Somebody stop me, before I eat popcorn again (2/23/97)
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Alphaville. [Jean-Luc Godard, 1965.]
— Stars Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina [Godard’s girlfriend]. Has a sort of pop-art sensibility; for a while Godard used the working title “Tarzan versus IBM”. — A spy dressed like Mike Hammer infiltrates the Paris of the future [no attempt is made to disguise the fact that this is just the Paris of the present, which says simultaneously that: science fiction movies are actually shot in the here and now, and that we’re already living in the city of the future], which is run by a computer named Alpha-60 [designed by a mysterious Doctor Von Braun] which is systematically turning the citizens into robotic zombies. After a lengthy homage to film noir, Eddie trashes the machine and gets the girl. — A sort of modern remake of Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis, and a kind of anticipation of Kubrick’s
2001. Has been in turn widely imitated, sometimes by the last people you’d expect; e.g. Mel Brooks. Another urtext of cyberpunk. A work of fucking genius, at least so far as I’m concerned.
____________Lament (1/1/97)
