Cosmos (1980)Streaming free at Internet Archive
“How did the universe arise? What was around before that?”
Here’s the answer to that question, and other things you’ve wondered about while high.Carl Sagan was arguably the best-known scientist and skeptic of the last half of the 20th century, and wrote numerous non-fiction best-sellers, explaining scientific concepts to ordinary people.
His best ‘splaining came with this 13-part public television series, aired on America’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1980. With then-state of the art special effects, Sagan takes poetic strolls through time and space, and asks big philosophical questions. The answers draw on astronomy, biology, history, mathematics, physics, and more, and add up to a college-level introduction to cosmology.
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| NEVERENDING FILM FESTIVAL #251 [archive] MAR. 3, 2024 |
It’s heady stuff, with Sagan discussing countless scientific concepts, but he covers it all from scratch so you won’t get lost, and with limitless enthusiasm that’ll pull you in.Written by Sagan with his future wife, Ann Druyan, every one of the lessons over all these hours is fascinating, even if you already understand what he’s explaining. And admit it, you don’t.
For years, I’ve been watching and re-watching random episodes of Cosmos — sometimes as serious entertainment, sometimes as a 1AM bedtime story.
It works as either.Cosmos was and remains the most widely-seen show from PBS, and it added Sagan’s much-parodied but genuinely awe-filled catchphrase “billions and billions” to the worldwide vocabulary. More than 40 years later, if you’re looking for visual effects, Cosmos looks more than 40 years old. If you’re looking for brain food, it holds up very, very well. It’s always curiously optimistic, and the music by Vangelis (Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner) is exactly what’s needed, like guacamole in a good burrito. Verdict: BIG YES.I’ve heard rumors of something called Cosmos on Fox a few years ago, with commercials but without Sagan. Never saw it. The original didn’t need a remake.
♦ ♦ ♦ Countdown to Looking Glass (1984)Streaming free at YouTube
There’s a crisis in the Middle East, covered live on TV as it builds toward a nuclear confrontation between America and Russia. Of course, there’s always a crisis in the Middle East, and we’re always moments or at best days from the end of the world, but we take it for granted.Countdown holds your attention well, mostly as a series of TV news bulletins, juiced up with stock footage of tanks, fighter jets, bombers, protests, etc, and a few ‘off-camera’ scenes behind-the-scenes.The believability is bolstered by analysis from real TV commentators you might remember, Nancy Dickerson and Eric Sevareid. Most (possibly all) of the talking heads interviewed are
alleged experts of the 1980s, playing themselves — retired military
officers and university professors, etc.For warmongering, the newscasters talk to Newt Gingrich, and for peacemongering there’s Eugene McCarthy. In keeping with the film’s general aura of reality, Gingrich is on screen repeatedly, always given paragraphs of air time to argue for nuclear war, while McCarthy is seen once, and allowed about five sentences before being cut off.Everything here seems so genuine, the presence of movie stars Scott Glenn, Michael Murphy, and Helen Shaver feels out of place, and the movie might’ve been better with less famous faces in those roles.Countdown to Looking Glass is quite good, though. As CNN and Fox have noticed, people love watching “breaking news” coverage of horrible things.Unfortunately, the film has never been released to video, so the only copy I could find is a blurry VHS uploaded to YouTube.Verdict: YES.♦ ♦ ♦ Crime Wave (1985)
a/k/a Broken Hearts and Broken Noses
a/k/a CrimewaveStreaming free at YouTube
Like a noir classic, this opens with a death row convict’s slow walk to the electric chair, and the film is a feature-length flashback telling how he got there.Unlike noir, this is in color, plays like a cartoon, and is really, really stupid, but on purpose. It was written by Joel and Ethan Coen with Sam Raimi, who directs, and the stupidity of it all is the joke, but you’ll need to dial back your IQ or get roaring stoned. Crime Wave has a few laughs, but not enough to justify sitting through it. Blame the studio, not the Coens or Raimi — all three had only indy films between them, the Coens’ Blood Simple and Raimi’s The Evil Dead, and nobody upstairs believed in the project.The first thing Columbia Pictures did was boot Bruce Campbell from the lead. He’s demoted to an amusing supporting role, while the star is an unknown zilch named Reed Birney, who makes the movie vanish in a cloud of boredom whenever he’s on screen. Verdict: NO.♦ ♦ ♦ Crime Wave (1985)
a/k/a The Big Crime WaveStreaming free at YouTube
This is an enthusiastically bizarre and funny film, written, produced, and directed by someone I’d never heard of, John Paizs. He also stars as wanna-be “color crime” moviemaker Steven Penny — but never says a word in the entire film.Steven is an awkward and introverted loner, renting a room above the garage in a painfully normal Canadian family’s home. He’s trying to write the script for his first movie, but he’s plagued with writer’s block, which is certainly not Paizs’s problem — Crime Wave is written with ginormous gobs of low-budget imagination. The family’s daughter is fascinated by Steven, but she’s about ten years
old so it’s not a romance, more like a demented Shane. She collects Steven’s discarded scripts from
the trash, and arranges for him to meet Dr Jolly, a script doctor
who wanders in from another movie, possibly Friday the 13th. The
girl (she never did another film) cheerily narrates much of Crime Wave, which is set in a chirping-bird suburbia borrowed from the 1950s.
In an interview I’ve lost the link for, Paizs said that he knew
he wasn’t a good enough actor to carry a film loaded with dialogue, so
he wrote himself wordless. It takes a smart person to know your
limitations, and Paizs not only knew his, but made it into an asset — watching the movie, you gotta love this guy who has nothing to say.
He comes to a costume party dressed as a suicide bomber, and stays in character all night, wondering why everyone’s uncomfortable around him. Plot twists are signaled when the word “twists” appears in a window, and later Steven becomes a streetlamp.
Not everything here is awesome, but it’s entirely original, made from scratch and served as fresh as insanity. I’m adding everything Paizs has done to my watchlist.It was never released in theaters, but this is the finest movie named Crime Wave made in 1985. Homemade weird beats the hell out of big-budget weird.
Verdict: YES. 3/3/2024
• • • Coming attractions • • • Crime without Passion (1934)
The Crying Game (1992)
The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
… plus sometimes,schlock, shorts, and surprises.jpg)
There
are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign
or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of
making them — that if you only watch whatever’s on Netflix or playing at
the twenty-plex, you’re missing out.To get beyond the ordinary, I recommend:Alter • Cineverse • Criterion • CultCinema Classics • DocsVille • Dust • Fandor • Films for Action • Hoopla • IHaveNoTV • IndieFlix • Internet Archive • Kanopy • KinoCult • Kino Lorber • Korean Classic Film • Christopher R Mihm • Mosfilm • Mubi • National Film Board of Canada • New Yorker Screening Room • Damon Packard • Mark Pirro • PizzaFlix • PopcornFlix • Public Domain Movies • RareFilmm • Scarecrow Video • Shudder • ThoughtMaybe • Timeless Classic Movies • VoleFlix • WatchDocumentaries • or your local library. Some people even access films through shady methods, though of course, that would be wrong.
Reviews are spoiler-free, or at least spoiler-warned. Click any image to enlarge. Arguments & recommendations are welcome, but no talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.
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