Rob Pincombe is a prolific television writer, recovering comedian and sometime comic artist/storyboard artist who just wasn't satisfied with a single blog.
He writes about sci-fi and fandom at rebelalert.com, Canadian comics at comicanuck.com, and shares thoughts and insights on writing at starkravingadventure.com
Sci-Fi and genre are well-represented at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, running this week. We’ve checked out the shorts in my last post. Now lets look at the feature-length mayhem lighting up Park City, Utah’s silver screens.
Canada’s genre-on-a-budget superstar, Vincenzo Natali, the writer-director of Cube and episodes of, God help us, Earth:Final Conflict, brings Spliced to this year’s fest. The cast features David Hewlett and Sarah Polley (Yay!) and Adrian Brody (Boo!). Polley (Yay!) and Brody (Boo!) play husband and wife geneticists who impregnate an ovum with animal and human DNA and struggle to raise the fast-growing, increasingly dangerous (Boo!) and yet oh-so enticing female (Yay!) creature they create.
Twitchfilm.com’s 2010 Sundance review of Splicedcalls it a “genre mash of science fiction cautionary tale and a young parenting drama…” Or “Freudian family politics with bio-evolution in fast forward…” Sounds perfectly messed up.
PopularMechanics.com has a rundown on The Top Sci-Fi, Military and Environmental Films at Sundance 2010. Their master list includes Spliced, the post-apocalyptic One Hundred Mornings and Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei’s documentary, Space Tourists, which follows “self-made multimillionaire” Anousheh Ansari’s one week aboard the International Space Station.
www.io9.comfollows suit with a round-up ofSundance 2010 Midnight Screeningswith creepy, horror-esque entries All My Friends Are Funeral Singers and the Butcher Brothers latest, The Violent Kind.
Last month Collider.com shared images from more Midnight films hereandhere.
I’d also include former NOVA and PBS producer Jason Spingarn-Koff’s Life 2.0as a sideways genre film, dramatizing the blurring of reality that can come form spending too much time living in Second Life’s online, digital world.
As the Toronto International Film Festival gets bigger and bigger, it becomes more of a challenge to get into any screenings without advance planning months ahead of time. It got to the point where I would just buy the program book and read it over the course of the festival from the comfort of my couch. Now even that seems like too much work, which probably reveals more about me than it does about TIFF.
I find it easier to look at a festival like Sundancefrom a comfortable distance, where I don’t have to take line-ups and sold old screenings personally.So a quick tour around the net has helped to identify some of the genre films making their debuts this week at Robert Redford’s little, Park City, Utah film festival that could.
Keep your cybernetic implants on the look out for these genre films. First up, let’s check out the bumper crop of shorts thanks to io9.com and wired.com.
The future of sci-fi is becoming more and more of a global phenomenon and the so-called Third World countries are the new torchbearers.Last year Mexico led the pack with the debut of Alex Rivera’sSleep Dealer.The film followed in the footsteps of trailblazing director’s like Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy), Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men) and Alfonso Curón, letting creativity of ideas and imaginative visual language sell his sci-fi drama on a budget. Of course as Wired.com Underwire blog pointed out last fall (Vintage Mexican SciFi Beams a Blast From the Past con Queso) this stems from a grand tradition of low-budget Mexican sci-fi.
After the holiday success of the South African-shot District 9, it’s not surprising that there’s some big buzz at this year’s fest surrounding director Wanuri Kahiu’s Kenyan short, Pumzi, produced by Simon Hansen, who also produced the short District 9 was based on, Alive in Joburg.
Pumzi takes place after a “Water War” has pretty tapped out the Earth’s supply of water and fresh air is the ultimate commodity.Kahiu tapped into the environmental realities faced Kenya and other small, economically-challenged countries today and projected them into a potential future.But she also looked to the past for inspiration, according to this Pumzi interview at Underwire.
But to produce Pumzi, Kahiu looked to the past, as well as the future.
She researched classic 1950s films to create her movie’s futuristic sets, comparing the processes of matte painting and rear-screen projection with indigenous African artwork.
“We already have a tradition of tapestries and functional art and things like that, that loan a backdrop for films,” Kahiu said.
