Jules (2023)

A spaceship has crashed in my back yard and has crushed my azaleas. Milton Robinson (Ben Kingsley) is a 79-year-old widower living on his own in his small town of Boonton in Western Pennsylvania. He regularly attends city council meetings where he asks the same questions every weeks and makes the same comment about the town’s slogan phoning home. He receives regular visits and help from his daughter Denise (Zoe Winters) a veterinarian locally. One day, a UFO lands in his backyard and a small humanoid alien (Jade Quon) crawls out. Milton attempts to get help, calling the police and his daughter and bringing it up at the city council meeting but is brushed off as senile. Milton brings the alien, who is nonverbal, a rug to keep him warm but after seeing he’s cold outside on the back stoop, coaxes him inside the house and treats him as a regular houseguest, providing him with a tray of assorted food but discovering that his guest only drinks water and eats apples. Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) an acquaintance from the meetings, stops by and discovers the alien, telling Milton that they should keep it a secret for its own safety. Joyce (Jane Curtin), another elderly woman from the meetings irritated that Milton has been keeping company with Sandy also discovers the alien when she doorsteps them. Jules, the alien, begins repairing his ship but does not appear to be making quick progress. Milton’s daughter hears about her father’s antics and schedules him for a mental evaluation at a local facility where a neurologist Dr North (Anna George) says his faculties are quickly diminishing and that they should consider assisted living. The idea that he might have dementia upsets Milton and he storms out. Sandy, who is attempting to start a programme to connect with the youth of the neigbhourhood, is robbed by Danny (Cody Kostro) a young man she invites in to her home after he’s called her up on seeing the poster around town. After she states that she will call the police, the man tackles and attempts to strangle her. However the alien (whom Milton and Sandy have named Jules but Joyce insists on calling Gary – is there a certain singer in mind? His birthday is tomorrow, fact fans!) receives a vision of the events and telepathically causes the assailant’s head to explode. This raises the suspicion of the National Security Agency since they are conducting an ongoing search for the crashed spaceship. Milton, Sandy and Joyce finally figure out from Jules’ regular cat drawings that he needs dead cats to power his ship, so Milton and Sandy go out to find some but Milton continues to be troubled by thoughts of his declining faculties. Meanwhile, they are unknowingly followed by police who observe their strange activities … I’m not sure what to do. This hasn’t happened to me before. At first the screenplay by Gavin Steckler seems like a blend of Cocoon and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (the situation plus verbal nods are more obvious than meta) but this witty portrait of pension-age life also hits dark notes with ease and bats them away as quickly – in one case in an act of astonishing violence, albeit offscreen. His eyes are very understanding. There are some fun running jokes – Milton walks everywhere and curses the lack of a crosswalk; his repeated requests at the local council meetings; and each time he says he’s got an alien living with him, it’s received with the same query – An illegal alien? How three very different elderly adults deal with this extraordinary situation is treated with kindness and humour – while Joyce insists on performing If I Leave Here Tomorrow a 70s song that recalls her wild days and nights once upon a time in Pittsburgh, Jules’ empathy is such that he sees that Sandy is on the verge of being killed and does the necessary as Joyce warbles away beside him. That’s some juxtaposition. He’s very friendly, he’s undemanding, he watches whatever I watch. Companionship, the ignorance of adult children getting on with their own lives and the patronising misperception of the elderly’s capacities to cope are part of the emotional tapestry being enacted here – against the backdrop of a grand science fiction scenario. It is quite literally a study of alienation. I don’t see why we should prejudice him with our fearful thoughts. This meditation on ageing and friendship has a serious subject at its heart and that’s our loss of control when our faculties start misleading us. But this has the happiest of outcomes, all thanks to an alien who has the power to explode the head of a marauding raping home invader. Aside from the references to Milton’s beloved CSI on TV three times a day, there’s a knowing nod to the Men in Black who are in pursuit of the gentle non-verbal alien in their midst. You’ve seen the movies, you know what happens to these guys, deadpans Milton. A droll, witty, assured and heartfelt paean to friendship and the ironies of people on their home patch where they wind up being treated as idiots once they hit a certain age. The performances are pitch perfect from all concerned and Joyce is right about Gary/Jules – those eyes really are understanding. Quon is remarkable in the role of listener as these seniors pour out their worries. A low key left field joy! Directed by veteran producer Marc Turtletaub. You’ve got to enjoy your life, not worry it away

