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Unz just published Jared Taylor’s great précis of the Shackleton Expedition Have There Ever Been More Courageous Men?. What caught my eye¹ was Shackleton’s climb across South Georgia Island.

The men had no climbing equipment. They had salvaged two-inch screws from the Endurance, and drove them through the soles of their boots as makeshift crampons.

The crossing itself was an extraordinary accomplishment – 36 hours over unnamed mountains and glaciers, some so steep, the men had to hack steps into the ice. Going down was worse: lower a man on a rope, where he hacked out steps, join him, and lower him further, while he hacked out more steps. Worsley called some of the ice faces as steep as church steeples. Shackleton allowed no sleep; if the men drifted off, they would freeze to death, and if they failed, there was not hope for any of the other men. Without a proper map, they mistook landmarks several times, and spent agonizing hours backtracking.

What a wonderful opportunity to recreate an original mountain climb. I thought to suggest this a new film idea for Greg. It turns out that adventurer and ecologist Tim Jarvis did just that 2012 and that it’s documented in a three part film, Shackleton: Death or Glory (2013, Chasing Shackleton in the US). Here’s the 11 minute reader’s digest version:

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Happily the three part 130 minute version is also available online. This is part three, the landing in King Haakon Bay and the climb across South Georgia Island to Stromness Station.

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As in Greg’s experience, tensions ran high between expedition members and the film crew. His film about Canadian real life climbing cosplay in British Columbia has been acclaimed as “one of the best comedies ever made”. Indeed, film crew spend most of the day hanging around and waiting for something to go wrong and revel in disaster.

Tim Jarvis felt he required the film crew for economic reasons but often expressed loathing towards the visual jackals:

The more miserable we looked in our old gear, the happier they were.

In his book Chasing Shackleton, Jarvis is more complimentary about his cameramen:

many other cameramen’s names were being bandied about but none seemed an obvious choice. I met [Ed Wardle] at a London cafe in June 2012 and he arrived dramatically on a powerful motorbike dressed in leathers. Quite apart from the fact he was Raw TV’s choice, I could see immediately he was a solid guy, and I liked his efficient, can-do attitude and his polite, direct I style. I could also see myself getting along with this Scot in the confines of a small boat and felt I could trust him. And because he had summited Everest twice, spent fifty days on his own in Alaska living off the land, and was a former UK free-diving champion (free divers hold their breath and go as deep as they can) he was an ideal candidate. The fact he had compromised personal hygiene standards and eaten absolutely anything while in Alaska was enough on its own to qualify him for life aboard the Alexandra Shackleton. And while I hoped we wouldn’t have to call upon his free-diving skills, at least if we sank someone might survive to tell the story. As soon as let Ed know he was on the team, he repaid me by getting to work on the camera and power systems for the Alexandra Shackleton, figuring out how best to film at sea and while crossing South Georgia.

There have been other attempts to follow in Shackleton’s footsteps. In 2004, Jake Norton, Dave Hahn, and Dierdre Galbraith made the trek in modern climbing gear. There’s only a photo montage of this trip.

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In 2017, the grandsons of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay (the first two to reach the summit of Mount Everest) began to lead commercial recreations of the trek in all modern gear. Here’s Lindstrom’s ad for Peter Hillary and Jamling Tenzing Norgay’s guided expedition, Recreating Shackleton’s South Georgia Trek:

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In comparison to Shackleton’s improvised gear, this excursion in all modern gear looks like cheating both history and oneself. One could make a strong argument for ropes for safety but with the modern outdoor gear it’s not so much following in Shackleton’s footsteps but driving past Shackleton’s trek in a Landrover.

Lindstrom’s commercialisation of Shackleton’s quest for survival does not end here. There’s a bathetic discount version for duffers and overweight Americans, where Shackleton’s 36 hour trek across South Georgia is turned into a slow-paced six hour hike around Stromness Station. This one is called Hiking Like Shackleton | South Georgia & the Falklands.

