Ishiro Honda's Gojira (1954)

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Darren Aronofsky's Pi (1998)

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Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1999)

I was riding down the sunny streets of New York City on a motorcycle. As I sped toward Times Square, the former owner of my new bike’s parents shuttered through my mind: I wondered what their reaction would be when they found out that their son had just been murdered for his Tetsuo brand motorcycle. The thought passed, and I kept riding.

It wasn’t the first homicide I had committed that day. Just minutes earlier, I aimed the barrel of my gun at a propane tank parked at a fueling station and pulled the trigger. I wasn’t able to count the bodies before I could get away from the Five-O on the unidentified man’s Tetsuo bike, the same who lay dead on the pavement in the middle of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

The cops were catching up to me now. Fifty, sixty, seventy the speedometer read. I was the Minnesota cowboy who could not be caught; something in my teetering bulb of dread and dream knew I would never be. And so I killed again

The police were cut off by a walk only street in Greenwich Village. My newly hijacked motorcycle, a Kaneda model, was acquired from an Eastern European gentleman below an underpass off of Highway 78 running alongside the Hudson River. The man’s neck snapped sharply between my fingerless leather gloves. It was the last noise his body would ever make as his legs twitched silently beneath my feet. Sirens blared. This time, I didn’t have enough time to think about his parents.

I raced down the east end of Broadway St, weaving in between a combination of pedestrians, limos, and pigeons. A police officer flew out his windshield into oncoming traffic behind me, sporadically bouncing across the concrete safari of the city for blocks. I knew an acquaintance would be waiting in Brooklyn with a chopper to take us out of the sights and minds of the NYPD, but it would take more than a motorcycle to get there.

I headed for the docks on the Lower East Side, where I might be able to hijack a jet ski to take across East River into the borough to the south. The plot thickened when I tried to pass the SWAT teams on South Essex Street, where spotlights blinded and helicopters deafened. I was about to finally be roped in. The tires of my Kaneda were shot out by a rooftop sniper. For a moment, I flew. The next, I lay dead.

The masochistic nature of my killing spree in Grand Theft Auto IV left me thinking about those motorcycles I rode in my final hour of play. I suspected the names were Japanese, and I knew for a fact that they were fictitious.

Fictitious, but not original. A Google search took me to a character list for an animated film called Akira. Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, branded their virtual motorcycles under the veil of an Easter egg, the names of Akira’s central characters.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg labeled the film unmarketable in the United States, but Akira managed to achieve cult status after its national 2001 release.

Tetsuo and Kaneda are cyberpunk motorcycle gangsters, members of a society described as “low life and high technology.” Akira has an advantage over live action films in the genre in that the special effects options that went into making a dystopian Tokyo circa 2019 were limitless in its art form.

Akira is much praised as an animated cult movie that managed to influence live-action blockbusters. The Matrix (1999) drew from Akira’s account of a human’s attempt to do right in a corrupt, technology-based society, a remarkable feat for a film without any actors. Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA looked to director Katsuhiro Otomo’s methods of audio engineering when creating the sound effects for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), compositing the noise produced by a 1929 Harley Davidson with that of a jet engine.

Word of a live-action remake of Akira arises in the media every so often. Warner Brothers Studios bought the rights in 2008, and the various proposed cast lists have been exclusively white A-List: Ryan Gosling and James Franco as the leads, Mila Kunis as femme fatale, Helena Bonham Carter typecast as the villain. No deals between the studio and the actors were ever secured, and production has shut down a total of four times as of January 2012. It’s better that way. The power of Otomo’s storytelling with the animated art form is timeless.

Watch for the respect Kaneda gives his brethren in light of their losses, dissimilar from the respect I failed to give my victims back in my Grand Theft Auto IV days. Hayao Miyazaki fanboys could never stomach the violence you are about to witness.

August King
Film Club Co-President

Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Essay unavailable at this time.

Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1993)

The Truman Show is that rare triumph of family filmmaking that introduces its viewers to something bigger than children’s movies. It is made with perfect Hollywood ease, an easy-to-follow plot, and somewhat exaggerated acting. Still, that it pushes its viewer to think is undeniable.

I remember watching the film in elementary school and having a discussion about it afterward. Up until then, my movie-watching had consisted mostly of cartoons and musicals, repeated about ten times each thanks to the wonder of VHS. It was then that I discovered a movie that genuinely gripped and confused me, with a shocking twist two-thirds of the way through. Even more shocking than the twist of plotline was the presence of anything unpredictable at all in a storyline.

The initial appeal has faded, but I’ve watched Peter Weir’s The Truman Show several times since and I keep finding new questions. What does Truman tell us about human consciousness? How does the rubber idiot of Dumb and Dumber transform into a transfixing, thoughtful actor? (This is a question that comes up again in Jim Carrey’s best movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) Is the movie responsible for those people who schizophrenically believed that they were in a television show – dubbed “Truman Syndrome” by the Institute of Psychiatry in London?

Still, the biggest question is: How did Weir know? Just a decade into the future, Americans are fascinated by televised private lives, from Octomom to Jersey Shore. Not since Network has a movie so accurately predicted the future of popular culture.

Noah Shavit-Lonstein
Film Club

The Evolution of Jim Carrey, Actor

It’s worth considering Noah’s question regarding Jim Carrey’s transformation from elastic clown to amiable naif in his career. He approaches his early movies, driven by a kind of manic hyperactivity, as if his goal were to become a Tex Avery cartoon character (which he pretty much does in Chuck Russell’s The Mask). But in The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which Film Club will screen in February), he’s more human, more a part of the film, more consistently someone to whom life-changing events happen, and, in the end, more watchable.

It’s also worth noting that Carrey is not the first late-night sketch comedian to make this transition. Watch Bill Murray mug and smirk his way through early films like Stripes, Ghostbusters, Meatballs, and Caddyshack, then note the mellower, wryer, more bittersweet characters that he plays in Rushmore or Lost in Translation. Will Ferrell, too, relied on his ironic clueless, self-absorbed jerk act through movies like Anchorman and Talladega Nights, but turned to a more serious, three-dimensional role in Stranger Than Fiction. Heck, even Adam Sandler, after a number of screechy steroidal arrested-adolescence films like Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison (and Little Nicky, which we’d rather scrub our eyeballs with cleanser on a wire toothbrush than have to watch again), tried to move from the look-at-me medium of feature length sketch comedy to true movie acting in Spanglish. Not successfully, mind you, but he tried.

What we learn, perhaps, is that while "Saturday Night Live" and "MADtv" and "In Living Color," post-prime time sketch comedy series, may boost an actor to popularity (especially if the opportunistic comedian comes up with a memorable catch-phrase), it’s still a long way to serious acting. In fact, said comedian may be hampered by the kind of characters one develops in those kind of shows – they tend to be one-dimensional, built on a idiosyncratic characteristic, and a bit improvisational. As you watch Truman, take note of Carrey’s ability to blend himself into the texture of the film and to use his usually plastic face more subtly, showing Truman’s struggle with confusion, alienation, and adversity. Compared to Fire Marshall Bill, he’s almost a different species.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Phil Tucker's Robot Monster in 3-D (1953) and National Geographic's Sea Monsters 3D (2007)

The Rubicon and SPA Film Club present
"3-D: Then and Now"

Then… Robot Monster

In 1953, the first major motion picture in 3-D (Man in the Dark) hit theaters. Patrons donned their anaglyph glasses, sat in stadium seats and watched as American cinema changed forever.

In that same year, 25-year old Phil Tucker directed and released Robot Monster, a science fiction movie shot and projected in dual-strip, polarized 3-D. The stereoscopic photography in the film is high quality for the time, impressive from a crew that had no experience with the previously unused camera rig. In spite of this accomplishment, Robot Monster is considered one of the worst films ever made.

