Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Read online

  But there are still times, late at night, when I’ve had too much bourbon and I find myself unsatisfied with what I do for a living, that I dream of wearing black leather and racing down a cracked and pitted highway in a supercharged V-8, armed with a sawed-off shotgun and battling punk-rock barbarians.

  And I smile.

  THE TIME BANDITS

  (Director: Terry Gilliam; starring: John Cleese, Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, Katherine Helmond - 1981)

  Joolz Denby

  I was once in the enviable position of being paid to throw someone through a plate glass window. OK, not everyone’s cup of tea but I was looking forward to it no end. It was part of one of those dodgy ‘Youth TV’ programmes of the Janet Street-Porter variety that mushroomed in the 1980’s like pallid, hysterical fungi fulminating in the bowels of various desperate television companies manned – and I do mean manned – by portly perspiring fellas in striped shirts with white collars and red braces, wearing Buggles specs and a more than pungent whiff of Eau De Uncool. This particular one was an ‘eclectic magazine show’. That meant they chucked a mess of disparate people together in a ‘crazy’ studio set hosted by a bird with big hair and an inane giggle and hoped it made sparks.

  So there I was, large, sulky, black-clad, heavily jewelled, wearing the kind of eyeliner that would make Amy Winehouse look like an amateur and in the full, gamey flood of my dubious renown as the Gothic Style Icon, and the only female Ranting Poet – two dubious honours fully certified by the NME, Sounds and Smash Hits – and bored out of my flame-haired skull. The other guests were a pair of dun-coloured professional Feministas determined not to have a laugh at any point and severely disapproving of my attire, jewellery and lipstick, and with no interest in my fully paid-up Feminist credentials. How could a woman, looking as I did, possibly espouse the same cause as themselves, they muttered righteously and audibly, and worse, how could she, after they refused furiously, say yeah, go on, fella, I’ll do the stunt with the dwarf.The dwarf in question being Dave Rappaport, he of the noble, expressive mien, diminutive stature and sardonic Yiddish-Cockney demeanour, wreathed in the glorious incense of everlasting fame and mighty kudos for starring in one of my favourite ever films, Time Bandits. Do a stunt with Dave Rappaport, where I get to like, hang out with him and make carefully casual fan-chat about Bandits? Oh, duh, like, yeah. I loved Time Bandits. We all did. A generation of 80’s Goths probably still know the dialogue by heart: ‘I am the Supreme Being you know, I’m not entirely dim’. It was a perennial favourite of tired and emotional bands on tour buses all over Europe where leathery pot-head pixies reclined on the worn plush banquettes of the Upstairs Lounge unplugging voracious German (they’re always German) groupies from their persons and inhaling deeply as they wheezed, ‘Bandits, Bandits’ in a warped Gregorian chant and rifled through the stacks of porn and worn out copies of Spinal Tap to triumphantly uncover the bus copy of their favourite comfort film. I must have seen it – or as much as I could see through the dense fug of fag and dope smoke – hundreds of times.But why did we love it so? Why was Time Bandits so adored by the type of road-warrior likely to make most folk cross the road – and themselves – on sight? What was it about a toothy overbite kid and a bunch of wide-boy dwarves on the make that etched itself forever into our hearts?It is a sentimental, yet incredibly hard film. It always seemed to us that the cast enjoyed making it. To us, love and kindness were woven through the fabric of it, criss-crossing the brutality of things like Boy Hero Kevin’s vile gadget-obsessed parents being blown to smithereens in front of his eyes by a lump of pure evil (‘Mum! Dad! Don’t touch it, it’s Evil!’) – all that remained of the character simply named Evil, brilliantly played by David Warner as a terminally cynical, bored dilettante who out of sheer ennui turns his underlings into pigs, amongst other tricks.The action centres on the map of wormholes through Time that the dwarves have nicked from the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson channeling his headmaster) and with which they want to do a little wealth acquisition. Accidentally acquiring Kevin (Craig Warnock, bless him), they get in and out of history – a splendid and heart-catching section with Agamemnon, for example, played by Sean Connery in one of his greatest acting moments – getting and losing swag, being unwittingly manipulated by Evil (when not trying to acquire Post Office Telecommunications) so he can get the map and naturally, as with all villains, rule the world. It’s bonkers, of course. Apparently it was shot at knee-height to give a child’s eye view of the world and I can believe it because it has the psychopathic clarity of childhood. It is moulded into extraordinary gilded, swagged and festooned rococo clay by Terry Gilliam, a man apparently possessed by his particular vision of the universe which he may, or may not know, corresponds neatly with that of lots of stoned musos. Mr Gilliam has made many films since Bandits but he has never bettered it, I believe. It’s a little bit of loveliness, a small piece of grace, and strikes home to the jaded, the world-weary, the jejune in a way more sophisticated exercises do not. It’s childhood and outsider-ness, and we all hope so much that in the end, when the dwarves go back to making fjords and the rock n’ rollers fall asleep in their odorous bunks, Kevin is adopted by the friendly fire-fighter who is, of course Agamemnon in the modern day. And I did the stunt with Dave and told him, without any pretence at cool, as he stood on the table waiting for our cue to do the stunt, I loved the film. ‘Me too’, he said, just before I chucked him through the toffee glass window. ‘Me too.’ He killed himself in America. I cried when I heard. Maybe he could have done with a bit more of that Bandit love and kindness himself, rest his soul.