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If you’d like to participate, you need only pony up $24,900 and join 137 other guests on the South Georgia and the Falklands cruise (flights not included) offered by Lindblad Expeditions. Not everyone can be a Shackleton, whose main claim to fame is that despite all the obstacles Shackleton managed to bring back his full crew alive from the 500 day expedition.²

Still it’s astonishing to see Shackleton’s tremendous tale of survival turned into the equivalent of an Antarctic Disneyland ride. Seriously though, it’s wonderful that these trips are so expensive. Otherwise, with a decade or two there would be little left of the Antarctic and even less of South Georgia Island. Mount Everest became a garbage dump of bright orange goretex, water bottles and human excrement before Nepal’s government forced climbers to clean it up.

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Unfortunately even when “cleaned up” apparently the trash doesn’t go far, just into pits and crevices nearby in Sagarmatha National Park.

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Humans it seems are much like rats. Just more difficult to kill.

Here’s a few quick portraits from opening night.

Hard at work looking after guests and looking great, as ever, Director of Guest Relations Natalia Klenovska

Festival videographer Daniel Dluhý is a keen analogue photographer with over twenty vintage cameras including medium format which he uses to create Ansel Adams like black and white prints of his native Kezmarok.

This happy gentleman has visited four film festivals this year. The life of Reilly.

Well-dressed festival director and producer Tomas Klenovsky opens another wonderful year of Cinematik.

VSMU lecturer (aesthetics of film) Dr. Juraj Oniščenko is the longtime Director of Protocol at Cinematik.

Guests Dominik and Frederique in front of the 2022 Cinematik banner in Dom Umenie. Dominik distributes films in Slovakia and Czech Republic, while Frederique dances in a Slovak folk dance ensemble when not teaching or enjoying cinema.

Slovak film director Juraj Lehotský is finishing a new film Plastic Symphony about materialism and sacrifice. His last feature Nina (2017) is about divorce from a child’s perspective.

The ever cheerful bar staff at the Cinematik night bar pulling delicious beers on tap

While doping, fomenting civil war and foreign intervention are serious human transgressions, they are only the symptoms of Russian rancour not the source of Russia’s malevolence. The producers of Things that Go Bump in the Night have gone further into the darkness of Russian depravity and uncovered its source.

Remember your first frights as a child? Imagine lying alone in bed at night. That terrible feeling that something dark lurks under your bed, just waiting to pounce when you put a foot in the ground. Some children still wake up in the middle of the night screaming from suffocating nightmares. No child should suffer these dark dreams.

It turns out that childhood fear has its roots in dark Slavic fairy tales which came out of the same Eastern Forests where ur-Russians hid from the Mongol hordes. Terrorized by their Asiatic overlords, Russian crones invoked dark demons who continue to spoil childhood across the planet.

When African children wake up screaming in the night, it’s not the hunger or disease, it’s Russian demons. When European children cannot sleep from fright, it’s not violent US police dramas and gunfire which keep them awake but Russian demons. On the surface, the ADD and obesity from which modern American children suffer seems driven by sweets and deep fried food and inadequate physical education. In reality the source of American children’s disorientation are the Russian demons Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl inadvertently let loose on worldwide childhood during Perestroika.

Producer Larry Weinstein (previous winner of more AVN awards than any producer in history) selflessly gave up two years of his creative life to create this compelling documentary. Early in his research, Weinstein was joined by the film’s director and editor, former CIA analyst turned anti-Russian activist Laura Palmer, also working pro-bono. Together they visited libraries and universities across the United States at their own expense to compile material about Russian demons.

[fvplayer src=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDi-qkSjMug” splash=”https://cdn.uncoy.com/images/2018/03/Things-that-Go-Bump-in-the-Night-Clip.png” width=”900″ height=”600″ caption=”Exclusive Pre-Oscars Clip from Things that Go Bump in the Night”]

Weinstein and Palmer spoke to over three hundred Slavic department, political science and psychology professors, all of whom unanimously exposed Russian demons as the blight they are. The few experts Palmer and Weinstein met who presented a balanced or pro-Russian viewpoint turned out to be deluded and dangerous. Such contagious delusions led to unemployment for most and prison for a few, their plight also captured in Weinstein and Palmer’s salutary documentary.

Weinstein and Palmer examine both the historic Baba Yaga fairy tales as well as more modern Russian art. Weinstein talks about cinema’s role in Russian mythology:

Tarkovsky was closer to his native demons than almost any filmmaker alive. No wonder he died young. It wasn’t the cancer who killed him but dark visions from childhood. His final film is even named The Sacrifice where his family home goes up in flames. He hoped by incinerating his home and symbolically Russia to make the world safe from Russian demons.