So why would we choose it? Because it is SO bad, it’s good. Who can resist a character like the evil “Ro-man” who comes to earth in his bad gorilla suit and diving helmet to exterminate all the “hu-mans” remaining after the rocket explosions, lightning storms and giant lizard attacks? Or odd courting rituals like tying a woman up to show her deep, undying affection? And who can forget moments like Ro-Man’s impassioned line (think Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” speech): “I cannot - yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do ‘must’ and ‘cannot’ meet? Yet I must - but I cannot!” Try getting that one past an SPA English teacher in an essay. No, actually… please don’t.

This film is wonderfully terrible and an important 66 minutes of 3-dimensional history.

Now… Sea Monsters 3-D: A Prehistoric Adventure

The way monsters are depicted in National Geographic’s Sea Monsters is a stark contrast to the 3-D of the 1950s. While Robot Monster focuses on adding depth behind the screen, the Sea Monsters swim toward the viewer. In truth, both effects are created by playing with depth perception but that is not the point: truly, you will be carried away by the mysterious creatures in this animated documentary.

Sea Monsters shows what marine life looked like in prehistoric times, and you will see no gorilla suits, here: everything from the Dolichorhynchops family we follow through the film to the amazing Styxosaurus, a fish larger than an adult male, is connected to archeological discovery.

Not only is Sea Monsters 3-D, but it was shot in IMAX for the biggest of the big screens. National Geographic cut no corners making this film; they brought in big names like Tony Award-winning actor Liev Schreiber to narrate; Richard Evans, David Rhodes and Peter Gabriel collaborated on the score. Think of Cameron Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything, John Cusak and boom box and you’ll recall how iconic Gabriel’s music can be in a film.

And speaking of the 1980s, when I was in elementary and middle school 3-D films made a comeback, especially with sequel thrillers. Jaws 3-D (1983) and Friday, the 13^th 3-D (1982) hit the screens and had me covering my eyes but peeking through my fingers. So when The Rubicon staff said, “Let’s do a 3-D issue,” I couldn’t help but think terrifying … and fun!

Today 3-D is more popular than it has ever been. With the invention of Real 3-D and 3-D televisions, the big screen magic 1953 film patrons experienced can be replicated in the comfort of your own family room… or in Bigelow Commons. Enjoy the shows!

Kathryn Campbell
The Rubicon Adviser

L. Q. Jones' A Boy and His Dog (1975)

Despite a certain amount of sex and violence, L. Q. Jones’ A Boy and His Dog is more like Road Warrior lite than a direct American counterpart to George Miller’s brutal Australian post-apocalyptic warning, which may be why the latter is better known (although one might also cite the nascent superstardom of Road Warrior’s Mel Gibson). In both movies, civilization is but a vestige of its former self and so humans are reduced to scavenging, scrabbling to eke out a minimal existence in a desert-like wasteland. Where Miller’s Road Warrior focused on the centrality of gasoline, the absence of which reduces most humans to sub-human sadists, A Boy and His Dog takes a more whimsical, general view – the movie explores more the question of daily survival than the threat humans pose each other when the social fabric has been shredded. Vic (Don Johnson) wants only food and the occasional female companionship to maintain his sense of quality existence.

In fact, if there’s a theme to A Boy and His Dog, it’s companionship. Jones juxtaposes two modern and common kinds, emphasizing them by their near-necessity in the post-civilized world: the companionship we feel with our pets (here represented by dogs who can telepathically communicate with their human counterparts) and the companionship we seek through mating (that’s right, sex and propagation of the species). In the end, A Boy and His Dog actually argues that one kind of companionship outweighs the other, but before we get to that, let’s consider the subtext. The script, from an original story by the fabulous science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, tells us that, when the world is destroyed, our greatest fear will be loneliness, a much gentler moral than those suggested by the nuclear-winter-and-cannibals hopelessness of John Hillcoat’s The Road (from Cormac McCarthy’s novel), the steroidal butchering motorcycle gangs of Miller’s The Road Warrior, the viral holocaust of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, or the genocidal irony of Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (from Pierre Boulle’s novel).

