The Final Programme

Rating:
Summary: "A very tastey world!"
Review: What can you say about a film that, opening scene onwards, you either love or loathe? It's fantastically dated, and that's what makes it fantastic. From the London Red-Bus Movie music, the bizarro pseudo-science, the biting dialogue, and the (almost) Cast of Thousands, "Final Programme" is one of my favorite films ever. I've almost worn out my copy.

The plot's incidental, but what the hey? Jerry Cornelius (Jon Finch) is a Nobel Laureate living on Bell's scotch, pills, and chocolate digestives in a chaotic world where Trafalgar Square is a vast dump, arms dealers operate in basements across from the National Gallery, and Amsterdam's now "25 square miles of white ash--for once the Americans got it right." Jerry's dad, mad-scientist and founder of the Cornelius line, was working on something weird in Lapland when he died, but that's not Jerry's problem now. He's more worried about his crazy brother Frank (the wonderful Derek O'Connor), who is holding their sister Catherine hostage in the Family Manse and is, if possible, more strung out than Jerry.

But Lapland returns to haunt him in the form of Miss Brunner (Jenny Runacre) and three Magritte-like scientists. They need Jerry to help them get his dad's microfilm, the last piece of The Final Programme---a project staggaring in conception and quite, quite funny. The microfilm is locked in the house with Frank, and as the old family retainer tells Jerry,"There's another problem--it's that house. You know what that old house is like." "I haven't forgotten" says Jerry.

That "old house" is a super-modern fortress, of course, complete with lights of simulate "pseudo-epilepsy", booby traps, poison gas, and a pantheon of James Bondish dangers. Along the way to the microfilm, it becomes apparent there's something very odd about Miss Brunner, and that Frank's not the fool he seems.

I know it's dated and I don't care. I don't care if the continuity is bad. I don't care if the budget could've been bigger. I don't care if the "science" is Junk with a capital "Juh". I'm oblivious to it all, because this is such an entertaining movie. For one thing, Jon Finch is incredible. He's the perfect Jerry, and Prince could only PRAY to wear a Goth/New Romantic suit as well as Finch does. For another, Jenny Runacre's Miss Brunner was feminist before there was a common understanding of what that word meant. And the versatile Derek O'Connor's greasy, desperate Frank is brilliant.

You'll need to have your finger on the "rewind" button--the dialogue comes fast and urbane. You'll keep recognizing British character actors, and let's face it, if you're female, you'll want to gaze on Finch's beautiful, intelligent face again.

And the visual jokes--watch for "LOVE" embroidered on the vampirical Brunner nightie in the "climactic" final scene!

A warning, though: this really does deserve its R rating. Hustle the kiddie-winks to bed first--then enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: "Throw down your needle and come out with your veins clean!"
Review: Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel? Well, I'm going to, a bit. The fact is, this really isn't a very good film. Despite the inventiveness at the set design level, and despite the great shirts worn by Jon Finch, this film is surprisingly subdued at an ideas level. The free-wheeling political, sexual and chemical anarchism of Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius character is largely absent. So is altogether too much of Moorcock's plot; director Robert Fuest obviously hadn't read the book with, shall we say, a clear head, and neither had his scriptwriter.

Instead of Moorcock's plot (actually the first Elric novel re-staged in the acid-glow London of an alternative universe) we get something that mostly looks like a mildly futuristic secret agent film, with a familiar enough "swinging London" as a backdrop. But despite these trappings we never exactly get a secret agent plot, either.

Though I think the reviewers who compared Jon Finch's Jerry Cornelius to Mike Myers' Austin Powers, psychedelic spy, are exactly right. But the resemblance is surely no coincidence. Mike Myers has almost certainly seen this film more than thrice, and the fifth time he was taking notes. Though the Austin Powers films actually make more sense than Fuest's film, and god knows that's not saying much.

_The Final Program_ more or less works as a cult film of an interesting cult book. But the trouble with cult films is that unless they're very, very good they tend to fall into being very dull instead. There's only so long you can say, "But the plot isn't _supposed_ to make sense," and "But they're _deliberately_ acting like that", and "yes, but it being shambolic is part of the _point_", and so on, before starting to rebel. Maybe, one suspects, it seems to be not very good because it's not very good.

