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A Hypnotic 71 Minutes: Last and First Men

A Hypnotic 71 Minutes: Last and First Men

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Last and First Men (Zik Zak Filmworks, February 2020)

Just watched Last and First Men (2020), an Icelandic sci-fi film by the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson who sadly died two years before the film’s release. It is based on the 1930 novel Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future by British writer Olaf Stapledon, and rather than employing a typical film narrative, Jóhannsson chose to present a meditation on the theme, with Tilda Swinton’s voice-over combined with a haunting score and stark, black and white images of forgotten monuments shot in grainy 16mm.

Swinton begins by saying “Listen patiently,” and you must be patient, in fact you might do well to approach it as an audiobook with a visual montage. The images are of inhospitable landscapes studded with brutalist architecture and the iconography of an extinct race (us) set two billion years in the future.

It’s fascinating, somewhat hypnotic, beautifully made, and worth 71 minutes of your time if you need a quiet moment alone with Tilda’s voice.

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Goth Chick News: I Believe The Exorcist: Believer Looks Pretty Good (Maybe)

Goth Chick News: I Believe The Exorcist: Believer Looks Pretty Good (Maybe)

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If you’ve hung around here for a while, then you know how I feel about tampering with classics. We’ve had some close calls in the past. For instance, around 2014 and then again in December of last year, there was a lot of buzz around remaking Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Frankly I’m still holding my breath hoping this one doesn’t actually happen, since as late as January of this year there was still Hollywood scuttle that Michael Bay would direct Scarlett Johansson in a reboot. 2016 saw remake rumors for, wait for it… Gone with the Wind, which were thankfully also gone just as quickly. I mean, some things just need to be left alone, I don’t care how desperate the entertainment industry is for material.

Admittedly, I am a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to classic horror. I cut my tiny goth girl fangs on Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney who starred in the most classic of classic monster movies. But revisiting Dracula, Frankenstein and The Wolf Man in contemporary times has usually been done in films I’ve looked forward to. I guess it is because the monsters themselves have been ingrained in our collective conscience for so long, that it seems okay to update their stories for new generations of audiences. Which is why I’m on the fence about the news I am about to share.

When The Exorcist first hit screens in December 1973, it was late and over budget. No one, not even the studio, expected it to be successful. Instead, it became the first official horror blockbuster, driven by not only its shock-value, but by the stories of audience members going screaming out of theaters, or being sick in the aisles. In fact, there is a fascinating short film available on YouTube which documents the audience reactions.

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Goth Chick News: del Toro Takes on the Monster Universe… Maybe

Goth Chick News: del Toro Takes on the Monster Universe… Maybe

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Forgive me if I’m a bit jaded when it comes to writer/director Guillermo del Toro’s announcements. Sometime back I stopped talking about the numerous horror-related projects he announced over the years including a scary adult-version of The Haunted Mansion, a sequel to Pan’s Labyrinth, and a film adaptation of Dan Simmons’ novel Drood. Why? Because almost as soon as the news hits, it is followed by a retraction. There is even a Wikipedia page dedicated to del Toro’s “unrealized projects,” (30 by the way) which is a nice way of listing out all the times he ghosted us.

But here I am again, about to give you details on an upcoming del Toro project I am too excited about to keep to myself. And the reason I’m going out on this limb one more time is that there are reasons to believe this one might happen.

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The Complicated Morality of Joel Miller

The Complicated Morality of Joel Miller

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Hello! I’m back with more The Last of Us stuff because I’m not quite done with it all. I want to talk about how the first game (and the first season) ended, and the maelstrom of morality debates that followed the incredible, tortured conclusion.

What follows will include spoilers, so if you haven’t played the game or watched the series, you might want to go ahead and do that and then come back to this.

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Talking Tolkien: Does Size Matter? The Rankin-Bass Hobbit by Thomas Parker

Talking Tolkien: Does Size Matter? The Rankin-Bass Hobbit by Thomas Parker

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Fellow Black Gater Thomas Parker and I share quite a few interests – but within those interests we tend to vary wildly. I enjoy chatting with him. I conned him into writing a…I mean, he graciously agreed to do a Horace McCoy piece for A (Black) Gat in the Hand, and I’ve been after him to shore up my Black Gate views by doing a guest piece for me. And man, do I LOVE this one on the Rankin-Bass classic, The Hobbit. It was worth the past four years of badgering him.  Read on!

Let me begin with a statement that is impossible to prove but that almost no one would dispute: J.R.R Tolkien’s 1937 children’s fantasy The Hobbit is one of the most beloved books in the world, and because it serves (according to the cover of my old Ballantine paperback) as the “enchanting prelude to the Lord of the Rings” it is also one of the most influential books of the last century, all of which means that those who would presume to adapt the story for other media would be wise to tread warily.

