Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

Like many new arrivals to New York City, Joe Morton’s character in John Sayles’ indie comedy is hoping for a fresh start in the strange, scary but not entirely hostile metropolis. The big difference, of course, is that Morton’s innocent mute is a three-toed extraterrestrial, an escaped slave from "another planet" being pursued by two vaguely feline (and white) Men In Black (who, ironically, are far more concerned with the number of toes on their quarry’s feet than the color of his skin). Sayles’ gentle parable of multicultural integration features a magic trick (in the scene above) that hinges on a still-timely sociological sight gag about urban race relations. Yet it’s interesting to ponder what the eponymous Brother would think if he made a return visit to our planet today: with the Disney-fication of Times Square and the ongoing gentrification of Harlem (not to mention the upcoming Obama inauguration), even the human characters from Sayles’ early ‘80s world might feel a bit disoriented in the strange land of 2008 Manhattan.

UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

Malcolm Lowry's novel of self-destruction is a force of nature. John Huston's film of the novel is, sadly, not. Sure, it contains moments of beauty and tragedy, but when things go wrong, they go wrong with a dogged determinism. Albert Finney plays the drunken Geoffrey Firmin, ex-consul of the British Empire in Mexico, with a grace rarely afforded cinematic alcoholics. The other actors are, sadly, not up to his standards (Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood has the same problem, as leading man Brad Dourif's talents far outshine all other actors onscreen, save Harry Dean Stanton.) As Firmin stumbles further out of the relative safety of his regular haunts, Mexico becomes less like an exotic extension of his home and more like a seedy extension of the jungle, where Firmin's haughty imperialism will lead to a swift downfall.

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006)

Sacha Baron Cohen’s most notorious creation, Borat Sagdiyev, isn’t really a stranger at all. He’s more of an infiltrator. And his America isn’t a strange land, either; in fact, it’s one the British comedian smugly believes he knows like the back of his hand. Whether you loved or hated Borat is largely dependent on how much tolerance you have for Baron Cohen’s assumption that he can easily get to the ugly creamed filling under the sweet exterior of America just by biting it in the right spot; there are those who find his style of humor hysterical and telling, and others who find it manipulative and condescending. But no one can doubt, after seeing it in action, how skillfully he wields it, not to inform, but to eviscerate. Borat is a butcher, not a surgeon, and we’re his meat. His Kazakhstan is funny because he correctly assumes that it’s distant enough from our daily lives that we’ll laugh at his fantastic portrayal of it; and his America is funny because he correctly assumes that we’re so far inside of it that we won’t even realize how he’s making it look until it’s far too late. The archetype of the man trapped in a world not of his own making usually derives its humor from the fact that he’s a holy fool, innocently reflecting our reality in his ignorance; Borat shows how dangerous it can be when the holy fool is really an unholy genius who knows exactly how to take advantage of the fact that people are likely to do anything if they think they’re in the presence of someone who doesn’t know any better.

THE NEW WORLD (2005)

It’s no surprise that Terrence Malick’s name would show up on a list of great movies about culture clashes. Since the beginning of his career, he’s specialized in showing us the beauty and violence that grow out of peoples’ encounters with the strange, whether that strangeness is expressed as the dreary middle of the U.S., the uncontrollable vastness of the new west, or the tempting primitivism of the South Pacific in wartime. What’s shocking about The New World is that he manages to pull the same trick twice in one movie – and both times with spectacular results. Filming in modern-day Virginia, his conjuration of the lands that greeted John Smith’s men is so perfect, so unspoiled, so bountiful that it’s almost terrifying. His men were promised heaven, and to see it in this life fills them with an almost religious dread. But this quickly fades: if heaven is on earth, what need have they for law? The settlement soon devolves into a stunted, filthy savagery that stands in marked contrast to the gorgeous plenty of the New World. It’s all done with some of the most breathtaking camera work ever seen, but then the movie takes an astonishing shift – one that, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, would have shattered the tone of the film. We see England through Pocahontas’ eyes as no less strange and unreal a place than was America in John Smith’s eyes, a place of man without nature, of infinite variations of gray and wet, and it has no less devastating an effect on her life.

MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984)

Made at pretty much the exact last moment that Robin Williams was capable of doing anything likable, Paul Mazursky’s charming Moscow on the Hudson now seems like a relic of an ancient age, but it should be remembered that it came out at a time when the only cinematic method of interacting with the Soviet Union was with hails of gunfire and exploding rocket-bombs. Mazursky’s story of a simple and kind Russian musician who decides to defect during a state visit to New York had its bittersweet moments, as Williams’ Vladimir Ivanoff discovered that life in America is not all smiles and sunshine even for those who have the rare opportunity to have sex with Maria Conchita Alonso. But it also managed to convey the belief, greatly underrepresented in theaters at the time, that Russians were actual human beings who might not deserve to be shot in the face; and it also suggested the possibility – which, as it happened, turned out to be disturbingly correct – that the best way to get the Commies on our good side was just to let them take a gander at a well-cut pair of blue jeans and a fully stocked shelf at the supermarket. Many of Moscow on the Hudson’s land-of-plenty/land-of-want scenes are cliché by this point, but at the time, they seemed fresh and earnest enough to work.

