Anglofuturism: The tropical planet Nelson is a jewel in Britain’s Galactic Empire and home to Spaceport Cromwell, a short shuttle from which lies ‘Space Club Tropical Excellent Rhodes Retreat’, an exclusive retreat where Royal Space Navy Officers unwind between deep space voyages pic.twitter.com/BdIGWMtJvM

— 🚮 ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 (@kunley_drukpa) November 28, 2021

Lost in Spice

The Bad

The characters mumble. Not much of the book's "poetry" has survived. And in fact the film generally is altogether so artsy that a lot of it is literally too dark, too blurry, too indistinct and, quite simply, too cool.*

Conversely all the female characters seem to have been miscast. None of them is remotely so cool as in the book or, for that matter, as in the Lynch version. (The Spice Girls they ain't!) Obviously no actress has ever been so cool as Siân Phillips.  But Jessica has been reduced from being an elegant and invincible matriarch to being a scowling, whingeing Karen. And Zen-dire, who plays the same character she plays in the Spider-Man films, is never so cool as she thinks she is anyway.

The Fremen, meanwhile, are "diverse". No attempt has been made to make them into a realistic race of people, or indeed to subvert expectations. Why not have a black Paul Atreides and the Fremen all blond-haired and, er, blue-eyed? It could have been interesting, at any rate.

Duncan Idaho on the other hand is cool. (Jason Momoa is cool. Duh!) So why does he have a crap death scene? (Actually that whole subplot is fairly boring and could easily have been cut, as it was in the Lynch version.)

I never noticed the Atreides' hyper-masculine homoerotic thing before. But why don't we hear Gurney Halleck sing? (Can Josh Brolin sing?)

In fact there's actually too much prophecy in the film, so that by the end of Dune: Part One we already know what's going to happen in Dune: Part Two before it's even begun filming.

And the Harkonnens' "pet"? WTF? Is Villeneuve trying to make up for the lack of Guild Navigators, not to mention heart plugs and cat-milking?

Finally, the "voice" is realised on screen just as stupidly here as in the Lynch version. And in fact there's still too much of Lynch's Dune altogether. There's no real conflict between the "liberal" materialism of the Harkonnens and the traditionalist honour of the Atreides. There's none of the book's "Ruritania in Space", which even Lynch (and George Lucas!) kept a certain amount of. And yet, sed contra, Lynch at least made the effort to explain all sorts of things, such as the Mentats, and indeed why the spice is so valuable. This is crucial plot background that never so much as seea the light of day here. So the book's poetry has gone for a burton, but there's precious little of the book's "science" either. (Maybe there'll be more in Part Two!

The Good

The military stuff is all good, and in practice I quite enjoyed all the homoerotic hypermasculinity.

I loved the ornithopters.

All the goody male characters are actually well cast, including Duncan Idaho. Chalamet, strange but true, actually has a lot of youthful gravitas. 

Yueh is Chinese. WTF?

Hans goes Wagnerian in the final scene.

The sign language and the Fremen walk are well realised.

And whereas Lynch's worms were giant willies with giant foreskins Villeneuve's are proper trad vaginae dentatae again. Nice!

*Elizabeth Bachmann in Stranger First Things observes somewhat archly 'due to cool, blue-toned lighting, some unconvincing CGI, and the fact that the actors rarely broke a sweat, Villeneuve’s desert left me feeling rather chilly.' Touché!

Jordan Houlden

Wet, bulging - and looking like a hero!

Only one of the following countries is not using Covid passports. Can you spot it? 🧐 pic.twitter.com/HX22yTspA2

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) November 12, 2021

Sexy Sailors

This famous photograph of two sailors kissing was originally taken in San Diego, California in 1942. It's currently owned by the notorious Kinsey* Institute.

This cropped version was used by Gran Fury's ACT UP “Read My Lips” campaign.

There is of course a perfectly sensible reason why the two young gentlemen are normally only shown from the waist up. Suffice it to say that are very much "for real" and they're very much enjoying both themselves and each other.

*Yes, it's the same Kinsey who collected that "interesting" data about prepubescent boys having multiple orgasms.

Grosse Pointe Cool

Between punk and the millennium, between T-2 and The Matrix, between the golden age of action movies and the post-9/11 rebirth of high fantasy... there was an oddly sleepy sort of time called the 1990s. Action comedy Grosse Pointe Blank very much represents the better end of that particular market. (Please don't ask what was at the other end.)

John Cusack is there. He's still pretty much got it. In fact he's as good as he ever was. And as a leftover 1980s teen heartthrob par excellence (albeit better known to "my" generation as that guy from The Grifters and Wesley Crusher's dead older brother in Stand by Me), he fits his role perfectly. He's now doing the quintessentially cool amoral 1990s thing - which is of course contract killing. (Hey! After the '80s even Bond was little more than a hitman - witness Dalton and Brosnan in Living Daylights and World is Not Enough!) And indeed 1980s top funny man Dan Ackroyd is there too, also great as ever (and even getting a throwaway Ghostbusters-type line about astral projection and telepathy).

So if you ever wondered what happened to John Hughes' kids, well, they got hip, they got cynical, they got cool... and they warmed up for Fight Club ("I don't think what a guy does for a living reflects who he really is", "You can never go home again, but you can shop there.") and (of course, "killing a lot of people"!) American Psycho. (Did mini-marts even in the '90s have Blistex and Trojan condoms on the front counter? Funny how it's always the most recent past feels the most alien!)

So Cusack plays a hitman called Martin. He wears black. His surname is 'Blank'. Get it? He's not a real person. He's a Man in Black. (This was the era of classic X-Files, remember, and before Men in Black the movie! In fact his secretary - played gloriously by Cusack's own sister - even has Scully's outfit and hairdo.) But is he also firing blanks - metaphorically in as much as he wants to quit the cool job that he's now too cool for? (I do really like Blank's office though. In those days even "old school" could still be cool!)