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Things which Go Bump in the Night won its award not just for its theme but for technical mastery of the medium of film. Where there are no illustrations sufficiently monstrous, Palmer cleverly uses cutout animation to reveal hidden Russian wraiths, never before seen on film.

Weinstein and Palmer look forward to a future without Russian demons. Psychologist Ariel Brzezinski offers hope:

The native home of these demons is Russian children and Russian childhood. The most effective step to eliminating childhood demons would to eliminate Russian children. As a few might consider this solution monstrous, instead we propose to eliminate Russian childhood. There are so many over forty careerist couples and gay partners in America who cannot have children of their own. Why not rip all these unhappy demon-infested children away from their troubled Russian parents and give them happy American homes where they can grow up demon-free?

Weinstein and Palmer envision a prosperous world without childhood demons, without war, without Russians. Their bold vision captured the Jury’s imagination. Things that Go Bump in the Night was our only nomination for the Oscar for Best Documentary 2019 and won by unanimous acclaim.

1. They steal content from more reputable writers and re-post it as “click bait” 2. Judging by the brief and easily agreeable copy it’s easy to tell that the newer writers barely understand what they’re writing about nor do the writers even watch some of the tutorials/case studies they post anymore. 3. Ryan Koo, Robert Hardy and Joe Marine don’t write enough. And when they do it’s half-assed. They are this blog, and they are dropping the ball. 4. Quality over quantity has been lost and the reputation of the blog is suffering as a result. The basic idea of “think before you speak” could really benefit some of the writers here.

Gordon Robert’s critique is pretty much right on.

Frin Opus Jazz: Dance Filmed Right: Exciting, Dynamic

In this context of deteriorating standards, Lauretta Prevost recently put together an off the cuff clickbait article about dance film, based on the work and opinions of a certain Angelo Silvio Vasta.

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Angelo Silvio Vasta dance showreel 2016

Based on his uninspired and dull showreel, I wouldn’t take any of Angelo Silvia Vasta’s advice on shooting dance. In particular, Vasta dismisses dancing with the dancer and handheld footage.

“Don’t try to follow the action directly with camera movement,” Vasta advises. “If the dancer is going left to right to left to right, don’t do the same with the camera. That’s disturbing.” You don’t want to be so directly connected, but move around the space. “There’s this idea of ‘dancing with the dancer’ some people prescribe to,” Vasta says. “I don’t think it is so directly connected.

Evidently Mr Vasta is unfamiliar with the steadycam. Dancing with the dancer is harder but it can yield exciting dance footage. Removing depth of field from dance (everything in focus) is another cardinal no-no which Mr Vasta blithely advocates. The goal with dance film is not to chronicle the spectacle (that’s the craft of shooting theatre archives) but to capture the inspiration and movement.

Here’s a counter example, Althea Frutex.

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Althea Frutex, Alec Kinnear, D.A. Hoskins, Kristy Kennedy

Vasta goes further recommend eliminating depth of field:=”http://uncoy.com/images/

Pro-tip: Camcorders are best for dance, with a limited depth of field. Never shoot below a 5.6 aperture.

Here’s a modern dance video in HD which breaks every rule in Vasta’s book (depth of field, camera movement) and is hence intrinsically exciting, Wendja Regentanz.

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Wendja Regentanz Music Video

If you’d rather see dance which is not part of a music video, take a look at Opus Jazz. Here’s an extract on PBS, Passage for Two. Breaks every rule in Vasta’s dull book and is hence absorbing.

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Opus Jazz – Passage for Two

Here’s the trailer in HD (start watching at about fifty seconds as before that there’s no movement):

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Opus Jazz Trailer

Dance film can be exciting. And should be exciting. Camera should move with the movement. Every effort should be taken to create an almost 3D effect. Dance is movement in three dimensions. The only bit of Vasta’s advice with which I can agree is to attend dress rehearsals. Before you film dance it should be at least your second time seeing that piece:

One important tip Vasta offers is to attend the dress rehearsal and make notes on lighting changes….Vasta shares that at this stage in his career he’d be uncomfortable filming a live show without seeing a dress rehearsal.

