Saw a Takashi Miike picture called The Great Yokai War. "Yokai" is a Japanese term for monsters from folklore, as opposed to the more familiar kaiju. It's a kids' picture, about a young boy from Tokyo sent out to live in the countryside with his older sister and his intermittently senile grandfather. When a vengeful spirit appears, the boy gets caught up in a war between warring groups of yokai and must find his courage to become the "Kirin Rider", the hero who will set everything to rights. It's not a bad picture - nothing deep, but an amusing story. Some of the yokai are really trippy, Japanese folklore can get pretty "out there", apparently.
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Speaking of the New Hollywood era, we finally watched They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). Brilliant and bleak. It holds up and remains relevant, but still captures the angst of two eras, the Depression and 'Nam War America.
Here they are again, folks! These wonderful, wonderful kids! Still struggling! Still hoping! As the clock of fate ticks away, the dance of destiny continues! The marathon goes on, and on, and on! How long can they last?
We watched Star Trek: Section 31 and Gladiator II. Weren't impressed with either. Very by the numbers, very predicable. And outside of Denzel Washington, not very well acted. Even Michelle Yeoh couldn't save the dialogue/plot of Section 31.
Ever wonder what Persis Khambatta did after Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Nothing much good, though she does make an uncredited appearance in My Beautiful Launderette (1985), a great little British film. In 1988, she played the main villain (sort of-- there's an evil Reverend Mother behind her, plot and appearance wise very much like the Emperor in Star Wars) in a terrible 1988 film called Phoenix the Warrior aka She-Wolves of the Wasteland aka Phoenix the Warrior: She Wolves of the Wasteland. This inexpliciably came up in our recommendations after we re-watched (me) and watched (my wife) Fritz the Cat, which hasn't improved since I last saw it.
It's a low-budget (no, lower. Think lower) film set in a discount Mad Max future where (we're initially led to believe) only woman have survived, and most are trained warriors, apparently informed of the concept of "bulletproof nudity." Gas, makeup, and hair products remain inexplicably abundant. Fabric, apparently, is in short supply. According to an interview with Kathleen Kinmont who played Phoenix the Lead, her fee barely covered her gas to the filming locations, which consist of the Mojave desert, the San Bernardino Mountains, and some unidentified industrial site. The satiric segment with TV-zombie creatures is the highlight. The acting, overall, would be the low point.
Kinmont has a long career in horror, exploitation, and TV shows. She also appears in a seemingly similar film called Roller Blade Warriors: Taken by Force, in which "a warrior nun on roller skates must rescue a seer, who is to be sacrificed by a band of mutants." And she had a small part in That Thing You Do, so there's that.
I haven’t seen Phoenix the Warrior, but I would say it’s not representative of Persis Khambatta’s work. I see that she worked steadily as an actor before and after Star Trek: The Motion Picture. She had a prominent role as an accomplice of Rutgar Hauer’s terrorist character in the movie Nighthawks (1981). After seeing this in its original release, I made a point of buying the DVD and need to rewatch it. Unfortunately, she died at the young age of 49 from heart problems.
The movie that I remember Persis Khambatta doing after Star Trek: The Motion Picture was Hal Needham's MEGAFORCE (1982). Not because I saw the movie but because of the Megaforce Membership Kit ad from the comics!
It looks like Barry Bostwick got the part because Burt Reynolds doesn't do sci-fi!
The Other Side of the Wind (shooting started in 1970. Released in 2018).
Orson Welles's troubled final film, shot between 1970-76. Editing continued until Welles's death, many legal problems occured, and other people finally finished it decades later. Weird film about the last days of a famous director, played by John Huston as a cross between himself and Ernest Hemingway, and his own troubled final film-within-a-film, a parody of post-Golden Age of Hollywood experimental trends. It often feels like one of those art school things where the director and friends throw together a weird movie, except the director is Welles and his friends are famous and talented. Some of the shots are excellent. Welles may have been experiencing financial troubles, becoming entangled with his own bizarre movie, and drinking too much Paul Masson, but he still knew how to frame a shot. Watch the ending of this thing if you want to see what I mean. Many other scenes are filmed with an assortment of cameras, to be assembled in a crazed pseudo-documentary manner. Perspectives multiply. Someone called it "Rashomon on LSD." Fair, to a point.
Among numerous bizarre facts:
The portion shot on the MGM backlot was done without permission. Short of money, they snuck into MGM and filmed there without permission.
Rich Little was supposed to play the key role ultimately performed by Peter Bogdanovich. He left under disputed circumstances, Bogdanovich took the part (they also used his house for some scenes), but Little can be seen in some shots.
Oja Kodar, actress and Welles's mistress, has a starring role. Kodar's not First Nations, but she looks as though she might be, and her character is so-identified. A lot of the comments surrounding and directed at her, while in keeping with the attitudes of the time, are seriously uncomfortable, perhaps more so given that John Huston stars.
