Livin' in the future...

There's a fun web-only feature over at Popular Mechanics' site, citing ten of the most prophetic sci-fi movies ever. Because it's a PM piece, its approach is more particular in its wonkiness than other movie lists. Here aesthetic criteria are eschewed in favor of considerations of prescience. (This is probably the only way that a potboiler such as The Running Man or comedic sci-fi dreck like Short Circuit could end up on any ten best list.) Writer Eric Sofge enumerates, with considerable wit, what a given film got right, got wrong, and what's still up in the air. Musing on the cannibalism theme of Soylent Green (aha! the Richard Fleischer reassessment trend continues apace!) he notes, "Corporations can sometimes be vile. And human beings, on rare occasion, eat other human beings. But the urge to dine on the so-called "long pig" is a private matter, reserved for plane crash survivors and the criminally insane. To think that any corporation is capable of planning, orchestrating and keeping a lid on an operation as massive as Soylent Green is to have a conspiracy theorist's view of human competence." Good stuff. I'm currently checking out a restoration of Fritz Lang's final silent feature, Frau Im Mond (Woman on the Moon) and pondering how it is that a rocket scientist of considerable note is living in a Berlin garret. Lang and co-scenarist Thea von Harbou clearly had a unique view of the economics of such engineering back in the day.

PM, by the way, is thriving under the stewardship of my old friend and former Premiere editor-in-chief Jim Meigs, who used to urge me—when I was editing one of Premiere's "Shot-by-Shot" features, say—"Give it more of Popular Mechanics approach." This year PM has garnered three National Magazine Awards nominations, including one in the much-coveted General Excellence category. Congratulations and good luck to them.

(But then...not to get off topic too much...National Magazine Award nominations are often all over the place. PM's are clearly deserved. Still, one cocks an eyebrow sometimes. This year, in the reviews and criticism category, my friend the great Tom Carson (at GQ) and New York's estimable film critic David Edelstein are both nominated, and competing against...Caitlin Flanagan, a smug clod whose work descended to rank self-parody at the precise point when she was published for the second time. The other two nominees in the category are The Nation's William Deresiewicz and The New Yorker's Louis Menand, author of the Quixote. I'll bet all four fellows are thinking the same thing: "I don't mind losing, but please, don't let me lose to Caitlin Flanagan...")

Comments

[Dave]

I found the Menard joke really funny (perhaps too much so), which I think speaks well to our mutual nerdiness.

[Gorilla Bob]

I've been noticing for sometime now that life in the US is beginning to resemble SF movis fromt the 70s - Rollerball, where corrupt corporations run things, Death Race 2000, where the President blames all the country's troubles on the French. And Soylent Green looks better & better these days, quite frankly. Maybe we're not dining on each other, but our environment is lookng more like Soylent each day. And corporations can't cover up? They kept all the problems with atomic energy pretty bottled up for decades. Plenty of radiation leaks and mistakes are still waiting to be revealed.