The 1970's Science Fiction Movie Poll

I'm honestly kinda surprised Alien won.

neither science-fiction, nor good

Worst tagline ever.

With Star Wars missing, I'll have to go for Mad Max followed by Zardoz.

phase iv

so good

giant radioactive scorpions!

whoa? really? I had wondered if Fallout had nicked the radscorpions from somewhere else or not...

Silent Running 2

lol hippies

I fell asleep during Stalker - what are you people thinking. do not get the tarkovsky love (I hated Solaris too, and am a huge Lem fan)

you just don't have Soviet rhythms.

but I like lots of other Russian stuff!

well, I think his masterpiece is The Mirror, not sf, but what is it you loathe about him?

I don't loathe him exactly I just don't get what's so great. Solaris and Stalker both look quite nice but the glacial pacing and stone-faced characters = zzzzzzzzzz

A symphony of naps!

I love glacial pacing and stone-faced characters, but I know I'm in a minority there.

just rented: Quintet by Robert Altman, 1979. internet is covered with snarky bad reviews and frequent mentions of Zardoz. Can Not Wait.

Cast:Paul Newman (Essex), Fernando Rey (Grigor), Bibi Andersson (Ambrosia), Vittorio Gassman (St Christopher)

Plot: It is the future and the world has undergone another Ice Age. The seal hunter Essex comes out of the wilderness to visit his brother, bringing with him his wife Vivia who is one of the first women to become pregnant in a long time. In the decaying city, the bored populace spend their time playing the enigmatic dice game Quintet. Essex is invited to join one round but while he is away getting wood for the fire, Vivia and the others are killed in a bomb blast. As Essex tries to stay alive, he seeks to understand the nature of Quintet in which people’s lives are forfeit when they lose.

Quintet is awful

Indeed it is not. It looks as if it was filmed through gauze. If you enjoy the light in Barry Lyndon or Carravagio's paintings, Quintet is worth watching. It is unrelentingly bleak, though.

its all shot with a soft-focus prismatic effect and there are lots of mirrors. the central plot point is so totally boring and obvious tho I dunno how anyone could maintain an interest in it. I saw it a few months back when I was home with a cold.

and its certainly not as lol-riffic as Zardoz!

what is?

Quintet is a chore, but it looks pretty fantastic.

I love tarkovsky, but apparently I have some heretical views on him.

andrei rublev - this is my favorite movie, ever, so it towers over everything else in his BoW not to mention all of filmdom. my great love is for the 185 minute cut though, which is pretty much unavailable in the US. there is no perfect version of rublev in existence, and if there is it's certainly not the criterion workprint. their labeling it a "director's cut" is one of the more grotesque instances of marketing-driven abuse of the term. however, the film in any format is a bloody brutal love letter to creative types everywhere.

when the painter apprentice rublev and his teacher theophanes engage in a spririted debate about the morality of pandering to an audience, it's soooo far from the tarkovsky cliche of characters as stoic marble-shitting oil paintings. hey I'm an atheist so I shouldn't care about the christ and all that but the screenwriting is so fucking good it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Theophanes: All right, tell me in all honesty, are our people ignorant or not... I can't hear you!

Andrei: Yes, ignorant! But who's to blame for that?

Theophanes: Their stupidity is to blame!

Andrei: Have you never sinned because you're ignorant?

Theophanes: Yes, I have, too. O God, forgive, reconcile, and curb our passions! The Day of Judgement is coming. We'll all burn like candles.

Mind my word, it will be hell! People will lump the blame for their sins on one another, justifying themselves before the Almighty.

Andrei: I don't understand how you can paint, having thoughts like that. You even accept praise. I'd have taken vows of schema long ago and settled down in a cave for good.

Theophanes: I serve God, not people. Today they praise, tomorrow they'll abuse what they praised only yesterday, and after that they'll forget both you and me. They'll forget everything! All is vanity! All is useless!

The human race has already perpetrated all stupidities and wrongs, and now it's just repeating them. Everything falls back into place again, and goes round and round... If Jesus came back to Earth again, He would be crucified once more!

Andrei: If you remember only evil, you can never be happy before God.

Theophanes: What?

Andrei: Maybe some things should be forgotten, but not everything. I don't know how to say it...

Theophanes: If you don't know, then be silent! Listen to me!

Andrei: You think that good can be done only single-handedly?

Theophanes: Good? Have you forgotten the New Testament? Jesus gathered people in the temples, too. He taught them. And then they gathered together in order to execute Him.

"Crucify him!" they shouted. And His disciples? Judas betrayed Him, Peter renounced Him. They all abandoned Him! And they were the best!

Andrei: But they repented!

Theophanes: That was much later, don't you understand? When it was too late.

Andrei: It's true, people do evil, too. And it's very sad. Judas had sold Christ out. But do you remember who bought Him? The people? No, the Pharisees and their scribes. They couldn't find any witnesses, no matter how hard they tried. Who would slander Him, the innocent?

