Word: scifi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film thick as a cloud of ozone. The plot is not all that original either. All through the seemingly ceaseless running time - nearly 2½ hours, and considerably trimmed from the Russian version - one is put longingly in mind of Forbidden Planet. A lightheaded piece of American scifi, Forbidden Planet (1956) was a genial reworking of The Tempest in which some American astronauts were trapped on a distant planet. There a wizard, a stand-in for Prospero, conjured up an unconquerable force field of "monsters from the id." Hearing this, one of the astronauts inquired without hesitation, "What...
...happen to trip out to Central Square meanwhile, check out Survive, for some gut-dropping suspense; or to Boston, see Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, for more artsy poignancy. Then there's the Russian scifi film Solaris. A friend told me this movie has "a lot of connotations; I didn't even like it until afterwards, when I spent all night with friends making all the connections." One of those. I guess I'll have to go investigate those connotations for myself and get back...
...Asian moviemaking world whose output is prodigious by Hollywood standards but who is seldom seen in the U.S. (Shashi did play opposite Hayley Mills in Pretty Polly.) For the most part, that is just as well. No other region of the world produces such a concoction of Kung Fu, scifi, porn, soapers, chasers and period pieces with such uneven degrees of tackiness and brilliance. From India to Japan, the film studios of Asia churn out more than 1,200 pictures a year, the work of moguls like Hong Kong's Run Run Shaw (see box) and one-shot entrepreneurs...
...film is a mad send-up of future shock and the trappings of conventional scifi, but it works as a kind of crack-brained adventure. Fuest, who made his reputation with a couple of fang-in-cheek vampire flicks, has a good time parading Hero Jon Finch about in black - a color scheme observed even in his nail polish and toothbrush but modified in his shirts, which are sparkling white and ruffled, like a lapsed romantic poet's. It is comforting to know, how ever, that when some heroics are required, Finch can rise to the occasion...
Cool, cool Byzantia, Mrs. Weldon decides, "is a destroyer" in a generation created to destroy forever a certain sort of female image. A bit melodramatic, even scifi, perhaps. Yet beside Fay Weldon, all the Germaine Greers, all the Kate Milletts, all the non-fictionists of Women's Liberation pale into abstract theory...