Tag: 1970s

Review: Jaws

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Jaws

Behind every good 1970s movie is a bad 1970s book. Perhaps the ur-example of this saying of mine comes in Peter Benchley’s Jaws. I had heard very little good about the novel but decided I had to see for myself. Well, the shark bit.

I recognized the prose style immediately. And by immediately I mean “A few paragraphs and I recognized the wannabe 1970s pop epic style right away”. Much of the book really feels like someone who wanted to write “‘Arthur Hailey’s’ Tourist Town “, with huge long descriptions of how Long Island resort Amity works, runs, or doesn’t. These are interspersed with long, almost Proust-esque descriptions of things that straddle the line between padding and pretentiousness.

Oh yeah, there’s a shark. Spoiler alert. However, there’s surprisingly little shark. There is a lot of romantic drama and legal drama that Spielberg rightfully threw into the chum bucket. Which is what renders the book nothing but a curiosity. The movie superannuated it. Completely.

Review: Knockdown

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Knockdown

Dick Francis’ Knockdown is a horse racing mystery. I feel like I would have liked it a lot more if I was into horse racing. It’s a little hard to review because the basics are very good. I can see what it’s trying to do. It’s just there isn’t really a connection with me.

I guess it’d be like if I was a horse racing enthusiast and I was reading a mystery novel set in a conventional World War III. The basics are mostly good, but there just isn’t anything to grab. Which is a shame. Or maybe I just jumped into the deep end of the series too quickly. Which is still a shame.

A Thousand Words: The Woodstock Movie

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Woodstock

The Woodstock music festival is probably the most overrated cultural event ever. A ramshackle mess that could have very easily turned into a 1960s Fyre Festival or something much worse, all it gave was a huge mess in an upstate farm, music, and… a documentary film.

A massive reason-perhaps the biggest reason-why the concert is so well remembered is Michael Wadleigh’s masterpiece. Easily the best documentary/concert film I’ve seen, it cuts from the performances (of varying quality in every sense of the word) to interviews with dazed hippies, musicians, and the festival organizers, to things like the rainstorm and Wavy Gravy’s pronouncements, all done with amazing cinematic skill.

I could point out that despite being intended to be sympathetic, the interview subjects and even the whole festival doesn’t exactly look the best. But that’s the beauty of it, with the film being detailed and close (again in multiple senses) enough to give the viewer enough evidence to a make a judgement call. Its main goal was to chronicle, and chronicle it did.

Weird Wargaming: The Realistic Space Warship

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In the late 1970s, the BDM Corporation did a study for what a plausible space warship could look like (thanks to the invaluable Atomic Rockets for its analysis).

It has a spin-gravity crew quarters, is powered by nuclear reactors, and its armament consists of a laser in a de facto turret, a forward facing railgun, and a rear-facing particle beam (because the radioactive particles can’t risk hitting the ship).

The Space Shuttle in the picture is for scale-the whole thing is about two hundred meters long!

A Thousand Words: Jodorowsky’s Dune

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Jodorowsky’s Dune

In the early-mid 1970s, arthouse filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky ended up helming an “adaptation” of Dune. The quotes are deliberate as the movie and its tone would have been Starship Troopers/The Natural levels of intentionally different from the book. In 2013, the story of the most extravagant and absurd movie that never was was finally told in the titular documentary.

This is a great production. Everyone is clearly enjoying themselves as they talk about how the production got more and more crazy. Jodorowsky had his own son play a major role, and of course the son talks about it decades later. The art and effects brought together such figures as Jean “Moebius” Giraud, Dan O’Bannon, and H. R. Giger, the latter two of whom would make a monster movie that was a little successful. Yet the all-star cast was the craziest, featuring Orson Welles (paid in free food) as Baron Harkonnen, Salvador Dali, and Mick Jagger.

What makes the documentary shine is its soundtrack, with Kurt Stenzel’s minimalist electronic score being both a perfect accent and a great piece of music in its own right. (Although I’m biased because I like minimal electronic music, fair warning). The cinematography is also effective.

If I had to have one quibble, it’s that the documentary didn’t have the necessary devil’s advocate/reactor scram button to bring things down to earth. The movie is mentioned as being impossible, but in the sense it was too ambitious for Hollywood. In actuality, it would have been unreleasably bizzare, bound to burn money in its production, and simply strange. (There are scenes in at least some versions of Jodorowsky’s Dune that the documentary doesn’t mention, likely because they’re too weird and/or gross). If it actually got out the door, Jodorowsky’s Dune would probably just have been a bloated mess like Marlon Brando’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Still, this is a great documentary about a great story, even if it wouldn’t have been a great movie.

