![]() ![]() It turns out to be a pirate picture, and the black man on the horse is never seen again, but Homer comes to identify with him–a Bedouin, a wanderer with no home. Words! The titles, the names of the actors were written in the sand by an invisible hand. The ferocious black Arab nomad brandished a frightening curved sword whacking the lumbering camel with the flat of the blade, he drove the beast into a faulty, staggering gallop across such endless sand dunes that the animal and its rider were soon only a speck on the vast horizon. Mounted by the camel’s grotesque hump was a black-skinned man almost entirely concealed in white wrapping-bandages! thought Homer Wells. It was a camel, actually, but Homer Wells had never seen a camel, or a picture of one he thought it was a horribly deformed horse-a mutant horse! Perhaps some ghastly fetus-phase of a horse! The camera staggered back farther. ![]() Something’s head-a kind of horse! thought Homer Wells. The camera backed, or rather, lurched away. It is something’s mouth! thought Homer Wells. Wilber Larch, goes to his first drive-in movie, also, judging by his reaction, his first movie of any kind. The main character, Homer Larch, who has been raised in a Maine orphanage run by the obstetrician Dr. Skimming through the novel, which takes place during World War II, I find only one reference to a film. That’s no coincidence, for Irving successfully (in my view) modeled his own book after these older works. In the book, characters are always reading Victorian novels: Dickens’s David Copperfield, Little Dorritt, and Great Expectations, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Preparing this post made me appreciate a particular difference between the two versions. The Cider House Rules (1985) is my favorite John Irving novel, and I liked the 1999 film adaptation by Lasse Hallström a lot, too. We see him power it up, spool the film in a projector, and watch it for the umpteenth time, his rifle lovingly cradled beside him. He’s equipped one cinema with a generator. Neville, it appears, has developed an odd obsession with that documentary, perhaps because the utopian hippie dreams in it appear so quaint in the light of his harsh world. (A previous film version was The Last Man on Earth, 1964, with Vincent Price - no movie in movie.) The present day of The Omega Man is 1977 the pandemic had hit seven years earlier, when Woodstock was playing in theaters. ![]() Sagal and screenwriters John William Corrington and Joyce Corrington decided to show Neville (Charlton Heston) actually watching a film - not at home but out in the world. Matheson says that he occasionally screens movies for himself but doesn’t name them. and his nights inside his apartment, looking to stay alive. He spends his days patrolling Los Angeles, looking to kill vampires with wooden stakes. The protagonist, Robert Neville, appears to be the only survivor of the pandemic. Wikipedia’s description of the book’s setting: ” a pandemic … has killed most of the human population and turned the remainder into ‘vampires’ that largely conform to their stereotypes in fiction and folklore: they are blood-sucking, pale-skinned, and nocturnal, though otherwise indistinguishable from normal humans.” Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) pulls up to the theater.īoris Sagal’s The Omega Man (1971) was based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend. Here’s a clip (you can ignore the opening seconds, where a tiny Carrey is submerged in a sink): (IMDB plot summary: “The blood of a primitive fish exposed to gamma rays causes a benign research professor to regress to an ape-like, bloodthirsty prehistoric hominid.”) Joel and Clementine (Kate Winslet) are at a drive-in - actually outside a drive-in - where for some reason the feature is a 1958 exploitation flick, Monster on the Campus. The movie has an ingenious premise and plot, which gradually reveals itself, so I’ll try to resist any spoilers, only say that in this scene, some ragtag scientists (played by Mark Rufalo, Tom Wilkinson and Kirsten Dunst) have hooked Joel (Jim Carrey) up to a machine that extracts memories, and thus the movie-in-movie scene is a flashback. A few weeks ago, I watched Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and enjoyed it quite a bit, including learning that the title is a quote from the 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope. Like a lot of people, I guess, I’ve been able over the last nine months or so to catch up with some (not enough) movies I somehow never got around to seeing. ![]()
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