Is Jones that naïve or have our tastes merely conflated the allegorical nature of the post-apocalyptic story with our lust for horror films? (That’s a real question: discuss it amongst yourselves for a few minutes.)

One answer may come from that fact that this film, at times, has its tongue firmly in its cheek. We’ve included it in our collection of “post-apocalyptic visions,” but another way to look at A Boy and His Dog is as a cinematic shaggy dog story. Not that it’s about Blood, but that it contains a lengthy build-up to a rather sophomoric, somewhat disconcerting gag. We won’t give it away, but it may leave you wondering whether you were really meant to take the rest of the film seriously after all.

We hope you do. Ellison/Jones see their future world divided into a pair of communities not unlike those we found in the Boulle/Schaffner Planet of the Apes film – one group on the surface of the planet adapting to hardships in a remade world and one group beneath the surface, desperately trying to retain the vestiges of a passing civilization. One asks oneself, which is the more viable approach? Which the more desirable? And isn’t it better to avoid the whole choice in the first place and try to keep the world we have intact?

And if we can’t, will mere companionship make the new world palatable? (Consider what drives Viggo Mortensen on in The Road.) So now you get to choose: the dog or the human? Which will it be? Maybe you can discuss it with the person who came to the film with you while you have a bite to eat.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973)

Woody Allen is kind of a funny guy. The critics think so. With five films on the AFI 100 years…100 Laughs list, he is the most represented director. The viewers think so, too. He has a rating of 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is only brought down by the poorly conceived films he acted in. And we think so. Sleeper, a comedy from 1973, is one of his funnier movies.

Allen stars as Miles Monroe, a health food-selling Brooklynite who undergoes nonconsensual cryogenic freezing. When he is defrosted 200 years later by scientists who hope that he can help overthrow the evil dictator in charge (a scene which Mike Myers and Austin Powers took more than a few cues from), the world is a very different place. This setting change from the tangible, real modern world to a completely goofy figment of Allen’s imagination allows for as many creative additions as he wants. The people of the 22nd century are all slightly robotic and vapid, and when the government police show up to arrest the scientists who have thawed Miles, he panics, scatters, and ends up posing as a robot in the house of Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton), a poet in her own time. Cue a disastrous dinner party, slapstick jokes, and a new head for Miles the robot. Since robot Miles does not want to lose his human head, he kidnaps Luna. More hilarity ensues as they run from the police. Eventually, Miles is captured and brainwashed. Then rescued. Then involved in a plot to kill the evil dictator. (But struggles against adversity really aren’t the point in Sleeper.)

Funny writing, clever dialogue, and smart jokes characterize many Woody Allen movies. He is a cerebral writer and director, and it comes out in his humor much of the time. Sleeper represents a break from the later, more traditional Woody Allen mode. There are far more physical, Buster Keaton- and Charlie Chaplin-esque jokes, such as Allen’s robot impression, and the debacle that occurs in the fix-it shop. Physical humor turns out to be something that Woody Allen does very well. He has plenty of ironic and satirical humor, as always, but also includes props like the ‘Orgasmatron’(you’re not going to find an explanation here) and ‘the orb,’ a device that, when held, gives its user a sense of euphoria.

Sleeper also pays homage to scenes from other movies throughout. When Miles is attempting to get back to sanity, he flashes into a scene from “A Streetcar Named Desire,” playing Blanche DuBois, and Luna is forced to step into the role of Stanley Kowalski (by doing a ludicrous Marlon Brando impression) to steer him back to the real world. Also, Allen mimics the famous Marx Brothers scene involving a full-length mirror.

If you’re more familiar with Allen from his later more intellectual style in films like Hannah and Her Sisters, Annie Hall, or Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the comedic romp in Sleeper may catch you by surprise. Not that the movie isn’t intellectual, but it also includes and relies on humor that fans of the Three Stooges might enjoy. Yes, there’s a bit with a banana peel. A very big banana peel. If you’re a snob, you may have trouble enjoying it, but if you’re out to enjoy laughs any way they come, Sleeper is an easy one to sit down to.

