Change Your Image
fifties
Reviews
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Black satire of Christianity
Nice Pinnoc update. Disney sanitized it, now Spielberg/Kubrick, with approval of Hebrew University (Einstein likeness use), thoroughly blasts all one-sided Love from Above. Cup your ears to catch all the religious references, especially WHY God made man originally. All love is merely programmed when not reciprocated? Father (ref Blade Runner), Son (same ref, or ET), and Holy Ghost (back to Close Encounters' little skinny fellas, with transparency and basketball potential). Catholic Church reduced to a narrow store front with one exiting patron smiled upon by the Devil. Romans drinking beer at the County Fair. Underwater stained-glass windows of the carpenter's son's life searching for The Blue Fairy (Madonna). Spielberg must have choked on the comment made about ET by a reviewer: "it's looking for the Blue Fairy." What guts! I raise my hand in salute (a la Charleton Heston in Soylent Green): "AI ARE ...PEOPLE!" Where ARE the theater picketers?!
Project Moon Base (1953)
Lippert historical document/comedy
The paranoid, sexist 1950's has rarely ever been so summarily(unintentionally?) satirized as in this early-TV-quality space-opera. Was THIS the SciFi movie in Midnight Cowboy? I wish I could ask Heinlein how long it took him to get his tongue out of his cheek. If you liked Rocky Jones Space Ranger for the cardboard sets and acetylene-torch rocket engines and hokey camp plots and dialogue, and the required cutie with sweater-popping Pleasantville-weight undergarments (Ah, DVD on Pause), then this jaw-dropping side-to-side-head-shaker is for you. Both Rocketship X-M and Destination Moon assumed that an "unassailable base on the Moon" was vital to US survival. No mention of the Tax Payers here! Well, RXM had it politically and environmentally right, Destination Moon made it seem silly and one-way, but this thin movie includes a church-approved ending (that Forbidden Planet left off) which takes the cake. All 3 movies are so moral that you may wonder how year 2000 movies will look to people (if any) in about 50 years. Will we look this crazy?
Rocketship X-M (1950)
More reasonable and ecological than Destination Moon
Okay, the special effects now look incorrect, and the science now looks erroneous, and the men are pigs, but the big point of the movie is still valid. The hogwash talk of needing an "unassailable base" on the Moon is also found in Destination Moon (a more-expensive comedy with a cartoon and sidekick), and Lippert's other (silly) Project Moonbase. But this movie has more to say. I was startled as a kid seeing this when it came out, and still love the love story (Lloyd B asked the director to excise it, for Heaven's sake), and especially the red-filtered (sepia tone on DVD) sequence of the sandstone-hills marchers. The DVD is so clear that you can see a Pleasantville city in the matte-painting distance?! Anyhow, I bought a Geiger Counter and went into Big Science because of this movie. Destination Moon, on the other hand, kept me from joining the Military! (See October Sky for the other side of the story.)
The Great American Broadcast (1941)
Origin of the Internet ?
While it is almost impossible to bypass the beauty of Alice Faye, I wish to mention that the plot of this cute fluff pic contains an interesting idea: hook up radio stations in a coast-to-coast network via the telephone. One hears so many arguments (political and otherwise) about "Who Invented the Internet?" It's easy to forget our honorable ancestors in the early days of Radio (when that name drew enough awe to have SciFi and even strange Westerns use it as a buzzword). The idea of telephone hookups apparently gave audiences a thrill.
Kronos (1957)
A late-night favorite with some very funny lines, sets
This movie might be awful if it were not for the wonderfully Ed Wood style dialog from a writer with a sense of humor. It had Fem Lib, astronomy, and ethnic jokes long before Star Wars thought of doing them. And the psychobabble is on par with the gaffs of more self-serious efforts like The Cob Web, Snake Pit, and Hitchcock's Freudian-Dali dreams. I understand the actors did not realize the inappropriate telescope views were there, but that really helped the humor. Is that the 200 inch Mt. Palomar Telescope in an echo chamber behind the lab door? And is it hooked up like the big scope in Things to Come? Could a better assistant be hired for the computer, or the darkroom? I'd give anything for a shiny kitchen-sink faucet made to look like Kronos. My little mind reels at the possibilities when I see this movie after midnight.
It Came from Outer Space (1953)
Polaroid 3D, not red/green 3D, was great in 53
I've seen it in red/green 3D and found it extremely hard on the eyes, but as a 10 year old, seeing it in polarized 3D was great. That was the era when anything jumping out at you (frogs, rocks, heroines) almost made you drop your popcorn. Maybe we need to wait for color hologram movies to re-experience the thrills of true vision. Youngsters watching this movie now naturally laugh at the puppet special effects, but the few poetic lines of Ray Bradbury still evoke wonder. Well, Barbara Rush too (my age is showing).
Armageddon (1998)
Sorry, Sir, but you are no War of the Worlds
If this movie is a remake of War of the Worlds, then I must agree with the old saw that "remakes are seldom as good as the originals." I had to take the batteries out of my hearing aid, put in my foam earplugs, then cover my ears with my hands, and open my mouth, just to survive the ground-zero sound pressure. Was it 20 dB above a jet engine at 10 meters? The scientists have said that you can tell how close to the bomb blast people were at Hiroshima by whether their eardrums are intact. The plot and lines were hardly better than the junk I wrote at age 9, but (then) I wrote as poorly as this now. Why can't this level of dollars go to more thinkers' movies (like Contact) than...(bleep)...movies?...it rhymes with thinkers.