Review: High Disaster

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The Penetrator 22: High Disaster

The name High Disaster is fitting for the 22nd (!) Penetrator novel. By now co-author Chet Cunningham had clearly gotten sick of the series. That was the first problem, though someone as prolific as him could have just powered through a contract potboiler. The second and worse problem is that the ‘kill the mobster’ plot had played out and the ‘kill the terrorist’ plot had not yet become big.

So most men’s adventure novels in that period simply ended, with the oil crises not exactly helping things either. Yet the Penetrator kept going like a large caliber tank shell penetrating through a BMD-1. You ended up with things like High Disaster, where the threat/villain is (without spoiling anything) not exactly overwhelming, and the big gimmick is…. wildfires. In the American West. Which is kind of like rain and floods in Southeast Asia.

To appreciate the highs of a genre, you need to see the lows. And that is the only reason I’d recommend this book.

A Thousand Words: The Sting

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The Sting

The Robert Redford classic The Sting is a movie about Great Depression-era con artists pulling a dangerous game against a powerful mobster. A well-regarded movie, I would reckon it’s one of the best films to center around sports betting. Why?

Well, the plot that the protagonists are (supposedly) pulling involved horse racing, and the central scheme of outrunning the official updates to place advantageous bets is something I knew very well. Combined with excellent cinematography and performances, this is a 70s masterpiece.

Rockwell Advanced Bomber Study

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With the B-1(A) cancelled, Rockwell took a look at a variety of bombers that ranged from “deliberately low technology for the sake of development time and risk” to “LASER GUNS” (seriously). The bomber needed to have a payload of 50,000 pounds, mostly in the form of sixteen nuclear-capable cruise missiles. It needed a strategic mission range of about 5,200 nautical miles with said payload.

The five main examples were:

  • Subsonic, low technology/cost
  • Subsonic, lowest weight
  • Supersonic
  • Stealth
  • LASER GUN

The resulting report makes for very interesting reading. One of the more interesting proposals that’s mentioned but not elaborated on there is the modular plane that could be a bomber, an AWACS, a transport, and more.

What implied stats emerge (I’m not an aviation engineer) show the cargo version of the bomber as having neither the raw payload capacity of a heavy airlifter (the payload charts only went up to about 40 tons/80,000 pounds) nor the ruggedness of a light one (the takeoff distance, though impressive for a heavy bomber, is less than a dedicated airlifter). And that’s even before considering the issues with a modular pod (there’s a reason why very few transporters like it have been built). Still fun to think about.

A Thousand Words: King Kong 1976

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King Kong 1976

The 1976 remake of King Kong is often regarded as a horribly dated piece of 1970s kitsch that pales in comparison to the classic 1933 original. And that is completely accurate. But what’s interesting is how, given that the plot structure is more or less the same.

First off, there’s the human cast. Jeff Bridges, who is just about as hairy as King Kong in the film, is the stereotypical Post-Nixon Rebellious Academic, who of course is completely right and accurate. There’s Charles Grodin as the evil human villain, and he does a good job. Finally, there’s Jessica Lange whose performance has to be judge by the fact that her character “Dwan” (real spelling) has to work with a script and direction that Thalia and Melpomene themselves couldn’t do well.

But for the real star of the show, it’s very weird. The various props depicting Kong himself are done as well as could reasonably be for the time period. However, the movie fails completely (and I mean completely ) at effectively integrating them. Enjoy hours of clunky green screen that’s terrible even by the standards of the time! Watch as the dinosaur fight is replaced with a “struggle” against a snake prop! Marvel at the giant gas pump in the finale!

Now while the overall plot is the same, this is a lot more obviously contrived than the original. It’s an oil expedition that, after not finding oil on Kong Island, grabs the ape as a consolation prize. Lange’s character is shipwrecked separately and rescued by the oil ship.

All this adds up to-a horribly dated piece of 1970s kitsch that pales in comparison to the original.

A Thousand Words: Soylent Green

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Soylent Green

Soylent Green is perhaps the most early 70s movie of all time. Set in the dark far off future of 2022, the film is a documentary about life in a Warhammer 40k hive city, cautionary tale of overpopulation and societal breakdown as well as a grand mystery. The problem looking back on it in hindsight is that everyone now knows the big twist about what the titular food is made out of (human corpses). But there’s more to it than just that.

See, the movie is very early 1970s in that the characters dress and talk so similarly that sometimes I had trouble telling them apart. But it also takes the most ridiculous set pieces and expects the viewer to treat them with utmost somber seriousness-and I don’t just mean “ridiculous” as in later shown to be inaccurate ie the prison Manhattan in “1999” in Escape from New York. It shows a wildlife sanctuary consisting of one tree in a greenhouse bubble and a long scene where rioters are literally scooped up in bulldozers and expects both to be serious.

The movie isn’t badly made and you could do a lot worse than watching it. But it is ridiculously dated and belongs to the pretentious pre-Star Wars school of 1970s sci-fi.