  BLADE RUNNER

  (Director: Ridley Scott; starring: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos - 1982)

  Guy Adams

  It is no great revelation to say that the memory cheats. There is nothing as fragile as creative sacred cows when revisited. Take Blade Runner for example, a film so iconic as to be almost untouchable. And yet…

  I first came to the movie on VHS while in my early teens. My best friend, Miles, would drag out a pair of uncomfortable director’s chairs (we would use nothing else; as crippling as the damn things were, it was part of the tradition, the ‘process’) and microwave some popcorn, and then we would watch movies whilst picking sharp corn skins from our teeth. There were a limited number of films on offer – we didn’t have money for rental. He had little interest in my burgeoning collection of horror nasties (though he had a grudging love of The Evil Dead II); he was more of an action man. We had Lethal Weapon, Mad Max, Firefox, Heartbreak Ridge and Blade Runner (with light relief provided by The Blues Brothers). We wore those tapes down. We could quote the things arse-backwards and never tire of them. To this day, the smell of microwaved popcorn makes me think of Mel Gibson – and that, ‘sugar tits’, is somewhat off-putting given his descent into arsedom.

  Those movies became sacred (yes, even Firefox), little nostalgia capsules, untouched once I became an adult. It is not that I feared they wouldn’t live up to memory, more that they belonged to my adolescence, like drinking Diamond White cider and thrice-daily masturbation. You move on.

  Then I watched Blade Runner again. My partner, Debs, asked to see it. It’s far from being her cup of tea, but the iconic nature of it, the idea that it was a film that everyone should see at some point, made her determined to ascertain what all the fuss was about.

  And she enjoyed it… in a limited fashion. She could see, at least, how it had earned its stripes, how it was held in both popular and critical regard. I, on the other hand, spent most of the time cringing. It seemed an entirely different film from the one I remembered (and yes, before you say anything, I do know that Blade Runner exists in a number of different versions. Ridley Scott picks the damn thing like a scab every few years).

  Okay, so the cinematography holds up – although it’s as much part of the eighties as fluorescent socks and hairspray – but the script is audible print of the worst kind and the acting is, for the most part, risible. Take Harri
son Ford. He gives one the impression that he has fallen asleep between takes and that nobody has bothered to mention that the camera is rolling again. As a leading man he has all the magnetism of the test card. His background in carpentry was never more apt, given his wooden performance. He is not alone either. The scene when he is dragged into the police station is excruciatingly poor. After thirty seconds or so the temptation is to look away, as if you’re viewing a group of people attempting something embarrassingly beyond their limitations. Like the blind drunk trying to body pop. These folks were not born to act.

  So why the hell is this movie so fondly remembered? Perhaps it’s simply because it is so influential? I mean, after Blade Runner you couldn’t move for grimy sci-fi dystopias until The Fifth Element came along and brightened things up (rather like the Pet Shop Boys doing a gig in an abattoir). But then again, Blade Runner was hardly the first film to claim that the world and its inhabitants were heading rapidly to Hell in a hand-basket; the future, as seen in cinemas, had needed a damn good clean for years. Was it, therefore, because Blade Runner was so smart, so literate? But again Ridley Scott’s supposedly seminal movie came at the end of a decade that had seen countless mainstream examples of sci-fi cinema as brainfood: Silent Running, THX 1138, Westworld, Soylent Green (although, like Planet of the Apes, this latter example was hampered by the presence of Charlton Heston as lead… which, to me, is pretty much the cinematic equivalent of some swine shitting in the middle of your lovely, soft, sugary doughnut).