The early Jerry Cornelius stories and the first novel are themselves mostly a sort of in-joke, but there are plenty of incidental pleasures along the way in Moorcock's writing. But the film is an in-joke without enough out-jokes (the biggest laugh isn't for anything contributed by the scriptwriter, but when Finch's Cornelius quotes Monty Python: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition"). It's not so much shambolic, in the end, as sham bollocks.

Still, though it was a disappointment to Moorcock fans, and probably everyone who saw it (I first saw it at the art-house cinema in Mission Bay, the disgusted manager leading me into a vast theatre where I had the company of only seven other patrons; and of only three other patrons by the time it had finished), it's a curiosity, and it has some residual charms. Finch's performance is one source of charm; his big shirts are another. Some of Fuest's set designs are terrific, such as his version of Moorcock's mythical club "The Friendly Bum" (Fuest was really more of a designer than a director). And occasional Moorcock gems survived the addled scripting: Jerry's ultimatum to his evil brother Frank, "Throw down your needle and come out with your veins clean" is one of cinema's great lines, that belonged in a better film.

So... it never quite works, and it cheapens too many of Moorcock's ideas. Especially the end, when Moorcock's climactic merging of his male and female characters to create a new androgyne, beautiful and deadly, is replaced in Fuest's film with the creation of a, well, a man in an apesuit. Moorcock makes a point about gender; Fuest gives us instead a puzzling and irrelevant visual joke.

But for all these defects and disappointments it's an original film, odd, visually interesting, and not without charm. I can't in all honesty give it a very high rating, and yet I took the trouble to see it three times in cinemas, being prepared to cross town on a rainy night to catch a screening, or infuriate girlfriends by taking them to this instead of something decent (I have never met a woman who has seen this film and liked it).

It's a film that seems to shimmer with the ghosts of ideas that never quite make it onto the screen; it clearly comes from a strange place. And for all its faults, including some dull patches, there's that charm thing. Somehow, it's got charm. But rent it first: Taste and try, as Frank might say, before you buy.

Rating:
Summary: "Throw down your needle and come out with your veins clean!"
Review: Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel? Well, I'm going to, a bit. The fact is, this really isn't a very good film. Despite the inventiveness at the set design level, and despite the great shirts worn by Jon Finch, this film is surprisingly subdued at an ideas level. The free-wheeling political, sexual and chemical anarchism of Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius character is largely absent. So is altogether too much of Moorcock's plot; director Robert Fuest obviously hadn't read the book with, shall we say, a clear head, and neither had his scriptwriter.

Instead of Moorcock's plot (actually the first Elric novel re-staged in the acid-glow London of an alternative universe) we get something that mostly looks like a mildly futuristic secret agent film, with a familiar enough "swinging London" as a backdrop. But despite these trappings we never exactly get a secret agent plot, either.

Though I think the reviewers who compared Jon Finch's Jerry Cornelius to Mike Myers' Austin Powers, psychedelic spy, are exactly right. But the resemblance is surely no coincidence. Mike Myers has almost certainly seen this film more than thrice, and the fifth time he was taking notes. Though the Austin Powers films actually make more sense than Fuest's film, and god knows that's not saying much.

_The Final Program_ more or less works as a cult film of an interesting cult book. But the trouble with cult films is that unless they're very, very good they tend to fall into being very dull instead. There's only so long you can say, "But the plot isn't _supposed_ to make sense," and "But they're _deliberately_ acting like that", and "yes, but it being shambolic is part of the _point_", and so on, before starting to rebel. Maybe, one suspects, it seems to be not very good because it's not very good.

The early Jerry Cornelius stories and the first novel are themselves mostly a sort of in-joke, but there are plenty of incidental pleasures along the way in Moorcock's writing. But the film is an in-joke without enough out-jokes (the biggest laugh isn't for anything contributed by the scriptwriter, but when Finch's Cornelius quotes Monty Python: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition"). It's not so much shambolic, in the end, as sham bollocks.