If you are a dancer and thinking of creating a video record of your dance, whatever you do, do not take Angelo Silvio Vasta’s advice on how to shoot dance. You will bore your audience to tears. If you are an aspiring dance filmmaker, find another mentor.

This was originally a much shorter comment under the article but Lauretta Prevost managed to get my comment blocked and banned so I posted my comments at greater length in an article.

TIgre v Meste cast

The main story follows a hotshot young prosecutor in Bratislava, Rudolf Jazvec. This gentleman at the age of thirty has not lost his virginity, much to the amusement of his randy bon vivant zoo keeper friend Hyena who has been boffing Rudolf’s oversexed younger sister and fitness instructor Jane for the last five years. Rudolf is in love with a radio host on Bratislava’s culture channel, Marina Kuznikova.

Kristina Tothova and Diana Morova in an intimate moment,
no it’s not a lesbian love story: Tóthová plays a man

Unknown to anyone except the viewer, Marina’s Russian husband Ivan (the boxing instructor of Jane) has been brought in by Marina’s mafioso brother to eliminate a troublesome state prosecutor. Rudolf.

I’ll stop here before giving away much of the complicated plot, as some people insist on not know anything about a movie’s story before seeing it. Plot really doesn’t matter in Tigers in the City, how it happens is far more important than what happens. There is drunkeness, there are failed hits, there is mistaken identity, there are endless zoo animals, there is a waitress who dreams of being a stewardess, there are water bicycles and speedboats, there are homing pigeons, there is happy gay love. The invention never stops.

But perhaps most extraordinary is that Rudolf is played by a very slight and very young actress, Kristína Tóthová. Her voice is dubbed over with a peculiarly resonant and gruff mail voice (Tomas Mastalir). But when she’s standing around in her undershirt, you can clearly see Tothova’s small but shapely breasts. There is no attempt to bandage wrap them to her chest.

The trailer gives a taste of strangeness of Tigre v Meste

There are a few other anachronisms. Without being a corrupt prosecutor, there is no way Rudolf at thirty years of age would be living in the 120 m2 palatial renovated apartment in the center of Bratislava s/he enjoys in Tigers in the City. On the other hand, even Truffaut and Rohmer gave their petit bourgeous better digs than are likely. Why not give life a bit of glamour?

On the side of realism, we really do get inside the upside down pyramid of Slovak radio and have a good look at the grubby smoke filled offices and endless corridors. I’ve never seen the zoo in Bratislava and am tempted to visit now (do we really have so many white tigers?). It’s quite delightful how filmmaker Juraj Krasnohorsky took the trouble to show us so much of Bratislava. We visit the river, we visit the ponds, we visit the center, we even see the then brand new Eurovea. All of it dynamically shot by French cinemotographer André Bonzel. For those of us who like our little city on the Danube, Bonzel reminds us why.

delightful Ivica Slavikova as tough fitness instructor

Though walking us through a morality play, Krasnohorsky does not neglect any opportunity to delight our eyes and inspire the curiousity of visitors.

The only film with which I can compare Tigers in the City is Jean Piere Jeunet’s Amélie. Both films share the same kind of narration and a quality of not being of this world but in it. Amélie is the superior film but that sophomere director Krasnohorsky can get close is a great achievement anywhere, all the more so in Bratislava’s straitened film circumstances.

I did wonder throughout the film what the point of casting a woman as a man was. That is the point: it keeps you wondering and off-balance, aware that you are watching a construct. I think Krasnohorsky and screenwriter Lucia Siposova wanted to avoid letting people off the hook to sit back and zone out to a crime thriller or a love drama. Watching Tóthová fake being a man constantly reminds you to pay attention and that things are not always what they seem. It’s a very clever cinematic variant on Berthold Brecht’s alienation effect.

The less exciting alternative would be that it’s just a very eighties look at androgyny (David Bowie, Liquid Sky): it’s not your sexual organs that matter but your soul. Actually sorry guys/girls – as those who tried to cross those boundaries back then could tell you – yes the plumbing does matter. Love is about two thirds chemistry and one third soul.