Over the decades, there have been stage adaptations (including an operatic one), graphic novels, and many audio renderings. But when it comes to film adaptations, there are really only two versions to choose from, and they couldn’t be more different in scale, emphasis, and execution.

Most recently we have the triple-decker expansion offered by Peter Jackson — The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), three movies that together have a running time of almost eight hours and that were made with all the technical sophistication and immense resources that Mordor… er, a major Hollywood studio can offer. The trilogy had combined budgets of six hundred and sixty-five million dollars, and during their initial theatrical releases the films netted approximately three billion dollars (to say nothing of profits from home video and merchandising). As the Dark Lords of the boardroom can tell you, each zero in those immense grosses is a veritable Ring of Power in itself.

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Goth Chick News: Does This Make the Xenomorph Queen a Disney Princess…?

Goth Chick News: Does This Make the Xenomorph Queen a Disney Princess…?

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I’m not sure what to think about this, so I’m asking all of you.

To begin, let’s base this discussion on two facts. First, with the 2019 acquisition of Fox, Disney became the owners of the long-running Alien sci-fi franchise. Second, in 2012 Ridley Scott, who created the original masterpiece that was Alien (1979), decided to leap back in after five other directors had a go at some portion of the story. This effectively scuttled the planned Alien movie we all deserved, which would have been a sequel to Aliens directed by Neill Blomkamp and would have ignored the movies which followed Aliens. This story would have reunited Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Hicks (Michael Biehn), and probably would have been awesome.

Instead, what we got was Sigourney Weaver permanently bowing out from the franchise, and two prequels from Scott, which were anything but awesome. Though nostalgia and eternal optimism caused die-hard fans to make Prometheus (2012) a technical box office hit ($130M budget against a $403M take), we’d learned our lesson by the time Alien: Covenant came around in 2017. It was considered a disappointment by Hollywood standards, bringing in less than half the ticket sales as its predecessor. Personally, I wished Scott would have kept his hands to himself.

Now, with this in mind, we have the news I’m about to share.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Sequel Debacle

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Sequel Debacle

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Highlander (20th Century Fox, 1986)

Most heroic fantasy films are one-shots, made to tell a single story and hopefully do well enough at the box office to recoup their substantial production expenses. But occasionally, one of these epics strikes a chord and finds enough of an audience to warrant a sequel. It’s often the case that the folks who made the first film didn’t really have a sequel in mind when they did it, and faced with making a follow-up they flounder about somewhat.

And sometimes, dazzled by unexpected success, they simply go mad. Everyone somehow forgets what made the first movie work so well, and the sequel just goes to crazytown. This can be terrible, or this can be wonderful — and sometimes, it can be both at once.

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Goth Chick News: How Many Horror Films Has Harrison Ford Been In? Two

Goth Chick News: How Many Horror Films Has Harrison Ford Been In? Two

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What Lies Beneath (DreamWorks Pictures, 2000)

This is the week when you can’t spit a piece of gum without hitting some reference to the fifth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which lands in theaters on Friday. Though due to quite a lot of early buzz my hopes are less than high, I will of course be in the theater on the 30th having purchased my tickets a month ago. Nostalgia alone will make Indy 5 a huge hit, even if it really is a master class in CGI and not much else (pardon my potentially unfounded snark).

But it did get me to wondering about Harrison Ford and horror.

I have vague memories of one horror movie in particular, starring Ford, called What Lies Beneath (2000) which costarred Michelle Pfeiffer and was directed by Robert Zemeckis. Ford plays an adulterous husband who murders his lover, placing her body in her car and sinking it into the nearby lake. However, the unquiet ghost comes back both for revenge and to save Ford’s wife (Pfeiffer) from being the next victim.

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So Many Choices, So Little to Choose

So Many Choices, So Little to Choose

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Old Man Rant, take one. Lights, camera, Action!

Ask anyone who really knows and loves movies — what was the greatest decade in the history of American film? You will get many different answers, depending on the respondent’s preferences and degree of familiarity with the films of the past.

The familiarity part is essential, of course; without it you may think that the latest entry in the Fast and Furious franchise is the Greatest Movie You’ve Ever Seen, and tragically, you’ll probably be right. (That kind of presentism is why I can’t stand The Ringer’s popular Rewatchables podcast, which I should love, being movie-obsessed as I am; even when they’re talking about a film I like, the unspoken, always-lurking assumption that cinema didn’t exist before Star Wars drives me up the wall.)

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Look for the Light: The Last of Us, Episode Nine

Look for the Light: The Last of Us, Episode Nine

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Well, here it is. The final episode. I didn’t really want to get here for two reasons. One, it’s the end of a most excellent season of a most excellent show. Two, I have absolutely no idea what my next article will be about. There was some comfort in having an article already decided two weeks before it must be written. But enough of the pity party. C’est parti!

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