Films of the week 3

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (dir. Robert Wise, 1979). After the cancellation of the original Star Trek television series in 1969, creator Gene Roddenberry made a number of attempts to revive Star Trek through the seventies. Finally, after an abortive attempt at a second series entitled Star Trek: Phase II, the script concept for the the two-hour series premiere was developed into a theatrical film with a full-on budget, and fans of the original series saw the starship Enterprise as they never had before. Production was on a tight schedule necessitating some cutting of corners, but when the film opened it was a hit, and Paramount soon realized that it had a highly lucrative franchise on its hands. The rest, of course -- ten theatrical films and counting, five spinoff television series, and innumerable additions to the Star Trek mythology -- is, as the man says, history. For fans, the Enterprise crew's mission to intercept a vast sentient machine before it reaches Earth is familiar territory, and serves well before it sort of evaporates into quasi-mystical gibberish at the end. In fact, this re-imagining of Star Trek has a lot going for it, but still had a way to go; the majestic largeness of the production tends to make the cast and its chemistry (always the show's main strength) look insignificant, and it took another sequel (1982's The Wrath of Khan) before the formula was just right.

Born in '45 (Jahrgang 45) (dir. Jurgen Bottcher, 1966). As a result of an action of the government of the German Democratic Republic banning a number of films that featured new styles, themes and techniques, this film did not see its premiere until after reunification, in 1990. Rolf Romer and Monika Hildebrandt are a young couple whose marriage is showing signs of strain, which causes Romer to leave his wife and drift through Berlin, trying to figure out his life and whether it will continue to have Hildebrandt in it. Director Bottcher and cameraman Roland Graf were heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism and what could be seen of the French and Czech new wave film in this poetic and realistic drama about young people in the GDR. Bottcher, who never made another narrative feature, was just one of many filmmakers whose careers were impacted by the government's ban (he became a documentarist and a painter), and the ban profoundly affected the subsequent development of cinema in Germany.

2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968). This is arguably Kubrick's best film, one that significantly influenced the genre of science fiction film, and always worth seeing again just one more time, though I find that this time it is mostly to see the favorite bits. Those who are mostly into space opera tend not to like the obscurity of the story, though summing up the plot is actually easy: an unknown extraterrestrial intelligence, through the placement of a strange monolith among a troop of prehistoic anthropoids, have spurred them to discover the use of tools, leading to the anthropoids evolving into modern humans and eventually to space travel, and have planted a similar monolith on the moon which, when discovered and unearthed by the humans, emits a signal directed to the planet Jupiter, where Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and the sentient computer HAL 9000 wend their way on the spacecraft Discovery to encounter a third monolith -- and possibly to an evolutionary leap more profound than the discovery of tools.

His Kind of Woman (dir. John Farrow, 1951). A straightforward film noir suddenly goes deep into left field when Vincent Price joins Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell at a fancy and moderne resort in Mexico. Mitchum has been sent there for a purpose unknown to him, but it involves a payoff of fifty grand and deported mob kingpin Raymond Burr. Russell is a self-styled heiress and Vincent Price is a star of Hollywood swashbucklers she is trying to snare. When Mitchum finally realizes the jam he's in, it's up to Price to swashbuckle his way in and save the day. Howard Hughes owned the studio, RKO, and put his name on the picture, so expect to see prominently displayed two of the tycoon's obsessions: airplanes and Jane Russell's cleavage.