  Perhaps, then, the movie’s enduring reputation can be attributed solely to those final scenes in the abandoned hotel – a coruscating mélange of dripping water, splintered neon and Daryl Hannah wailing like a beast? The climax is certainly impressive, and of course, Rutger Hauer (not just here, at the film’s denouement, but throughout the preceding 110 minutes or so – depending on which version you have seen) is an absolute joy to watch. This is the film – alongside The Hitcher – where his unearthly weirdness fits to perfection. Like Christopher Walken, Hauer is an actor that should never be cast as an ‘everyman’, for the simple reason that he is not one. He is a weird, plastic-faced alien. Watching him move from howling lunatic to a reflective, gentle corpse is one of the few journeys in the film that is as affecting as memory insists. Though the pigeon being released into a glimpse of blue sky is perhaps a little too heavy-handed – and a precursor to John Woo’s interminable obsession with slow-mo fluttering – there is a delicate beauty to those last five minutes that goes a long way towards redeeming the film’s previous faults. Perhaps, like The Wicker Man, Blade Runner is a film that climaxes so beautifully that our memory of the shaky path leading to that point is smoothed over. Until the next time we walk down it anyway…

  2010

  (Director: Peter Hyams; starring: Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren, Bob Balaban - 1984)

  Paul Cornell

  2010 forms, alongside Aliens (1986) and Psycho 2 (1983), a mini genre of films that revisit the scene of classic movies. They use their original subject matter to perform riffs on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the first movie being the terrible happenings that the second one sees revisited by the guilty survivor. The similarity of approach is startling: these are the objective versions, what ‘really happened’ during the dreamlike narratives they refer to. They begin with a recitation of notes, as if the subjective experiences of the initial movie were being put before an inquest. The heroes of the two SF movies are on a delayed quest, the deaths of their crew being seen as their fault. They decide to go back into the nightmare, with a team, in order to prove what’s real and find absolution. (As Heywood Floyd, the hero of 2010, says: ‘My past is also inside, and I want those answers’.) They wake from suspended animation amongst surly military types who don’t trust their specialist knowledge, the move from comfort to frontier being signified by a cut from human warmth to an ugly, sinister spaceship cleaving through the night to a stark soundtrack. The casts of both enter a wrecked base where we know a monster is lurking, but asleep. In 2010 and Psycho 2, the civilising influence brought to bear on the monster, to make it into a person, is psychoanalysis. If only this were the case in Aliens as well. (Though as in the Psycho series, Ripley eventually becomes the monster.) One can imagine this genre taken further, with Dorothy’s account being doubted, and her deciding to head back to Oz, the US army and Sigmund Freud alongside her.

  Floyd is played by Roy Scheider, who was also the rational man trying to pick his way through mythological material in order to survive in Jaws. His character in 2001 was hardly a person at all, but an emotionless figure in the dream, who didn’t even reach the centre of it. Here, the alienated calm of that movie is again present, but translated into scenes of repressed, brittle emotion between Floyd and his wife. It’s as if the Cold War is heating up, and so the point of view is too. Here, the broken glass, symbolic in the original movie (in the Jewish tradition of representing the chaos of the world or the broken hymen of a new marriage, some critics say) is her doing, not Bowman’s, an emotional, not distanced moment. And Floyd has gained a character too. He may be an everyman, but at least now he’s someone.

  2010 represents the conflict between the numinous dream and the hard SF reality as the conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union. It’s about an American dream, a Cold War fight to own the magic, whether the US military has the right to keep the Monolith in a warehouse. The Leonov’s clunky spacesuits and angular pods are the opposite of Kubrick’s round, organic, dream tools for fertilising space. John Lithgow’s character, Kernow, is called upon to fall on a wire into movie SF’s first genuinely relativist space, where everything is spinning relative to everything else, in search, fabulously, of meaning. This results in (literal) nausea, and a wonderful moment on the ship he boards where he and his companion are gripped by a supernatural fear of the dead.