Milan Ondrik Zuzana Sebova as zoo odd couple

Quite a bit of care went into the details. The hit man is played by international Czech star Karel Dobry, which gives Tigers in the City some star quality and probably opened some doors. Dobry puts in a decent effort as the reluctant assassin. None of the other actors offends through incompetence and many impress, from the peculiar Tothová through Diana Mórová who plays the melodramatic radio host. By the end of the film, you are really convinced she is a completely superficial airhead. Lubo Bukovy as the homosexual friend infatuated with his straight celibate friend even manages to come off as more touching than creepy. Milan Ondrik as Hyena lets down the ensemble a bit with occasional clumsy overacting.

Ivica Slavikova probing uncertain sexuality of Lubo Burkovy

Pretty Ivica Slávikova steals her scenes as the tough talking, sex kitten fitness instructor sister. Not only is she first class eye candy, but she has a physical charisma relatively uncommon here, vibrant as an Italian or a Russian film star. This is her first real role. Look out for her next films.

If you would like to see Bratislava from the inside and/or amuse yourself with a delectable modern morality play, Tigers in the City is light, yet filling entertainment. All but the most dour and least imaginative will leave the theater with a smile on the face and questions in the heart.

Love poster Jakub Kroner

Here we have three typical student girls living in the main dormitories at Mlynskina Dolina. They sneak boys in and out of their rooms and dream of having punky guys turn up with pear spirits in their underpants. After drinking the bottle straight, some of them have sex with the said punky guys. The next week Sandra cries that Tomas doesn’t call her anymore. So far so good. The same maudlin story which French étudiantes might live through, albeit with better rooms and better liquor.

Meanwhile one of them Veronika, the cutest, is flunking out of her Management courses (which are supposed to be at the Economics University, target of some well earned and pointed jokes about the empty headed and pretty girls who attend that institution – but then Veronika’s exam turns out to be Comenius University which has no particular problem with its management program). Apparently one of her classmates gets straight A’s by blowing the professor in the afternoon.

All of this is just fine if a little depressing. Not the best image of Slovakia but perhaps something in common with grim reality.

Michal Nemtuda, Jakub Gogal and Samuel Spisak
smoke a bong in vile apartment

Where we go downhill is with the guys. Our twenty two year old protagonists Mato and Tomas are best friends from childhood. When they are not circulating among the city’s brothels or trashing Bratislava’s nightclubs, they have a little hobby nicking cars for Boris. Boris is a great guy. If you don’t bring him the car he orders he drills a hole in your hand. As Mato and Tomas are very good at what they do, they don’t have problems with Boris.

Dusan Cinkota as Boris Love

Our two guys swear and bitch and have contests to see who can steal the most gear from parked cars in a lot. Then they smoke up or drink beer. They never clean their vile apartment.

The problem with Lóve becomes apparent. These empty-headed car thieves without morals are put up on the big screen as almost our only image of youth. The heavy advertising campaign meant that as large a young film public as exists saw Mato, Veronika, Tomas and Sandra as their big screen counterparts. While serial killer Jason Bourne is hardly the ideal image, international espionage beats petty larceny and is at least far enough removed from life as to not be aspirational.

Jakub Kroner, we need better images of ourselves. There’s enough petty toughs and trashy floozies in Bratislava without glamorising them at the center of the few films we have.

While Kroner’s script meanders at points (he could use some tighter script editing), despite the best efforts of cinematographer Mario Ondris and editor Otakar Senovsky, there are some pretty moments, particularly at the top of one of the buildings of Bratislava with Mato and Veronika and even the car chase.

Still it’s not all blackness.

Kristina Svarovska film Love Bratislava

Mato and Veronika fall in love and Mato starts to aspire to something better and cleaner. When Veronika is kicked out of her exam he gets caught out in his lie of working reception at the Sheraton. Mato turns up and pays the real concierge €400 for his jacket. The misunderstandings between Mato, a woman with a lapdog, the manager and the original concierge verge on classic comedy. A pity we didn’t have more of this dark comedy.

Love Jakub Kroner Bratislava car chase in the rain Apollo Bridge

Michal Nemtuda as Mato carries his role quite well. He’s no Vincent Cassel (who ironically enough started in a similar role in La Haine) but avoids most of the melodramatic bearpits the script puts in his path. As Veronika, Kristina Svarinská would be the revelation among the actors: she’s beautiful and compellingly intense. Abandoned by her mother at birth, growing up in an orphanage, somehow it seems unlikely Veronika would come through so unscarred, but if producers can get away with overly glamourous actresses in Hollywood why not Bratislava?