Pumzi may be the “pure speculative fiction”, lit pick of the fest but for sheer entertainment value, La Petit Dragon looks like pure, fresh-squeezed fun juice.The premise supposes the Dragon spirit of Bruce Lee was reincarnated in a doll’s body thirty years and is finally freed from his box.
The That’s Just Wrong Award goes to "N.A.S.A. – A Volta", for it’s “ulta-violent” drug deal gone wrong and "Please Say Something" may be the final word on the age-old game of cat and mouse.
The other short getting a lot of buzz is director Spike Jonze’s 30-minute short, I’m Here. After mining movie magic from Maurice Sendak’s children’s book classic, Where the Wild Things Are, Jones returns to literature aimed at the youngbut read by all, taking his inspiration from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. According to theHollywood Insider…
The director admits to the Silverstein influence, adding that he named his main character Sheldon in honor of the 1970s poet and storyteller. “I was trying to take the influence of The Giving Tree, but write about relationships,” says Jonze. “I love Shel Silverstein. I just love him.” Jonze hired Andrew Garfield (The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) and Sienna Guillory to don robot costumes, while his special effects crew did a fantastic job drawing emotions out of robot heads that resembled the old Apple Macintosh Classic computer.
I remember being moved by The Giving Tree as a kid only to return to it as an adult and see it as an ode to an extremely abusive, one-sided relationship from which the selfless victim never escapes, even in death.
"Where am I?" "In the Village." "What do you want?" "Information." "Whose side are you on?" "That would be telling." "We want information... Information... Information..." "You won't get it." "By hook or by crook, we will." "Who are you?" "The new number Two." "Who is Number One?" "You are Number Six." "I am not a number. I am a free man!" (Mocking laughter)
-Weekly opening of "the Prisoner"
Welcome to the rebellion.
AMC’s six-hour miniseries remake of the Prisoner began last night starring Jim Caviezel (Frequency, The Count of Monte Cristo) and Ian McKellen, (Richard III, Gods and Monsters, The Scarlet Pimpernel); an occurrence which provides me with a unique opportunity to demonstrate one of the reasons I have don’t blog as regularly as I should.
Several factors have conspired to keep me from my online duties. A great challenge is the constant juggling of television scripts in my day job. As a modern, freelance writer working mainly in animation, I’m not paying rent if I’m not writing on several shows at once.You’d be surprised how much energy and brain power it sucks out of your creative well to switch completely gears every few hours.Add to that the fact that I often work into the night when I desperately want to spend time with my new wife. The last thing I usually want to do is take more time away from her to post a blog.So that lowers the online priority for me.
And November is more or less a bust for posting because this year because, as I did last year, I am attempting to spit out a novel in celebration of National Novel Writing Month. Last year I reached the word count but never ended the story, realizing I had very specific character and theme questions to solve first.This year, I am determined to avoid that but so far other story issues are conspiring to screw me up again.
The second challenge is that I actually write three blogs (with contributions to a fourth one coming soon): Rebel Alert, Comicanuck and Stark Raving Adventure.I began Rebel Alert to post humorous Star Wars items and comics for a fake Star Wars online newspaper I created to go along with a friend’s fan film. (The film is Death Star Repairmen and the newspaper is the Empire’s paper of record, The Imperial News – “All the news that’s fit to censor”.)The blog soon became a vehicle to talk about all kinds of things from a sci-fi bent.So I branched out to better cover my interests and maintain each blog’s identity.
The math on this is pretty simple.Even if I do manage a post a week, it goes to one site or the other. My personal blog on life, Stark Raving Adventure and writing often gets the short end of the stick after a comic or sci-fi. But the biggest challenge for me is my inability to write a short blog post.
I have some success on this front with recent Rebel Alert postsbut in general my posts tend to be much more thorough than most.I ‘m not big on just linking to an item posted somewhere. I want my blogs to be more than just a link fest. Other sites dedicated to that do it far better than I ever could.When I discover an intriguing story I usually want to more about what I’ve read or seen. I want to uncover the “story behind the story”. Inevitably I discover intriguing connections and fun questions that other sites haven’t.That is no knock on them. The connections I find are often quite idiosyncractic to my own experience and sense of humour.But it takes me a while for my brain to work through all this and then write a post that takes you on the same journey.
