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Blake's 7: Orbit (1981)
One of the Finest of the Series
Blake's 7 hit many high points during its run, and this easily ranks among its best episodes.
Blake's 7 always tried to remind its viewers that the characters we were seeing, with the possible exception of Blake himself, were not nobly motivated justice-seekers, but significantly ignoble people driven in large part by self-interest, and who saw a certain advantage in joining up with Blake and taking pot-shots at the Federation. A mix of such personalities has certain dark, nearly unavoidable consequences, and the fourth season explored them in fuller measure than the previous three.
Avon and crew have been led to the planet Malodar seeking the missing scientist Egrorian, who has created the Tachyon Funnel -- a super weapon that can annihilate whole planets from halfway across the galaxy. But Egrorian is no philanthropist -- in fact, almost no redeeming qualities of any kind -- and in exchange wants their computer Orac, one of their critical tools for staying ahead of the Federation.
Avon agrees to the trade, but senses a double-cross. His fears are borne out in full measure when they try to leave Malodar and discover their shuttle has been sabotaged and will crash in mere minutes.
So far, all of this seems like any other cross-and-double-cross, race-against-time yarn, and seems fairly run-of-the-mill. Almost lazy, in fact... Right up to the point you learn how much Vila weighs.
For nearly four seasons, we've gotten to know the crew of the Liberator/Scorpio, their interactions, their personalities, and their motives. Over time, we ascribed to Avon a mantle of nobility, one we assumed he had taken as a result of his time with Blake and his encounters with the Federation. And, indeed, he wore it well when it suited him to do so. But throughout the series, no secret has ever been made of Avon's motives, and his actions in this episode are entirely consistent with his history. And yet, we are still stunned.
It is an absolutely brilliant episode.
SCTV Network 90: CCCP 1 (1981)
A Masterwork
There is a non-zero probability that you, Dear Reader, can't remember a time before the Iron Curtain fell. If so, your ability to appreciate this episode of SCTV is grievously diminished, as it is easily one of their finest.
The "Perry Como Live" sketch would be worth the price of admission by itself, as Perry Como's "relaxed" performing style is taken to a hilarious extreme. But then they catapult themselves to sheer brilliance.
SCTV begins a live broadcast of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," starring lounge comedian Bobby Bittman (Eugene Levy) in the title role. He immediately begins (badly) ad-libbing gags, when the video signal starts to fall apart. A Russian satellite has started jamming SCTV's signal and replaced it with broadcasts from Russia's CCCP-1 ("three-CP-one"), and two Russian hosts greet their new American audience. Thus begins one of the great television parodies of all time.
"Today is Moscow," is in the style of a morning show, but is cut short when the Soviet "mini-cam" burns out. "Uposcrabblenyk," introduces us to Russia's favorite TV game show; and a host is brimming with sardonic amusement at Russia's enormous geographic area in, "What Fits Into Russia?" A public service announcement warns us against associating with Uzbeks; and we get a teaser for, "Tibor's Tractor," where collective farmer Tibor discovers his tractor hosts the reincarnated spirit of Nikita Krushchev.
In this post-Soviet era, some of the jokes may seem confusing, since the anti-communist cultural background narrative has largely been lost since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Even so, it remains one of SCTV's most incisive and hilarious episodes, and is an absolute must-see.
Katamari damashii (2004)
We Are Moved to Tears by The Size of This Thing
Video games have become such an enormous -- and costly -- industry that wild imagination has been almost completely shoved aside in favor of shareholder-appeasing risk averseness, formulaic game design, and endless sequels. "Weird" games, when produced at all, generally get no major promotion or distribution. So when such a game not only gets produced, but gets enough buzz to get an English translation and American distribution, there must be something very special about that game.
Katamari Damacy is just such a gem. Developed by a small team at Namco originally for the Japanese market, Katamari Damacy absolutely resists any attempt to classify it among the common game genres. The term "surreal" is commonly applied, but that's a cop-out, as it fails to capture the game's charm. Indeed, any attempt to describe the game will leave the reader scratching their head. Yet a description must be attempted.