The actual gags though are also fired off thick and fast, and a surprising number are palpable hits. An assassin who sees a shrink was way ahead of Analyse This (and a much gentler but more incisive dig at the post-'80s "kinder, gentler" 1990s craze for counselling and "caring"*). And the one-liners are smart and daring. Greatest disappearing act since white flight? (WTF? Couldn't get away with that nowadays!) Live and Let Die on the soundtrack? Cheeky! The Story of a Mediocre Genesis? Nice!

And that Kipling quote is way, way deep!

*In reality it was little more than the boomers' moving on from their '80s physical exercise loopiness to trying to fill the spiritual void a decade later with neo-Freudian, New-Age bullshit.

Stars and Stripes?

J. Allen Hynek presents... (?)

How many "serious" sci-fi movies and TV-series about space aliens are there really?

My list goes something like this:

• The Outer Limits: 'The Bellero Shield' (1964) à Betty and Barney Hill abduction à The UFO Incident (1975)  à Travis Walton abduction à Fire in the Sky (1993)
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
• Starman (1984)
• Flight of the Navigator (1986)
• UFO Abduction (1989)
• Communion (1989)
• Fire in the Sky (1993)
• The X-Files (1993-)
• Roswell (1994)
• Dark Skies (1996-7)
• The Outer Limits: 'Beyond the Veil' (1997)
• The Shadow Men (1997)
• Taken (2002)
• The Outer Limits: 'Dark Child' (2002)
• Alien Abduction (2005)
• The Fourth Kind (2009)
• Race to Witch Mountain (2009)
• Dark Skies (2013)
• Alien Abduction (2014)
• Extraterrestrial (2014)

 

Whomosexuality 2: Planet of Fire

I discovered a few months ago that I'd never actually seen Planet of Fire. And if you don't mind the (literally?) smouldering homo-eroticism it's actually surprisingly good.

Peri - who with the possible honest exception of Leela is the only bona fide sexiful TARDIS girl - does literally seem to have gone to Greece on an archaeological expedition composed entirely of gay guys. I mean, "Kurt" and "Howard"? Really? And then they find an "intriguing" underwater dildo. Clearly the poor lass is recovering from a breakup and wanted to take a break from the cheerleader squad with the "safe" boys. Did Yankee passports really look like that though? Bit weird if they didn't! It's hardly adding anything to Peri's character to show that she's "well-travelled". And what sort of person leafs through her passport like that anyway? There's also something mildly problematic about the script's requiring Nicola to flounder about like a wilting violet when in actual fact she clearly is absolutely fit as a fiddle.

Turlough meanwhile has never been camper. "Doctor, you're showing off!" But his indignant "Earthlings!" when he sees Peri pretending to drown does seem to suggest a lingering taste for heterosexuality - except that he does also wear budgie-smugglers under his hot short shorts. (You know - just in case!) Actually why is Strickson still playing Turlough as camp and weird and nerdy? (Does one have to ask?) Surely by this time Turlough should be one of the good guys? "If you're holding back anything that might help the Master, our friendship is at an end. I know we only became friends in the first place because you were trying to kill me, but I do have limits." (One is reminded though that back in the 1980s a macho hero's "brother" could just as easily be his boyfriend IRL.)

Peter Davison does at least keep the Doctor in character - a glass of water and absent-mindedly paying with alien currency is oddly true to form even for his most "normal" of Doctors. Later on we even get the half-moon specs back again. Yes, I know it was the youngest actor at the time to play the part over-compensating, but surely kooky uncool fogeydom - as with Matt Smith's tweeds and bow-ties - is part and parcel of what the Doctor and Doctor Who are all about? And surely only a Time Lord could get away with a waistcoat like that on holiday!

Peter Wyngarde meanwhile ought by rights to be an object lesson in why you shouldn't have "proper" actors in Doctor Who. (In the apocryphal but immortal words of Lord Olivier, "I'm too fucking grand.") But in fact he goes to show how a competent actor can make a sound concept work even in the most unpromising of productions. Yes, there's a real problem that unless you listen to the dialogue (duh!) there's no obvious distinction between Sarn and Earth. (They both look like Lanzarote.) But in truth most of the time the special effects are used sparingly enough for them to have held up over the years. (Admittedly the running around stuff with the miniature Master would work better with Kay Harker in The Box of Delights later that year.)

Then of course there's the plot! Logar = Loki, as in the Norse god of fire? Nice! ("What does he look like, this fire-lord? I mean, what does he look like naked?") And the first non-sexy female in the entire story is literally a sceptic Karen. (I wonder how this will work out...) Of course by this time Doctor Who was in its twenty-first year, so for any long-term viewer there would by now have been a teeny growing sense of been there, done that. Sarn? Sounds like Karn! Is that life-giving sacred flame not just a little bit too familiar? The whole "the Doctor comes from <insert deity's name here>" has been a thing in Doctor Who since literally the Stone Age in literally the series' first serial. And of course there's something fundamentally silly about science-fiction encouraging scepticism about "organised religion" - as if a genre that permits space wizards and time travel can really have a problem with a straightforward philosophical proposition like the existence of God.

Alas, by the time Turlough reveals that he's deposed ancien regime in exile (very cool - albeit second generation!) it feels a bit late in the day to do anything "interesting" with the character. And the very eccentric solicitor on Chancery Lane sounds like a genuine piece of Doctor Who whimsy. So why didn't we hear more about him ever? (Presumably he was the one who got young Master Turlough packed off to Brendon in the first place!) Mind you, the people of Trion do use Arabic numerals, and they send their exiled princelings to English public schools. Wouldn't you say that's quite eccentric?