Though Samuel Spisák acts more of a caricature than a character as film’s happy go lucky drug dealer, Spisák does not lack charisma. He might shine in the right title role. Ironically and tragically enough the very talented Dusan Cinkota who shines in the role of tough guy Boris is in real life prison for eight years for drug use (pervitin). Cinkota lost his appeal in December 2012 against the case from 2007.

Still I’m wondering why we couldn’t have seen one of the many successful students whom I know with some progress made in life and without a prison term.

These hard working young people could open a restaurant or start a clothing store or sell cars (and not steal them). I know people with complicated love lives doing all of the above. I hope Jakub Kroner makes some new friends before he makes his next film and gives us something to aspire to, something to admire about ourselves on those rare occasions we get to see ourselves in the cinematic mirror.

Marfa Girl Adam Mediano with lovely Inez Mercedes Maxwell

Homo sapiens are a brutal and savage species, probably responsible for the elimination of Neanderthal man and since then we have sent thousands of species into extinction, from mammoths, to bison, to the dodo. If there’s a bad animal around, we’re it.

Clark like Golding is busy with representing the what is, ripping off of your rose-coloured glasses and then stomping on them to boot. Yes, your girlfriend in high school betrayed you. Deliberately. And your son’s girlfriend is probably betraying him now too. It’s just what people do. Your wife probably cheated on you at least once or twice too. Go and read Jane Goodall’s study of chimpanzees: how they mate and how they stalk their neighbours and kill.

Anyway back to Marfa Girl: it’s the same unlikeable group of teenagers smoking up and screwing as we’ve seen in other Clark movies. This time it’s on the US/Mexican border. There are some very dislikable adult border patrol officers and some slightly less dislikable promiscuous kids. It’s a film about ideas and loyalties. There are some extended Socratian dialogues between kids and cops, cops and cops.

Marfa Girl Jimmy Gonzales as Hispanic border officer Oscar

Marfa Girl Jeremy St James as border and customs officer  Tom

Marfa Girl’s eponymous Drake Burnette

Those ideas are played out through the bodies and lives of the Clark’s kids. Unlike in a Rohmer film, ideas are not apart from human existence. Ideas have a real human price.

Performances are convincing all round from mothers to daughters to cops. I really didn’t like either Adam (Adam Mediano) or Marfa Girl (Drake Burnette). But that’s not their job to make me like them. Their responsibility is to play their role convincingly and that they did.

If you are looking to be uplifted or dream of a brighter tomorrow, no Larry Clark film is for you. If you are looking to take a cold hard look at today’s passage from childhood to adulthood, Larry Clark is your man.

Marfa Girl’s Adam Mediano with Inez Mercedes Maxwell: joy of teenage love

I’m not sure I liked Marfa Girl, but I respect the craft. Anyone concerned with border issues will find a lot to think about. There’s a tall pile of DVD’s of films waiting more important to me than Marfa Girl. While I respect Larry Clark’s craft (I was lucky enough to see a premiere of Bully at TIFF with Clark in attendance in 2001), one of the reasons I am among the first to watch and buy is its direct online distribution. Direct digital distribution is the only future for independent film. Larry Clark is both wise and brave to choose exclusively online digital distribution with no cut to iTunes or any other of the conglomerates.

It’s an experiment worth supporting. If works the quality and the honesty of Marfa Girl are what direct distribution brings us, the future of independent film looks brighter than it has in over ten years.

If you are on the fence, please give Larry Clark your support to send a clear signal to both independent film makers and to Hollywood. Give us something better than the sequels and focus grouped rubbish which commercial filmmaking has become and we’ll pay for it.

The online viewing experience was very easy. You pay via Paypal with no extended offer nonsense or other advertising and you get a login key which lets you see Marfa Girl in very good quality HD right away. Absolutely no problem playing it in the browser.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus chooses to take up the same questions of alien visitation but in fictional form.

origin of life on earth disintegrating engineer in prometheus

Scott would seem to be the ideal visionary director to take us to other planets and to the future. Scott’s Blade Runner has long been my favorite film, competing strangely with Rohmer and Truffaut New Wave confections but certainly uncontested in the sci-fi and epic genre. The heart rending performance of Sean Young and enigma of Harrison Ford echo through time.

