Prompted by a colleague bemoaning the fact that she would be 30 soon and would need to go to 'Carousel', I got out Logan's Run, and, for good measure, Soylent Green.
I haven't seen Soylent Green before, though after all the references to it in Futurama, I kind of felt I had. Certainly I went in expecting to watch something preposterous and have a good laugh. Instead, Soylent Green turned out to be much better than that, even despite Charlton Heston (who I can't watch now without being reminded of Maurice LaMarche's voice performance of the robot actor Calculon, also from Futurama). Edward G. Robinson(!) was the real star. Naturally, soylent green is made from people, but there was also references to Malthus, and, ironically (they knew about it in 1973, yet here we are now?!), the greenhouse effect.
Best bit was the synthetic 'sound design' in the SoyLent factory. More loops for me!
And even Logan's Run isn't as ludicrous as I remember it. Peter Ustinov's first scene wasn't as long and harrowing as I remembered it, though he clearly thought he was in a different film. A film, for example, where people were required to actually act, overstuffing their performance with numerous character tics and quirks (wonderfully observed, but really wasted here). The line "And I call this [cat] Guus", which those I first watched the film with still occasionally quote to crack each other up, isn't actually in the film, but the weird accent is. Oddly, Ustinov comes across eerily similar to ex work colleague J. ("num, num, ah, Michael") Baltaxe.
Meanwhile Michael ("Beck Hanson") York and Jennifer ("my clothes keep falling off") Agutter occasionally try on American accents, only to revert to plummy a second later. Was nice to see that cool, aristocratically saucy Agutter became 'the girl' while pneumatic, bimbesque Farrah Fawcett did not. Justice!
All up, of the 70s SF dystopia flix I have seen (Silent Running, Dark Star, Logan's Run, Soylent Green, Zardoz, Westworld), they're really not a bad bunch. Silly, but not bad. As a callow youth I viewed these films as being irredeemably tacky, and that Star Wars improved things greatly. Yet now Star Wars coming on the scene feels about as welcome as Roland Emmerich gate-crashing a party for German Expressionist film makers, and that the dystopian movies have a bit of integrity, for all the wonky props and acidy wigouts.
Posted by stuart at March 30, 2008 11:38 AM