Android: (1982. dir: Aaron Lipstadt) Apparently, we as a species are unable to consider robots without imagining them turning human of their own volition. Certainly it makes for some of our most compelling science fiction tales, and this is one.
Max 404 (Don Opper) is stuck on a space station where he assists a scientist (Klaus Kinski... and, therefore, a mad scientist) in his obsessive work, which aims at the activation of the perfect android. Android research has been outlawed on earth since the Munich Massacre, a terrible Philip-K-Dick-ish robot uprising, some years prior. Word comes that his project has been terminated just as three escaped prisoners take refuge on the station, eagerly welcomed by the adventure-hungry Max, and more insidiously by Kinski's Dr. Daniel, who needs the energy of a human woman to breathe life, Metropolis-like, into his robot.
Max's whimsical charm never sugar-chokes because it's soon enough leavened by the story's descent into darkness, leading Max into his own dark places. The budget is low, the acting good, the story well and easily told. It's easy to catch a boom-mike lowered into a shot, hard to block out the '80s cheeseboard electronica soundtrack, but all flaws are forgiven in the end in this bare-bones prize.
Blueberry: (2004. dir: Jan Kounen) Overlong and pretentious (it is French, after all) but gorgeous and strange Euro tripper-Western, slipped quietly and belatedly onto U.S. video shelves in a truncated version called Renegade. Based on a popular French-language comic, it brings to life the blood-feud between Marshal Mike Blueberry (Vincent Cassel) and archnemesis Wallace Blount, played by a well-used Michael Madsen. In fact, in a largely humorless film (it is French, after all), Madsen has the one laugh-out-loud moment when he holds a tarantula in Eddie Izzard's face and says, "If I was a spider, you'd crush my head. You would. You'd crush my furry black head."
Now that I've given away the one joke, what's left is an extraordinary landscape that blurs boundaries between internal and external realms. The phenomenal thing about this film is the showdown in the end, a full ten-minute segment which takes place entirely in the heads of the two enemies as they lie next to each other, physically incapacitated but psychically released on a wild and mutual peyote trip.
Conflict: (1973. dir: Jack Gold) In the early sixties, the Catholic Church was rocked by an earthquake from within called the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican -- Vatican II for short. It changed everything, issuing revolutionary rulings on liturgy, theology, and many aspects of Catholic living. Nowadays we take these rulings for granted and are easily appalled when Mel Gibson takes an unapologetic hard line on non-Catholics being destined for Hell, but a mere generation ago the hard line was all there was, short of heresy.
Originally titled Catholics for its television debut and based on the novel of that name by Brian Moore, this low-budget b&w outing brings a young and hip Fr. Kinsella (Martin Sheen), as representative from the Vatican, to a tiny island off Ireland where Trevor Howard and his band of dedicated monks have attracted unwanted attention for the crime of saying the Mass in its traditional Latin. The monks are played by a coterie of brilliant Brits (Cyril Cusack, Andrew Keir, a young but assured Michael Gambon) and the whole film is a quiet and engaging conversation about the issues raised by Vatican II: about the nature of worship itself, what lies at its heart, what compromises are necessary in its name and what battles are worth fighting.
Dark Wind: (1991. dir: Errol Morris) I refuse to feel guilty about this low-key pleasure. It's an early screen version of the Tony Hillerman novel (one of the first Jim Chee books), made prior to the PBS series. Morris, famed for his documentaries, has an arresting visual style, and the measured pace keeps faith with the book without sacrificing suspense. Lou Diamond Phillips provides an especially sad-sack Jim Chee appropriate to his tenderfoot status on the rez, and Gary Farmer brings his usual trickster magic to Cowboy Dashee.
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