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From: ultra@cmcl2.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: Liquid Sky - (nf)
Message-ID: <33650@cmcl2.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 2-Oct-83 15:22:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: cmcl2.33650
Posted: Sun Oct  2 15:22:51 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 3-Oct-83 04:52:38 EDT
Sender: ultra@cmcl2.UUCP
Organization: New York University
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#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.