Sam Rock
SPA Film Club

Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984)

“The life of a repo man is always intense.” “The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.” “No one is innocent.” These, and other lessons, can be learned from the mid-‘80s film Repo Man, written and directed by Alex Cox.

Repo Man follows the path of a disaffected young punk named Otto (Emilio Estevez), whose odyssey is a result of his disillusionment with his friends, his parents, and his life. His girlfriend dumps him for his friend who recently got out of prison. His parents send the money in his college fund to a televangelist. And he loses his mindless job in a grocery store. Otto is an individual with no direction until he meets Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) and learns what the life of a repo man offers. Otto does not find direction immediately, but after a while on the staff he finds what he wants do with his life and what is really important to him.

But Repo Man is no typical coming-of-age or message movie. It’s a howling satirical attack on the substancelessness of American culture. Instead of being about typical American existence, which is about buying and getting items, Repo Man is about repo men, whose only function in society is taking things away from people. Cox increases the irony when he calls attention to American consumerism by highlighting the absence of glaring product labels. In Repo Man, for example, there are no corporate labels on food, or anything else. Beer is “Beer,” Corn Flakes are “Corn Flakes,” Canned Beans are “Canned Beans,” etc. The products may be generic, but it reminds us that we are surrounded by advertisement. This simplicity clashes with the American identity that is the consumer.

The life of a repo man is simple as well. As the quote “repo man’s got all night” shows, all that a repo man does is pick up cars. Again, Cox is tweaking our sense of irony, making heroes (or at least protagonists) out of a profession that is more likely to be reviled by anyone who takes the time to think about it. The entire movie could be defined as similarly counter-culture, from the ‘80s punk soundtrack to the anti-consumerist actions of the repo men to the focus on people who repossess vehicles. And we haven’t even mentioned the UFOs and deadly top-secret (possibly alien) substance in the back of that Chevy Malibu.

The surrealism of Repo Man is what makes it so funny. Through another character’s eyes, Otto’s world could be a horror film. However, we watch as Otto encounters goofy people, gets into goofy situations, and says goofy things. What happens to Otto is so strange and unrealistic that it is funny, especially the nature of what happens to him.

Sam Rock
Film Club

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1983)

It’s a simple question: What makes us human? At this point, you could have about fifty different answers: our physical structure; our ability to rationalize, to think, to have memories, to feel emotions, to dream, to hope. To love. But in the end, your ability to believe you are human could simply be a conscious dream. There is nothing you can truly do to prove to yourself that you are more than possibly a machine. Blade Runner asks us this question: How can we know we are truly human?

Directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator) and adapted from the famous novel by Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner is possibly the greatest science fiction film ever put to screen. It is visually stunning, creating a bleak, dystopic vision of Los Angeles in 2019. It is a hybrid of genres, taking a science fiction story and forming itself as a film noir. It constantly uses visual cues, brilliant monologues, and a wonderful storyline to ask us to explore our humanity. And it is also the film that defined the importance of the director’s cut. Originally released in 1982 to mundane applause, Ridley Scott made his intended version of the film in 1992, away from Hollywood’s grasp, making Blade Runner into a cult classic.

The film begins with a title card telling us of our bleak future. It is 2019, and for years a giant corporation has been producing replicants, androids that are identical or greater in every single way to humans, including intelligence and physical capabilities. Used mainly for slave labor on off-world planets, replicants finally realized their own capabilities and began a mutiny. They were finally banned on Earth and “retired” by an elite group of police called blade runners. Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark), used to be one of these blade runners. Deckard’s adventure begins as five replicants come to Los Angeles, hoping to find a way to cure death, as replicants have an expiration date. Deckard, recovering from his divorce, is put back on the force with the task of hunting these men down, while closely being watched by a man named Gaff. The world is dark and grim, but Deckard seems to be unmoved by this, simply hoping to get his job done.