WOODY ALLEN IN GENERAL: PARTICULARLY SLEEPER (1973), BANANAS (1971) & ZELIG (1983)

I used to think of Woody Allen as an explorer of the well-known. He endlessly treads around his own expensively analyzed psyche to tell new truths about self-absorbed Manhattan professionals. Strange then, to realize that much of his early work deals with outsiders who are unable to cope with their surroundings, then suddenly find themselves in even more alien circumstances. In Sleeper he is cryogenically frozen, then thawed in a strangely familiar future where pot-smoking has been replaced by fondling an orb and sex by the Orgasmatron machine. In Bananas he's a hapless doofus who has no particular luck with the ladies. That is, not until he finds himself at the center of guerilla action in a small Central American country in a permanent state of coups and revolutions: an innocent abroad if there ever was one. Then there's Broadway Danny Rose, where Allen stars as a man who lives his entire life somewhat out of his element. (His buddies at the Carnegie Deli suggest a Danny Rose sandwich would be a bagel with Marinara sauce). In Annie Hall he is Alvy Singer, who is perpetually on guard against his familiar New York surroundings turning strange on him. Whenever he ventures outside of New York his suspicion that he is an alien in his own country are confirmed. He cannot function in L.A. and when he visits Annie's family in Wisconsin, he finds himself transformed to a Hassidic Jew. Finally, of course, there is Zelig, the story of the eternal chameleon, never at home, and always adaptable.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Take Five: Resident Aliens

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The ever-busy John Cusack stars in Martian Child, opening wide this weekend. Based on an award-winning novel by legendary sci-fi author and Star Trek scribe David Gerrold (who also executive-produced the film and had final approval on the script, ensuring that, if nothing else, it’ll be loyal to its source), the film focuses on an older man — Cusack, essentially playing a straight version of Gerrold himself — who, battling his own personal demons, adopts a disturbed young boy who thinks he’s from Mars. It’s not your typical science-fiction scenario, but it’s one that echoes a number of other films in the genre that play on the ambiguity, or at least strangeness and charm, of the idea of an alien among us. As with many other types of genre films, science fiction is often at its most successful when it eschews the gimmicks, special effects, and labyrinthine plots and focuses instead on drama, revelation and humanity, even if the human is very possibly an alien. Here’s a fiver of films to get you in the mood for Martian Child.

THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (1948)

Directed by film-industry trouper Joseph Losey, The Boy with Green Hair gives us the spectacle of, well, a boy with green hair. Not technically an alien-among-us sci-fi story, it nonetheless functions in that same sort of parable mode, bringing us what is now a terribly dated and hokey message of tolerance. At the time, though, it probably seemed a lot more subversive; it was made even before the Hollywood blacklist was in full swing. Its post-war setting and refugee metaphors also must have scored some points about Jews and blacks that weren’t likely to be made explicit at the time. And despite how archaic it may seem today, it’s worth seeing for one reason: the ten-year-old protagonist is played by a young Dean Stockwell.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967)

The Quatermass series was something of a predecessor to Dr. Who, with many of the same themes and concerns, but the good doctor has never come close to cranking out a story this unexpected and unsettling. In it, a scientist discovers a Martian spacecraft, millions of years old, buried beneath the London underground, and as soon as it’s unearthed, it bequeaths the aliens’ final legacy to us: violence, madness and directionless hatred. Quatermass eventually discovers that it was these ancient astronauts who shaped us into the dominant species on Earth, by carefully guiding our predilection for mayhem; in this underseen and underrated sci-fi thriller, we have met the alien, and he is us.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

In a role originally intended for Peter O’Toole, David Bowie — who was simultaneously, in his music career, playing at being an alien — puts in one of the finest, creepiest performances of his career. In this supremely weird, often affecting Nic Roeg vehicle, Bowie plays an urbane visitor to Earth who’s come here in search of water, establishing himself as a multimillionaire (using high-tech gadgets entirely familiar to the modern viewer) in order to do so. Admirable support is turned in by Rip Torn and others, but it’s Bowie’s ultra-frosty, near-reptilian performance, shot through with transcendent humanity at just the right moments, that will have you wondering if the guy really was an alien after all.

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

John Sayles made this movie to raise a few bucks and bide the time while making Matewan, but it’s quite an accomplishment on its own. The story of a stranded alien who arrives in Manhattan wearing a black man’s skin — in which he is surprised to discover he merits different treatment — The Brother from Another Planet manages to rise above its exploitation origins (and often goofy genre conventions, such as grade-Z special effects and bizarre superhero subplot) and deliver some fine acting and interesting insights into matters of race and class. Taken on its own, it’s worth seeing, but it especially works in the greater context of Sayles’ work.

STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997)

Forget Showgirls — director Paul Verhoeven’s most misunderstood film is this adaptation (and subversion) of the classic Robert Heinlein novel about total war in space. Verhoeven, in typical black-comic style, takes the creepy, quasi-fascist tone of the Heinlein book and completely upends it, making one of the most damning statements on film about the futility and stupidity of war. It also functions, in its treatment of the utterly inhuman and thus utterly disposable buglike aliens, as a presciently barbed statement about our human tendency to dehumanize the enemy in times of war.

— Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab : the brother from another planet

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Six)

Take Five: Resident Aliens