Asteroid City (2023)

Am I in this? In a retro-futurist kind of 1950s, a television host (Bryan Cranston) introduces a documentary about the creation and production of Asteroid City, a play by the famed playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). The play’s events are depicted in widescreen and stylised colour, while the television special is seen in monochrome Academy ratio. In the play, a youth astronomy convention is held in the fictional desert town of Asteroid City in the American Southwest. War photojournalist Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) arrives early to the Junior Stargazer convention with his teenage son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) a would-be intellectual and his three younger daughters Andromeda (Ellie Faris), Pandora (Gracie Faris) and Cassiopeia (Willan Faris) . When their car breaks down, Augie phones his father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks) asking for his help. Stanley, who dislikes his son-in-law, persuades him to tell the children about their mother’s (Margot Robbie) recent death, which Augie had concealed. Augie and Woodrow meet famous and disillusioned actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) who, like Woodrow, will be honoured at the convention. Augie and Midge and Woodrow and Dinah, gradually fall in love throughout the play. The other convention participants arrive: five-star General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), astronomer Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), three additional teenaged honorees Clifford (Aristou Meehan), Shelly (Sophia Lillis) and Ricky (Ethan Josh) and their parents J.J.(Liev Schreiber) Sandy (Hope Davis) and Roger (Stephen Park), a busload of elementary-school children chaperoned by young teacher June Douglas (Maya Hawke) and a cowboy band led by singer Montana (Rupert Friend). A local motel manager (Stephen Carell) provides everyone’s accommodations. Gibson welcomes the attendees at the Asteroid City crater where the teenagers are to receive awards for various inventions. A UFO suddenly appears above the crater; an alien (Jeff Goldblum) emerges and steals the remnant of the meteorite that created the crater. Augie photographs the alien. Gibson, with instructions from the president, places the town under military quarantine, and everyone is subjected to medical and psychiatric examinations. Meanwhile, a romance blossoms between Montana and June, who assure the students that the alien is likely peaceful. The Stargazer honourees use Dr. Hickenlooper’s equipment to attempt to contact the alien. Tricking the guard watching the pay phone, Ricky calls his school newspaper to relay the quarantine details and cover-up to the outside world … They’re strange, aren’t they, your children. Compared to normal people. What is this, exactly? A faux-documentary about a play about a 1950s junior stargazer convention in the Southwest. After that indigestible meta-in-joke construction is absorbed, what is this – exactly? The latest Wes Anderson production is more ironic with flatter backdrops than usual, presumably to (ironically) play on the flatness of the desert itself with the theatrical sets, the drama is only truly enlivened by two performances, those of Cranston (primarily in black and white) who breaks the fourth wall by intruding on a scene in colour, and Hanks, appropriately whose charisma warms up a setting that is paradoxically stifling in the desert heat – well, as the film within the play within the documentary. I don’t understand that emotion. I’ve played it, of course. It’s difficult to know where to look but as a dramatic rule, when in doubt, follow the emotion, which leads back to the three delightful little girls who learn their mother has died and are determined to give her a funeral in the dust which their estranged grandfather (Hanks) eventually commits to performing even if the kids call themselves witches. I still don’t understand the play. There is probably a bigger point being made about political theatre with a Kazan-like narcissist director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) leading the TV production and a needy self-conscious Methody movie star (Johansson) who, accompanied by that giant bottle of Chanel No. 5, can only be a parody Marilyn but this is ultimately confused. It’s not entirely unlikeable, not with those triplets, but it’s not very funny either. A real curate’s egg of shallow smugness from a story by those arch space cadets Anderson and Roman Coppola. You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