The vision of the future that Scott has set is breathtaking. The world is covered with lights and pollution, not a utopia as other directors have imagined. If Star Wars was the first to show an unclean future, Blade Runner took it to the extreme. Though some areas may be pristine perfect, other areas show Los Angeles as a dilapidated hole, not renovated in years. Scott also comments on the integration of Japanese culture into the United States. In the film, a majority of the population appears to be Japanese and most advertisements feature Japanese. In the 1980s, it was largely believed that Japan would overtake the United States in economic power, a belief still held today by many, and Blade Runner shows that fear and anxiety well.

Blade Runner also plays with the ideas between science fiction and film noir. Many influences of both classics like The Maltese Falcon or neo noir like Chinatown can be seen in this film. It is full of dark and shady visuals. We follow the film from a single protagonist (who in the original cut has a narration) that had a shady moral outlook. There is a femme fatale. The score is a mix of futuristic tones and jazz, as created by the famous Vangelis. And finally there is the question of corruption, seen by almost every person that dominates this screen.

Speaking of film noir and more specifically, femme fatales, the character of Rachael (Sean Young) is one that haunts my mind. While visiting the replicant corporation, the head introduces Rachael to Deckard as his secretary, but she is actually a replicant who doesn’t know her identity as one. Implanted with the memories of the boss’s niece, Rachael has no idea that her life is simply a machine. Which brings me to the major philosophy of this film. If Rachael, a woman who can love, emote, and have memories among other qualities, does not know she is simply a machine, how can we know what we are not? How can we perceive our reality as a human to be actually real?

Eyes play a major role in this film as a symbol for perception. The opening sequence is an eye reflected upon the city. People’s eyes light up. This is important for Scott’s film, because this is the medium in which we perceive our own reality. Our brain is designed to think that if we can see it, it is probably real. But in Blade Runner, we perceive Rachael originally to be real. Our eyes can deceive us, just as any body part of us can. We can only trust in the soul.

But the question that remains incontrovertible to the entire film is the reality of our main protagonist. Unlike most directors’ cuts, Scott only changed three small parts to his film. First he removed the narration the producers demanded he put in. Second, he removed the happy ending footage of Deckard and Rachael driving into the sun (which was actually extra footage from The Shining). And finally, he added a small scene where Deckard dreams about a unicorn. The importance of this dream can be seen at the end, when Gaff leaves a small origami of a unicorn outside his apartment. Gaff throughout the film leaves small origami figures like the unicorn to toy with Deckard’s emotions, but the unicorn proves that Gaff knows about his dream of the unicorn. And if Gaff knows without ever telling him, then his dreams may have all been implanted. Thus, the ultimate question of this film is: Could Deckard by a replicant?

It is a shocking revelation to think about it, but it makes complete sense if Deckard was simply created as a replicant to hunt other replicants. If film noirs are all about untrustworthy narrators, what is more perfect than a narrator who doesn’t know he isn’t human? But what does this mean for us as an audience? It’s a shock to think about Rachael’s existence but if our main character, a man we have come to trust for the last two hours, was nothing but another corporate machine sent to do a human’s job, how can we trust our own reality? What makes us human? What separates man from machine?

The other major intellectual fight is the one for immortality. Our antagonist for the picture is Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), the leader and wisest of the replicants. Roy wants nothing more than to stop the expiration date he is designed with. It is this fight for survival, for human existence, for preserving one’s memories that remain the emotional heart of this film. The final monologue by Roy is one that amazes me every time: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” I find Batty to be the most complex character, and maybe the most well developed antagonist in any film I have ever seen.

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is an epic and philosophical science fiction masterpiece that will probably never be equaled. This is a film that I find perplexing every single time, and makes me wish I could somehow assert my humanity to the world. But as Scott suggests, it is impossible to assert our own humanity. There is no way we can ever know we are truly human. But this is not just a philosophical film, Scott has used visuals, motifs, and a film noir story to adapted to his theories on life, death, and meaning. Blade Runner is one of those few films that will be etched into your mind for years to come, a masterpiece of the highest magnitude, responding to the mind through entertainment, visual appeal, and philosophical terms.

