TCM Genre movies schedule...
- Thread starter Klaus
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Okay, I found Zardoz on cable, though it took a few moments to realize TCM would be on the "Free Movies On Demand" channel instead of the "Entertainment On Demand" channel. And man, that is one freaky movie. It has an interesting idea, sort of, and some intriguing visuals (lots of use of reflections and projections and in-camera special effects), but it's also kind of pretentious and goofy, and it becomes rather farcical and incoherent in the climactic portions. And its treatment of gender, sexuality, and rape is rather ghastly. (Like how the Apathetic woman Zed tried to rape was the same one who was "awakened" by his life force and eagerly sought him out later on. And how did Consuela go from hating him to suddenly being in love with him? I guess the idea was that her hate was driven by her unadmitted desire for him, but it was clumsily handled.) I'm also not a fan of stories that go for the cliche that trying to improve on the natural order of things or overcome mortality is automatically evil. I wish the film had focused more on the wrongness of how the Vortex people were just the rich one-percenters who hogged immortality for themselves while enslaving or mass-slaughtering everyone else. There could've been an effective allegory on class conflict here, sort of an inversion of the Eloi and the Morlocks, if it hadn't been so preoccupied with sex and death.
It occurred to me that this film is set in the same year as Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (and the first part of Generations). Talk about your radically different visions of the future.
It occurred to me that this film is set in the same year as Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (and the first part of Generations). Talk about your radically different visions of the future.
Zardoz didn't say that. What they said was that the Vortex inhabitants weren't up to the challenge, and their utopia with irrevocable immortality couldn't be sustained without the slave labor from outside. Their set-up was thus a dead-end. Zed broke humanity out of the trap. Their knowledge wasn't lost, though, implying that someday humanity might do better.
^To me, it seemed to be saying that trying to overcome death was intrinsically bad, that going back to the natural order of things was necessary and right. Note how the really clunky final shots drive home the idea of the restoration of the normal cycle of birth, aging, and death, presenting that as the culmination of the story. A lot of mass-media science fiction defaults to the idea that any change from the way things normally are is a corruption that needs to be undone. It feels rather naive, or at least one-sided, in the context of modern transhumanist SF, in which genetically engineered, enhanced, or immortal societies are often portrayed in a more positive light.
Yeah, I see what you mean. But maybe the point was that their utopia was ill-conceived. The way it came about itself seemed brutal. They selected the wealthiest, but did they really get the best-suited?
About the clunky final shots: they didn't really seem too happy, which I thought was odd. If the film's message was about restoring the natural order, they didn't seem too thrilled about it. Plus, the Beethoven, while brilliant, isn't exactly uplifting, either.
I thought about mentioning the really distasteful rape stuff in my post, but I was afraid that might open up a whole can of worms I didn't really feel like dealing with.
I guess I could see where maybe they were trying show that Zed was giving in to all of the worst and most violent apsects of humanity, but it was definitely very badly handled.
This is from the same guy who did Delivierence and Excalibur, so he definitely seemed to have some weird ideas about sex.
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I've mercifully never seen Deliverance, but it has a lot to answer for in terms of promoting ugly, dehumanizing stereotypes about Appalachian people. As for Excalibur, I remember seeing it on TV once upon a time, but I don't remember anything about its sexual content (which was probably edited for TV anyway).
There was a lot of sex in EXCALIBUR, at least in the theaters. Uther mounts Ygraine in full armor (which made every woman I knew wince), Arthur is seduced by his half-sister, Lancelot and Guenevere end up frolicking naked in the woods, etc. I think there were even hints of incest between Morgana and her son Modred, although my memory is fuzzy there.
Excalibur's one of my favorite films.
I agree. Then too, seeing how smart phones are used in dumb ways...
Some of my favorite lines come from this movie:
t's an ark. A ship. A spaceship. All this technology was for travel to the distant stars.
- John Alderton as Friend
A vote was to be held. And we hear this:
https://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/df084c8e-45b4-4cc0-979a-4f3d32ed210e/gif
refreshing.
Somehow I can totally believe that from you.
Also, isn't it great we live in a world where there's a novelization of Dracula's Dog?