My interest is energy – transference of energy. Humanoid alien Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) comes to Earth from a distant planet on a mission to take water back to his home planet,which is experiencing a catastrophic drought. He uses the advanced technology of his home planet to patent many inventions on Earth, and acquires tremendous wealth as the head of a technology-based conglomerate, World Enterprises Corporation, aided by leading patent attorney Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry) who carries out all the interactions with people. His wealth is needed to construct a space vehicle with the intention of shipping water back to his home planet. While revisiting New Mexico he meets lonely Mary-Lou (Candy Clark) who works as a maid, bell-hop, and elevator operator in the small hotel where he’s staying. He tells her he is English. Mary-Lou introduces Newton to many customs of Earth, including church-going, alcohol, and sex. She and Newton live together in a house Newton has built close to where he first landed in New Mexico many years earlier. Womanising college lecturer Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) lands a job as a fuel technician with World Enterprises and slowly becomes Newton’s confidant. He senses Newton’s alien nature and arranges a meeting with Newton at his home where he has hidden a special X-ray camera. When he steals a picture of Newton it reveals alien physiology. Newton’s appetite for alcohol and television becomes crippling and he and Mary-Lou fight. Realising that Bryce has learnt his secret, Newton reveals his alien form to Mary-Lou. Her initial reaction is one of pure shock and horror. She tries to accept what she sees but then panics and flees. Newton completes the spaceship and attempts to take it on its maiden voyage amid intense press exposure. However, just before his scheduled take-off, he is seized and detained, apparently by the government and a rival company while Farnsworth, is murdered. The government had been monitoring Newton via his driver and he is now held captive in a locked luxury apartment, constructed deep within a hotel. He is kept sedated with alcohol (to which he has become addicted) and continuously subject him to rigorous medical tests, cutting into the artificial applications which make him appear human. Eventually, one examination, involving X-rays, causes the contact lenses he wears as part of his human disguise to permanently affix themselves to his eyes … It happened literally overnight. Paul Mayersberg’s adaptation of Walter Tevis’ 1963 novel is rigorous and finely attuned to the surreal. Bowie was living on milk and cocaine at the time, if his own admissions are to be believed, and his detachment and appearance are central to the success of probably the greatest science fiction film of the Seventies, an exploration of fragility and trust and rotten human behaviour. And it’s also about the alien nation of America, alienation and sex, feeding into contemporary paranoia about the political establishment. The flashbacks to Newton’s home and family are strange and lovely, his arrival in the nineteenth century simply dramatised for extra effectiveness in a narrative based on juxtaposition of the modern and the unknowable. Beautifully constructed, shot (by Anthony Richmond) and edited (by Graeme Clifford), this may well be director Nicolas Roeg’s greatest achievement with a wondrous soundtrack co-ordinated by John Phillips and featuring compositions by Stomu Yamashta. Stunning. I realise you’ve made certain assumptions about me

UFO (2019)

The guy on TV was lying.  College student Derek (Alex Sharp) tries to use his exceptional mathematical skills to interpret messages that appear to have been sent around a UFO sighting at a local airport, suggesting extra-terrestrial attempts at contact. Accompanied by his room mate Lee (Benjamin Beatty) and girlfriend Natalie (Ella Purnell) he is rebuffed by the airport staff and Government officials including FBI Agent Franklin Ahls (David Strathairn) and suspects a cover up. He requests the assistance of his professor Dr. Hendricks (Gillian Anderson) who thinks he is brilliant along the lines of a Thomas Edison but doesn’t really want anything to do with a gifted guy prepared to risk his scholarship by flunking her class. But he is haunted by memories of a childhood sighting which his mother refused to acknowledge … Do you know how many threats the airport gets every day? It’s not quite correct to describe this as suspenseful because it doesn’t conform to the usual tenets of dramatic pitch:  rather it settles for a flat realist line mirroring the landscape, leaving the maths to do the talking.  What’s marvellous is the lo-fi approach of paper, pencils and calculators to try and decrypt the probability and navigate the universe. Anderson is cannily cast, linking her meta-fashion to The X-Files, a shortcut to the idea dominating the story: We Are Not Alone. An intriguing exercise of singular focus utilising real-life information and TV newscasts about a 2006 incident at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Written and directed by Ryan Eslinger with a smart score by West Dylan Thordson. They put the Fine Structure Constant in their message. The mathematical equations and graphs are a thing of beauty, no matter how impenetrable. Practically a Hipster PDA exercise in astrophysics. That’s Warren Beatty and Annette Bening’s son as Lee. The wavelength is the unit of the measurement – it IS co-ordinates

Enemy Mine (1985)

