Gióia Siciliana

plete distraction everyone would become a fan of a fatality-rich for-real roller derby played S and M gear on motorcycles. Again a rebel (James Caan) refuses to accept all his society’s dicta, one of them being “Thou Shalt Not Be a Hero,” and as a rollerball star challenges the system. In a climactic game (meet? match? battle?) Caan kills all his opponents and emerges an authentic now-type Numero Uno, proving, one may imagine, that our contemporary idea of how to play the game can’t be beat. Rollerball happens to be, under Norman Jewison’s guidance, a much cleverer package than Logan’s Run, but their conceits are identical. There is one small miscalculation, however, concerning the contrast between “now” and “then”—or perhaps the movie’s authors were merely acting shrewdly on their instincts about the deterioration timetable: from the eager cries of “Kill” and “Get the mother f !” in the audience the night I saw Rollerball when the players were having their skulls kicked in, we just may be further along toward future imperfect than most of us, in or out of Hollywood, suspect.

The year’s most popular sci-fi film (for the trippy-minded who can’t make it with flaming gore on a banked track) is Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. If anything can be detected behind its willful and arbitrary obscurity, here, too, there is reaffirmation of distrust in the benefits to mankind of complicated hardware. Roeg claims to have made a movie about the outsider in which the extraterrestial aspects are to be taken as a metaphor. Still, this outsider, while not a part of any future civilization, but rather of another universe entirely, is a refugee from a planet where drought and death cannot be prevented by advanced technology. David Bowie, as the visitor, plays a sort of Billy Budd character doomed by the hypocrisy of his not-quite-so fellow men. While the film offers anything but a complacent attitude toward contemporary life, it also predicates the destruction of that which is different.

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Nika Hazelton

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plete distraction everyone would become a fan of a fatality-rich for-real roller derby played S and M gear on motorcycles. Again a rebel (James Caan) refuses to accept all his society’s dicta, one of them being “Thou Shalt Not Be a Hero,” and as a rollerball star challenges the system. In a climactic game (meet? match? battle?) Caan kills all his opponents and emerges an authentic now-type Numero Uno, proving, one may imagine, that our contemporary idea of how to play the game can’t be beat. Rollerball happens to be, under Norman Jewison’s guidance, a much cleverer package than Logan’s Run, but their conceits are identical. There is one small miscalculation, however, concerning the contrast between “now” and “then”—or perhaps the movie’s authors were merely acting shrewdly on their instincts about the deterioration timetable: from the eager cries of “Kill” and “Get the mother f !” in the audience the night I saw Rollerball when the players were having their skulls kicked in, we just may be further along toward future imperfect than most of us, in or out of Hollywood, suspect.

The year’s most popular sci-fi film (for the trippy-minded who can’t make it with flaming gore on a banked track) is Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. If anything can be detected behind its willful and arbitrary obscurity, here, too, there is reaffirmation of distrust in the benefits to mankind of complicated hardware. Roeg claims to have made a movie about the outsider in which the extraterrestial aspects are to be taken as a metaphor. Still, this outsider, while not a part of any future civilization, but rather of another universe entirely, is a refugee from a planet where drought and death cannot be prevented by advanced technology. David Bowie, as the visitor, plays a sort of Billy Budd character doomed by the hypocrisy of his not-quite-so fellow men. While the film offers anything but a complacent attitude toward contemporary life, it also predicates the destruction of that which is different.