The Ohio Sci-Fi and Horror Marathons

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PostPosted: Fri Mar 11, 2016 1:41 pm 
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scottcoz wrote:
I want to apologize if anyone caught my cold! I probably shouldn't have come, at all, but I was thinking that, by Saturday, I'd be feeling better, and probably not contagious. Since the former didn't end up being true, I'm not sure the latter was, either!

Oh, and also - I apologize to anyone who I might have been unfriendlier than usual to! I'm a little neurotic about germs, and so, when it was clear I was still sick, I wanted to minimize the chances of spreading it to anyone else. So, I didn't want to shake anyone's hand, or even talk too long to anyone, or stand too near.


No apologies needed. I just hope you're feeling better, and also, I TOTALLY understand about being cautious of germs. I am a germaphobe myself.


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 11, 2016 2:35 pm 
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OK Joe.

Posted earlier. It disappeared.
Really like the diversity of other posters' comments.
Don't wish to review each film. If you're here you either saw them or read the above already. So these are reactions, not reviews.

Already stated my appreciations of the work of BruceJoe and their minions. No way that such a success could have occurred without the quantity, quality, and detail of their work. We are all the beneficiaries. And the theater was well run too! Thanks Drexel staff and management.

High-Rise seemed oddly retro. The combination of class hatred and aspirations along with the decadence was very late 60s-70s. Even the cars looked old. Haven't read Ballard for decades so on a hunch I looked it up. AHA! The book it was based on was written 40 years ago.
Obviously Hiddleston and the cast were excellent.
Ghost's question about the logic of the behaviors is beside the point. The piece is a moral (Immoral?) fable about class, not realism. Very well filmed and acted, but as one watcher said, "Once it's been established that everyone is insane, why go on?"

Zardoz
I would like to retract any previous snotty comments about this one. Hadn't seen it since a long gone Cleveland marathon. Lovely 70's fable about brutality and repression.
Had a hard time not laughing out loud at Zed and his merry bunch of bloody Exterminators. Very glad to hear Joe's digression on how Boorman got the clout to make his cheerful little fable. Didn't like the mannered conversation by the Eternals, but that's a feature of it's time.
Don't quite know why my reaction changed. Perhaps I've gotten a sense of humor?

The Man Who Fell - - -
Again, a film of it's times. Enjoyed Bowie's wanderings through power and culture. Kept wanting him to link his money back to saving his people but logic wasn't what this was about. Still, the conclusion, after his escape, seemed tacked on. They'd already made the point that Earth had pretty well destroyed him.
I even had hopes that Rip Torn's penis might mean something, but that sex was more of a throw away piece to show that they could do it than to make any point. The girlfriends were the prettiest females in any of the movies. Glad I stayed awake this time.

Arrowhead
I am glad that other people enjoyed this more than I did. Great staging and technical production work. And thank you very much David et al for arranging the interview with the director. That alone gave what we saw meaning.
I usually have no problem following a plot. And there is no reason that everything has to be explained in what was pretty much a character study. Everything can't be Moon or Time Lapse. But here the gritty realism gave the expectation that the convoluted action would be tied together by something better than a two sentence rationalization at the end. The explanation was telegraphed earlier, but still - hard to get through. And this is coming from someone who thought Shadows On The Wall was a watchable film.

Starman
Perhaps the crowd favorite. Certainly mine. It's hard to top a beautifully acted fable about warmth, love and brutality. Particularly when it's placed with films of a very different esthetic.
Jeff Bridges earned his Academy Award nomination as an alien operating a human body. Clutzy and goofy, a joy to watch. Karen Allen, a joy to watch, period. And again, a fable. This one a lot more direct with a message that's impossible to miss.

Destroy All Monsters and Fantastic Voyage
Changes of pace that are part of a great marathon presentation.
Great acting by Godzilla. You know that he would have high-fived Minilla(little Godzilla) after they kicked Ghidora's butt if the gesture had been invented before 1968.
Fantastic was a little hard to get through, but it is a reminder of dozens of films from the era and what used to be a sense of wonder. We are spoiled by CGI and movie effects of current films.
Heard a story that Isaac Asimov was very chagrined that at the time his best selling book was his novelization of Fantastic Voyage.

Turkish Star Wars
Expected to enjoy the goof of it.
The subtitles were very hard to read due to their being right at the bottom of the screen and there being a very tall watcher directly in front of me. Had not slept at all so after about ten minutes gave up trying to follow the mash up of what was going on and decided to rest. Thank you Jethrobot for mentioning the rock slapping montage. Sorry I missed the presentation of a new art. And wish I hadn't been so tired.

Jason X
Am very happy to say that I continued to enjoy the benefits of rest through this much requested epic.

Max 1 & 4
Max is mostly notable for its raw brutality. A 1979 indie could do it and make it come across as a moral fable. Max 4 is the culmination of that trend where production values, big budgets, great direction and brilliantly imagined mayhem are added to the formula, signifying???
For me it's still about raw brutality. I am glad that others enjoy it. The sheer wham of the film was not sufficient to get me to watch it at a second marathon in a couple of months and for a third time overall. Hit the road for the 2 1/2 hr. ride home.

Costume. The right guy won - for sheer chutzpah. The Zardoz was a great construction and could have won in other years, but I thought that the Zed actually looked like he was also playing a character from Turkish Star Wars (remember we hadn't seen it yet.) Nice job.

Crowd great. And I bitch about some movies, but this was a genuine mix. Please continue the Indies & premieres. And thanks to the donors and artists.
My card got called while I was in the John so I didn't get anything, but the freebies are something that lots of the crowd genuinely enjoy. Good that some kid got a prize.
Somehow the pace was better this year. Again.
Thanks y'all.