Do you think we really are alone out here? During a late 21st century a war between humans and the reptilian Drac race,Bilateral Terran Alliance (BTA) spaceship pilot Willis E. Davidge (Dennis Quaid) ends up stranded after their dogfight ends up with them both crash landing on alien planet Fyrine IV with enemy soldier Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.). While both Willis and his Drac counterpart can breathe on the planet, the volcanic environment and its creatures are relatively hostile, forcing the two to trust each other and work together to survive. As time goes by, Willis and Jeriba become unlikely friends, though their unique relationship faces considerable challenges over three years and they save each other’s lives. Davidge dreams of spaceships and then sees human miners scavenging on the planet:  they have to avoided because they use Dracs as slaves. Then Jerry, who like all Dracs is asexual, reveals his pregnancy and dies in childbirth after bearing a baby son Zammis (Bumper Robinson) whom Davidge undertakes to raise and return to the Drac world … Don’t you ever get tired of reading that book?  Edward Khmara’s adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s novella strains between creature feature and sci fi epic but succeeds on its own terms with a message of intrinsic humanity.  It harks back perhaps to the effects-laden production that was director Wolfgang Petersen’s previous outing, The Neverending Story, especially with Gossett’s lizard-like makeup, but the Why Can’t We All Just Get Along theme is well worked out in the inter-species friendship and Quaid is his typically charismatic self. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to find it touching. It looks great and the beautiful score is by Maurice Jarre. That’s why when we walk or when we hunt we always walk in the direction of the rising sun

The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

The world is perfect. Appreciate the details. In the sleepy small town of Centerville, Pennsylvania something is not quite right. News reports are scary with the earth tilting on its axis and scientists are concerned, but no one foresees the dead rising from their graves and feasting on the living, and the citizens must battle to survive. Chief  Robertson (Bill Murray) and his officer sidekick (Adam Driver) get to work dealing with the undead while Mindy Morrison (Chloe Sevigny) reluctantly accompanies them, terrified and Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) observes hostilities … The only way to kill the dead is to kill the head. Well I didn’t see that coming. Jim Jarmusch making a zombie comedy? Things are getting exceedingly strange in the world of the cool Eighties auteur when he’s making a film that serves at least partly as an homage to George Romero with a side salad of Assault on Precinct 13 and a reference to Samuel Fuller. The title comes from a short story turned TVM written by Robert Psycho Bloch and it’s somewhat honoured here with a subplot about juvenile delinquents and the revenge they take. It’s something of a shaggy dog story with slow-running gags and the Murray/Driver double act offers deadpan self-conscious commentary on filmmaking indicating the lack of genre commitment, which may or may not irritate and take you out of the action the wrong way. In fact it makes it a bit of a zombie zombie film, if you think about it. There is a huge head count and most of the fun is in watching the different tools used to decapitate – guns, garden shears and, with her fierce Scottish accent and a samurai sword, funeral home proprietor Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton). Even sweet Selena Gomez is separated from her torso. Did I mention the UFO?! Thought not. A nicely made oddity shot with typical aplomb by Frederick Elmes. This is definitely going to end badly

Stardust Memories (1980)

He just isn’t funny any more. Filmmaker Alvy Bates (Woody Allen) wants to make the transition from making comedies to serious drama and is persuaded to take a break from his heavy schedule of psychoanalsis, podiatry and hair treatments to attend a weekend film festival at the Stardust Hotel where he is the subject of a retrospective. His ex-girlfriend Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling) is recovering from another breakdown; his mistress Isobel (Marie-Christine Barrault) has left her husband and arrives unexpectedly; and he finds himself falling for the violinist girlfriend Daisy (Jessica Harper) of a Columbia screenwriting lecturer Jack Abel (John Rothman) attending the festival … It’s crazy. The town is jammed. I don’t know, is the Pope in town, or some other show business figure? In which Allen blends Wild Strawberries with 8 1/2 throwing a nod to Citizen Kane and pleads the case of the funnyman who wants to go straight all the while deploring the efforts of his fans and critics to understand him. And in case we don’t get this case of infectious auteurism (with jokes) it’s shot in an oily monochrome that befits this pretender to Fellini that has some wantonly cruel closeups of faces. It’s not just about narcissism and memories and how they encircle a rich man who travels about in his Rolls Royce it’s about the culture of fandom and the circus that seems to accompany success, hence the parodic elephant on the beach, not just in the room. While the women represent different and opposing aspects of Alvy’s brain, his real-life ex-wife and sometime co-star Louise Lasser (upon whom Dorrie is based) appears uncredited as a secretary while his manager/producer Jack Rollins plays a film executive but none of the characters has the complexity of the great female roles from his previous work. Perhaps because the film he made before this was the Bergmanesque Interiors and that left the critics cold. This response to critics is a loose rebuke to Judith Crist’s seminars at Tarrytown NY. There is some discomfort when what appears to be an underage girl (but actually a married woman) appears unbidden in his bed. Despite the undoubted aesthetic beauty (it’s shot by Gordon Willis) and the very funny lines it’s a difficult film to love principally because the degree of self-referentiality seems to hint at pure self-absorbed autobiography flattening the satiric effect. Are we supposed to empathise with a man who feels entrapped by his own fame? But its triumph is in its love of cinema, even if it happens to be made from the perspective of a man we might not actually love despite the frequent reminders of the standup comic Allen once was with some extraordinarily good lines flowing from a freewheeling script that limns politics, psychology and philosophy, perhaps ultimately focusing on the death of the ego.  It’s this film that prefigures the transition to serio-comic drama that Allen would ultimately make. In case you missed it, that’s Sharon Stone playing the dreamgirl on the train travelling in the opposite direction that we might wish Joseph Cotten had actually met way back when. You can’t control life. It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only-only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)

