Smart Words About Cinema
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire, a TV mini-series shot during a break on Fassbinder’s biggest and most prestigious project to date, Effie Briest, and broadcast on German television in 1973, begins as a corporate conspiracy thriller by way of a psychodrama, a stylized piece of pulp fiction in a near-future world. Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Several people have assured me that Logan’s Run is a well-above-average science fiction novel; not having read it, I’m hardly about to contradict them, or attempt to blame the failure of the film version on the novelists. But as Logan’s Run dribbled out via a hasty, convenient, [...]
On Saturday, February 11, Douglas Trumbull will receive the Gordon E. Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his contributions to the technology of the industry. Trumbull has over a dozen patents in his name, and developed or improved upon many of the filmmaking techniques that are standard in today’s [...]
Cornel Wilde’s grim, fatalistic end-of-the-world thriller No Blade of Grass is a forgotten dystopian classic of its time. Gritty and brutal, built on fears of ecological devastation through pollution and overcrowding (with hints of genetic manipulation gone bad), this 1970 eco-apocalypse thriller seems to have gotten lost in the overcrowded apocalypse now science fiction cinema [...]
The 1955 British science fiction thriller The Quatermas Xperiment is a landmark film for a number of reasons. It was adapted from a live TV serial The Quatermas Experiment (1953) by Nigel Kneale, which is still considered one of the most important and influential British TV productions of all time. It was the most ambitious [...]
Elio Petri’s mod twist on “The Most Dangerous Game” as social bloodsport is the original Survivor, where the bored, the ambitious, and the just plain violent can sign up for a deadly game of cat and mouse with fatal consequences. Based on Robert Sheckley’s short story “The Seventh Victim” (the script upped the body count), [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 52, October 1976] Bert I. Gordon’s initials form a whimsically appropriate acronym for the work of a man whose directorial stock-in-trade since the middle Fifties has been giantism. This time he has served up another “portion” of H.G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods, on which his 1965 Village of [...]
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I gave up my indignation over George Lucas screwing up Star Wars and sequels/prequels by re-editing scenes, adding special effects and rewriting small but central parts of the original experience. That doesn’t mean I like it—I’ve kept my lo-fi, non-anamorphic DVD edition of the original Star Wars, [...]
Roger Corman is the world champion of cinematic recycling. Why waste the potential of a set on a single film when there’s a hungry young aspiring director ready to cobble together a second feature and shoot on the set in the days (and nights) before it’s torn down? A couple of good films (and a [...]
In Scream 2, the question of whether a sequel can be better than the original film becomes a running gag, with participants intermittently suggesting examples. For Wes Craven, it’s just another of the many self-referential gestures in his Scream films and elsewhere. But for film lovers, it’s a game worth playing. Enthusiasts differ on whether [...]
When Star Wars became the smash hit of 1977 by turning B-movie adventure into big-budget spectacle, drive-in mogul Roger Corman saw the writing across the stars. The producer and former director had made his share of drive-in science fiction and space adventures, but they had all been cobbled out of spare parts and imaginative art [...]
Sucker Punch (Warner) There is no doubt that Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch, the director’s first original script, is a mess of movie. Even the term “original” is a questionable description, as the wide range of influences define the film as much as his own pop sensibilities. Yet Sucker Punch was so critically derided that I [...]
It’s always gratifying when a favorite film is discovered—or rediscovered in a way that creates a fresh perspective . Such is the case with 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, which was enthusiastically received in its time but continues to grow in stature. Last year, it joined the National Film Registry of significant American films. In [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 55, September 1977] Relevance has always been the great bugaboo of science fiction film. Among film genres, sf (“sci-fi” is a flippancy coined during the Fifties by people who took the genre less than seriously; those who know and love science fiction call it sf) has been a distinctly poor [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 56, November 1977] The gripping first few sequences of Damnation Alley are linked by slow-fade-to-black/ slow-fade-in interludes reminiscent of the time-passes-things-change ambience of 2001: A Space Odyssey; but the aimlessness of inconclusive ideas and what passes for special visual effects leave this new day-after-Doomsday thriller well out of the running [...]