No one was a caricature. Even the replicants were living beings. Rutger Hauer etched himself into our collective consciousness with his dangerous edge as an orphaned replicant seeking a life extension. Joe Turkel as Eldon Tyrell fit well into a long line of billionaire tycoons going back to Citizen Kane seeking to control lives and life with their money.

Prometheus attempts these deep waters again. The difference between man and machine. The billionaire Tycoon. The meaning of life.

Ridley Scott has lost none of his visual touch. Prometheus is a gorgeous work, carved even in 3D. Starting as an advertising director, Scott has always adopted the latest toys with a master’s touch. Scott even had the good sense to shoot as much as possible live, which means the CGI artists have a much more solid core to built out on and the human eye is convincingly tricked, which just doesn’t happen with straight CGI. Do not underestimate the mastery and generalship involved in creating an epic like Prometheus, it’s more than a year of straight work on script, art direction, shooting, editing and effects requiring thousands of artists and technicians. Scott is one of the few directors who can pull of a project like this so efficiently (it takes James Cameron or Peter Jackson about three to five times as long to finish a project of the scope of Prometheus).

Of the big themes, the one most successfully broached is the difference between man and machine: can a machine have a soul? In Prometheus, Scott’s answer is yes. Michael Fassbender as David strives to carry on existing just like any man or woman would. Indeed, the robot servant David is the most interesting character. His anodyne subservience has its model in Shakespear’s Iago, when he poisons scientist Elizabeth Shaw’s fiancé with a biological weapon. Machines may smile and smile and still be villains.

On the other themes, Damon Lindenhof’s script lets us down for a hard fall. The opening sequence reveals a strange white giant astride a volcanic waterfall (Iceland if you’re wondering) who drinks a strange cocktail which kills him and disintegrates him. This is the beginning of life on earth. The suggestion falls apart scientifically. If aliens came to earth why would they poison themselves to start life and as they share the same DNS with humans what happened to the development of all the in between forms? And where on earth are the dinosaurs then?

It’s a nice image to start a film but it puts us firmly on the path of senselessness which carries on when the spacecraft arrives on the target planet after four years of space travel. Two thousand years ago, giant warriors died here while fleeing something. It turns out this planet is a giant biological weapons depot for the aliens who started life on earth. More a thought on the level of Transformers than Blade Runner.

When the remaining alien is awakened from stasis, he picks up and starts his spaceship to go and destroy life on earth. Well in that case what was he waiting for two thousand years? There is a scene where robot David addresses him in the ancient tongue (sounds something like Georgian). The alien appears to understand but kills them all immediately. Surely the alien would seek to gather some intelligence first before dispatching the intruder.

Roy Batty from Blade Runner

But coming up with some kind of meaningful interaction here would mean working hard on the script. Much easier to set off a huge set of fireworks and special effects instead. Returning to Blade Runner, Roy Batty tells us before his death:

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.

There is none of this depth in Prometheus’s script. The closest it comes is the panic the previously sterile Shaw experiences when she realises she is pregnant with an alien life form and performs a cesarian on herself with the help of an operating capsule. It’s not that the actors aren’t up for the day: there is scant little for them to work with.

Scott’s aliens are just oversized versions of the same brutes running drone actions and dropping atomic bombs on recalcitrant subject nations. Anglo-Saxons with an albino problem. This is such a weak thesis, it’s not worthy of Scott or the original Chariots of the Gods.

There is no reason to suspect that aliens would be as small-minded, petty and vengeful as ourselves. It’s a fundamentally anthropocentric view. There is no reason to think aliens would be a close physical match to ourselves. Star Trek had better science with all kinds of different alien races including some which were truly different.

Watching Prometheus is like going to bed with a beautiful hooker. Everything is perfect but there is neither love nor feeling nor sense in the motions.  Back to Blade Runner.

dark side of the lens gulls

dark side of the lens diver

This film is supposed to be about surfing and underwater photography.

For me it is about the sea and it is a paeon to this monument of beauty spanning most of the planet.

I see this and I wonder how we continue to relentlessly despoil this unrepairable wonder with oil spills, deslickers, polluted rivers, radioactive waste.

The wickedness of civilisation, at least in its capitalist extant, is to borrow the profit of today against the misery of tomorrow. Man has been at this a long time though. The folk of Easter Island expired when they consumed their entire food chain.