Case in point…I have been meaning to write about the Prisoner for some time but the ideas I wanted to explore are better suited for an MBA thesis than a blog.The sheer magnitude of what I wanted to write about kept me away.
Let me run you through it and watch how the simple summary I planned to give you can bloom into a full essay.
For those of you who don’t know, American born Irish actor Patrick McGoohan was up and coming actor in the late 1950’s, eventually being named Best TV actor of the year in Britain.He rose to prominence starring as secret agent John Drake in the UK’sDanger Man series (titled Secret Agent in the US) for four seasons before growing bored with the role. Setting up his own production company, McGoohan and mystery novelist and script editor George Marksteinpitched The Prisoner, about an important government figure with a sensitive post who quits his job, only to wake up the next morning in the mysterious Village: a fanciful Big Brothereque resort cut off from the world where people who know too much are under psychologically and physically manipulated to break down their sense of identity.
Markstein, who devised the setting, background and wrote “Arrival”, the pilot for the series, maintains the character is John Drake and the series is a literal and allegorical sequel to Danger Man. McGoohan denied this all the way to his death, insisting the character of Number 6 was a scientist and had no relation to his previous character. Markstein is glimpsed in the opening credits as the man McGoohan hands in his resignation to.
The series ran with its bizarre concept, taking it to heights of surrealism and allegory not previously seen on television before.McGoohan served as the series star, director, producer and taking over an increasingly large portion of the scripting duties. Markstein clashed with McGoohan over the direction the series was taking andeventually left the series around episode thirteen or so.The remaining episodes became even more wild and hallucinogenic.In fact, the psychedelic finale caused such a stir in England and continues to baffle and fascinate audiences to this day.
And the legend grew.
Henrik Ibsen is tired of explaining his plays to you.
To me, the Prisoner series, and the behind the scenes circumstances of the production, is pureIbsen. (some Peer Gynt and a whole lot of Brand and therefore, pure Kierkegaard, but I’ll get to that.)McGoohan himself once played Brand before The Prisoner started, likely to great effect with his commanding presence, precise diction and booming voice. The play follows the life of a priest dedicated to dong the right thing no matter what the consequences are. His Old Testament view of God allows no compromise but the cost to him is great.He loses his wife and ministers to a village “flock” that increasingly fail at the moral tests Brand (and life) confronts them with. Brand’s goal is to save the world and the soul’s of man but his inability to compromise and accept human weakness eventually leave him alone with his moral fortitude.
In the end, Brand suffers from the harsh judgement he subjected others to when he is stoned by his flock, banished to the glacier where he grew up and buried in an avalanche.Brand’s dying words express profound doubt. “Does not salvation consider the will of man?” It is open to interpretation whether or not Brand is abandoned by God with the play’s final words, uttered by an unseen voice, “He is the God of love.” Does that mean he left no room for love in his life or that God accepts him?
Apparently, we modern readers tend to take an unsympathetic view of Brand’s harsh moral code, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, although Rand’s philosophy eschews religion and good works and places mankind as it’s own God, with individual self-interest and achievement as the noblest of activities.
Ibsen’s Peer Gynt stars a man-child who spends his entire life avoiding accepting any kind of responsibility for his actions and yet, somehow comes through unscathed, with others bearing the damage of his choices.Finally, after a lifetime of adopting and abandoning many roles, old man Peer discovers his soul is forfeit because he has never been “himself”. Peer is defenceless, having no idea who he really is and finding no one he knows can vouch for him.He is finally granted a reprieve thanks only to the pure love of his long abandoned sweetheart, Solveig (who really needs to get more).
The key to the philosophy of Peer Gynt can be found in Act Two. While in the Mountain Hall of the Troll King, the monarch asks Peer Gynt, “What is the difference between troll and man?” When Peer Gynt is understandably at a loss for an answer one is provided by The Old Man of the Mountain, "Out there, where sky shines, humans say: To thyself be true. In here, trolls say: Be true to yourself-ish.”Peer adopts his own version of the troll motto from then on, declaring to all that he is himself, whatever that is. Peer spends the rest of his days avoiding facing himself or facing truth in general.You might say, Peer Gynt was Ibsen’s version of the Nick Hornby book, About A Boy, with Will (played by Hugh Grant in the film) as a modern Peer.
