Sunday, January 31, 2010

input contrary to established facts

A few things to note about the camp 1970s sci-fi classic Logan's Run, which I bought for about 3 quid off Amazon the other day:
  • This was the first in-flight movie I ever saw on an aeroplane - given the film's release date (1976) I suppose it must have been on the way back from Korea to the UK in December 1976.
  • As I was only 6 at the time of first seeing it I was unable to appreciate the full awesomeness of a machine that would make a semi-nude Jenny Agutter appear in your room at the touch of a button. Needless to say it would have to be the 1976 (or thereabouts) edition; although she is a fine-looking older lady (57 in fact) these days it wouldn't be quite the same.
  • There are many reasons why Jenny Agutter does strange things to men of a certain age - I think it's mainly the good girl/bad girl combo of the cut-glass English accent and the relaxed and liberal approach to nudity in many of her films. Walkabout is the canonical example of this, but to be honest the fact that she was only sixteen at the time of filming makes me slightly squicky. I've never seen Equus, but the shower scene in An American Werewolf In London is absolutely marvellous, in a completely artistically valid kind of way. I mean, who doesn't like a sexy nurse?
  • Anyway, back to the matter at hand, as it were. Logan's Run is good fun, but really rather silly, and a lot of the special effects are a bit rubbish (Box the robot in particular). But, in a way, this almost makes it more fun. It also concludes with a version of a classic cinematic trope - an unexpected or paradoxical response to a question causing a previously pretty much omniscient supercomputer to start hysterically chanting "does not compute" or some variant thereof and then explode, though only a bit at a time so as to give the protagonists time to escape. TV Tropes calls this a Logic Bomb.
  • In linking here and also adding it to the blog sidebar I should on the one hand commend TV Tropes to you as a great source of information and fun, while on the other hand warning you that you can lose hours and days in there without realising. I was only 26 when I started typing this blog post.
  • I've also added the fantastic and fairly self-explanatory Information Is Beautiful blog to the sidebar, which is also highly educational and well worth losing an hour or two in.

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