Reviews

I didn't 'dislike' this film. I like the genre--spies and submarines--and Patrick McGoohan makes the story, bridging his roles in Danger Man and The Prisoner. But watching it again today on TCM in letterbox with a very good restored print and uncut/uninterrupted, I was underwhelmed. I also saw it in the Honolulu Cinerama theater on the widescreen for which it was made, in initial release. It bumped 2001 prematurely, which I saw once a month the whole time it was there. I only saw ISZ once.

Considering the resources that went into it, it's almost Plan 9 from the North Pole. Start with the static title sequence. No action, suspense, emotion, nothing to pull viewers in. When the titles are over the trend continues. It was ~45 minutes into the film before a shot was taken with other than a static, locked-down camera, and few shots had any motion in them throughout, either by the camera or by the actors.

Excellent actors appear wooden in ISZ. McGoohan is the only real spark, and Borgnine's Russian accent is credible, but everyone else portrays as stiff, flat.

In the parachute scene, even on a modest television it's obvious those parachutes were no larger than a foot. But at least they were moving.

The climactic confrontation scene was as obviously shot on a soundstage as the Star Trek TV show was. The wind is heard howling, but the snow never moves, the actors' hair never moves, even their fur parkas never move. And mostly, again, neither does the camera or the actors. They just stand there reading lines amidst styrofoam snow.

For fans of the film, all these things obviously don't detract from its entertainment value. But with huge stars, the roadshow format and 70mm anamorphic photography, the huge budget and MGM's pedigree behind it, it just sits there. It could have been a slide show and not looked much different. The most money I've ever seen spent doing almost nothing visually. Recommendation, rent before buying.

What COULD compare? Yellow Submarine is 130,000 frames (90min x 60sec x 24 frames/sec) of classical, pop, tribute (to earlier animation styles), and original art from Da Vinci to Warhol to Picasso to Popeye to unbridled hallucination, drawn to a best-of-Python screenplay of non-sequiturs, puns, and pokes at institutions from cold-war antagonists to (governor) Reagan's paranoid National Guard deployment against counterculturists.

It's a feast for the senses and sensibilities. One can revel in the flashing, dancing colors and art styles--most of which well-shame anything Disney ever attempted and make today's phony-depth digital claptrap look like spilled esophageal reflux. The soundtrack is a condensed spectrum of the range with which Lennon/McCartney/Harrison composed, from deeply contemplative (Eleanor Rigby) to near-post-adolescent exuberance (Harrison's contributions) to silly-love-song filler showtunes (All Together Now). The dialog exchanges keep viewer's verbal senses on the edge of their seats. The theme undercurrents lightheartedly appeal nostalgically to those who were drawn to it in its theatrical release, historically to those who still wonder 'what the 60s was all about', without getting in the way of sheer artistic ebullience.

If you're an adult, it helps to like animation and British-invasion-era music (or Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Rodgers & Hammerstein, for that matter). If you're an adult watching it with your kids (there's nothing offensive), be prepared for them to groan at Disney/Pixar/Nickelodeon rubbish from then on, and say "I want more of THAT!"

Of all the movies I own, few withstand watching several times a week. After 30 years, this one does. It's like a 'favorite album' you can always play and enjoy no matter how many times you've heard it.

Not that Cheech & Chong are timeless on their own--their other stuff wears pretty thin, if you could sit through it the second time. Not that Adler's stuff is timeless on its own--the oldies station still plays 'Monday, Monday', but do you? But the triumvirate manages to strike a synergy here that's often sought and seldom achieved.

Who knows? Maybe the magic was the editor's or the casting director's or the sound editor's. Or the hairstylist's. The soundtrack romps--secure loose objects and crank your subwoofers. Like 'American Graffiti', it doesn't grind through entire oldies, it plays hooks from them as transitions. Unlike 'AG', the 'Up In Smoke' track is half original material--some Rasta riffs, some covers like The Coasters' 'Searchin' (who knew it was a drug song in 1956?), and one verse each of 3 original 70s LA proto-punk groups in live performance. Oh, and Cheech's inimitable butchering of some rock standards lyrics (guacamole in my chooz).

A few strong, fairly-recognizable supporting character actors appear briefly (Strother Martin, Tom Skerritt). A host of unknowns, relatives, acquaintances, and aspiring nobodies rounds out the cast. The 'nobody' characters in '-Smoke' are a lot more memorable than Harrison Ford was in '-Graffiti', and as transparently convincing in their roles as a Dustin Hoffman or a Meryl Streep would be.

The locations are real southern California--you can almost smell the smog despite the fog of burning recreational flora. The timing of both the performances and post-production is flawless.

If you're morally or ethically offended by depictions of contraband consumption, stick to the features that have rides named after them at Disney Whirl. If you have memories of the early 70s, wish you were there, or kinda forgot that you were, 'Up in Smoke' will evoke a simpler time when the clouds had cannabis linings. "Porque all of the time get hi kine."

Why do we choose to go to a given movie? We expect it to conform to our notion of what we find entertaining. On what do we base this expectation? Marketing, or recommendations of someone we know who saw it.

Marketing depicted EWS as 'steamy'. It wasn't, so specially. Kubrick's fault? The audience's? Hmm, 'whom' does that leave?

Seldom if ever does Kubrick hand us a film that answers all the questions it raises. "2001" sure didn't, but I didn't go expecting answers, I went expecting a space adventure and was grandly rewarded. "Clockwork" sure didn't, but I went expecting something similar to 2001 and was grandly disappointed. EWS doesn't either, and 1/3 of the way through it, watching late on HBO out of curiosity, I was thinking "I bet they sold a lot of popcorn" and "another 2 hours???". But neither could I turn it off... or even step out-of-view toward the microwave.

EWS is epically crafted and riveting. But don't watch it expecting the plot line to fall in your lap neatly packaged... or anything else to happen "in your lap". It's an art film, not porn and not "Austin Powers". Adjust your expectations accordingly, schedule yourself so that you can see the first hour uninterrupted, and see if YOU can turn it off. If you can, next time rent Austin Powers. Simple as that.

If you like Star Wars/Trek, come see where they got all their ideas and cinematic devices. It's my top 2 favorite movies of all times, other-worldly-futuristic and psycho-thriller. The intensity of the root material (Shakespeare's "The Tempest") is not overshadowed by whizbang gimmickry (a la later Lucas). And just because it was made in 1956, don't assume you can 'see the strings' holding the flying saucer up. This was the first movie where you COULDN'T. Miracle it was made at "A-movie" scale, economics and tastes at the time were stacked heavily against it. And director Wilcox's previous 'hit' was "Lassie Come Home". Until I looked him up, I assumed 'Fred Wilcox' was a pseudonym for a director who was already or later became famous, but at the time didn't want to be associated with sci-fi, which was strictly a "B" genre back then. This was either a very VERY visionary production, or a very fortuitous 'mistake' on the part of the folks who bankroll Hollywood.

There are the massive-scale mattes with live action almost microscopically inserted that Lucas used extensively. There are intelligent machines that transcend the stereotypical 'user interface'; "computers", as they've come to be portrayed much less futuristically in later works. Star Trek's 'transporter' is there, visually, almost unaltered by Roddenberry 10 years later. And if the Trek/Wars technobabble turns you off, FP's scientific references are not overdone and are all accurate, even today. The "ship" set is comprehensive, sparklingly realistic, as good as anything you've seen since, and more convincing than anything 'Trek' has done, for TV or film. We didn't get to spend as much time there as I would have liked.

If you ever wondered how movies got into space so competently, watching FP will explain all that. It's definitely not 'Wagontrain to the Stars'.