Document2 The Day the Sky Exploded Directed by Paolo Heusch Alpha Hollywood has ...
The Day the Sky Exploded
Directed by Paolo Heusch
Alpha
Hollywood has a long history of offering up "asteroids hurtling toward earth" movies: When Worlds Collide, The Green Slime, Meteor, Asteroid, A Fire in the Sky, Armageddon, Deep Impact and at least a dozen others.
Most all of them fall into one of two categories. Either an asteroid/comet/planet is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth, and it's up to scientists and the military to either divert it or destroy it before it wipes out the human race, or the damn thing actually hits (as in, say, The Blob), and it's up to scientists and the military to figure out how to clean up the aftermath, which is usually in monster form.
The Day the Sky Exploded, a low-budget Italian offering from 1958, falls squarely into the former category, but with a few interesting twists.
Paul Hubschmid plays American astronaut John McLaren, who's been chosen from an international team to become the first man to orbit the moon. Something goes wrong, however (the problem is never clearly defined, but seems to be magnetic in nature), and he's forced to abort the mission shortly after lift-off. But while his capsule returns safely to Earth, the rest of the rocket continues on its journey into space.
Some months later (I'm guessing-the movie gallops along at a breakneck clip), the nuclear-powered rocket explodes while passing through an asteroid belt, sending hundreds of giant rocks tumbling on-yes-a collision course with the Earth. Even before they arrive, the now-super-magnetized collection of asteroids starts messing with the tides, with electronics and with animals the world over.
In what must have seemed a bold political statement in its day, Americans and Russians are shown setting aside their differences (if reluctantly) in order to work together to avert the end of the world. In another interesting move for the time, women play key roles on the scientific team scrambling for a solution. There's much discussion about the threat of nuclear war and the inherent dangers of nuclear energy. Apart from the radical sociopolitical issues (which can probably be attributed to its being an Italian production), The Day the Sky Exploded poses a few other interesting questions too-like what happens if the asteroids hit and destroy the moon instead of the Earth?
So while the dubbing is obvious and the special effects are clunky, in general this little movie turned out to be a hell of a lot more interesting than most of your more recent asteroid pictures. I was very pleasantly surprised.
Being an Alpha release, the print's less than crystalline, the sound is muddy, and there are no extras to speak of-but it's real, real cheap.
Jim Knipfel
A Woman is a Woman
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Criterion DVD
Worth a second opinion-and a fifth and sixth look-Godard's only musical is more relevant than ever. It shows how Irwin Winkler's abysmal De-Lovely (very likely the worst movie this year) brings back the movie musical-and disgraces it. Godard's film still shines as a new form of genre exercise, the movie musical as conceived through an art-minded, politically alert consciousness. As one of the signal films of the French New Wave, Une Femme est une Femme (the French title occasions a lovely verbal joke at the end) depends for the film's most potent effect on the audience's familiarity with movie- musical structures and its joyful appreciation of them.
Without indulging fantasy outright, Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard photographed the film with a straight-on, almost documentary style, but emphasizing color in the intense manner of 1950s MGM or the Fauves. Part of what makes this down-to-earth story of mixed-up lovers and the question of abortion and the question of love so much like a musical is that the naturalistic, widescreen imagery is so lively. The colors-and the essence of objects-nearly lean forward for a viewer's tactile appreciation. This was Godard's unique, satirical way of bringing movie fantasy closer to actual life.
Plus, the film is bravely semi-autobiographical in its love triangle plot that features then-Madame Godard (the disarming Anna Karina) singing out her choices between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Claude Brialy. Godard was responding to tradition as well as Jacques Demy's epochal lyrical drama Lola. Reinventing Hollywood genre, Godard called this combo of tough love and whimsy "a neorealist movie-musical." That's what Winkler is after, but he clearly doesn't know the form and casting Kline and Judd guarantees boredom.
Surely no movie-star casting beats the trio of A Woman Is a Woman. Karina, Belmonda and Brialy were the definition of a 60s sexy combo, but decades later, each performer seems to embody particular romantic principles. Their individuality and charm add to the film's complexity; the optimism and utopia that characterize movie musicals don't seem far-fetched here, even though Godard consistently shows that love songs are about the desire within reality. That brings back the dishonesty of Winkler's sexual candor in De-Lovely. Note this bio-pic's title: De-Lovely is not only a reference to Cole Porter's song "It's De-Lovely;" it's a warning-as in de-ceitful, de-crepit, de-fective, de-bilitate and de-fecation. But Godard's movie is all about blissful deconstruction.