Peer Gynt and Brand are flip sides of the same question for Ibsen. Both seem to be based on Soren Kierkegaard’s book, Fear and Trembling, a lengthy consideration of the bible story of Isaac, who was asked to sacrifice of his beloved son in Genesis. Kierkegaard interprets the tale, wrestling with the nature of faith, God, morality and faith’s relationship with ethics and morality.To do this Kierkegaard introduces us to the Knight of Faith and the Knight of Infinite Resignation.
The Knight of Faith, in this case Abraham,gives up everything that is important to him in the world save his faith in of, sure that he will regain everything through divine possibility.When God asks him to sacrifice his son, Abraham does so, secure in the knowledge that somehow God will someone keep he and his son together. He exists in paradox.Likewise, Peer Gynt easily gives up on what’s importantin this world, assuming he will gain it all back through divine providence or simply due to the “strength of the absurd.”
The Knight of Infinite Resignation gives up everything in the hopes of regaining it in the next life, but spends their life suffering the pain of their loss.Just as Brand is governed by his faith, he also suffers through it and is punished for it. McGoohan’s Number 6 is totally Brand. Single-minded and indomitable.Heidi MacDonald sums it quite nicely over atThe Beat.
McGoohan radiated angry determination to escape, fierce intelligence, and sharp efficiency when physical action was required. He was sexy but remote - unlike some other super spies, Number Six didn't jump into bed with every hot lady he met. Number Six was not a person for whom giving in or internal struggle was natural - no wonder he broke ever Number Two who showed up. In the role, McGoohan was dead fucking cool. His acting was knife sharp. No matter what he did later, McGoohan was dead fucking cool. His acting was knife sharp. No matter what he did later - from ICE STATION ZEBRA to several turns as Det. Columbo's most cunning foe - you could never stop watching Mcgoohan, because he wasnt' just so good he was scary; he WAS scary. He was as enigmatic as he was charismatic.
Exactly!And after years of my Brand/Peer Gynt theory percolating in my head, imagine my surprise to discover that my long-held belief was delightfully accurate!In an interview atwww.the-prisoner-6 , George Markstein confirms the Brand influence on the development of the Prisoner.
…my feeling is that McGoohan wasn't really very keen on doing any other series. What he really wanted to do I think was to play Brand. He'd had an enormous success some years previously on the stage with Ibsen's 'Brand' and Brand personifies everything I think McGoohan would like to be: God! He was very good as God, so he wanted to play Brand ... again. He was very keen to set up 'Brand' as a film and I think that was really what he wanted to do. What a lot of the people in the studio wanted was to keep their jobs! They hoped he'd go on doing a series and so I sat down at the typewriter one day - you know, any port in a storm - and typed a couple of pages. They were about a secret agent - and after all Drake had been a secret agent - who suddenly quits without any apparent reason, as McGoohan had quit without any apparent reason, and who is put away!
McGoohan as Brand at the Lyric Theatre,
Hammersmith in the late 1950's.
McGoohan also carried the Brand image off-screen, overdosing on multi-hyphenates as he micromanaged production of the Prisoner. At this point, Markstein hit the eject button and bailed on the show when:
“…egomania took over! You know, when McGoohan was everything! When McGoohan was writing, was conceiving, was directing ... and didn't know where he was going. My presence was superfluous - and we've seen the result after my departure… the non-conclusion. I think it was an absurd pantomime.You tell me what it means. I think it was a bit of gross self-indulgence by someone who was fed up with the whole thing and wanted to get out of it and wanted to go out in a blaze of ... something or other… I was surprised because I thought something much better would emerge. After all, when one has conceived something one wants it to die a reasonable death, not some horrific joke!
Like Brand, Markstein feels McGoohan was a Prisoner of his creation.
I think that in many ways THE PRISONER is a tragedy ... because McGoohan became a prisoner of the series and it's never nice to see that happen to a human being, the combination of ambition, frustration, wanting to be writer, director, actor - you name it. It was sad, it was very sad I think. It did something to him that wasn't very good and it was reflected in the series and that's why the series ended like that and that's why people have said "I don't understand the end". Of course they don't understand the end, because there is no end ... I don't think even McGoohan understood the end, or if he does, well, perhaps he does, but that is the biggest tragedy of THE PRISONER that Patrick McGoohan became a Prisoner himself.
