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I’m apparently the one person in the world who has no interest in Star Trek, the TV shows, the movies, any of it. Yes, I know, I ruin everything. But Leonard Nimoy’s passing is a real sadness. His gravitas was used to perfection not just for Mr. Spock, but also in the pseudoscience documentary series In Search of… and in one of my favorite movies, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, in which he played the bookish psychiatrist of your nightmares.
Tags: Leonard Nimoy
From “If They Could Only Talk,” Hannah Bloch’s new National Geographic article about the elemental questions we need to ask about Easter Island:
“Easter Island covers just 63 square miles. It lies 2,150 miles west of South America and 1,300 miles east of Pitcairn, its nearest inhabited neighbor. After it was settled, it remained isolated for centuries. All the energy and resources that went into the moai—which range in height from four to 33 feet and in weight to more than 80 tons—came from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed on Easter Sunday in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture. The moai were carved with stone tools, mostly in a single quarry, then transported without draft animals or wheels to massive stone platforms, or ahu, up to 11 miles away. Tuki’s question—how did they do it?—has vexed legions of visitors in the past half century.
But lately the moai have been drawn into a larger debate, one that opposes two distinct visions of Easter Island’s past—and of humanity in general. The first, eloquently expounded by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, presents the island as a cautionary parable: the most extreme case of a society wantonly destroying itself by wrecking its environment. Can the whole planet, Diamond asks, avoid the same fate? In the other view, the ancient Rapanui are uplifting emblems of human resilience and ingenuity—one example being their ability to walk giant statues upright across miles of uneven terrain.”
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Leonard Nimoy applies his spooky gravitas to Easter Island, 1977:
Tags: Hannah Bloch, Jared Diamond, Leonard Nimoy
I never liked Star Trek or any sci-fi TV shows except for The Twilight Zone, but this is still fun. Nimoy, by the way, played a Little Italy street tough in 1952’s Kid Monk Baroni.
Tags: Leonard Nimoy
Americans have always been paranoid about intruders, believing that there are Russians, Martians and Kenyans among us. Maybe the burden of an immigrant nation is that we’re never completely sure about our neighbors–or maybe it just gives us a handy scapegoat for what ails us internally, as individuals and collectively. Certainly the paranoia has only increased post-9/11, when it became clear that there really were malignant sleeper cells.
On a 1977 episode of In Search Of…, Leonard Nimoy looked at U.S. citizens who believed they’d sighted flying saucers. The host wonders if there really are UFOs. Of course there aren’t, you fucking idiot. Incredibly ridiculous and amusing. And some awesome incidental music.
Tags: Leonard Nimoy
Of the three versions of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, a story about enemies secretly living among us, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version was the one that had the weakest sociological context to play off of. The 1956 original was made in the age when McCarthy and HUAC were conducting a witch hunt for alleged communists in our midst. The 2007 version was filmed in a time when terrorist sleeper cells were a reality. So why is Kaufman’s version, which largely is a satire about the rather mundane evil of the self-help industry, so much more effective than the others? Sometimes talent trumps context.
The Kaufman version stars Donald Sutherland as Matthew Bennell, a San Francisco Health Department inspector who spends his days making surprise visits to restaurants, trying to differentiate between capers and rat turds. His staid life in interrupted when his secret office crush, Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), begins having problems with her boyfriend. The thing is, Elizabeth doesn’t only feel that her beau has changed suddenly and drastically, but that people all over San Francisco are becoming emotionless and creepy overnight. Matthew doesn’t agree initially but is forced to see her point after a number of shocking occurrences. Meanwhile, a personal-growth guru (Leonard Nimoy) uses feel-good palaver to try to calm every one down as the city falls into chaos. “You will be born again into an untroubled world,” Matthew is ominously told at one point, and he and Elizabeth and their friends realize they have to run for their lives before they too are transformed into drones.
Kaufman and cinematographer Michael Chapman, who would soon work his magic on Raging Bull, use San Fran’s quirky beauty to amazing advantage: every sloping sidewalk seems sinister, steam in an old dry cleaner becomes a fog of suspicion, each exotic flower doubles as a weapon. What results is one of the best genre pictures ever made, and one that wisely knows that paranoia knows no particular season and the fear that things aren’t what they appear to be never goes out of style.•
Tags: Brooke Adams, Donald Sutherland, Joseph McCarthy, Leonard Nimoy, Michael Chapman, Philip Kaufman