Armond White
Directed by John Boorman
metro-goldwyn-mayer
Following his stunning update of the noir sensibility in Point Blank (1967), director John Boorman reteamed with star Lee Marvin for a reshaping of the war film, Hell in the Pacific (1968). Costarring with Toshiro Mifune, the two icons of machismo play soldiers stranded on an island during World War II. Almost entirely free of dialogue, the film concerns the war and strained peace between one American and one Japanese soldier who are ultimately forced to reach a tenuous harmony, based less on understanding than mutual incomprehension. When Marvin's soldier is washed up on the island previously solely inhabited by Mifune (names do not emerge until the end of the film, and are wholly beside the point), he disturbs the fragile existence the Japanese soldier has scraped out for himself. Marvin's character is downright feral, a battered jungle cat whose piercing blue eyes speak of the horrors that have sapped much of his humanity.
The first half of the film pits Marvin and Mifune against each other, their skirmishes a microcosm, both for them and us, of the war as a whole. Cinematographer Conrad Hall utilizes an array of zoom shots, augmented by an adept use of sound, to convey motivation and thought in the absence of dialogue. Hall zooms in on the faces of each of the characters when they confront each other for the first time, followed by a lovely shot of the entire beach, placing the two antagonists at opposite ends of the shot. Zooms on their eyes are paired with the imagined shellackings they hope to give the other. Similarly, the sound of dripping water, combined with the longing glances shot by Marvin at Mifune's stash of water, conveys his half-crazed desire for something to quench his thirst. Marvin and Mifune cease battling and call a temporary cease-fire when they realize that their only possible escape from the island of war, back to sanity, is through cooperation.
Hell in the Pacific has some fun with the newfound camaraderie between the pair (Marvin exclaims when surprised by Mifune, "For a second, I thought you were a Jap!"), but the film is ultimately lacking in insight into its characters, or their larger significance as symbols of war's brutality. Mifune stumbles into some hurriedly abandoned possessions of his fellow countrymen, discovering a patch of lovely orange flowers, and a framed photograph of a beautiful Japanese woman. This scene is lovely, and touching, but is ultimately not enough for a film unsure whether it is a gruff action-adventure or a meditation on war's costs. Marvin and Mifune are both superb, good enough to make one regret the lack of a fully fleshed-out concept for the film.
Saul Austerlitz
Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces
Directed by Ferid Boughedir
Kino Video
"Erotic Arab film" is not a phrase that trips lightly off the tongue, but this sensual 1990 Tunisian work is just that. Thirteen-year-old Noura is a slight youth still able to accompany his mother on her trips to the Turkish baths. There he experiences all the delights of the unclothed female body, pleasures normally denied males. Noura serves as a conduit between the male and female world, lubricating the discreet social and sexual interactions taking place behind the scenes.
In this modest film, Tunisian society operates with two sets of rules: the official ones, which forbid any contact between men and women (as Noura's father tells him: Real men do not fraternize with women), and the unofficial ones in which sexual desire and the longing for companionship do their best to circumvent what is proscribed. Like a gloss on Fellini's Amarcord, Halfaouine is a well-told story of a young boy's burgeoning understanding of adulthood, seen through the rose-colored glasses of one fearful that the moment depicted is rapidly slipping irretrievably into the past.
Saul Austerlitz
Incident on a Dark Street
Directed by Buzz Kulik
Passion
Although the cover art for this 1973 made-for-tv movie gives a clean-shaven William Shatner top billing, in the film itself he sports a fake Robert Goulet mustache and plays a minor role. The copy on the back makes it sound like a thrilling film noir.
Guess they had to do something.
The plot is simple enough. After a potential mob stoolie is murdered, lawyers from the U.S. Attorney's office try to convince his brother to testify instead, as they trace mob ties that lead straight to the top?of?of?the local utilities board!
No, it's not very thrilling. But it does have those great 70s opening titles, those drab, washed-out 70s colors and that great canned 70s made-for-tv music. Plus, there's no denying that the film is a treasure trove of third-rate character actors. Along with Shatner as a mobbed-up utility chief, there's Murray Hamilton, James Olson and David Doyle. Gilbert Roland plays the mob boss, Robert Pine plays a young lawyer who won't prosecute drug cases and the great Richard Castellano (The Godfather) plays the would-be stoolie brother of the dead would-be stoolie.
The print looks like it was taken off a third-generation VHS tape, and there are no extras. But like The Day the Sky Exploded, it sure was cheap!
Jim Knipfel