Over at Glenn Kenny’s Some Came Running blog, we find a remembrance of McGoohan’s other genre contributions, most notably the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh and his intense work in David Cronenberg’s Scanners. Kenny quotes the book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, wherein the director recalls with discomfort the disorganized first shooting day and how it foreshadowed a difficult shot.
"It kept on being that difficult. Patrick McGoohan was part of the reason. He's a brilliant actor; the voice, the charisma, the presence, the face. Phenomenal. And he was aging so well; he looked so great in that beard. But he was so angry. His self-hatred came out as anger against everybody and everything. He said to me, 'If I didn't drink I'd be afraid I'd kill someone.' He looks at you that way and you just say, 'Keep drinking.' It's all self-destructive, because it's all self-hating. That's my theory. He was also terrified. The second before we went to shoot he said, 'I'm scared.' I wasn't shocked; Olivier said that he was terrified each time he had to go on stage. With Patrick, though, it was just so raw and so scary—full of anger and potent. But he was sensing the disorganization; the script wasn't there, so he was right to worry about it. He didn't know me. He didn't know whether I could bring it off or not. We parted from the film not on very good terms ultimately."
In the finale of the original series, Number 6 at last confronts Number 1, yanking off a false face to reveal his own countenance staring back at himself. Apparently McGoohan told close friends this revelation was meant to imply that Number 6, who pictured himself as the ultimate rebel, had imprisoned himself by thinking like a prisoner, thereby always limiting his options.That gives us a reasonable and very clever explanation for the answer Number 6 receives in every episode to the question, “Who is number 1?”The response is always, “You are Number 6.”But could it also he heard as, “You are, Number 6”? This fits into Markstein’s original approach to the series. Number 6’s has faith in his own self-image and ultimately, that faith is the one thing that defeats him.
So where does Peer Gynt fit into the Prisoner?Well, the other residents of the Village appear to be much like Peer; changeable as the wind and whims of the various Number 2’s and generally getting by quite well.That attitude alone makes them anathema to Number 6 and more dangerous to his mindset than any plan of Number 2’s.
But however much Number 6’s defiance and self-image make him an exemplary Brand, he is also very much Peer Gynt himself. He readily accepts and even embraces the routine of the Village and his constant struggle for identity. Intentionally or not, he seems go along with each new attempt to break his will with increasingly practised ease, always on the lookout for a chance to escape –to find something better in life.The Village has given Number 6’s life meaning his previous life lacked, as evidenced by his defiant resignation featured every week in the opening credits.Number 6 accepts that he is a Prisoner and redefines himself in those terms.Like Peer Gynt McGoohan declares himself to be a free man yet why would a free men constantly need to escape?“I am myself, whatever that is.”
Whew…
You can see why it's taken some time to tackle this post. It’s a lot to consider even though I’m trying to keep things simple (More for my own poor, overloaded brain’s sake than your sprightly minds, gentle readers). I avoided the temptation to go into specific examples from the series and compare dialogue and scenes to passages from Fear and Trembling and Ibsen.But it still took ths long to reach the page.
Sigh... Weeks between posts. I try to make them worth the wait.
AMC has theoriginal Prisoner episodes available for free viewing at their remake's website. Something I definitely plan to take advantage of.
Click over to Youtube for a fascinating four-part interview with Mcgoohan several years after the Prisoner phenomenon.
Next time: Let’s talk about the new AMC version and how it stacks up to the original and for those who’ve never the sixties series) compared to their other exemplary series, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
According to theHuffington PostandNASA’s website(by way of Jonathan Llyr at hardcorenerdity.com) the space agency’s LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) project designed to confirm or disprove the presence of water reaches it final stage today. The shepherding spacecraft is now in an elongated orbit, positioned to separate with an Atlas V’S Centaur upper stage rocket, essentially launching it toward the moon’s South Pole at twice the speed of a bullet.