And the Pharisees were great deceivers, literate and cunning. They even learned to read and write in order to gain power, taking advantage of His ignorance. People ought to be reminded more often that they're human beings, that all Russians are of one blood and of one land!

Evil can be found anywhere. There will always be those ready to sell you for 30 pieces of silver. And the Russian man gets more and more misfortunes. The Tatars raid him thrice a season, then comes a famine or a plague. But he keeps working and working, bearing his cross with humility. Never despairing, but enduring it silently. And only praying to God to give him enough strength to endure. Can the Almighty not forgive such men their ignorance?

You know it yourself that whenever something goes wrong, or you're exhausted and despairing, and suddenly... you meet some human eyes, and it works as if you took a Communion, and the weight is lifted from your heart.

Isn't it so?

mirror - his next best, and although it's as conventional as a candy squid, it's actually a good place to start for a newbie. free flowing and spot on, like good jazz or poetry.

solaris - occasionally tarkovsky tried a little too hard for the "epic" vibe, and this film is a casualty. would be better if the first 45 minutes were lopped off. after that it's a pretty heady + paranoid little film but by that time you might be too stupified to notice.

stalker - his most overrated film in my book. he shot a large part of the film and then had it destroyed by a careless lab, forcing him to start again from scratch. sometimes I wonder if that took some of the wind out of his sails (though he was no stranger to operating under adversity). the philosophical psychobabble of the characters gets irritating after a while. hands up, who wants to slap the writer? the ending gets me though, that understated effortless imagism, talk about sticking the landing.

ivan's childhood - arguably a sounder film than stalker, but he was still aping bergman at this point and hadn't struck his own path.

I'm saving nostalghia and the sacrifice for the day I need them.

moral: never bring up tarkovsky on a thread I'm reading.

boy, if you consider The Mirror 'conventional' by any measure...

(it's screening in nYC tonight)

That post is almost as long as Andrei Rublev itself.

lol

(and mirror is as conventional as a candy squid, i.e. not at all)

oh, I missed that! I figured it was some common treat sold in Brighton. :)

actually a candy squid is a fishing lure, so I guess it's conventional if you're a fisherman. let's pretend I said squid candy. although that's probably conventional in japan. let's just pretend I said nothing.

The Tarkovsky films are in such a league of their own, I almost left them off this list -- they're not just dystopian, they're transcendental. My vote for Phase IV was based on the wider context of what all the films on the list were collectively going for -- I can't be surprised Stalker and Solaris garnered as many votes as they did but in hindsight this shouldn't have been a poll, just a discussion thread

Quintet has a lot going for it. Most of the film is slow pans over the set design for the underground city of the last five million people -- all the technology vandalilzed and destroyed, snow and ice covering almost every surface, occasional pockets of people cooking, drinking, and killing each other and wild dogs show up within three minutes after you die to eat you. Very hypnotic and immersive and I kept pausing the image just to stare at the sets.

Casting the hallmark actors from Buñuel, Bergman & mod 60's/70's Italian films turns this into a weird European art film -- this is the first time I've ever seen Rey or Andersson speaking in English. Gassman plays a minister who preaches to a huge room full of immobilzed infirm: life is a blissful interruption of the agonizing infinity of the Void

so sure I can see how someone who doesn't have the patience for Tarkovsky wouldn't like it. It's also really schitzo Altman in that the mood throughout is sober, moody and grim, but the dramatic punctuations are so bizarre that to most people they'd come across as unintentional humor or incompetence -- but this is the guy who directed The Long Goodbye so you can't help but suspect that the corpse's frozen grimace was supposed to be funny.

(If a bored moderator wants to remove the spoiler I didn't mean to post upthread, my thanks to them)

perhaps this was flavored by the last few posts on the thread but I was wondering if this was Altman responding to Tarkovsky. there's a scene in a small hotel room where Paul Newman switches on an electric light and the loudest sound on the soundtrack for the next several minutes is dripping water as the ice that's covering the bulb slowly melts away

interminable water scenes are sure signs of a tarkovsky fixation.

my favorite tarkovsky reference is in miike's audition, when the two guys holding the fake audition ask the girls a series of ridiculous questions, one of them being "do you like tarkovsky?" it's so absurd + dickheaded.

Thanks to this thread, that Loguns Run pic is now my wallpaper

(on my pc, not my house walls. but hmmm...)

my favorite tarkovsky reference is in fassbinder's 'the third generation' where the corrupt cop is staring out a skyscraper's window, staring at the traffic, and says 'I saw this incredibly boring film last night, nothing but endless shots of traffic' and the industrialist says 'was it called solaris?'

so I was thinking about milton's comments about what does and doesn't belong on the list, and the cronenberg thing again, and star wars. I thinnk what holds this list together is the consistent dystopian bent of the films. sci-fi is usually a dystopian/utopian game - is science and technology an enabling force (or, at least, a neutral element), or does it lift the lid on pandora's box? films like star wars, battle beyond the stars, buck rogers in the 25th century, these clearly hold a less jaundiced view of the future than phase iv, soylent green, a boy and his dog.

