The Final Programme

[dreamer_easy]

The DVD arrived! (Don't worry, Jon, I hugely want to re-watch it with you.) And unlike watching it at the tender age of about eighteen, I can navigate this, I know just where I am. It's an early seventies SF film, a bit like A Boy and His Dog (ETA: or A Clockwork Orange), with a large dose of late sixties / early seventies satirical whackiness a la Head. Large spaces, silences, apocalypse, and you just have to focus and keep up, it's not going to be spoon-fed to you. At eighteen I couldn't have made head nor tail of it and would only have been noticing what had been changed from the novel.

ETA: With his deep Shakespearian voice, Finch's Cornelius is like an alarming mashup between Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner and Mick Jagger.

ETA: Oh good grief, that's Graham Crowden. I knew I knew the voice.

ETA: omg Sandra Dickinson!!!!!!!!!

ETA: I think the main problem with this film is that there are a few scattered references to the world ending, but we see almost no actual apocalypsing, and in fact it's sort of forgotten by the end. The changes are mostly intelligent ones to draw the story together a bit more conventionally, bu you don't feel that the ending is really set up by the beginning - instead there's a huge exposition dump right at the finish, unconvincingly broken up by a contrived fight. Plus they left out Jerry's marriage.

Comments

[redstarrobot.livejournal.com]

an alarming mashup between Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner and Mick Jagger

HOT.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

There's some David Essex and Tim Curry in the mix as well. It's like a massive seventies transporter accident.

[redstarrobot.livejournal.com]

Can I watch it in my Zardoz-esque geodesic dome, is all I wanna know...

[sheramil.livejournal.com]

to the best of my memory she wasn't in The Final Program, but if there's a force that could bring on the apocalypse, it would be Jerry's mum.

"Jerry Cornelius yer can just get yer s****ty littel finger art and do an 'and's turn like the rest of us, you bugger. F***in' 'ell, yore dad was f**kin' lazy, but yore the fu***n' world champion you are."
- Honoria Cornelius

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I got a bit bored with A Cure For Cancer and skipped ahead to The English Assassin, which I'm pretty sure I've never read, and of course ran smack into Jerry's mum, who reminds me oddly of Vyvyan's mum from The Young Ones. (I have returned to ACFC, although due to massive Cornelius overload today's bus reading was Dreams and Dream Interpretation in the Biblical world.)

[sheramil.livejournal.com]

in one of the Jerry Cornelius comic strips (and gods, i wish i could remember where i saw it) Mrs Cornelius was a force to be reckoned with. when Captain Maxwell, Frank Cornelius, Bishop Beesley etc were busy farnarkelling around with time and they had Jerry trapped and helpless, his mum stepped in and just told them all to clear off. and they did. heh.

[jesusandrew.livejournal.com]

You can find the comics in the 1993 anthology "The New Nature of the Catastrophe" (trade paperback). It's not in the 1997 reprint (smaller paperback) as the comics would not have reproduced well at that size.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

That is an extremely useful piece of information, as I'm hunting for that book right now! Ta!

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Bloody hell, I would have!

omfg Elric at the End of Time is stunning! It's like a trip to the valley of the prog rock albums! Thank you so much!

Frankus is going to send you a Doctor Who book from the stash he has behind my desk. (I think he nests on them. Speak up now if you're allergic.)

[sheramil.livejournal.com]

anything post-fourth-Doctor would be fine, thanks, Frankus.

[frankxcat.livejournal.com]

Brrr-ow.

[fizzixrat.livejournal.com]

Having no idea what you're talking about, Kate, I'm starting to wonder if this is a Gene Wilder sequel entitled "Charlie and the Soylent Green Factory"??? :)

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Well, it might as well be!

[infinitarian.livejournal.com]

I remember trying to read The Condition of Muzak when I was about twelve, and having to give up. I think I'd recently read the Oswald Bastable trilogy (shortly after reading E. Nesbit's original Bastable books, which must have been a bizarre experience), and enjoyed them as the boy's own adventure stories they were pastiching / piss-taking.

I didn't really "get" Moorcock till much more recently, when I acquired The Final Programme and A Cure for Cancer and discovered that both are fab. I also read the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy for the first time a year ago, and that was so fantastic (and so in tune with various of my SF obsessions) that I couldn't believe I hadn't read it before. Hurrah for Moorcock.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I still haven't quite worked out why I liked it then and like it now - it's often very funny, of course, and Moorcock's writing is just so readable, you're just drawn along with him no matter how odd it gets. But there's more to it than that - what? I get the whole "what everyone takes so seriously is actually ridiculous" thing now I'm older, but what else is going on these novels?

[infinitarian.livejournal.com]

Jerry Cornelius, or Dancers at the End of Time?

I'm not sure I can answer the first without having read at least the four core novels (which I haven't, yet)... although my copy of The Final Programme (Fontana, 1979) does have an excellent introduction by John Clute, analysing the tetralogy in terms of harlequinade.

This being New Wave SF, there's obviously a lot of millennial anxiety, with talk of entropy and cyclical time; I'd guess (although I haven't done the maths) that there's probably a good deal of acting-out of Jungian and / or Freudian psychology as well. And the "everything serious is silly" idea is making a valid point about cultural relativism potentially extending even as far as icky stuff like incest taboos.

Actually, Dancers is pretty much the same, except it also has fun metatextual stuff about HG Wells. And the culture / counterculture clash is disguised as decadent end-of-timers annoying prim Victorians, rather than obviously showing long-hairs freaking out the squares as the Cornelius stuff does.

[sheramil.livejournal.com]

i loved that whole thing between Mistress Christia and Werther de Goethe - "Pale Roses", from "Legends at the End of Time". it's what i imagine goth literature could be. there's such a wealth of throwaway ideas that i caught one and began writing Ivan Turgiditi's great Novel of Discomfort, "Wet Socks".

(advertisement) http://www.very.net/~nikolai/read/wet-socks.html

[gooofy.livejournal.com]

wait a minute - there's a movie based on The Final Programme? *wibble*

Ta da!

[kateorman.livejournal.com]