You play the role of the very diminutive Prince, son of the King of All Cosmos. It seems the King went on a bender last night and inadvertently destroyed all the stars in the heavens. So His Majesty has given you the task of collecting enough material on Earth to reconstruct them. This goofy narrative serves as the back-story for one of the oddest game play mechanics ever conceived.
To collect the raw materials, you are given a Katamari, a sort of lumpy soccer ball that sticks to anything and everything in the world. Using the dual joysticks (PS2 version) in a manner not unlike driving a tank, you roll the ball over objects. The objects stick to the ball, making it bigger. The bigger your Katamari, the larger the objects you can pick up. Collect 20 or so thumbtacks, and you'll be big enough to collect erasers. Collect a few of those, and soon flashlight batteries are within your grasp. Get big enough, and the family cat will find its way into the rolling clump.
The goal: Grow the Katamari to a given size within the specified time limit.
I know. It *seems* lame. Where's the conflict? Where's the weapon load-out? Where's the mighty explosions? But before you know it your simian nit-picking drive kicks in, and you're rolling around the colorful abstract environment trying to pick up everything in sight.
Oh, yes, the environment. There's not even an attempt at photorealism. The environment is abstract. *Really* abstract. As in, flat-shaded polygons, and not very many of them. The object, creatures, and people in the world look less like themselves and more like figures from a Playmobil set.
I know. It seems *really* lame. But, rather than be a drawback, it serves to aid the player by allowing each object to be easily visible, which is important when you're surveying the landscape looking for the path that will yield the most objects most quickly.
This is not to say there are no outstanding elements to the game. The music is nothing short of *fantastic*. Given the abstract nature of the game, you could throw just about any musical genre at it, and it would work. And that's exactly what the makers did. About fifteen different tunes are heard during the course of the game, all in very different musical styles, and not a clunker in the set. In fact, the soundtrack is so good that it got released separately on CD. Especially good tracks are "Fugue #7777," "A Crimson Rose and A Gin Tonic," and "Lonely Rolling Star," But by far the most infectious is, "Katamari on The Rocks," the game's signature tune. I absolutely guarantee you'll be humming along within minutes of hearing it.
But putting all these elements together results in a game far greater than the sum of its parts. Katemari Damacy is utterly unique in today's game market. Yet, despite being unique, the game is unpretentious, never taking itself at all seriously. Indeed, the makers clearly knew they were doing something very weird, and injected a great deal of humor. They had an odd idea and, rather than seeking to justify it, ran with it as far and as hard as they could.
The result is a delightful game that anyone can pick up, learn almost instantly, and enjoy. Katamari Damacy is a landmark in video games, and deserves to be seen and played by gamers everywhere.
Rollerball (1975)
An Enigma
This film defies classification or easy description. It's science fiction, but not really. It's social commentary, but not really. It's an action film, but not really. It's a cautionary tale, but... Are you starting to get the idea? Well, not really.
Rollerball is a story set in a near future where nation states have destroyed themselves via war, and have been replaced by corporations providing social services, structure, and governance. A classic description of dystopia. But not really, because everyone's beautiful and well provided for. But not really, because corporate executives wield absolute authority over every aspect of people's lives, so there's no freedom. But not really, because everyone's happy with all their luxuries and easy living, and no one bothers to test the bounds of their lives or ask any questions.
Enter Jonathan E (James Caan), an uncomplicated man who's starting to get the idea that something's amiss with this world. Jonathan E is an athlete in a game called Rollerball, an amazingly violent, brutal distillation of football, hockey, roller derby, motocross, gladiatorial combat, Unreal Tournament 2004, and jumping into a chipper shredder. Jonathan is the best player the game has ever seen. And that's a problem for the corporate executives, who designed the game specifically to chew people up, to reinforce the concept that individual effort and achievement was futile.
