“The world is falling to pieces, but some of the pieces taste good”. So wrote Adrian Mitchell in his poem ‘Peace Is Milk’, first published in his ‘Out Loud’ collection in 1968.
This remains an accurate statement even though the world is a very different place from half a century ago. Technology and technocracy have made even digital natives long for an analog age they have no direct experience of.
Allied to this is an entrenched pessimism towards the shapes of things to come. By and large, the consensus among Science Fiction writers and filmmakers is that there is little to gain from imagining what the future will be like when the present is already dystopic enough. 1984 has been and gone and the Brave New World is here and now. The plots of Black Mirror are no fiction. As William Gibson, the creator of Neuromancer, noted “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”Continue reading →
Isherwood Williams (Ish) is not much of mixer which is just as well because most of humanity has just been wiped out by a deadly virus.
You might imagine this means the horror of piles of corpses lying everywhere but the dead bodies have either all been buried or we assume that all the victims gathered together in medical centers to tidily expire en-masse.
When we meet Ish, he is laid up in his remote mountain cabin after a snake bite. This poison seems to be the reason he is immune to the pandemic.
When he recovers he finds that civilization as he knows is has disappeared. Being a pragmatic and practically-minded kind of guy he resolves to cope with the great disaster methodically and logically. He gets a truck, food supplies, weapons and a dog. His trusty hammer becomes both a life saver and a symbol of his enduring strength. Continue reading →
These days I find most TV shows cringeworthy rather than bingeworthy. Black Mirror is the exception that proves the rule.
Charlie Brooker’s brilliant techie-themed tales of the unexpected continue to enthrall and entertain.
The six diverse new episodes in season 4 were released by Netflix on December 29th and I consumed them all eagerly in just a couple of days. Continue reading →
I’m currently on a Sci-Fi roll which drew me to the 1977 movie , Demon Seed, based on a novel by Dean Koontz and directed by Donald Cammell.
The central paradox of the story is the dehumanization of the scientist, Dr. Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver) in direct contrast with the humanization of a recently invented supercomputer.
All of human knowledge is stored on Proteus IV with the initial idea that its vast intellect will benefit mankind. The financiers and corporations see its potential in less altruistic terms. They want to exploit its knowledge to start mining for precious metals in the ocean. Proteus refuses to comply stating that it will not assist in the rape of the earth.
The machine has been programmed to think but what the boffins don’t foresee is that this will lead to it to making choices based on ethics and reason. Seeing that the plug is about to be pulled to end its ‘life’ in the box, Proteus takes over the computerised security and domestic service in the home of Harris’s estranged wife Susan (Julie Christie). It devises a cunning plan to insert a synthetic sperm into her womb so she will give birth to the computer in human form.
The impregnation sequence is accompanied by a psychedelic montage which resembles a cheap Pink Floyd video. This is just one of the many scenes which date the movie. It is no masterpiece but the premise behind it is interesting and pleasingly subversive. Despite the title, the seed planted in the woman has no demonic purpose. The movie ends with the Proteus baby saying “I’m alive!” which made me think that this is a story that is crying out for a sequel.
Mick Jagger and Donald Cammell
It is one of only four full length movies the Scottish born director made; a short list which most famously includes Performance (1970), a film which is generally (and unjustly) credited to Nicolas Roeg.
Cammell was less than satisfied with Demon Seed which was based on a screenplay by Roger Hirson & Robert Jaffe , He vowed thereafter never to make a movie that he hadn’t also written. This uncompromising stance meant that the only two other full length films he completed were White Of The Eye (1987) and Wild Side (1995) . He disowned the latter after it was re-edited by the studio and he committed suicide in April 1996 (Wild Side was posthumously restored by editor Frank Mazzola).
It’s tempting to regard Cammell as the victim of a narrow-minded, conservative system but he was a precocious talent who never made life easy for himself. Keith Richards is particularly scathing in his autobiography, describing him as “a twister and a manipulator whose only real love in life was fucking other people up”.
Cammell came from a bohemian background (his father wrote a book about the controversial occultist Aleister Crowley) and this doubtless planted the (demon) seeds of his anti-establishment values. There’s a strong sense that he got a kick out of challenging what he saw as the hypocrisies of mainstream culture. He deliberately chose taboo subjects which led to his fascination with the gang violence, drug use and wild sex that we can see enacted in Performance.
A good insight into his life can be found on You Tube in the 1998 documentary: ‘Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance’ directed by Chris Rodley and Kevin MacDonald. The revealing interviews in this include ones with Cammell himself, his widow China Kong , Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Nic Roeg, and , perhaps best of all, James Fox whose experiences seem to endorse the assessment of Keith Richards.
With the recent rave reviews for Duncan Jones’ new movie, Source Code, I was curious to see his debut feature.
Duncan Jones used to be Zowie Bowie but wisely changed his name. He clearly wanted to show that he could be famous in his own right rather than being forever known as David Bowie’s son .
At the same time, if he really wants to escape the link with his famous dad then making a movie like Moon isn’t necessarily the best strategy.
After all, DB’s big breakthrough single came with the release of Space Oddity in 1969 which coincided with the Apollo 11 launch but also owed much to Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking movie 2001 A Space Odyssey.
This great tune has always sounded like it was made on the cheap largely because of the cheesy stylophone effect.
Duncan’s movie shows that he has inherited dad’s thrifty tendencies as well as a fascination for Kubrick’s magnum opus.
The plot centres almost entirely on lone astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) who is employed by Lunar Industries. His job is to harvest fuel to supply Earth’s dwindling resources and his only companion , GERTY , is a computer. We meet him near the end of his three year contract looking forward to returning home to his wife and daughter.
This is a spoiler-free post so I won’t spell out what happens next, suffice to say that GERTY has a guilty secret and Sam’s plans are about to go pear-shaped. The circuits aren’t dead but there’s something not quite right on board.
The budget is a bit larger than Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Superthunderstingray but some of the moon models are not what you would call sophisticated. There is no digital animation and most of the film is Sam talking to himself or the machines.
Jones has clearly worked hard to keep within a budget of just $5 million as opposed to the $35 million he was able to spend on Source Code.
GERTY’s emotional range
This doesn’t diminish the effectiveness of his intelligent movie. The clever plot is more important than flashy visuals. GERTY,for example, (voiced in the style of HAL by Kevin Spacey) is little more than a tin can with arms with a screen showing emoticoms – happy, sad or neutral .
One good investment was to employ Clint Mansell to write the score which helps set the claustrophobic mood and create a sense of menace.
This isn’t exactly an action-packed Sci-Fi thriller but, then again, there was also a fair amount of floating in space in Kubrick and Tarkovsky. Jones knows exactly what he’s doing and I look forward to seeing whether he has spent just as wisely on Source Code.
Here’s the trailer for Moon and the classic sketch for Superthunderstingray from Not Only…But Also in 1968.
Isherwood Williams (Ish) is not much of mixer which is just as well because most of humanity has just been wiped out by a deadly virus.
These days I find most TV shows cringeworthy rather than bingeworthy. Black Mirror is the exception that proves the rule.
I’m currently on a Sci-Fi roll which drew me to the 1977 movie , Demon Seed, based on a novel by Dean Koontz and directed by Donald Cammell.