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PostPosted: Fri Mar 11, 2016 7:28 pm 
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For those interested in a conversation with the director of High Rise:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/a6f2af02 ... e9ee6.html


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PostPosted: Tue Mar 15, 2016 11:35 am 
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Better late than never. I suppose. I had a very busy week of work last week, so didn't get around to the site until today. I don't think I am going to go through a film by film breakdown. Just a few film comments. Okay, I lied.

The only negative I have, which is getting more negative as I think about it, is my hoodie. I'm the one who had his new hoodie go missing. I almost bought a t-shirt, decided no, let's splurge and get a sci-fi hoodie, since I have a horror one from years back. I thought I had left it on my seat when I went to turn in my ballot and get my starter cup of pop. I came back to find someone in my seat. He was nice enough to move. I was three rows from the back, next to the new seats. It actually worked nice getting in and out. Anyhow, I had put some of my stuff with another marathoid and thought the hoodie was there. I decided to run it out to the car and noticed it wasn't in with his stuff. Looked around, the folks around me looked around and that is when we figured out it was gone. I thought perhaps the guy who had grabbed my seat had mixed it in with his stuff by accident, but I didn't recall him well enough to find him. I said something to Joe and Bruce but alas, I still don't have it. I was hoping it was an innocent accident, I have never had anything go missing before and I still think it may be with someone's stuff and they never heard Joe and Bruce's comment and they are trying to figure out why they have it. The bummer is, by the time it was gone, all the shirts were sold out.

As for the nudity, sex, violence aspects with regards to parenting, Sergei, my older son who will turn 13 in May, was old enough to go this year and wanted to go, but was swimming at the Central/SE OH/ WV Championships in Canton. I might have steered him away from this year. As someone else mentioned the sex and or nudity isn't the problem in a film like Starman. It is the way it is handled in some of the other films that would make me uneasy about it. But I knew when the films were, it is my job to figure it out, not the job of Bruce or Joe.

Nice to see a big crowd. Will the remodel reduce the number of seats, the new ones are bigger and have more leg room, so I would think it would have to cut the seating numbers down. Will this start selling out? I had to make a last minute decision this year, I did not buy my ticket until Friday night. Again, to echo a previous poster, I thought the crowd was a bit too quiet, especially given the size. So many serious, we need to be respectful, films up front kind of put a damper on the crowd. The Donald Trump comment at the start of Mad Max was quite funny though.

Hoping the cafe comes back, the concessions were fine, the staff great. Excellent booth work this year. Like the new bathrooms. Noticed at one point they redirected the ladies to the old bathrooms. I assume the water still worked there, but not for the men's because it would have been nice to have access to both, the line was a bit long.

Okay, I lied a couple quick thoughts on each film.

I like when we do the bookends, Alien/Aliens, Terminator/T2. I had not seen this one in a long time and had actually forgotten how long it took before his wife and child died. I was thinking it was end of the first act or so and the taking down of the gang was more drawn out.

Starman. I had a huge crush on Karen Allen as a kid between her roles in this, Raiders and Scrooged. I like the chemistry and I always laugh at the Red Light, Green Light, Yellow Light bit.

I liked Arrowhead except for the little things like supplies where I had trouble suspending disbelief. I wasn't the one who asked the director that questions but was of the same opinion.

It had been a long time since I saw The Man Who Fell To Earth. I forgot that it had Little Women (or as my wife would say Return of the King) disease, in that you keep thinking this would be a logical place to end, but wait there is more.

I wasn't that impressed with High Rise, because like others said, the leap from all is well to chaos seemed way too sudden. The acting was fine, I just think I probably should pick up the book.

Zardoz - Not so much on the film, but I did have to explain to Sergei why the guy in the red diaper beat the well crafted Tom Servo in the Costume Contest. Which by the way, I was happy to see a really good costume contest.

Turkish Star Wars - Had recently seen part of it in a list of video clips where they gave it props for keeping the original Wolfman that Lucas edited out in later versions of a New Hope. Going back to Karen Allen she had a better smile when Marion's Theme played. Actually, I'm not sure if she ever smiled when it played, will need to rewatch Raiders, but I knew a smile was coming when the song started in this movie.

Jason X - I'm okay with slasher films. I wouldn't sit through a Jason or Freddie or Halloween marathon, but I don't hate them. And I have no problem with this one playing at the SciFi. This movie is Alien with a more familiar monster and not as accomplished of a cast. And more folks survive. If you sat a group of average movie goers down and had them watch Jason X and High Rise, I suspect more would pick Jason X as Sci Fi. In outerspace? Check. In the future? Check. Androids/robots? Check. And I was fine with High Rise being shown. Heck, I like the documentaries we have shown, so I am in the big tent camp for what can be shown. I just don't get the vitriol some have for this movie.

Fantastic Voyage - I imagine I agree with Dave on the science of shrinking films. Still this was a nice film, though I might have swapped it and Destroy All Monsters. It was still a bit early and a couple spots it is a tad slow.

Destroy All Monsters - I don't know that we need one every year, but I grew up on these when I was a kid watching Superhost on Channel 43 out of Cleveland on Saturdays. I'd like to see one at least every other year. I'll even take the 90/00s remakes.

Fury Road - I confess with my wife's health issues and a 4 and 12 year old, I rarely get to the movies and I hadn't seen this one, though I had heard a ton and I wasn't disappointed. It almost could have been split into two films, though. Or at least it felt long enough. I really thought when they got on the motorcycles to go across the desert that was going to be the end of the film.

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PostPosted: Wed May 18, 2016 4:21 pm 
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The Hall of Marathonia has been updated with SF33.

Also uploaded some scans and pics to the Archives.

The pics aren't the best but I'm digging around for more. That is all. :)

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