Reviews

Macross 7 is indeed an odd one that took some getting used to on my part. A city-scale space ship under attack by psychic vampires? Yeah, okay. So why are they bugging us with this sub-plot about these silly pop-stars? Oh: the pop-stars are also fighter pilots. And they fight the psychic vampires by *singing bad pop songs at them*. There's a peculiar premise behind all this about music as a powerful motivational force, and an apparently sincere belief that you need to listen to bright, happy, bouncy music all the time or else you may collapse into a grumpy pit of depression. Strangely enough, many people react badly to all this (A comment on alt.Gothic from someone who uses "macross" as his handle: "Macross 7 is retarded"), but if you're looking for exposure to an alien point of view or for that matter just looking for silly kitsch, "Macross 7" may be just the thing for you.

There are three different looks or modes packed into this 12 minute short:

(1) A pretty Japanese woman (Emi Elenola, of the band "Demi Semi Quaver") dressed to the nines in a fabulous dress made of black and white striped latex, striking poses.

(2) Hallucinatory, vibrating color image overlays of this woman in motion (perhaps representing dream and memory).

(3) Absurd claymation, a series of comedy routines on silly/raunchy subjects.

The plot: A woman finds meaning to her life, playing the freak in a public place, performing on the escalators in an outdoor atrium in Tokyo. She's troubled by recurrent dreams of riding up a long, unfamiliar escalator, and one day she finds it: an escalator to heaven... or hell? The Second Rate Comedy Club! Chilidog.

This was written and directed by Naoko Nozawa, the woman who among other things, leads the band "Ass-Baboons of Venus". This explain some things.

If you get a chance, you should *definitely* see this, at least once.

But... the claymation stuff, like most comedy, would probably not be so funny the second time around, which is a shame because the rest of it is so visually strong. I would've liked to hear a little more of Emi Elenola singing, (but then this isn't supposed to be a music video).

Alphaville is an attack on the syndrome of Science Fiction films full of flash and color but devoid of ideas. They intentionally took an "Our Town" attitude toward special effects -- e.g. driving along in a car, with dialog indicating that they're in a spaceship; commenting on how beautiful the stars look when you can't see anything but the glare of streetlights, and so on. If there's a problem with this movie, it's that the ideas themselves are perhaps not really all that strong; the notion of a dystopian city ruled by an all powerful computer just doesn't seem that heavy, not even taken as some sort of symbolic allegory; but on the whole I think SF cinema would be in much better shape if it had learned the lesson of Alphaville (think "La Jette"). Minimalism is not a crime, which is why I find it very annoying that I need to babble for another couple of lines to convince IMDb.com that I've said enough to be worth logging as a movie review.