Even archeology has not been enough to sober world leaders apart from that fleeting glimpse of a president Gore.

But back to the film and the ocean. Don’t miss the splendid soundtrack and the free poetry of the voiceover. Here’s a few strong phrases.

i never set out to become anything particular, only to live creatively…

my heart bleeds celtic blood and I’m magnetised to familiar frontiers…

if i only scrape a living it’s a living worth scraping..

DARK SIDE OF THE LENS

Both words and music strongly wrought by subject and filmmaker Mickey Smith. 

A small SEO thanks to energy drink Relentless for making this possible. Via ISO50.

Much of the story seemed to be adaptations of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenenant novels. In just one example, the Mord’Sith seem a near clone of the Bloodguard but with breasts.

Which set me to asking myself whatever happened to a film version of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenenant Trilogies (there’s three of them)? The Thomas Convenant novels are fantasy for grown-ups dealing with issues such as acceptance and exclusion via physical metaphors like lepresy. The sex lives are also very complex, exploring the breakdown of the physical elements of love over time.

Despite some heavy hitters signing up to develop such a film, no studio signed off on it. Here are Stephen R. Donaldson’s own notes on the subject.

"Covenant" film news: it’s over. The producers who optioned "Lord Foul’s Bane" have tried everything they could think of, without success. Now their option has expired, and they have declined to renew it. Bury it now, folks, ’cause it’s dead. 1/29/07

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Possible "Lord Foul’s Bane" film: bad news. It doesn’t look good. So far, the project has been rejected by Fox, Sony, and Dreamworks. "Too dark." "Too much like LOTR." The prospective producers have decided to change their tactics. They are now hoping to get a reputable director "on board." If they succeed, this may increase the project’s credibility.

I’ll post more news when I have some. 2005

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This past week, "The Hollywood Reporter" announced that "Covenant" is coming to the big screen. This is both premature and misleading. Here are the facts to date.

The production team of Mark Gordon ("Saving Private Ryan") and Peter Winther ("Independence Day") is quite serious about wanting to make a "Covenant" film. "Revelstone Development" has a design in place and a screenwriter on board (John Orloff, "Band of Brothers"). What Gordon and Winther do *not* have is a studio (i.e. money); and without a studio little or nothing is likely to happen. Since Hollywood basically shuts down in December, Gordon and Winther plan to start approaching studios in January.

I would like to emphasize that I have no control over any aspect of this process. After all, the film rights are held by Ballantine Books, not by me. I’ve met Winther and Orloff, and I’m convinced that their respect for and excitement about "Covenant" is genuine: for that reason, I’m starting to get excited myself. And I have no doubt that Revelstone Development will consult with me from time to time, and will take whatever I have to say seriously. But I have no actual power here. Nor do I want any. In fact, I’ve refused every offer to give me any power. I love movies; I hope a "Covenant" movie (or several) will be made; I hope it will be good; and I hope it will be successful. But I’m simply not qualified, either by experience or by personality, to make the kinds of decisions–and compromises–which are essential to film-making. And I have my own work to do, work which pretty much consumes all of my creative energy. So I’m rooting hard for Revelstone Development; and if Gordon, Winther, and Orloff ever want my opinion, I’ll give it to them. But really this is all out of my hands.

More news as it develops….

P.S. I’m just guessing here; but I suspect that peculiar references to "Saturn" in "The Hollywood Reporter" are a confused conflation of "Satan" and "Sauron." I can’t think of any other explanation.

As it happens, Russell Crowe has decided NOT to take on the role of Thomas Covenant, no doubt (drum-roll, please) because he considered it too taxing. Imagine my surprise. As you may know, money people typically commit to a movie, not because they like the project, but because a "bankable" star has agreed to participate. Therefore the "Covenant" film remains purely hypothetical.

I’m amazed that the Thomas Convenant series has never been made into a motion picture considering how far near the bottom of the barrel Hollywood scraped for its Lord of the Rings lookalikes in the boom years. Or that it hasn’t been picked up for a television series.

Too sophisticated?

Ann McAffrey’s Dragon series made it to the big screen on a large scale. Even latecomer to the screen Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy made it Sci Fi channel in 2004. Surely somebody has to get around to the Thomas Covenant Chronicles eventually even if they end up simplifying and whitewashing some of the darker elements.