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Save Point: On Movie Night

Cleos New Couch (Chew Marks by Niphur)

Tonight is movie night and so they are watching 'Overture', an underappreciated cult film that somehow nonetheless managed to attract the acting skills of Leonardo DeCaprio, despite its being a modern take on, and homage to, the classic UFO invasion films of the 60's. (Terrowne wanted to watch 'Stalker' by Andrei Tartovsky, but was overruled by Cleo, who promised to butter the popcorn if she was allowed to drool over Leo's good looks.)

Cleo's favorite scene in the movie is the bit where, travelling in a huge military truck convoy through a foreign but otherwise peaceful and harmless nation, apparently in some former British colonial island outpost (the location is deliberately left vague) the inept and badly undereducated American grunts who are driving get lost and turned around. There is a pause to consult maps and be confused, at which point the main character gets out and goes to the front truck to issue directions and advice. At the same time, a number of the displaced civilians the trucks are carrying take the opportunity to get out and mill around, stretching their legs and demanding to know what is going on. Once the directions have been sorted out (Leo points out a distant hillside cafe past a shallow pond, with a large roadside sign that looks strangely like a flying saucer, in a mock-reference to the movie itself) it turns out the civilians are hungry, which is why they're so annoyed. Bread in clear plastic bags, no names or labels (telling detail) is handed about, but in the resulting confusion Leo himself is left behind, the nearest grunts assuming he's a civilian (because he's carrying bread and in local clothes) and the civilians assuming the grunts have made sure to collect him (because of the directions). Once everyone else is aboard, the truck takes off and he is only just in time to take a running leap and catch a sort of metal grab-handle at the side of the closed door near the back. An alarming thirty seconds as he claws his way back aboard and gets the attention of the driver is depicted in realistically scary detail (apparently as a counter-point to the usual blithe antics of action-movie heroes). Finally he gets back aboard and climbs in with the civilians, who seem to be preferable to the American military backup, who are hopeless.

Cleo makes a point of interrupting the film to tell Terrowne about how the scene is very similar to that in one of the Street Fighter movies, in which the British combat vixen Cammy leaps aboard an Allied Nations truck being driven away by Will Guile at considerable speed. However, it's also a deconstruction of that scene, which in the original is fast and graceful and an example of almost impossibly athletic stuntwork, featuring a hot skinny lithe girl with lots of muscles and a pronounced camel-toe that looks really good in freeze-frame. This, Cleo insists, is how the scene should be done instead, with conviction and complexity.

Terrowne, on the other hand, cannot decide which scene he likes most and is torn between two that strike him as significant. The first is the scene in the shallow swamp, where the characters are crouched for cover behind a long piece of square-cut stone, half submerged in the water. It's full of unspoken implications - the pieces of stone were obviously once part of some ancient structure, but what it was and what happened to it are never mentioned. There are darkness and shadows and rain and fog all about, and strange things are obviously going on out there in the distance, but we never get to clearly see what, or even any good glimpses, just as though we actually were some random observer on the ground. Instead, the film focuses on the response of the characters to what they are seeing, and how they interact with one another as a result. The only real clue as to what is happening is a sort of wide, wrist-mounted LED screen display that one of the participants is wearing strapped to the back of his his left forearm, where it is prominently visible to the camera. The display shows shifting patterns that form ever-changing but disturbing shapes, resembling stylized monsters or animals with teeth.

The second scene he likes is the bit near the end, at which the damaged saucer is repaired by a multitude of smaller saucers which are drawn into the tear in its exterior. These are then cemented in place by a series of even smaller saucers and so on and so forth, until at last the camera zooms down to show small cellular structures, looking like the saucers but obviously alive, continuing with the repairs. It's an apparently simple special effect in 60's black-and-white that probably took the combined resources of an entire modern-day animation studio. But that's not why Terrowne likes it - it's the implication of multiplicity, of layer upon layer going all the way down, to the hidden meaning at the heart of it all. There's something about it that strikes him as familiar, although he cannot say why.

Movie night is thus a great success, with both of them agreeing the film is a sleeper hit, a cult classic of the sort that will attract fans long after the movies that everyone else watched instead are hopelessly dated. "So bad - or so good - that it's brilliant," concludes Terrowne.

"So, what else is on?" asks Cleo.