{"id":5688,"date":"2010-07-21T11:29:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-21T18:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/?p=5688"},"modified":"2015-04-02T15:35:15","modified_gmt":"2015-04-02T22:35:15","slug":"sci-fi-july-week-3-%e2%80%93-we-watched-the-brother-from-another-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/sci-fi-july-week-3-%e2%80%93-we-watched-the-brother-from-another-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"Sci-Fi July week 3 \u2013 we watched The Brother from Another Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Once again big ups to Astrid’s Buznik blog<\/a> for the remarkable shots. For the third installment of Sci-Fi July, we watched The Brother from Another Planet, which only one other person in the audience had seen before, but it was pretty unanimous at the end that this was a big hit. Especially for its visuals and street scenes of NYC from the early 80s, but also just because it’s a very fun film, with natural dialog and almost hilarious human elements throughout. My introductory text is below.<\/p>\n

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Welcome to the third installment of Sci-Fi July, a rooftop film series of the science fiction genre.<\/p>\n

So far we’ve seen a mid-90s film pretending to take place in the 21st century; we’ve seen an early 70s film that was no doubt about it set during the early 70s! In the 90s we were led to believe that a pair of VR gloves and wrap-around shades were all that was needed to “place a long-distance phone call” and enter the computer; in the 70s our spaceship designs were wholly believeable but everything else that we understood about space was a flop – this is understandable given that film was released 6 years prior to the launching of the Voyager I and II space probes.<\/p>\n

But what about the 80s?<\/p>\n

Although it was not my original plan to choose a film from each of the past 4 decades, it became a natural logical extension to focus on the 80s after reflecting on the impact of the previous two films in this series. The 80s were something of a high-tide for science fiction, immediately after the rise and popularity of space opera. It’s hard to deny the originality and influence of the 80s – movies which Hollywood is now attempting to remake as it runs out of ideas. Ideas like Predator from 1987 whose franchise was attempted to be revived just a couple weeks back, or Tron from 1982 whose game will be updated at the end of this year.<\/p>\n

While by no means comprehensive, other notable 80s sci-fi films include:
\nBlade Runner
\nAliens
\nthe Ghostbusters films
\nHighlander
\nThe Running Man
\nBrazil
\nThe Abyss
\nHoward the Duck
\nMad Max II
\nWeird Science
\nDune
\nGojira
\nTerminator
\nBack to the Future parts I and II
\nRoboCop
\nE.T.
\nMaximum Overdrive
\nand 4 of the original Star Trek films and 3 of the original Superman films<\/p>\n

Other cult, anime or fantasy crossover films included:
\nThe Dark Crystal, Repo Man, Cherry 2000, Akira, Flash Gordon, Flight of the Navigator, Tetsuo, Transformers the Movie and Spaceballs – whose tongue-in-cheek style summed up the parody-genre that was also pervasive during the 80s.<\/p>\n

The 80s were marked by other extremes, milestones and conditions that the world hadn’t experienced before or since. Without going into details:<\/p>\n

Reagan was elected; the first Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off; the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates 73 seconds after launch, killing 7 crew; Margaret Thatcher, the first female elected leader of a western country, ruled for the whole decade, and a year before and after; the IBM PC was released and the Commodore 64 became one of history’s best-selling computers; Solidarnosc is founded in Poland; the Berlin Wall fell, or was sledged apart rather; MTV launches; Michael Jackson introduced the Moonwalk; the Simpsons debut; the Nintendo Entertainment System launches in 1983 in Japan and then in 1985 in the US; John Lennon was assassinated; Chernobyl melted; the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and the accompanying television images and magazine photos brought to popular attention our attachment to the sludge; military dictatorships fell throughout much of South America while they were consolidated in regions of southeast Asia like Burma which became Myanmar under the State Law and Order Restoration Council; and of course the recognition of a new disease, and the ensuing AIDS pandemic.<\/p>\n

In short, the 80s were definitely an era that you either experienced or you didn’t, and I’m personally thankful for my time and place in it.<\/p>\n

Now of course it’s hard to screen a film on a rooftop in New York City without thinking about New York City. The water towers in the distance, the subways – aboveground – rolling along nearby 31st Street, the honks horns and hollers of this city’s inhabitants. Now these words might immediately evoke images of Escape From New York – whose many scenes were shot throughout East St. Louis and St. Louis where I grew up. But I’m not interested in perceptions of future New York environments, I’m intrigued by real-world street scenes.<\/p>\n

And while science fiction is often not employed as a genre to critique or understand the social milieu, what better way to understand the above-mentioned extremes, conditions, perceptions, realities, problems, dilemmas, and blessings of the 80s than via a mute alien who has escaped his captors, crashes in NY harbor, and eventually gets dumped in Harlem where he befriends the patrons of a local bar, thanks to his ability to fix electronics by simply touching them!<\/p>\n

Joe Morton plays “The Brother”, who remarkably manages and makes believeable his ability to go for 108 minutes without saying a single word! It is those around him who speak for him, or rather about him and get us to first pity, then embrace the alien inside. A movie whose characters go largely un-named, some are simply social archetypes: Hispanic Man, Islamic Man, Haitian man, Korean shopkeeper, etc.<\/p>\n

Interesting moments include two “Men in Black” who perceive NO stereotypes when entering an African-American bar in Harlem, perhaps because as aliens they don’t comprehend such base racisms; an eyeball used as a recording device; some extreme frame-rate arcade game-playing; those steam-pipes in the streets of New York City haven’t changed in over 25 years; encounters with graffiti; intravenous drugs and the Wall Street brokers that sell them; and a remarkable subway card game!<\/p>\n

as the tagline of the movie goes:<\/p>\n

Welcome to a world of crude beauty… of danger and excitement… of wonders, legend, and imagination… Welcome to Harlem<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Once again big ups to Astrid’s Buznik blog for the remarkable shots. For the third installment of Sci-Fi July, we watched The Brother from Another Planet, which only one other person in the audience had seen before, but it was pretty unanimous at the end that this was a big hit. Especially for its visuals […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5690,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[1229,663],"series":[],"class_list":["post-5688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geekathon","tag-geekathon","tag-sci-fi-july"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/tumblr_l5w372y8wS1qcbdnho1_500.jpg?fit=500%2C333&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6OfVu-1tK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5688"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13561,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5688\/revisions\/13561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5688"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=5688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}