Jonathan E is summoned by Mr. Bartholomew (John Houseman), Executive Director of the Energy Corporation, which owns the Houston Rollerball team for which Jonathan plays. Jonathan is politely asked to retire from the game. Bartholomew says the corporation is merely looking after his own best interests. But Jonathan is already soured on the idea of corporate benevolence, as they took away his wife some years ago and gave her to an executive. He was never told why. He seems to have accepted that indignity with great difficulty. But for this newest request, he hesitates. He doesn't understand why the corporation would want its best player to retire, or why he should be forced to compromise again. He starts asking questions. He wants to know why.
And that is simply Not Done in this corporate-run world.
The corporation retaliates by changing the rules of Rollerball to make it more brutal, more dangerous, presumably in the hopes Jonathan will be injured or killed. But it is Jonathan's closest teammate, Moonpie, who is seriously injured and rendered brain dead. It's here when Jonathan realizes that there are no "rules" in corporate society; that executives will change things around at whim to serve some unspecified ends.
Jonathan decides to seek out the highest authority he knows: a computer named Zero which is the central index of all human knowledge and history. He asks it how corporate decisions are made and who makes them. Jonathan gets essentially gibberish in response, despite the computer technician kicking the machine and yelling at it to answer the question. Whether the computer is actively refusing to tell Jonathan, or it simply doesn't know, is left unclear.
Not even Jonathan is sure of his motives at this point. But the idea of simply walking away, as everyone around him has pleaded with him to do, is even more of an anathema to him as he enters the final game of the Rollerball season. The rules have been changed again, essentially to ensure that no one will leave the Rollerball rink alive. With essentially no rules, the carnage is total. All pretense of sportsmanship and fair play are abandoned. Jonathan is badly injured but plays on. Jonathan smashes the only other remaining player from his motorcycle. He is about to cave his face in with the game ball, but relents. He seems to discover, in that moment, that his enemy is not the player before him, but the game itself. With labored effort, he stumbles toward the goal and plunges the ball in -- the only goal scored in the game. The scoreboard reads 1-0, with him as the last man standing. Jonathan has not won the game. He has defeated it.
This film leaves you asking lots of questions: How could a corporate state succeed in comprehensive economic prosperity where previous governments failed? Why did the corporation see Jonathan's removal from the game as their only option? Why was Rollerball the only public spectacle available? Surely you want multiple spectacles so that you can diffuse popular interest, so that no single spectacle or emerging personality can dominate the popular consciousness.
Perhaps that is the hallmark of an important film -- one that keeps you asking questions. Rollerball doesn't neatly slot in to any of the common cinematic genres. It's not flashy, it doesn't have a rich score or very quotable dialog. The acting is restrained. It has a few good action sequences, but nothing compared to modern spectacles, or even other action movies of its time. The look of the film is dated, due to its heavy 1970's jet-set vision of the future (for which I have a nostalgic attraction). There is not one single thing that you can point to in this film that is its stand-out, defining quality.
And yet, the film as a whole seems to demand to be seen. As you watch the film, you can't help but get the feeling that Something Is Going On Here. That there's something important and significant about this film, and that you should pay attention.
And I guess that's what I have to say about this film: Find it, watch it, and pay attention. Because it's that kind of film.
Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965)
A Disappointing Reinterpretation
In 1963, the BBC produced an extraordinarily low-budget science fiction series. Doctor Who featured an enigmatic character known only as The Doctor, an extra-terrestrial time traveler, who flitted about time and space in his TARDIS timecraft, encountering strange lifeforms and cultures and righting wrongs wherever he went. The show was originally conceived as an "edutainment" program (before the word had been coined) with the Doctor traveling throughout Earth history and encountering major events. For this reason, the show very nearly died on the vine. But in the second serial, the Doctor travels millions of years into the future to the planet Skaro and encounters the iconic alien menace that would capture viewers' imaginations and propel the show forward for over twenty five years: The Daleks.
