote from Spaced has to be read in Simon Pegg's voice as he becomes more and more frantic with every word and every "B" is more explosive than the last. Also, Spaced is awesome and has lots of SFnal references in it, although it is well outside the 60s/70s range of this thread.

Torie: LOL, it's not the extremism of you lot that makes me think we wouldn't have much in common, but my own extremism. I like to characterize myself as being so far left even Che can't see me. As an example, I've spent much of the day reading and nodding along to Trotsky in his work on the path of the rise of fascism, and also shuddering somewhat.

Quote from bobsandiego on November 29, 2011, 17:58
Torei & Eugene: I think The Manchurian Candidate will seriously mess with you image of Angela Lansbury. (snicker snicker snicker)

Oh, it did--further reinforced by her amazing performance in Sweeney Todd.

Cait: Hahaha! Okay, just checking. Message me sometime if you ever want to talk politics.

Bob: Yeah, I try to keep it out of fandom unless the work is overtly political itself (like the rebooted BSG's Iraq War season... that was weird!).

Tangentially related to Angela Lansbury, I've been meaning to re-watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest after watching Louise Fletcher for seven seasons of DS9.

Demetrios: Oh, I've seen it, but it's been a while. It's also one of my favorite books.

Hmm, you actually said REwatch. Reading comprehension, I has it.

There's a fair amount of Trek connections in that movie. Louise Fletcher in DS9, Christopher Lloyd in ST:III, Brad Dourif was in a couple episodes of Voyager, Vincent Schiavelli was in an episode of TNG. All we're missing is somebody from Enterprise and maybe from the TV version of TOS.

For me, Brad Dourif has always been Bruce Dern: The Next Generation. He took over the "man between 20 and 40 who is wound WAY too tight" roles, though Dourif has a bit more range than Dern. He does sinister better; I can't see Bruce Dern really pulling off Wormtongue.

Dwight Schultz, OTOH, is the poor man's Bruce Dern. He tries to fill the same niche, but never quite pulls it off. Maybe his skills were hampered by spending years in a cast where the other 3 never did more than mug for the camera. But I suppose we'll get to him later. Interestingly, both Dourif and Schultz were on B5.

One movie worth tracking down - for historical research - would be "Chariots of the Gods" based on Erich Von Daniken's books "Chariots of the Gods" and "Gods From Outer Space." While those books seem largely forgotten and the movie almost completely forgotten, there was a period during the 70s when their influence could be noticed everywhere - even in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Does TV count? I really enjoyed UFO back in the day, and most of the early episodes hold up okay, but it lost its focus after a while. That opening, though, is classic!

I love Brad Dourif. My first encounter with him was that X-Files episode, which remains one of my favorites. He's perfected the big, watery-eyed creep look so well. I'd still love to see him play Iago, but I guess he's a little old for that now.

I'll be watching him again soon because I finally got a blu-ray player and the first thing up for viewing is the LOTR trilogy.

Let me add a couple more movies that aren't SF, but are sort of SF adjacent.
Flight Of The Pheonix And that would be the original, not the thrice cursed remake. The idea of making an new airplane out of a crashed one is a concept i think deep in the soul of the modern geek. That with out techn and our brains we can survive.
The Wicker Man (do I have to say it? the original not the woman hating remake. Really dud where did you get woman hating out that first movie?) This film can be best described as an art-house, musical, horror film, and people either really like it or they think its a jumbled mess. I think it's one of Christopher Lee's best performances.

LOL - the Starlost was truly something. It was made on a budget that made old Dr. Who look lush, in a studio in east Toronto about two miles from where I lived as a teen. Walter Koenig got a role on it, playing an alien called "Oro" who wore a gold-lamé jumpsuit and had a flying saucer.

Sadly, it could have been such a cool thing, but it really wasn't. The writing was so awful, the acting and props nd sets were...gah. Even the presence of 2001's Keir Dullea as one of the two pathetic male leads (the other is a TV weatherman in Toronto now, for a good thirty years) couldn't make the show watchable.

Harlan Ellison was successful in forcing the producers not to use his real name (he was credited as Cordwainer Bird, his Alan Smithee handle), while poor Ben Bova got stuck with credit as the "science advisor" for the show (he quit after one episode had aired).

Truly an appalling mess, one of the few really bad things to come out of the early years of the CanCon rules. By law, public broadcast TV must show a certain percentage of Canadian-produced work, with some complex formulae about whether something is Canadian enough - in the early years, this meant some really appalling dreck was broadcast (*cough*TheTroubleWithTracy*cough*), but in more recent years, it's brought some pretty damn good shows to the air, like X-Files and Supernatural and Stargate and The Tudors and a bunch of others, all of which were/are shot or produced in Canada and thus count to some greater or lesser extent.

I watched the original Rollerball not long ago. (First time in at least Ten years.) I think this one stands out as one of the best examples of how movies, and audience expectations, have changed since the 60s and 70s. When this one first came out all the buzz was about the exciting action scenes on the track. By today's standards, the pacing is slow and the action looks staged, but this one still holds up for me. James Caan's performance as Jonathan E. is amazing. Jonathan is a man with only Two passions and both of them have become out of step with what the controllers of the society he lives in expect of him. During this last viewing, I found myself comparing his unemotional performance to that of Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump.

Rollerball was one of Two movies given to me this year in the giving of unusual DVDs as Christmas gifts between myself and the owner of the hobby shop where I work. (I've come to look forward to this as he's introduced me to some things I'd have not seen like The Fearless Vampire Killers [watch this one only if you like bad movies for being as bad as they are] and Hot Fuzz [the ads didn't appeal to me but now that I've seen it, I love it].) Anyway. The other movie this year was A Boy And His Dog. I've not re-watched that one yet. I'll have to get in the right frame of mind to watch it. I can see why some people love this movie, but my problem is that I read the Harlan Ellison story several times long before the movie was made. This story is like WSB's Naked Lunch (or any of his Wild Boys stories) in that you cannot make a faithful film version and expect to be able to openly show it - anywhere. On top of that, I expect that the film will not work because the sexual and moral attitudes will stand out like Dudley Moore's loveable drunk in Arthur when viewed against today's standards.