Back to School: written by Rodney Dangerfield, Rich Eustis, Harold Ramis, PJ Torokvei, William Porter, Steven Kampmann, Dennis Snee, and Greg Fields; directed by Alan Metter; starring Rodney Dangerfield (Thornton Melon), Sally Kellerman (Dr. Turner), Burt Young (Lou), Keith Gordon (Jason Melon), Robert Downey Jr. (Derek Lutz), and Ned Beatty (Dean Martin) (1986): Rodney Dangerfield's star turn here made this a box-office success. It's a surprisingly sweet-hearted comedy, utterly improbable and probably somewhat perplexing from a woman's standpoint (why is Dangerfield's character so attractive to women?).
Ignore the boilerplate Hollywood sexism, though, and one can derive a lot of enjoyment out of the one-liners, the improbable situations, the physical comedy, the bizarre comic stylings of supporting actors such as Robert Downey Jr. and Sam Kinison, Dangerfield's pop-eyed charm, and Dangerfield's surprisingly moving reading of Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." As Dangerfield's son, Keith Gordon does a nicer version of his damned nerd in Christine; a very young Terry Farrell, 8 years away from Star Trek: Deep Space 9, plays his love interest. Recommended.
Galaxy Quest (1999): written by David Howard and Robert Gordon; directed by Dean Parisot; starring Tim Allen (Jason Nesmith), Sigourney Weaver (Gwen DeMarco), Alan Rickman (Alexander Dane), Tony Shaloub (Fred Kwan), Sam Rockwell (Guy Fleegman), Daryl Mitchell (Tommy Webber), and Enrico Colantoni (Mathesar): The best Star Trek movie that isn't a Star Trek movie ever made. Galaxy Quest runs with an idea that's actually been a staple of fan fiction since fan fiction came into existence in the 1970's because of Star Trek's devoted fans. What if the Star Trek actors found themselves on the real Enterprise on a real mission?
In this case, the show is Galaxy Quest, an early 1980's sf show that riffs on both the original Trek and the Next Generation. The plot's enough of a romp that I won't spoil any of it. The actors are all terrific. Tim Allen is great as the self-absorbed but ultimately good-hearted William Shatner stand-in, Alan Rickman kills as a classically trained British actor forever typecast as Allen's logical second-in-command, and Sigourney Weaver gets a lot of laughs out of a character whose sole job on the original show was to repeat what the computer said (shades of 'Hailing frequencies open, Captain'). The marvelous Enrico Colantoni (Person of Interest, Flashpoint) appears here in a rare comic role as the leader of the aliens who seek the help of the Galaxy Quest crew.
The visual effects are both superb and often hilarious, and the movie itself has a genuine affection for all things nerdy and geeky and science fictiony. Sam Rockwell supplies a sort of semi-hysterical running commentary on the action throughout as a former Redshirt who gets pulled into the action, while Tony Shaloub plays this show's version of Scotty as a blissed-out pothead. Highly recommended.
Childhood's End (2015): adapted by Matthew Graham from the 1951 novel by Arthur C. Clarke; directed by Nick Hurran; starring Mike Vogel (Ricky Stormgren), Osy Ikhile (Milo), Daisy Betts (Ellie Stormgren), and Charles Dance (Karellen): This SyFy Network miniseries does a far better job than most theatrical releases at adapting a classic science-fiction novel. Its problems, though, are all self-inflicted.
Changes made to the original add melodrama and angst at the cost of the intellectual aspects of the production. Indeed, at no point does the miniseries explicitly state several things that are crucial to understanding Arthur C. Clarke's unblinking look at one of the possible paths human evolution might take. If you've seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, then be aware you're in the same territory of thought as that work from Clarke and Stanley Kubrick.
Mike Vogel does his best as a central character who has been Americanized, ruralized, and inserted into all three parts of the miniseries: the novel, also divided into three parts, takes place over several hundred years while the main action of the miniseries occupies about 20 years, with one 85-year time jump near the end that is also in the novel. Only one individual character, the alien Karellen from the race humanity knows as the Overlords, appears in all three of the parts of the novel.
