Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years back, Columbia Pictures chose to produce Starman instead of a children's movie with a similar theme: E. T. It is easy to see why. This is a fairy tale for adults; the impossible dream realized here is not a cuddly playmate for a lonely boy but the resurrection of love in a life gone sour. Starman's appearance to Jenny is a double shock: he is both the incarnation and a parody of her lost love. He speaks in the tones of a computerized Muppet and moves in twitches, like a punk robot...
...that prove without effort that the world is a strange place. The last short piece is called The Leather Man, after a strange tramp who wandered southern New England in the 19th century, insulated from the world by an outer leather armor he had devised. It is an awkward tale that works only intellectually, as an argument the author is having with himself. Is it possible that a life can be understood only when one has deliberately estranged oneself from it, turned oneself into an outsider, a leather...
...occasional violence is all the more harrowing because so much of the action consists of nothing more than long dialogues in frumpy British parlors. Indeed, the series captures wonderfully an India so housebroken that it has come to resemble a dowdy British institution. Instead of the fairy-tale land of kohl-eyed houris and snake charmers, the subcontinent here seems to be a domesticated place of hospital corridors, puddly lanes and gently twittering birds...
Like most of the late romances, Twelfth Night's confusion arises in part from a tearful tale of past woe. Viola (Elizabeth McGovern) has lost her twin brother in a tempest at sea, and assuming him dead, disguises herself in his clothing to pay tribute to his memory. This causes her considerable discomfort, however, since she is forced to hide her love for her "fellow" friend Curio (James Bodge). Add to this Curio's lover Olivia (Margaret Reed) falling unwittingly head over heels for McGovern, and you have the makings of a maze that keeps both actors and audience...
Science fantasy is an act of subversion disguised as a fairy tale. In primal imagery and orotund cadences it sets the young imagination on a children's crusade against malevolent power. It describes a vicarious rite of passage through bloodshed and anarchy to heroic manhood; it upends the prevailing social order to establish a new moral equilibrium. For the generation of budding revolutionaries in the 1960s, Frank Herbert's Dune was a magical mystery trilogy that, along with The Lord of the Rings and the Gormenghast books, galvanized the spirit like a Disney Das Kapital. In Dune, rival...