  The movie concerns a successful search, in the face of Armageddon, for God. (Event Horizon (1997) recognises this and does the opposite, terribly.) It’s the story of HAL as Judas, desiring only to play a conscious part in the sacrifice that led to Dave Bowman’s transformation. It’s a description of a new covenant between humanity and the cosmos, carved in stone in the novel, ‘a new lease and a warning from the landlord’ as Floyd puts it, the redemption of HAL’s original sin by allowing him, this time, to substitute himself for his lord. This covenant includes two new intelligences, the Europans and artificial minds like HAL, and sets out a new Eden for all three. And it’s born, like something out of Revelation, out of an end times conflict. The Monolith is SF’s cross, ‘a shape of some kind for something that has no shape’. The phobia this time, rather than of the alien, is the fear of God, with conceptual scares alongside false alarms like HAL’s initial, and later, voices, and the chilly synth score. What other movie asks us to be afraid of the size and condition of Jupiter? Dave Bowman, the man in God, announces, or annunciates in that Canadian way of his, himself on Earth like Christ or the Silver Surfer. He even lists when Floyd will see him again. And what every doubting Thomas is most afraid of is a calm voice saying ‘look behind you’.

  John Hyam’s straightforward, unshowy direction provides exactly the objective calm the film needs, though he does include moments of genius like framing Floyd and Kernow talking about betraying HAL at a distance, boxed in, like the doomed astronauts who tried that trick last time. The starchild is shot not against the pod bay, but, with some taste, in another space, outside of Floyd’s cinematic experience. There’s a sober loveliness in the simple exposition of hard SF ideas, handing, not spoon feeding, the details to the audience. The Russian crew has no subtitles, their expressions doing that work. The exposition is mostly upfront, and entirely befitting the rational world the mariner, or James Bond, is about to leave for hectic dreams. Sometimes it’s too concrete: I’m not sure about that flying hairbrush. But the calm means that when HAL makes his sacrifice, there’s a power to it. Chandra moves from being rationally certain that SAL will dream in sleep, to being
rationally uncertain HAL will dream in death.

  Altogether, this is nowhere near as showy and shallow as ‘the sequel to 2001’ could have been. As the latter Alien and Psycho films were. It’s a splendid work of atheist Christianity. And in some ways it’s better than the original.

  THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION

  (Director: W. D. Richter; starring: Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum - 1984)

  Chris Roberson

  The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is arguably not a very good movie, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also a great movie.

  A kind of post-modern pulp hero, Buckaroo Banzai and his Hong Kong Cavaliers are like Doc Savage and his Fabulous Five filtered through a lens of kung fu films, rock-and-roll records, science fiction B-movies, and probably more than a little bit of marijuana smoke. Banzai is the best in the world at everything he does, ably assisted by a host of colourful characters with their own particular talents and skills to contribute, inhabiting a world in which bizarre events seem to happen on a regular basis.

  The plot of the movie is difficult to summarise, to say the least. Buckaroo Banzai is a polymath, a genius inventor, scientist, rock-and-roll musician, and adventurer, who as the film opens is experimenting with an invention that will allow him to move across the ‘8th Dimension’ – an experiment previously conducted by his parents, who perished in the attempt when he was a child, and even earlier by Banzai’s Japanese mentor and Italian scientist Dr Lizardo. The failure of the earliest attempt seemingly left Lizardo mad, confined to an insane asylum, but in fact he was ‘possessed’ by the consciousness of John Whorfin, an alien despot imprisoned (not unlike Kryptonian criminals in the Phantom Zone) in the 8th Dimension itself. Controlled by Whorfin’s consciousness, Lizardo was responsible for freeing the rest of the imprisoned aliens in 1938, and the news of their sudden appearance in Grover’s Mill was covered up as the ‘hoax’ surrounding Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast. Now, decades later, Lizardo has stolen the key component to Banzai’s 8th Dimensional invention, the ‘oscillation overthruster,’ and intends to use it to complete his own dimensionally-transcendent craft to mount the re-conquest of their home planet. The current rulers of their planet have been monitoring Earth, and now that Lizardo is close to carrying out Whorfin’s plans, inform Banzai that they will destroy the Earth rather than let the criminals return home.