Twilight Zone: Mirror Image; RIP Anne Francis

Caught a bit of the Twilight Zone marathon on SyFy the other night, as we do every year. Lucky enough to see a couple episodes we hadn’t seen before, or hadn’t seen in a long long time and didn’t remember.

Luckily the famous episode “The After Hours”, with Anne Francis as the confused department store customer, was one of them. We’ve seen that many times and never tire of it. How can it be that a 50-year-old, half hour Twilight Zone can have more of a grip on you than would about four hour-long episodes of current paranormal fair, like say, Fringe? A writer would like to credit the writing but it’s more than that. The actors, physically, were more appealing, yes, and less like they were stamped out of just two or three molds.  Vera Miles or Anne Francis have an edge, looks-wise, over Anna Torv, but acting styles are a factor too. Somewhere the naturalistic trend in acting passed a line. The actors used to actually pronounce the words so that they were comprehensible. They were able to convey the sense that what they were saying was important, encouraging you to pay attention. Today’s graduates of the Twitch-and-Mumble School seem like they couldn’t care less. They are handed far fewer good lines, yes, but would they be able to handle them?

Fringe is a pretty good show  but only a few of the episodes hold you in their grip from start to finish. And the show wouldn’t have lasted much past its pilot without Walter Bishop as played by John Noble. A funny, quirky character, yes, but also… say, is it a coincidence that  Noble plays it somewhat old-school, tending to pronouncments and at times holding forth like he might be in a 60s teleplay? The rest of the cast deliver their characters with the acting equivalent of the annoying ubiquitous shakey cam, a no-style visual mode of today’s directors. You get tired of the frames jiggling more than the ones you record with your own cheap camcorder that comes equipped with image stabilization, and you grow weary of the actors speaking the same language you do but to understand the show requires you turn on the closed captioning.

These are works of fiction, teleplays. Audiences know that. It’s not eavesdropping into real life, so don’t try to trick us into thinking it is. We’re not pushing for formalized mannered kabuki theater here, but over the long haul film and TV makers have sold their audiences short.

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One of the episodes I may have seen but forgot was “Mirror Image”, with Vera Miles and Martin Milner.  It’s an eerie one about a woman in transition, in a bus station — a place of transition –  who suspects she may be between worlds. Well worth a look for the doppelganger fan. Dopplegangers may be the next big thing.

TWILIGHT ZONE: Vera Miles in "Mirror Image"

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And coincidentally, sadly, while we had this post in draft status, Anne Francis died. Here’s a great promo picture picture from Forbidden Planet. Keep your eye out for her fine body of work over a long career.

Robbie the Robot and Anne Francis

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1884: Yesterday’s Future

Variety reports that Terry Gilliam is shepherding a steampunk feature film called 1884: Yesterdays Future. Directed by special effects specialist Tim Olive, it’s a film made in 1840, using steam powered filmmaking, of a story set 40 years hence. Both puppets and CGI characters will be used and the actors’ live action lips and eyes will be included, much like the old Synchro-Vox technique pioneered by Cambria Productions’ Space Angel and Clutch Cargo cartoons.

American stern-wheeler floating aircraft carriers in Tim Olive's 1884: Yesterday's Future.

Here’s the very rough four-minute teaser:

Hat tip: Quiet Earth

Steampunk: The Mysterious Geographic Explorations Of Jasper Morello

From Australian TV, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations Of Jasper Morello a steampunk tale of an airship navigator done in a lush shadow puppet style.

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations Of Jasper Morello

Rashomon

The dead man tells his story…through a medium, in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon.

"How quiet it was."

KiTE: Make your own bookmarks

JPG suitable for printing. Right-click and Save Image as…Enough KiTE bookmarks to last you a lifetime. If you live longer then just print another one. KiTE is a novel set in Earth orbit starring Mason Dash, operator of Kite, Janet Dash, his genius AI researcher wife and Sheila, his beautiful virtual assistant. More information here.

Kite bookmark sheet

Dead Girls, Richard Calder

Current reading is appropriate for a Halloween post, we’d think.  Richard Calder’s Dead Girls is not about corpses, although a few turn up along the way. It’s set in an extreme dystopian near-future where artificial intelligence, robotics and lethal fashionista rivalries have collided to produce a plague, the effective end-product of which is the transforming, by dint of their fathers’ corrupted DNA, the girls of the world into plastic creatures, dolls, and the men who love them into enslaved doll addicts. This is the first of Calder’s Dead… trilogy and it follows Ignatz, the central afflicted male, and the doll of his life, Primavera, back from a hyper-roboticized “Wild East” Asia to a quarantined London in search of the origins of the plague.

