Go ahead, put on some cool, soft jazz or maybe some selected songs from a certain French chanteuse. Grab some cocoa or an alcoholic - but not too alcoholic beverage. Light up a spliff or a cigarette, sit back, inhale, exhale. Let the soft flicker of dozens of refreshes a second massage your eyeballs into pure bliss. It's time for the low key Superelectric update.
Are you comfortable and relaxed? Then remember to bookmark this link for later reading. I found it on talking points memo. It presents extracts from a book about Afghanistan in the 80's and some of the ridiculous things Richard Perle and Ollie North wanted to do back in the day. Specifically, they wanted to encourage Soviet soldiers (remember, this is when the nutty Afghans were on our side) to defect to the US by surrendering themselves to the Afghans who, at the time, were really only interested in doing uncool things to their prisoners' butts. Very uncool things.
But we shall take it all in a spirit of weltschmerz, take a sip of cool and a drag of hot and click our way to a chiller rest of Superelectric update...
Doctor Who
Mmmm, just watched three hours' worth of Doctor Who. I remember being a wee lad on a certain summer night in the 80's. There was no air conditioning, just a fan in the living room to cool us down. It was late night Sunday night, and I had the rare privelege of staying up to watch Doctor Who. It was Genesis of the Daleks, a classic Tom Baker-era tale, in which the Doctor is called by the Time Lords to destroy the Daleks.
The Daleks are evil robots. Doctor Who, more than any other sci fi tv show, understood the value of good robot porn. This was no Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek, where you only caught brief glimpses of one or two Cylons or Borg every dozen or so episodes. Doctor Who always had some Daleks or Cybermen or horrific, tentacled things (close relative of the robot) ready to flop about the screen screeching something in a processed electronic voice. No prosthetic foreheads, no long shots sitting around the bridge set. Lots of running and screaming and fabulous 70's video effects. Oddly enough for a kids show, the sci fi element was usually a lot heavier than it was for the American sci fi shows.
Take Genesis, for instance. The Daleks are evil cyborgs. They look completely robotic, something like salt shakers with a robot eye on a stalk, but this robot exterior houses a small living creature, a poor schmuck who, as a result of the radiation of a prolonged nuclear war and aided by a little genetic mucking about has become a little lump of semi-jelly with a tremendously bad attitude. He's the Dalek's pilot. The Doctor is sent to the time and place where the Daleks are being created with a mission to blow them up before they can begin their metallic existence, the primary goal of which is to go around killing people and doing nasty things while howling "Exterminate!".
And the Doctor gets to the point where he's ready to blow up all the squiggly jelly things, but he stops, sits back, and he contemplates the results of blowing up all the Daleks, both good and bad. And then he decides not to nuke em because genocide is just really not cool.
Which isn't bad for a kid's show. My big brother Steve introduced me to Doctor Who, and twas with him that I saw...
Big Fish
which I didn't care for, although I always like Ewan. Before the show, I experienced a regretfully familiar shock. I saw a trailer for what seemed to be goofy Hollywood schlock, fronted by Tom Hanks playing a ridiculous southern gentleman walking anachronism. It's a story of a robbert of some kind with dopey hijinx. And then the title card "A new film by Joel and Ethan Coen" pops up and my heart sinks. It's a remake of The Ladykillers, a marginally amusing Alec Guinness comedy from back in the day (don't run out to see it, Our Man in Havana's much better). Man oh man, what happened to the Coens.
But don't let that get you down, I saw some really good movies, too, like Ozu's...
Good Morning
Ozu, whom I first heard of when he was called the anti-Kurosawa on a DVD commentary, directed this wee charmer of a flick about two boys who go on strike against their parents, refusing to talk until they buy them a tv. Set in a suburban 60's Japan, the film deals with the failures of human communication, but in a really groovily upbeat, Japaese Brady Bunch sort of way. The kids' moms all gossip nastily about each other, but in a wacky garbled communication sort of way. When the kids go on strike against their parents, they declare that adults talk far too much, saying lots of meaningless stuff like "Good Morning" and "How do you do" and "Nice weather, eh" and so on, hence the title. There's also a great bit of "pull my finger" style flatulence humor that runs throughout the film. Shot in a lovely, stationary style, it's well worth checking out from your local renter of Criterion discs.
If that's too "Seventh Heaven"-y for you, you could always try...
The films of William Friedkin that aren't The Exorcist or the French Connection
Sure, we dig it, thinking back fondly on our own childhood days, when Doctor Who was unreservedly cool, well before our own emerging sexual awareness turned us into a vomit-spewing demoness, but Billy's done some other good movies, like...
Sorcerer
is a remake of The Wages of Fear. Or they're based on the same novel. Or something. The basic story is that four guys - guys with nothing to lose - have to drive a bunch of nitroglycerin to an oil fire so that it can be blown out (incidentally, for a really weird quasidocumentary about the Kuwaiti oil fires, check out Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, which I think you can get as a free bonus rental with Little Dieter Needs to Fly). In the old one, the guys are the pawns of the evil oil company who must face their own well-scripted fears as they travel along the mountain. In Friedkin's, they're all men doing dangerous men's work with little time for talking. No, they'd much rather have cool montages set to the throbbing electronica of Tangerine Dream.
Honestly, they're both really good films. Both are worth watching. Wages is a bit more "thinky," in that the characters talk out their situation and their emotions and the drama, whereas Sorcerer's much more an exercise in atmosphere. In its manly men and brutal synthesized soundtrack, it's not totally unlike a John Carpenter film. Or, given that Tangerine Dream did the Blade Runner soundtrack, a Ridley Scott film.
Similar in tone is...
To Live and Die in LA
which I remembered getting bad reviews when it came out, and it didn't really seem to appeal to me at the time. It's quite good, though. The soundtrack's supplied by Wang Chung. So Billy went from the Blade Runner soundtrack guys to the "Everybody Wang Chung tonight" guys. Well, it works. Starts off with a rather pithy little Reagan reference.
It's about some Secret Service guys doing what nobody seems to know the Secret Service actually does - fighting counterfeiting. A shockingly youthful looking Willem Dafoe's the counterfeiter. William Petersen, now on CSI I think, but the guy in Manhunter for sure, is one of the agents following him, the other being a dude who later turned up on Paul Reiser's sitcom. Funny that.
It has an odd beginning. It's split between long sequences with no dialogue that are fascinating to watch (explicit counterfeiting) and some amazingly cliched-sounding cop movie business. Like there's a guy who's got three days until he retires. Guess what happens to him?
Quite apart from that, it's a really exciting movie about Petersen and Dafoe as two guys who act recklessly and violently in an oddly self-destructive manner. It's quite a different take on, well, weltschmerz, than that of the blogger. The film also has Dean Stockwell in a fair sized part.
Think Heat, but instead of sucking and being really dull, think what if Heat were really cool and an hour and a half shorter. Plus Wang Chung. That's TLADILA.
And that's what I had to say about all that.
Posted by mattb at January 19, 2004 12:24 AM