The intent is to kick up a plume of debris the orbiter can fly through to analyze for signs of water. You can watch it live this morning, Oct. 9th, at approximately 4:30 a.m. PDT. NASA has set up awebpage with all the information you need to watch for yourself on a home telescope (just make sure it’s a very good telescope). NASA also has a terrific simulationof the entire mission.
I suppose that's a reasonable explanation.
Or is it?
This could all be the result of building grudge in the space agency against the moon.
After hearing this summer that the original tapes of the historic moon landing wereaccidentally erased, we are forced to wonder if NASA scientists have been getting razzed by their cosmological buddies, calling into doubt their moon landing achievements now that they cannot produce video proof. Now every night the moon’s face waxes and wanes into a mocking grin.
Perhaps they’ve simply lost patience and want to blast it out of the night sky. At least that's what NASA's new director, D. Vader, hinted at during his first press conference several months ago when he warned the press that "this technological terror NASA has constructed paled compared to the power of the force" and he couldn't wait to "wipe the smirk off the faces of those holier than thou Selentites."
I know for a fact that this is going to end badly. This morning I blacked out fortwo minutes and seventeen seconds. In that time I flashed forwardto our future, skipping like a stone across the pond of time, foreseeing where all this will take us.
This is what I saw...
And:
And:
I also saw visions of high-quality cuts of beef in orbit above the lunar South Pole after the Centaur rocket sliced a leaping cow into bits on its way down to the surface. They were being barbecued up by this guy...
Say good night, moon.
END TRANSMISSION
FLASH!!! Thanks to Denis McGrath and his blog, Dead Things On Sticks, and Mr. Show's Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, we know have the true story behind this historic event.
UPDATE: Well, well, well... we may have have wells on the Moon after all. According to the Times, pulverizing the Moon has led to the discovery of "significant amounts" of water. Whether that's enough to help the planet through it's upcoming water crisis over the next few decades or only enough to hand wash a few sweaters in the sink remains to be seen.
The London Times has launched Eureka, a new magazine focusing on science and the environment.The Times Online announcement cites the paper’s extensive history of science coverage since 1785 and provides a celebratorylist of notable momentswhere great leaps and great reporting converged between their pages.
Landmarks in the history of Times scientific coverage include:
Eureka’s early stories include an overview offifteen scientistsconfronting fifteen of the “world’s most pressing problems.”It is a fascinating cross-section of today’s cutting edge science and the questions it strives to answer, from the mind-blowing to the mundane.From finding a safer fuel for nuclear reactors than uranium, using quantum theory to create computer’s capable of colossal processing speeds to growing batteries, marketing based on brain scans of what customers like and finding a way to prevent chewing gum from sticking to floors and furniture. Particle physicists and theatre ushers the world over await the results with bated breath.
This Tom Bonaventure/Getty Images picture of Pudong with its Oriental Pearl Tower (which accompanied the phosphorous city article) sends me into a tizzy of wonder that at least some of the things promised to me in the sci-fi of my childhood, are coming true.
Also up is a look at the possible future of our cities. In this case, focusing on efforts to use the examples of nature, like phosphorescent fish, to create bacteria-infused building materialsthat will allow our urban centers to provide their own light at a fraction of the current cost, perhaps using carbon dioxide from the air itself as its fuel.
Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy
And a wonderful article on Robert Fitzroy, captain of the Beagle, companion of Charles Darwin during the hydrograpic survey of the coast of South Africa that gave rise to his theory of evolution, and father of the modern weatherman/woman.Fitzroy's detailed observations of the weather conditions on that trip eventually led him to the discovery that collating data over a wide area allowed him to predict, or forecast, weather patterns. There’s no mention of whether or not Fitzroy also pioneered plaid sports coats and odd hands gestures over meteorological maps.
All in all, a magazine to keep an idea for a monthly glimpse into our futures.
Canada’s genre-on-a-budget superstar, Vincenzo Natali, the writer-director of Cube and episodes of, God help us, Earth:Final Conflict, brings Spliced to this year’s fest. The cast features David Hewlett and Sarah Polley (Yay!) and Adrian Brody (Boo!). Polley (Yay!) and Brody (Boo!) play husband and wife geneticists who impregnate an ovum with animal and human DNA and struggle to raise the fast-growing, increasingly dangerous (Boo!) and yet oh-so enticing female (Yay!) creature they create.