A person who belongs to the same online writers' group as I do (20+ years now!) was an extra in this film (he was a film school student in LA at the time).
Replies
Speaking of the New Hollywood era, we finally watched They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). Brilliant and bleak. It holds up and remains relevant, but still captures the angst of two eras, the Depression and 'Nam War America.
Here they are again, folks! These wonderful, wonderful kids! Still struggling! Still hoping! As the clock of fate ticks away, the dance of destiny continues! The marathon goes on, and on, and on! How long can they last?
We watched Star Trek: Section 31 and Gladiator II. Weren't impressed with either. Very by the numbers, very predicable. And outside of Denzel Washington, not very well acted. Even Michelle Yeoh couldn't save the dialogue/plot of Section 31.
Ever wonder what Persis Khambatta did after Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Nothing much good, though she does make an uncredited appearance in My Beautiful Launderette (1985), a great little British film. In 1988, she played the main villain (sort of-- there's an evil Reverend Mother behind her, plot and appearance wise very much like the Emperor in Star Wars) in a terrible 1988 film called Phoenix the Warrior aka She-Wolves of the Wasteland aka Phoenix the Warrior: She Wolves of the Wasteland. This inexpliciably came up in our recommendations after we re-watched (me) and watched (my wife) Fritz the Cat, which hasn't improved since I last saw it.
It's a low-budget (no, lower. Think lower) film set in a discount Mad Max future where (we're initially led to believe) only woman have survived, and most are trained warriors, apparently informed of the concept of "bulletproof nudity." Gas, makeup, and hair products remain inexplicably abundant. Fabric, apparently, is in short supply. According to an interview with Kathleen Kinmont who played Phoenix the Lead, her fee barely covered her gas to the filming locations, which consist of the Mojave desert, the San Bernardino Mountains, and some unidentified industrial site. The satiric segment with TV-zombie creatures is the highlight. The acting, overall, would be the low point.
Kinmont has a long career in horror, exploitation, and TV shows. She also appears in a seemingly similar film called Roller Blade Warriors: Taken by Force, in which "a warrior nun on roller skates must rescue a seer, who is to be sacrificed by a band of mutants." And she had a small part in That Thing You Do, so there's that.
But how MST3K missed this one I do not know.
I haven’t seen Phoenix the Warrior, but I would say it’s not representative of Persis Khambatta’s work. I see that she worked steadily as an actor before and after Star Trek: The Motion Picture. She had a prominent role as an accomplice of Rutgar Hauer’s terrorist character in the movie Nighthawks (1981). After seeing this in its original release, I made a point of buying the DVD and need to rewatch it. Unfortunately, she died at the young age of 49 from heart problems.
Persis Khambatta - IMDb
The movie that I remember Persis Khambatta doing after Star Trek: The Motion Picture was Hal Needham's MEGAFORCE (1982). Not because I saw the movie but because of the Megaforce Membership Kit ad from the comics!
It looks like Barry Bostwick got the part because Burt Reynolds doesn't do sci-fi!
The Other Side of the Wind (shooting started in 1970. Released in 2018).
Orson Welles's troubled final film, shot between 1970-76. Editing continued until Welles's death, many legal problems occured, and other people finally finished it decades later. Weird film about the last days of a famous director, played by John Huston as a cross between himself and Ernest Hemingway, and his own troubled final film-within-a-film, a parody of post-Golden Age of Hollywood experimental trends. It often feels like one of those art school things where the director and friends throw together a weird movie, except the director is Welles and his friends are famous and talented. Some of the shots are excellent. Welles may have been experiencing financial troubles, becoming entangled with his own bizarre movie, and drinking too much Paul Masson, but he still knew how to frame a shot. Watch the ending of this thing if you want to see what I mean. Many other scenes are filmed with an assortment of cameras, to be assembled in a crazed pseudo-documentary manner. Perspectives multiply. Someone called it "Rashomon on LSD." Fair, to a point.
Among numerous bizarre facts:
The portion shot on the MGM backlot was done without permission. Short of money, they snuck into MGM and filmed there without permission.
Rich Little was supposed to play the key role ultimately performed by Peter Bogdanovich. He left under disputed circumstances, Bogdanovich took the part (they also used his house for some scenes), but Little can be seen in some shots.
Oja Kodar, actress and Welles's mistress, has a starring role. Kodar's not First Nations, but she looks as though she might be, and her character is so-identified. A lot of the comments surrounding and directed at her, while in keeping with the attitudes of the time, are seriously uncomfortable, perhaps more so given that John Huston stars.
A person who belongs to the same online writers' group as I do (20+ years now!) was an extra in this film (he was a film school student in LA at the time).
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