Still, though it was a disappointment to Moorcock fans, and probably everyone who saw it (I first saw it at the art-house cinema in Mission Bay, the disgusted manager leading me into a vast theatre where I had the company of only seven other patrons; and of only three other patrons by the time it had finished), it's a curiosity, and it has some residual charms. Finch's performance is one source of charm; his big shirts are another. Some of Fuest's set designs are terrific, such as his version of Moorcock's mythical club "The Friendly Bum" (Fuest was really more of a designer than a director). And occasional Moorcock gems survived the addled scripting: Jerry's ultimatum to his evil brother Frank, "Throw down your needle and come out with your veins clean" is one of cinema's great lines, that belonged in a better film.

So... it never quite works, and it cheapens too many of Moorcock's ideas. Especially the end, when Moorcock's climactic merging of his male and female characters to create a new androgyne, beautiful and deadly, is replaced in Fuest's film with the creation of a, well, a man in an apesuit. Moorcock makes a point about gender; Fuest gives us instead a puzzling and irrelevant visual joke.

But for all these defects and disappointments it's an original film, odd, visually interesting, and not without charm. I can't in all honesty give it a very high rating, and yet I took the trouble to see it three times in cinemas, being prepared to cross town on a rainy night to catch a screening, or infuriate girlfriends by taking them to this instead of something decent (I have never met a woman who has seen this film and liked it).

It's a film that seems to shimmer with the ghosts of ideas that never quite make it onto the screen; it clearly comes from a strange place. And for all its faults, including some dull patches, there's that charm thing. Somehow, it's got charm. But rent it first: Taste and try, as Frank might say, before you buy.

Rating:
Summary: I saw it as 1974's Last Days of Man on Earth
Review: You can definitely see the Austin Powers roots here. But unfortunately, much of the gadgetry is only alluded to in events presumably happening off-screen (i.e. several references to the main character flying around in an F-4 jet). Was this for budgetary reasons?
I laughed at the end when I spotted the credit listing the person responsible for "continuity" since this movie had very little. And at only an hour and 15 minutes it is no wonder--all the transition scenes were cut. But perhaps wisely, otherwise it would have been criticized for being "plodding" among its other faults.
Really more of an action/spy flick than sci-fi. I guess this is why sci-fi movies had such a bad image before Star Wars. When I think of sci-fi, I think of what is more accurately called "hard" sci-fi, rather than this mildly apocalyptic-themed movie.
Campy and wacky in a dated, 1970's British way. My favorite scene is the sloppy fight with "the Greek guy" (gotta love the plaintive, "help, I think I'm losing..."). Oh, and the black fingernail polish. If you like that sort of thing, this is good for you.

Rating:
Summary: I saw it as 1974's Last Days of Man on Earth
Review: You can definitely see the Austin Powers roots here. But unfortunately, much of the gadgetry is only alluded to in events presumably happening off-screen (i.e. several references to the main character flying around in an F-4 jet). Was this for budgetary reasons?
I laughed at the end when I spotted the credit listing the person responsible for "continuity" since this movie had very little. And at only an hour and 15 minutes it is no wonder--all the transition scenes were cut. But perhaps wisely, otherwise it would have been criticized for being "plodding" among its other faults.
Really more of an action/spy flick than sci-fi. I guess this is why sci-fi movies had such a bad image before Star Wars. When I think of sci-fi, I think of what is more accurately called "hard" sci-fi, rather than this mildly apocalyptic-themed movie.
Campy and wacky in a dated, 1970's British way. My favorite scene is the sloppy fight with "the Greek guy" (gotta love the plaintive, "help, I think I'm losing..."). Oh, and the black fingernail polish. If you like that sort of thing, this is good for you.

Rating:
Summary: Good Movie (if you havn't read the book)
Review: You could call me a Michael Moorcock fanatic. I own over 65 of his novels...

Although this was a good movie. It strayed from the original work far too much. There where several parts of the book that where skipped or edited to the point of obscurity.

...One thing is for sure. Moorcock was not close at hand during the creation of the film.

Perhaps broadcast and media limitations at the time prevented him from creating the image he wanted. Or perhaps he simply didn't read the book. I don't know...

All in all the story is basically the same. And the movie is a fine piece if work. Especially for those of us who enjoy the 70's genre. But if your a Moorcock fanatic. Your going to be disappointed...