Peter Labuza
Film Club Co-President

Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (1956)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century" (1953)

Your Humble Commentator remembers being ten years old, some time ago, sitting at home on summer Sunday afternoons in his basement watching classic sci-fi B-movies on his family’s black and white TV: Them, The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came From Outer Space, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Incredible Shrinking Man. All great; all part of his current video collection. But the best of them all? That would be Fred Wilcox’s 1950s space epic Forbidden Planet. Perhaps that’s because the screenplay was taken from a script by some guy named Will Shakespeare.

Wait, you think, Shakespeare never had robots or spaceships or Anne Francis in a really short skirt in any of his plays! Well, no. But Forbidden Planet falls into a category that Shakespeare-on-Film critics call an “unfaithful pop culture adaptation.” That means it dumps Shakespeare’s language, borrows the plot of one of his plays and reuses it in a genre film more in keeping with the tastes of modern film-goers. Hence Taming of the Shrew can become a teen sex comedy like 10 Things I Hate About You or Macbeth can become a foul-mouthed mafia flick like Men of Respect or Hamlet can become an animated morality tale like The Lion King. (Yes it is. Yes it IS.)

So what? Watching this 1956 film you’ll probably notice more parallels to the not-too-distant cultural happening known as Star Trek than the vague allusions to Prospero (Morbius), Miranda (Altaira), Ferdinand (Commander Adams), and Caliban (Robby the Robot). And reveling in the B-movie effects and cheesy ray guns and flying saucer vision of space travel and terrifying monster will no doubt drive out any thoughts of Forbidden Planet as a cultural lens through which we can reflect on Shakespeare and Captain Kirk at the same time. Yet what we have here is a movie that aspires to the same cultural greatness – an entertaining, swashbuckling tale that rises above the common B-movie fare by singing a captivating song not of the aforementioned accoutrements of Eisenhower-era sci-fi films but of the more complex elements of human frailty and pride. Will you hear it? Good, for “the hour’s now come; the very minute bids thee ope thine ear. Obey and be attentive.”

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Woody Allen's Sleeper (1973)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "One Froggy Evening" (1955)

If you only know of Woody Allen as a recent, sad, old whiny character, badly miscast in his own movies (Curse of the Scorpion, anyone?), and you are not familiar with the younger Allen, who invokes the early film clown Buster Keaton and infuses his spirit with neurotic absurdity, then you're in for a treat. 1973's Sleeper finds Allen still working his stand-up comedy roots into his film, but beginning to develop a more socially astute work.

Here he plays Miles Monroe, a man cryogenically frozen in 1973 and revived 200 years in the future into a totalitarian society where he is adopted by a rebel underground in their struggle against a Big Brother-like ruler. While this sounds like a drama, Allen takes the typical dystopian vision (think Brave New World or 1984 or A Clockwork Orange) and turns it into satire.

The result is a great movie, full of images that have stood the test of time -- the "orb," the orgasmatron -- and raucous gags. Mike Myers, in his first Austin Powers movie, even blatantly plagiarized Allen's scene where Miles is revived. In the film world, it's considered "homage," and it's a way of recognizing a director's iconic touch.

Your Humble Commentator even thinks this film deserved an award. The Academy, however, tends to favor the dramatic over the comic. (Quick: Of the ten Best Picture Academy Awards in the 1970s, name the one comedy awarded.*)

And in 1973, the Best Picture Oscar went to George Roy Hill's The Sting. We here at Classic Films Central feel that comedy is overlooked too frequently. After all, which is more worthy of our notice -- drama, which helps us deeply explore the serious aspects of our lives? Or comedy, which helps us laugh at the serious aspects of our lives? This is not a rhetorical question.

Woody Allen once said, "Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all." For you, seeing Sleeper should solve that problem.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

*Answer: Woody Allen's comedy Annie Hall won in 1977.