By 1965, Doctor Who's popularity made a film adaptation inevitable. Thus was born, "Doctor Who and the Daleks," which is strongly based on the original television serial that introduced them. The Doctor travels to the planet Skaro, a planet ravaged by radiation from an atomic war, and encounters the Thals, a peace-loving humanoid race; and the Daleks, an aggressive, horribly mutated race who must move about in mechanized armored travel vehicles that resemble large salt cellars. The Doctor befriends the Thals and helps protect them from the Daleks, who seek to exterminate them all.
Since its inception, the television series has developed a fan base with a dedication rivaling that of "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" fans. As such, enthusiasts will find little that's familiar, and will immediately spot the glaring changes made to Who canon (presumably to make the film more accessible to people who didn't watch the TV series), The main character -- the extra-terrestrial Doctor -- is now a human named Doctor Who, an eccentric scientist who invented the TARDIS in his back yard. And while the TARDIS exterior still resembles an old London police box, the interior resembles nothing so much as a messy workshop. The TARDIS' horrible grinding noise when it takes off? Gone, replaced with a flaccid electronic "thwiwiwiwiwpp!" The iconic theme music has been abandoned for a contemporary original orchestral score which fails to enthuse. Even the Dalek's chilling battle cry -- "EXTERMINATE!" -- is essentially absent.
Okay, so the hard-core fans will always magnify insignificant differences into catastrophic flaws. But how might the film appeal to more ordinary people? Sadly, not very well. The chief problem is one of pacing, and it is here that the movie's biggest attraction, the Daleks, becomes its greatest handicap. Daleks speak in an electronic monotone, which means you're going to get odd pauses in the speech. Sadly, the actors chose to draw these pauses out and, in some cases, insert them between every syllable. This means that scenes featuring dialog between two or more Daleks -- and there are a fair number of them -- just drag on for seemingly ever and completely kill the pacing.
A big selling point of the movie was that, for the first time, viewers would be able to see the Who universe with a bigger budget, and in color (the television series would not be shot in color until 1969). In this respect, the film delivers 100%, with widescreen Technicolor. In fact, the film quality is so good that it reveals every detail, including just how cheap the production actually is.
In short, there's not much here to appeal to newcomers (too cheesy and clumsy) or to loyal fans (gratuitous changes from canon). In the end, it's probably little more than a historical curiosity, an adjunct to the "real" show from which can be drawn dozens of other, better examples of the Doctor's travels.
Everything You Need to Know (1993)
A Failed Experiment
This very short-lived series on Comedy Central was a weekly commentary on the news, written and hosted by Christopher Hitchens. It predates Jon Stewart's far more successful "The Daily Show" by a few years.
Being a Briton, Hitchens brought a very English set of sensibilities to the show and, indeed, to look at it, one might have assumed the show was produced in England. Unfortunately, this probably proved to be its downfall, as it was likely too alien for American audiences, and definitely not a fit for Comedy Central viewers.
Whereas "The Daily Show" is vaguely formatted like a news show (which allows them not only to comment on the news, but also parody news presentation itself), "Everything You Need to Know" was straight monologue commentary, with Hitchens as host/narrator, as well as writer. His material was essentially witty editorial, and he matched it with a dry, deadpan delivery (think of the narrator/book in the radio series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"). If you're into cerebral British humor, then this is probably right up your street. Unfortunately, it wasn't up anyone else's.
Example: Hitchens assembled footage of network news coverage of the massive floods up and down the Mississippi river that year and observed, "The same question was on the minds of all the news anchors -- namely, what to wear to a flood." He proceeded to comment on the specious nature of the anchors' wardrobe (mostly foul-weather wear). His thesis was that Dan Rather wearing a parka is completely silly because, honestly, Dan Rather is the absolute last guy the network is going to send into actual foul weather. However, this thesis was not overtly stated, leaving the viewer to come to the same realization.
Whereas this sort of thing might play well in England, in the US I imagine Hitchens came off as pompous and dull. I won't say it's cancellation was any great loss, but I would have been interested to see where else the show might have gone. Today, "The Daily Show" now largely fills the gap left by "Everything."