For the most part, this is better science fiction than, say, The Martian (which I really liked). Childhood's End deals with gigantic concepts and Sublime abysses of time and space, and it doesn't change the novel's stunner of an ending. The melodrama, though, doesn't add anything to the narrative. More importantly, having several characters other than the alien Overlord Karellen (beautifully voiced by Charles Dance) appear throughout the narrative cuts against the novel's emphasis on humanity as a collective protagonist over the course of the novel's events, and not a collection of individuals. Recommended.
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953/This revised edition 1990): Arthur C. Clarke's most famous novel still seems impressive more than 60 years after its initial publication. It's a novel about guided evolution, and evolution as a 'progressive' system, that yields a conclusion that's simultaneously depressing as all Hell and lyrically triumphant.
It's an early image in the novel that stays with people, and has been intentionally or unintentionally copied in such TV and movie works as the original V miniseries, Independence Day, and Skyline. Absolutely enormous alien spacecraft show up one day over the major cities of the Earth. And then the aliens start to talk to us, though they refuse to show themselves to anyone.
The aliens are soon known as the Overlords. With their guidance and technological expertise, Earth soon enters a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, though there are a few growing pains. The first section of the book explores these early stages through the person of the United Nations President who becomes the only liaison with the Overlords allowed to enter their ships. But even he doesn't know what an Overlord looks like. When he finds out, he keeps the secret. But even that secret will turn out not to be what it seems.
Once the Overlords finally start mingling with humanity, 50 years after their arrival, they continue to help run the Earth. And while they're at it, they keep humanity from pursuing anything like a space program. Why? Are the stars really not meant for Man, as one character opines? And why are the Overlords so curious about tales of psychic phenomena?
Well, eventually we'll learn. Some very cold winds begin to blow as the novel approaches its end. One of the oddities of the original publication, Clarke notes in his afterword to this revised 1990 version, was that Clarke put a disclaimer at the front to note that he didn't agree with one of the book's central tenets (The stars are not meant for man). And he also notes that by 1990 he no longer really believed that evolution would feature some of the paranormal powers shown here. Clarke had been hoaxed by that great hoaxing spoon-bender Uri Geller in the interim, and subsequently learned how he had been hoaxed.
When people talk of cosmic science fiction, this novel would be one of those things they'd be talking about. It's a novel about the fate of humanity and the fate of the Earth. It's also a novel about evolution and extinction -- including the extinction of the individual consciousness. And watching over it all, those enigmatic Overlords, who have become by the end peculiarly sympathetic and perhaps even heroic in the face of their own insignificance. Highly recommended.
Inherit the Wind: screenplay by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith based on the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee; directed by Stanley Kramer; starring Spencer Tracy (Henry Drummond), Fredric March (Matthew Harrison Brady), Gene Kelly (E.K. Hornbeck), Dick York (Bertram T. Cates), Claude Akins (Reverend Jeremiah Brown), and Donna Anderson (Rachel Brown) (1960): As much about McCarthyism and the Red Scare as it is about the teaching of evolution in American schools, Inherit the Wind is loosely based on the Scopes 'Monkey Trial' of the 1920's. In that trial, the State of Tennessee prosecuted a substitute teacher for teaching evolution in a high-school biology class.
That set-up only partially remains here. The prosecuted high-school teacher in Inherit the Wind is full time and, to complicate things dramatically, engaged to the daughter of the preacher who has him brought up on charges in the first place. Yikes!
And as Dick York's schoolteacher lives in a small town, there's really nowhere for him to escape the growing mobs of angry, placard-waving, effigy-burning Christian fundamentalists except for the town jail, where he plays cards with the sympathetic, apologetic jailer.
In the real trial, famous American defense lawyer Clarence Darrow led a team of lawyers defending Scopes. The prosecution was led by former Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Acerbically reporting on the whole affair was the famous H.L. Mencken.
Here, Matthew Harrison Brady stands in for Bryan, Henry Drummond stands in for Darrow, and Hornbeck stands in for Mencken. While the supporting roles are capably acted, and while Gene Kelly holds his own as the sarcastic, cynical Hornbeck, it's Fredric March and Spencer Tracy who command the stage here.
March is bombastic as the fiery, Bible-thumping Brady, while Tracy is slightly cooler and much funnier as the 'famous agnostic' Drummond. That the men share a history going back 40 years and were once friends adds another level to the intellectual conflict: both are disappointed in the path the other has taken, though only Drummond strives to cool things down, unsuccessfully, throughout the trial.