Hah! Cleaning my attic today I stumbled onto my copy of the novelization: THE HOUND OF DRACULA by Ken Johnson.
That's not by any chance the same person as Kenneth Johnson of The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk, V, and Alien Nation, is it?
I doubt it. It's a pretty common name (the disambiguation page at Wikipedia lists a couple dozen Ken and Kenneth Johnsons, including numerous professional athletes. And the entry on that Kenneth Johnson doesn't mention any involvement with Dracula's Dog.
EDIT: Some homework on the internet reveals that this was a different Kenneth Johnson, a British journalist who died some years ago. Despite this, at least one entry on Goodreads credits the book to the Kenneth Johnson, creator of "V" and such. I'm assuming that's in error.
Plus, there seems to be some confusion as to whether the book was based on the movie or the other way around, complicated by the fact that both and movie went through various titles. The cover of my edition simply says "Now a Major Motion Picture," although it sounds as though Ken Johnson may have written the screenplay for the movie, then novelized his own script?
EDIT 2: Seems the novelization was published before the movie was released, which may be why there's some confusion as to what came first. I'll be curious to check out the writing credits on the actual movie.
http://vaultofevil.proboards.com/thread/2239/ken-johnson-zoltan-hound-dracula
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It's not all a stereotype. I had generations of extended family who lived near so-called "mountain people" (in the Tennessee region) who behaved in a way very similar to the characters in Deliverance, and over the decades, they have shared various accounts of incidents of general violence and on occasion, men raping men. When visiting, I was often warned to stay away from certain areas because of that kind of threat. So, behavior like that is found in real life, and not isolated to the stuff of James Dickey's imagination.
You're just giving a textbook illustration of what stereotyping is -- painting a whole group negatively because of the negative actions of a few of its members. Which is no better than judging all Muslims for the actions of ISIL or all Germans for the actions of the Nazis. Many people of Appalachian heritage have been victimized by ugly "hillbilly" stereotypes, which are still widely seen as acceptable even after other racial and ethnic stereotypes have been recognized as wrong.
It's also pretty outrageous to single out "men raping men" as if that were somehow worse or more aberrant than men raping women. Just say "rape." It's an act of violence, not an act of sex. The genders of the perpetrator and victim are irrelevant to the magnitude of the crime.
I said "it's not all a stereotype," which means that some behaviors are true. I never said every living person from that TN region were like that.
I am male, so not only did family speak of it, but of when visiting the region, I was specifically warned about certain areas to avoid because of my gender. That's the point: there are men who target other men to rape. Remember, this sideline discussion grew out of comments about Deliverance--its most memorable, discussed and studied scene being the rape of Bobby by other men, not a general discussion on sexual assault.
Which is beside the point. Obviously any stereotype is going to be based on some actual behavior. So saying that it actually happens in some cases does nothing to refute the fact that it's a stereotype, and merely defends the stereotype as justified. By calling attention to that fringe behavior and not mentioning the behavior of the rest of the group, you implicitly promote or endorse the notion that the negative behavior can be generalized. That is the very essence of how stereotyping happens -- by fixating on a negative extreme as the primary depiction of a group.
No, the point is that the people who "warned" you about that were homophobes who found the idea of sex between two men more horrifying than the idea of rape per se. And that means that their "warnings" cannot be taken as any more factually reliable than Donald Trump's "warnings" about Mexican immigrants.
When talking about the behavior found among a certain group of people, that in no way paints the entire population as sharing that behavior, so saying--
Is:
- A sweeping, unjustified condemnation of the film, as it does not promote a stereotype of the entire Appalachian people.
- The story is talking about a specific group of men who act in a certain way, and at no time in the Dickey book, or the Boorman film do we see the entire population said to share their beliefs and acts
- If you did not see the film--as you admit--then, to be honest, you cannot make such a judgement, as it completely misrepresents the story.
Now you're being utterly offensive about people you do not know. There's nothing homophobic about warning a male about the truth of certain men who--in fact--rape other men. That was not a rumor, targeting or a talking point for an agenda. It was a fact. Unless you've visited areas in question, and know the various cultures, sub-cultures, behaviors and known acts, etc., you are (again) making a sweeping, unjustified condemnation of people and the situations they know as much as misrepresenting a film you never watched.
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