tas@ariel.UUCP (T.SKROBALA) (08/15/83)
Liquid Sky is a rather enjoyable film of the "strange" genre. It concerns a number of new wavish people living in lower Manhattan and their various needs, eccentricities, and jealousies. Major subjects are sex, heroin, and vanity. All is under the watchful eyes of aliens (including one German with a telescope) and the Empire State Buliding. The main character is a typical suburban Connecticut girl who has become a punked-out model living with a lesbian heroin dealer and competing with a boy model who looks just like her and despises her. She develops the power to kill people by having intercourse with them and uses this power to dispose of some rather obnoxious acquaintances. The film is most striking in its use of color. I don't think I've ever seen a more intense combination of flashes, streaks, and splashes on the screen (It's sometimes enough to make you think you're on drugs when you're not). The characters are rather Warholian. That is, they tend to dress and act ostentatiously while speaking in monotones. Smatterafact, the whole thing is rather like a Warhol film as directed by Ken Russell. The movie is funny and fun, not particularly touching or moralistic. Probably not a family film, but that depends on your family. Produced, oddly enough, by a bunch of recent Soviet emigres. Playing at The Waverly in Greenwich Village. Tom Skrobala ariel!tas 201-834-3558
dyer@wivax.UUCP (Stephen Dyer) (09/21/83)
Liquid Sky is an amazing film, yet very hard to describe. It is, at once, sci-fi, punk, amoral, and moral. (Very) briefly, it is the tale of a model in NYC who runs around in punk circles and encounters aliens in crafts the size of pie plates who are in search of opiates. Of course, the plot description is almost irrelevant to the film, which uses the zany, alienating punk culture to satirize western customs and values. The director, Slava Tsukerman, and about 50% of the production staff are recent Soviet emigres, which is even more fascinating-- he's completely digested what is traditionally American and the punk scene, and produced something completely original. Tsukerman wrote all the music, too. An amazing talent! This is not a movie which will play in the suburbs; it's often ugly and raw, and not something to see if you don't have a tolerance for the avant garde. But, if you make the effort, you'll be treated by a fascinating image of pop culture at its dead end. /Steve Dyer decvax!wivax!dyer sdyer@bbn-unix
dann@wxlvax.UUCP (Dan Neiman) (09/21/83)
My ex-college roommate and I went to see Liquid Sky the other night. Our credentials as movie critics are non-existant, but we have seen an awful lot of incredibly bad science fiction flicks in our time, and it was our conclusion that Liquid Sky was about the awfullest of the lot. A truly wretched film, but not without a few redeeming features. Yes, the photography and glimpses of New York at night are very attractive. The occasional cuts to skyline and planes flying over the city are also totally irrelevant to the mood and plot of the movie. There is humor in the movie. Some, maybe even most of it, is intentional. This is probably a movie to see if you are interested in punk, avante-garde films, or are just a fan of drugged out obnoxious characters. Oh, yeah, at one point in the movie, a character says something like "It's just like the ThreePenny Opera" for those of us in the audience who might have missed the point (that punk is just another form of convention). Such subtlety in a work of art boggles the mind. dann
ultra@cmcl2.UUCP (10/02/83)
#N:cmcl2:7700004:000:3412 cmcl2!ultra Oct 2 15:22:00 1983 I have seen Liquid Sky twice here in NYC, and I just bought the (yes, the) album. It is totally besides the point to classify this as a science fiction film. I have read a lot of science fiction, and this is simply not that. Science fiction in general tends to be about possible realities; even science fiction/fantasy-mode carries with it the implicit assumption that you could, in some sense, be there. The "alien" in the movie has about as much intrinsic importance as the size of its spaceship. It is just a metaphor, and the whole science fiction premise is just one of about 10 things that are tied together to squeeze out a few laughs. "Ze ale-yens, dey are keeling beeble due-rang ore-gez-m". It is quite likely that there is a strong connection between the nationality of the creators of this film, the fact that Germany is "in" for punk/art types these days, and the many digs thrown in about Germany -- "they love me in Germany, baby" -- the scientist. Liquid Sky is very obviously mod/current/contemporary/avante garde social commentary, not necessarily about anything as sweeping as "Western" values so much as the values of people in a certain age bracket growing up in a certain way, living in the context of the culture they were raised in, and in their own anti-culture, happening to be set in a certain place (i.e., NYC). The culture is satirized, the anti-culture is romanticized, idealized and also satirized, and in the process there is a lot of very beautiful photography, very good music (mostly done at a public-access synthesizer place), extremely good fashion, *great* acting (not mentioned here so far is that one woman plays both the "heroine" and a young male homosexual that she spends a lot of time arguing with), a nice but somewhat repetitive computer graphics, and some very nice image processing sequences. By great acting I mean that, yes, a lot of what was said seemed pretty flat (especially on second viewing), but there was something extremely *natural* about the dialogue, and something very real in the presentation of the scenes. The overall context of the movie was fantasy, but many of the scenes were very believable, and were drawn from doubtless very real experiences. It is possible for people to take this movie much too seriously, which is why it is going to be so popular (it will -- for all its weaknesses, this movie is going to set trends for the next year or so -- the country is starving for trends -- don't be fooled by any kind of "dead-endedness" in its commentary -- artists *love* dead-ends -- "painting is dead", "sculpture is dead", "punk is dead", "the sixties are dead"). I heard that there was a rather disturbed review of it in TIME. I have a friend who is fond of thinking there is no purpose to the world who went home, after seeing the the movie, and took 4 hits of acid and bummed out for 16 hours. But it is not that serious: it's just a movie, after all, and while there are a lot of people who look like those in the movie, and there are a lot of people who do drugs, and there a lot of people who think that various things are dead ... and, for all I know, there are a lot of pie-plate sized alien craft with creatures in them that look like digitized eyeballs ... the *confluence* simply doesn't exist: a movie is a movie is a movie, and it takes a lot of real hard work to make things look that romantic and interesting.
dyer@wivax.UUCP (Stephen Dyer) (10/03/83)
I just bought the album, too, mainly for the cut, "This is My Rhythm Box", which is a masterpiece whether or not you have a fondness for punk music. Otherwise, a good exercise in Wendy-Carlos-like synthesizer classical pop, a bit discordant, and nothing special outside the movie. I was quite disappointed that it did not contain the poem which Adrienne recites upon the death of Margaret's acting professor--a hilarious requiem for the 1960's if there ever was one. My point about "Western values" referred to Tsukerman's emigre-eye-view which allowed him to gently satirize not only the dead-end punk scene, but German scientists, middle-class aspirations and New York women on the make. Its tone is firmly tongue-in-cheek, but saying "it's only a movie" doesn't mean that it has nothing to say. As I watched it, I realized how much the same the avant garde remains, generation after generation. /Steve Dyer decvax!wivax!dyer decvax!genrad!wjh12!bbncca!sdyer
zrm@mit-eddie.UUCP (Zigurd R. Mednieks) (10/11/83)
Nowwaitjustaminuite! Dan Neiman must the the type of person who thinks Cabaret was bad, Dressed to Kill sexist, and that Fellini should hire prettier actors. Liquid Sky is amazing, funny, savage, grotesque, and a good substitute for mushrooms. Can't take another laser blast? Can't stand the thought of sitting through some smarmy slice of life? Then Liquid Sky is for you. Heck, even the Christian Science Monitor liked it. The sound track ( also good ) was done on a Fairlight digital sampling synthesizer. Kind of reminicent of Laurie Anderson. Good stuff. Cheers, Zig