News Harlan Ellison (1934-2018)

[Doctor Omega]

This thread started as a general thread about Harlan and his work - and it still is.

But recently I have been reading his book "WATCHING", which is full of essays - as opposed to reviews - about many different films.

I thought it might be interesting to see what films he loved and what films he loathed, with a few choice quotes from his essays/reviews.

I have to admit that some of the films he praises have vanished into obscurity - and he attacks some that are now regarded as classics.

Do you agree with everything he says?

Or is he talking out of his glass hand?

 

[divemaster13]

As a writer of short fiction, and especially as an editor, Ellison really assisted the transfer of "Sci-Fi" of the mid-century to the "Speculative Fiction" of the '70s and '80s and beyond. Some of his stuff is so experimental that I don't really care for it, but even so I can recognize how important it was. Dangerous Visions might have been the most important publication of the genre between 1965 and 1980.

 

[Doctor Omega]

GOTHIC (1986)

After listing who he considers the only 7 "genius directors" in the world, who were alive at the time...

Altman
Coppola
Fellini
Kurosawa
Resnais
Kubrick
Bunuel

... he added an 8th as a "guilty pleasure", which was KEN RUSSELL

Then he said of Russell's then current film, Gothic....

of which he said....

Gothic is loopy and fatally flawed and an aberration.
Yet I treasure this film.
I came away from GOTHIC with my soul on fire.
As in all the works of Ken Russell, it is palpably alive.
It is riot and ruin and pandemonium. But it will have you by the nerve ends.

 

[Doctor Omega]

MICKEY ONE (1965)

Harlan Says....

The finest American film of the year, and possibly of many years...

I suspect this picture came as much from the dark and mysterious terra incognita of the subconscious as from a Hollywood soundstage.

 

[Doctor Omega]

NB:

Joe Dante liked MICKEY ONE too....

 

[Doctor Omega]

JOE (1970)

Harlan says....

At the end of the film he needed his friends to....

.... help me up the aisle. I was trembling like a man with malaria.
I sat there, unable to communicate for twenty minutes. I was no good for two days thereafter.
Buy a ticket for a needy hardhat. For that is who should see this movie.
The only person who could walk away from JOE without a new awareness of the treadmill to tragedy on which America is running is the kind of person who is Joe Curran.
The beast who is Joe lives in all of us, longhair or hardhat. And then, friends, we drop to our knees and pray.

 

[Doctor Omega]

Buy a ticket for a needy hardhat. For that is who should see this movie.

The only person who could walk away from JOE without a new awareness of the treadmill to tragedy on which America is running is the kind of person who is Joe Curran.

 

[Doctor Omega]

Peter Boyle on playing the title character in the movie "Joe"

 

[Doctor Omega]

PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986)

Harlan says....

... what BACK TO THE FUTURE wanted to be.
... almost exactly the same story, told from the viewpoint of a woman, rather than that of a simpy, affected, smartass Michael J. Fox.
...it is adult and sincere and entertaining and everything right that BACK TO THE FUTURE did wrong.
I only hope, when you make the comparison, that you have not been so hornswoggled, that you cannot perceive the quantum leap in excellence and honesty between them.

 

[Doctor Omega]

He's gone......


https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/ob...son-science-fiction-master-dies-age/36474013/

 

[Doctor Omega]

One less intelligent writer in the world.

And I can't see many replacements coming along.

RIP Harlan.

 

[Doctor Omega]

Harlan Ellison....

“I wish for you the same delight that I felt when Michael Moorcock, the finest fantasist in the English-speaking world, sat me down in front of the telly and said ‘Now be quiet and just watch’.

“They could not have been more offended, confused, enraged and startled. . . . There was a moment of stunned silence . . . and then an eruption of angry voices from all over the fifteen-hundred-person audience. The kids in their Luke Skywalker pajamas (cobbled up from older brother’s castoff karate gi) and the retarded adults spot-welded into their Darth Vader fright-masks howled with fury. But I stood my ground, there on the lecture platform of the World Science Fiction Convention, and I repeated the words that had sent them into animal hysterics:

‘Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; ‘Star Trek’ can turn your brains to purée of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is ‘Doctor Who!’ And I’ll take you all on, one-by-one or in a bunch to back it up!'”