Camp seasonal classic for the ages featuring a very tiny Pia Zadora. Bliss, of sorts.

Night of the Big Heat (1967)

Aka Island of the Burning Damned/Island of the Burning Doomed. We must avoid injecting fear into an already dangerous situation. Novelist Jeff Callum (Patrick Allen) and his wife Frankie (Sarah Lawson) run a pub called The Swan on the island of Fara, on the English coast.  Jeff hires former lover Angela Roberts (Jane Merrow) as his secretary and she arrives in the middle of an unseasonal and stifling heatwave – it’s winter, yet unusual things are occurring with cars stalling and TVs blowing up and sheep are dying inexplicably. Scientist Godfrey Hanson (Christopher Lee) arrives and rents a room at The Swan, setting up motion sensor cameras and taking soil samples and Jeff confronts him about what might really be happening and discovers that extra-terrestrials are in their midst so it’s time to get local doctor Vernon Stone (Peter Cushing to lend assistance as the temperatures rise and everyone seems to be losing their mind and what on earth is down in the gravel pit? … If the heat goes on like this it could very likely drive us insane!  Adapted by Ronald Liles from John Lymington’s novel, this had previously been adapted for broadcast by ITV in their Play of the Week slot in 1960 and Doctor Who husband and wife screenwriting team Pip and Jane Baker were hired to do this rewrite. This Hammer Films iteration has the key players in the studio and is all the better for it: that alien protoplasm ain’t got nothing on these guys, living in a pressure cooker of sex and fear. It’s nice to see Patrick Allen – that terrifying voice that so dominates my childhood memories is actually quite the thesp:  hark at him explain to his wife what the deal is with the smouldering minx Angela:  I wanted her! I wanted her body! It was completely physical, I promise you! while Lee is his usual earnest self as the de rigeur scientist, completely rational for a change, with Cushing, as ever, battling evil.  Merrow is marvellous as the vamp, going crazy, like everyone, in the sweltering heat. Satisfying sci fi very well handled by Terence Fisher. He’s a peculiar chap – but he’s got guts

 

The Thing From Another World (1951)

Do you suppose the Pentagon could send us a revolving door?  Scientist Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) reports a UFO near his North Pole research base, the US Air Force sends in a team under Capt. Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) to investigate. They uncover a wrecked spaceship and a humanoid creature (James Arness) frozen in the ice. They bring their discovery back to the base, but Carrington and Hendry disagree over what to do with it. Meanwhile, the creature is accidentally thawed and begins wreaking havoc... That’s what I like about the Army – smart all the way to the top! Produced and closely supervised by Howard Hawks, although this is credited to editor Christian Nyby as director, it is usually categorised as a Hawks film (Tobey said Hawks directed all but one scene) and it has his usual tropes – a community of professional men on a mission, quick wit and a feisty woman (and Margaret Sheridan gets most of the best lines as Tobey’s useful love interest). I’m not your enemy – I’m a scientist! Add to this an alien accidentally defrosted and a journalist desperate to share a scoop, together with a philosophical difference between soldiers and scientists raging as a blizzard whirls outside and you have a thriller perfectly modulated in tense phases culminating in a dynamic fight that emblemises the Cold War (that setting’s no accident). Part of the narrative’s psychology derives from the horrors of Hiroshima and contemporary public scepticism about the supposed advances of science. This is a fun, smart, well-written and staged entertainment – it could only be Hawks, not that it really matters. Adapted from John W. Campbell Jr’s 1938 novella Who Goes There? by Charles Lederer with uncredited work by Ben Hecht and Hawks. Watch the skies!