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Owlwise's Replies
I don't think you'll be disappointed.
And I envy you the experience of seeing the series for the first time. I can still watch most of those episodes after having seen them dozens of times over the decades, and still find them as gripping & thought-provoking as ever.
It's a terrific series, just as good as The Twilight Zone, but not an attempt at copying it. It's very much its own series, with its own tone & approach. It often explores the darker corners of the human psyche, its fears & its terrors. But it's much more a science-fiction series merged with horror, rather than the fantasy merged with science-fiction of The Twilight Zone. The first season especially looks great, just steeped in utterly black shadows & German Expressionism. The truncated second season looks more like a typical TV drama series, but it still has some fantastic stories.
I'll be curious to see what you make of stories like The Man Who Was Never Born, The Architects of Fear, O.B.I.T. (this one is frighteningly timely), The Invisibles, Nightmare, The Forms of Things Unknown, Demon With a Glass Hand, The Inheritors ... to list just a few of my personal favorites. The best episodes really bring the paranoia & dread! Yet there's a great deal of compassion & humanity to be found there as well.
And thus completely unaware of the state & tone of the country at that time, reading it through 2020 eyes without any real knowledge of what it was like then.
Check out her work, both as writer & actress; you may be very pleasantly surprised.
Depends on my mood ... In A Silent Way for a mellower, mesmerizing listen, and Bitches Brew for an energized listen. Both fantastic albums!
I think it would have been more risky for morale & national determination to win, NOT to have made them. Wars aren't just won on investments & resources, as necessary as they are, but on the belief & faith of the public. Those WWII movies, along with other entertainment, were a reminder of the life & the world that they're fighting for, after all.
"Grace" was the first word that came to my mind, too. Damn.
Oh, how I'd love to see that!
I'd pretty much agree with that. If the best elements of both films were interwoven into one film ... :)
And bad echoes at that.
<blockquote>Still, Middle Earth is a "since time out of mind" kinda place, and those mythological settings tend to have stuff like ever-vigilant beacon-lighters.</blockquote>
That's it exactly. Tolkien always said that LotR wasn't a novel, but rather an old-fashioned Romance, after the Medieval fashion. Those weren't "realistic" in the way that geek fans expect fantasy to be today; they existed in their own literary & mythic space, apart from the everyday.
I actually preferred Bakshi's more understated Galadriel, much as I love Cate Blanchett as an actress. Still, I think Jackson had her go a little too over the top, especially with the CGI enhancement.
You're quite right about the Bakshi version having considerable merits, and I'm sorry he wasn't able to complete the entire story. Seeing it in a theater when it came out was a big thrill for us fantasy fans back then! :)
I don't think this movie calls for dramatic depth in its characters; in fact, that would just get in the way of the story. All that we really need to know about them is what we're given, and it's more than sufficient. The primary driver here is fear & paranoia & relentlessly mounting dread. And the film pulls it off superbly.
I Never Sang For My Father seems to be a somewhat forgotten & neglected film of his, and he was superb in it,
I love Zardoz! A film that simply couldn't be made today.
Agreed. I'd also add his early 1960s cult films A Fine Madness & The Hill.
Cat's Cradle is definitely recommended, as is The Sirens of Titan. Mother Night is darker & asks some difficult & fascinating questions about morality & identity. Of his later books, I particularly liked Galapagos.
Without a doubt! It does something I'd have thought nearly impossible by capturing the tone of the novel, as well as rendering its non-linear story with deftness. There's nothing flashy about it, in fact it's often quite understated, and it's all the more effective precisely because of that. As a previous poster noted, a seriously underrated & now nearly (unjustly) forgotten early 1970s film, and also one of that era's best films.