morbs doesn't think alien should be on the list 'cause it's a horror film, abbott doesn't think cronenberg should be on the list cause he's horror, milton doesn't think tarkovsky should be on the list 'cause he's transcendental. but the majority of the films on this list *are* horrific, in that the future state they envision (a place shaped by science and technology) is an absurd and alienating world eager to drop the hammer on the unlucky bastards who inhabit it.

solaris is ripe with existential dread, in league with the other films. rather than improving our lives, science (e.g. space travel) fractures identities, perverts desires, brings us into an uneasy, suffocating relationship with the unknowable terror of death. comparing the film to 2001 is rote, and their differences are significant, but their thematic basis are very similar - whether it's a big black monolith or a swirling psychedelic maelstrom, it's still the great unknown fucking with the human race on a whole other level.

cronenberg's 70s films (shivers, rabid, the brood), although full of jolting horror scenes, all derive their narrative impetus from amoral doctors tampering with human biology and unleashing a shitstorm of bad juju. cronenberg's chilly, detached approach to the material is, well, "scientific," and serves to reinforce the sci-fi orientation of his work. not to mention, as abbott pointed out, his biological fascination with virus and the flesh.

if I had to pick films on the list that don't fit this criteria, they would be things like mad max (which technically occurs in the future, but isn't that far from the wild angels / race with the devil type exploitation hijinks), star trek, and to a lesser extant, close encounters (which follows the dystopian model for almost the entire film until its bait-and-switch ending - surprise, it's utopian).

there was an interesting analysis of alien back in the 80s, can't remember who wrote it, but it read the film as a metaphor for a sexually abusive family. the alien as the phallic, abusing father, the computer system as the cold, remote mother enabling the father's bad behavior, the astronauts as childlike -- asexual innocents, no romantic relationships between them, the film opens with them all sleeping in the same room. they wake and are slowly introduced to an adult world of deceit and penetration.

Third Generation provides lots of lols.

Alien and Star Wars are so retro to me the space stuff is just genre-drag.

now I'm thinking of ash choking ripley with a rolled-up porno mag. there's a lot more going on in alien than "boogeyman on a spaceship."

I mean, it is "boogeyman on a spaceship," but then there's the psychosexual stuff, and the antonioni/tarkovsky-like pace and aesthetics. there are something like 10 lines of dialogue in the first 15 minutes. still surprises me how popular a movie it was.

I just watched Capricorn One, not seen it for years. Apart from the sadly lacking ending I think this is just a superb movie.

The congressman guy (big lebowski) has some terrific lines and makes a great character.

I think my fave moment is when the guy is climbing the canyon cliff telling the joke to himself, only to reveal the two choppers parked eerily on top. Sends shivers.

Fucking hell, did this REALLY need to be remade? http://www.aetv.com/the-andromeda-strain/

oh no:(

Is that him from A-HA on the left ?

just watched phase iv again this week. surprised at how well it holds up. directed by saul bass! he designed all those great movie posters like vertigo and the man with the golden arm.

phase iv is super creepy & psychedelic, with some of the best acting by real ants ever filmed and a great burbling electronic score. I was talking to a friend who had vague memories of seeing it as a child, but he had perfect recall when it came to the scene where ants started crawling out of the 3 circular holes in a dead guy's hand.

DVD NOW PLZ

we did an 80's sci-fi movie poll too, right? i can't find it.

50s one is easy to find.

Saul Bass also did the opening-title sequences for most of the films he created poster images for.

was phase iv the ants film where they walked through a house filled with ants and these people were breathing through straws, or something?

that's not in Phase IV

phase iv is super creepy & psychedelic, with some of the best acting by real ants ever filmed and a great burbling electronic score.

it's by David Vorhaus, raiding some of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop sound beds used on 'Dr. Who' and the White Noise 'An Electric Storm' album. the music in all these films is one of the main sources of appeal

I just love the fact that after a long, long career directing the title sequences & storyboarding for some of the biggest directors in Hollywood, when he finally traded in all his favors to direct his own film, he decided to make a film about superintelligent ants (and I can imagine the pitch: 'but here's the twist... it stars REAL ANTS'

http://faculty.cua.edu/johnsong/hitchcock/storyboards/psycho/bass-storyboards.html

type Saul Bass into youtube and you'll see the parade, the one for 'Seconds' is my favorite - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGq_ON4aXew

ant sequences were directed by Ken Middleham, this is the only interview with him where he talks about Phase IV & The Hellstrom Chronicle: http://www.cinefex.com/backissues/issue3.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellstrom_Chronicle

in other news I found a cheap copy of 'Parts: The Clonus Horror'. Incompetent on almost every front, but still a 70's science fiction film. It might be better to watch the MST3K version of this one, (unlike 'Phase IV')

I also bought a copy of 'The Silver Globe' on Amazon: http://www.fright.com/edge/silverglobe.html