The Venture Bros. (2003)
Pseudo-Retro High Adventure Parody
In the 1950s and '60s, the heady space age was fully upon us. Sweeping, magnificent Art Deco buildings and designs were all the rage. New manufacturing techniques meant that the rectangle was out; circles and curves were in. We looked forward to flying cars, commercial passenger flights to the moon, moving sidewalks, and push-button automation everywhere. The future never looked brighter (not to mention cleaner) and much of the media of the time wasted no opportunity to remind us of this. Common examples of the period include just about any James Bond film, the Flint movies, and animated series such as The Jetsons and Jonny Quest.
Forty years and two very cynical, jaundiced eyes later, we now have The Venture Bros., which liberally and hilariously skewers the, shall we say, irrational exuberance of the times. The most obvious target is Jonny Quest, but little from the period escapes the series writers' acerbic wit.
Son of Jonas Venture, Dr. Venture is sort of how you might expect Jonny Quest to have grown up -- forever living in the shadow of his father's greatness, leaving him insecure, sarcastic, and in a semi-permanent state of midlife crisis. Alas, Dr. Venture's own brilliance was not passed on to his boys, Hank and Dean Venture, who are in all major respects self-absorbed, easily distracted, and not too swift. In other words, normal adolescent boys. They are watched over by their hired bodyguard, Brock Samson, a chain-smoking seen-it-all paramilitary type from the Office of Secret Intelligence, whose extraordinary competence and calm under pressure is exceeded only by his -- as another poster put it -- relentless brutality.
The Venture Bros. is full of the obvious jokes (dim-witted villains surrounded by even dimmer-witted henchmen), but it also makes funny observations about the incongruity of its inspirational sources.
Example: Like Dr. Benton Quest, Dr. Venture is a super-scientist, making advanced gadgetry as easily as we might make a TV dinner. But what do you do when your lab becomes crammed with unwanted or no-longer-interesting inventions? Yup. Hold a yard sale. Try not to be surprised when all your arch-nemeses show up.
Another example: In episode three, we are asked to cast our minds back to the 1970's series The Six Million Dollar Man and wonder: What were Steve Austin and Sasquatch *really* doing chasing each other through the woods?
The music in Venture Bros. is also magnificent -- not just the signature tune, which takes its roots from the brassy modern jazz of the period, but also the background music throughout the episode. The music's sheer bombast is a perfect complement for the overblown, exaggerated characters, especially the villains.
Though a bit uneven in its execution -- it might actually benefit from being shorter -- there's plenty of funny stuff here to keep modern cynics laughing out loud.
Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark (1960)
Bleak
Produced in German for German television, this production of Hamlet becomes distinctly eerie when dubbed back into English. The production design is also "German Minimalist", typical of that era, making the movie rather bleak, even for Hamlet.
Despite the virtually non-existent sets and English-German-English translation, Maximilian Schell turns in an admirable performance as Hamlet.
This film was screened on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Whether or not this movie was "bad" enough for such dissection is open to debate, but Mike and the Bots leveled some excellent quips ("Honey, what happened to all the ear poison?").
Journey to the Center of Time (1967)
Black Featureless Void
That's where most of this movie takes place; a black, featureless void. It also pretty much describes the story line.
The evident lack of budget on this film is amazing. The "control room" is what looks like a bunch of borrowed props from The Time Tunnel, dropped haphazardly in a BFV. The time capsule, which is nothing so much as a stock footage screening room, has switches, lights, and rub-on transfer labels sort of randomly glued to the walls. The "future" is yet another BFV, with aliens in whiteface makeup standing on pedestals.
The techno-babble dialog is absurd, which is made all the more laughable by their deadpan delivery. "Quick! Lock in time synchronization!"
The special effects are nearly non-existent. Example: When the time capsule spins out of control, the actors strike a pose flat against the walls while the camera spins around in the middle of the room.
As we approach the end of the film, the plot pretty much circles the drain as they recapitulate the entire movie in a puzzling flashback sequence.
This film would be ripe for screening in the Mystery Science Theater.