With more than an hour devoted to the courtroom proceedings -- many of them closely following the real arguments -- Inherit the Wind succeeds or fails on the basis of the drama of two men talking. I think it succeeds grandly, as these two old, titanic actors are given lines and scenes that allow for high drama centered around people talking, arguing, shouting, and occasionally mopping their brows in the steamy courtroom, in the steamy hotel, or on the steamy hotel porch. It's hot, dammit!
I imagine a lot of people would be turned off by a drama of ideas, especially one in which fundamentalist Christianity takes the intellectual and moral beating of a lifetime. I think it's swell, and in a way an obvious forerunner to the work of Aaron Sorkin, though here much of the talking is done while the characters remain mostly stationary. Highly recommended.
At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (1931): When Frankenstein's Creature went bounding off into the Arctic wastes at the end of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the early 1800's, ostensibly to commit suicide, he helped start a small but rewarding sub-genre of horror: the Sublime voyage into the Arctic (or Antarctic) wastes. Shelley's unnatural Creature was repeatedly associated in Shelley's novel with the great Romantic obsession, the Sublime in nature: he inexorably leads his creator on a chase after him into the Arctic, and he's repeatedly seen against the backdrop of the Swiss Alps, nimble as a goat but much, much, much larger.
One of the uses of the Sublime in literature and art of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was as a statement on the ephemerality of humanity's constructions. This use explains why there are so many paintings from that period featuring a ruined building of some sort with a mountain looming in the background. Seriously. You can look it up. And the first age of Arctic exploration was underway as the 19th century began, leading to an entire landscape of the Sublime, rather than just one looming mountain.
That a lot of these real expeditions suffered grievous losses while looking for things like the Northwest Passage just increased their literary appeal -- as did the gradual exploration of the Antarctic coast during the middle part of the century. Those first tentative forays into Antarctic exploration led to Edgar Allan Poe's Antarctic nightmare The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, as well as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
Further Antarctic exploration would be one of the exploratory high points of the early 20th century, as would the seemingly Sisyphean race to climb Mount Everest. From these two contemporary Sublime enterprises -- and literary forebears that included Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe -- H.P. Lovecraft would forge his extraordinarily influential short novel, At the Mountains of Madness. The DNA of Lovecraft's creation would have many ancestors -- including the indifferent science fictional universe of H.G. Wells, in which humanity just isn't all that important -- but the final product would be something new and enduring.
Much of the pleasure of the novel lies in its gradual, vise-tightening approach to revelations both visceral and existential, accompanied by, and accomplished by, the accumulation of telling detail. Its bare bones would be in use soon after its mid-1930's magazine publication, in John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?", which would be adapted three times and counting into movies, always as The Thing. There, as in At the Mountains of Madness, an Antarctic expedition encounters something alien. Bad things happen. Very bad things.
Lovecraft deploys his signature documentary meticulousness here, as his narrator grinds through detailed descriptions of the foreboding landscape in order to build to the introduction of the fantastic. The details seem plausible even now, even the biological ones -- more plausible than, say, the similarly themed Prometheus. This is quite a feat for Lovecraft, as neither DNA nor the true timescale of the universe were known when he was writing. His narrative even goes all-in on plate tectonics, which in the 1930's was a theory held in contempt by mainstream geologists. So, like, score one for HPL's prescience.
At the Mountains of Madness really is a joy to read, perhaps Lovecraft's most sustained and modulated piece of horror writing. The final revelation may fall a bit flat, but I'm not sure it can do anything else, given the revelations already in play. Lovecraft's intrepid explorers find themselves not only dwarfed by a Sublime landscape -- they find themselves poised over a cyclopean Time Abyss which becomes more unsettling and unnerving the farther they physically travel into the unknown. In the end, only one revelation is comforting. And it's not that comforting.
Given how much of the novel is given over to description and exposition and people walking through tunnels looking at stuff, I'm not sure how Guillermo del Toro intended to adapt it as a movie. Like Moby Dick, which I'm pretty sure also brought some influence to bear on Lovecraft, this is an adventure novel of ideas and philosophical speculation. But what awaits at the literal and figurative bottom of the world is ultimately one step beyond rational explanation. Highly recommended.