The edition we’re reading has a great cover, which is similar to this one below. It’s more exactly like the one you’ll see in the author’s link above  (with the title in a black box) , but this version could be rendered here in larger image, and has the same effect:

Dead Girls, by Richard Calder

Dead Girls, by Richard Calder, excerpt:

We drove through an empty concrete wilderness that might have been twinned with Troy, Carthage or Pompeii; all about us were the lineaments of greatness soiled by sudden defeat.

‘Whitechapel,’ informed our driver. ‘Brick Lane.’

Whitechapel. That was where Mum and Dad lived when they first came to England. Jumping the kerb to avoid a burned-out car, the Bentley swung into a warehouse.

We got out, Jo leading us across an oil-stained expanse littered with automobilia – the sort of place grease monkeys dream of going to when they die – to where a rusted samovar stood. There, bending over, she grasped an iron ring set in the floor, and pulled. A trap opened.

Beneath our feet, a spiral staircase unwound into infinity; a plume of green light rose from the depths, casting a halo upon the warehouse’s roof.

‘Down we go,’ said out escort.

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No we  didn’t choose that passage just because in included the word ‘infinity.’ It’s dystopian! But we are attracted to the green and blue in the cover, the InfinityBound colors.

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A more detailed capsule review of Dead Girls will appear in the “Dark Streets” Suspense/Mystery column. Deadline is tomorrow (!) so we must get to it but now that the subject meshes some with the new swerve of this blog here’re the links to the previous efforts.  The next will appear on the 15th of November. If we forget to post it, remind us.

Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 8 – DARK STREETS
Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 9 – DARK STREETS
Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 10 – DARK STREETS
Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 11 – DARK STREETS

The Outer Limits: Duplicate Man

The Outer Limits, with its famous “There is nothing wrong with your televison set…” opening  was an early Sixties science fiction anthology series.  Somewhat monster- and alien-oriented, many of the episodes still hold up. One such is embedded below: “Duplicate Man”, written by Hugo Award winner Clifford D. Simak. What happens when you discover that you are a clone?

The Simak WikiPedia page cites the foreward of his short fiction collection Skirmish, noting that Simak thought of “Good Night, Mr. James” — the story on which this teleplay was based — as a vicious story: “…so vicious that it is the only one of my stories adapted to television.”

Full episodes of The Outer Limits can be found on Hulu.

Vincent Price Day

Saying “Happy” Vincent Price Day may not be quite appropriate, even if people do say Happy Halloween.

Hm. What to watch while in a dystopia phase, on Vincent Price Day.  How about The Last Man on Earth. Yeah. That’ll do.  Here’s a review.

Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price in TALES OF TERROR

Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to young writers: “Don’t use semicolons.”

Part 1 of an interesting speech by Vonnegut at Albion College in 2002 (“Kurt Vonnegut – How to get a job like mine”). We’re big fans of Vonnegut’s “early work,”  including his masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five, but his edge dulled considerably later on as he moved away — consciously, apparently — from his special brand of wry tragi-comic sci-fi with Breakfast of Champions. That was good enough to get us to start Jailbird, little more than a rant, which seemed to advocate the release of all criminals from prisons. Mm no. We don’t believe we finished that one.

Vonnegut deftly applied his personal experience as a POW at Dresden and its bombing as the central historical event of Slaughterhouse Five, spinning it into an indictment of war in general and U.S. warmaking in particular. In many ways the tragedy of the event was shortchanged and Vonnegut’s use of it facile and somewhat flip — practically an exploitation, but a canny one for the anti-war times. Dresden had more strategic importance than many post-event analysts allow. There were political considerations that went beyond bombing ball-bearing factories over porcelain workshops. In short, the Western Allies had pledged to assist their major Eastern ally, the Soviet Union in any way possible and were always, perhaps overly,  alert to opportunities to do this from long distance. The USSR was in the middle of an offensive, and their leadership, meaning  Stalin, would have no qualms about cruelty to German civilians, who comprised the bulk of the half-million-plus refugees in the city, there trying to escape the advancing Russian armies. Dresden would spend the Cold War under Russian control.

For an excellent, detailed and chilling account of Dresden’s bombing from the ground, the air and the leadership on both sides see John Toland’s essential The Last 100 Days. And for lots more detail about this raid see the page on it at the USAF’s Air University site:  Historical Analysis of the 14-15 February 1945