Word: iv
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...best thing about science-fiction films is their opportunity for wonder, their ability to draw out and contain the most extravagant imagery. In Stanley Kubrick's great 2001: A Space Odyssey, themes and images reinforced one another. In most other futuristic films -and Phase IV is one of these-the force of the ideas cannot compete with the power of individual images...
...Phase IV is good, eerie entertainment, with interludes of such haunted visual intensity that it becomes, at its best, a nightmare incarnate. It can also sometimes go quite wobbly, with ripely absurd dialogue and the most primitive sort of human characterizations. The movie is about ants, and it is clear that everyone involved was a lot more taken with them than with the Tinkertoy people provided by the script...
...hysterics, thanks to the skill of Director Saul Bass, a graphics designer and visual consultant here making his feature-film debut. Bass knows a good deal about how to isolate a single image, how to place it and build on it for maximum effectiveness. There are sequences in Phase IV that seem to have been lifted intact from a surrealist's fever dream: giant anthills looming like pylons against a gloomy sky; a dead man's hand, unclenched, revealing ants crawling out of holes they have chewed in the palm...
...movie works toward a vision of a chillingly absurd apocalypse, then pulls back a little, not in implication but in illustration. Originally, Phase IV ended with a montage of hallucinatory images suggesting man's destiny after the ants have had their way. But the sequence was deleted by Bass because he thought it too abstract. It may be just as well: the movie is not substantial enough to support the kind of philosophical freight such a montage would imply. Phase IV works best as a weird thriller and as a showcase for Bass's talents, which transform...
...Laughing Stock purports to be irreverent musical and political humor. Like so many things that resort to describing themselves as irreverent, it's spotty. It's playing in a cafe-like atmosphere in The Grotto, 'neath Henri IV, at 96 Winthrop Street. Tues--Thurs...