Watching a home-programmed double feature of Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams movies is easy. We know what we're getting.
On the weekend I went random, self-programming two disparate, in time and place (and style), narrative feature films.
Beyond the Time Barrier (1960 - Edgar Ulmer)
True Stories (1986 - David Byrne)
The first picture I saw a few times in my childhood as it played often on television and at least once at my local movie theatre (the Astral in CFB Borden, Ontario). Watching it as an adult makes one appreciate its themes. For a child it was more about the interesting visual stylings, and chills. (Those horrific mutants.) The environmental theme is up front: testing of nuclear weapons 'back' in the early 1970s led to a horrible plague, all but decommissioning the human race. The survivors moved underground; the human birthrate eventually dropped to zero. There's more, all leading to a memorable ending -- I remembered it for decades. This time,
Beyond was better overall than I had remembered it being. The passage of time helped. By the way, the X-80 rocket plane, which flies star Robert Clarke to the astounding year 2024, is in fact a Convair F-102 Delta Dagger.
In the mid 1980s I was a bit of a fan of the band Talking Heads, so it made sense that when band leader David Byrne released his
True Stories I would arrive at Toronto's (now gone) Uptown Theatre with bells on. I left slightly disappointed. About a dozen years ago I gave the film another shot, this time on VHS. The loosely connected stories about the quirky but human inhabitants of a fictitious Texas town called Virgil resonated more with this viewer that time around. Spinning the Criterion 2018 DVD release made me appreciate
True Stories even more. And there're those always cool Talking Heads tunes.
After my double feature finished I realized that both flicks were filmed in Texas. True Story.
PS: What's next? Maybe
Aguirre, the Wrath of God and
The Endless Summer.
