#Time for go to bed tor johnson movie#

A boy in red climbing between cars with the ground coursing by.

What do we get? On a train, a rash of images: kids sleeping on cardboard in the open bed of a gondola car. (Mike Brodie’s images appear on top, Claire Denis’s below.) In this one sequence, we’re back on earth, maybe in Mia Goth’s mind, maybe just in some sort of collective memory all shared by these rejects-in-space.

#Time for go to bed tor johnson movie#

Denis does do this (star baby notwithstanding) among other things, she doesn’t care much about gadgets.īut forget the baby: the whole of High Life isn’t what interests me here-although like most Claire Denis the whole movie is a fascinating mess/maybe masterpiece-but instead just an odd, earthbound minute-and-a-half sequence of images embedded in the movie, midway along the cast’s hellscape. Sometimes it can seem like the 1980s were the last time that nearly any sci-fi of any budget pretended to envision a future, rather than only a present with better gadgets. As though events back here on earth in the present haven’t already long since disproven the I believe the children are our future as any motivation whatsoever. …And, ultimately, the obligatory baby much sci-fi seems unable to dispense with, somehow the theoretically least-shackled genre in thrall to the Gospels: from 2001’s star child through Children of Men and Blade Runner 2049, there’s a savior-baby as MacGuffin. The complement of prisoners includes mad scientist and killer succubus Juliette Binoche, grounded Andre 3000/Benjamin, psychotic Lars Eidinger, catatonic Mia Goth… Sometimes we reject the bizarre: we just get up and walk out of the darkened theater-as did several of the audience on the day I felt myself almost alone with Claire Denis’s carceral cosmonauts: Robert Pattinson the longest surviving member of a crew rejected from earth (the downbeat way to imagine being shot off into space toward a black hole, testing their sanity and fertility: not the best of the best, but the worst of the worst: maybe just the least of the least). The strange does make us laugh sometimes. The movie in question, High Life, is not funny, although it is bizarre. Zadie Smith left the project wanting a funnier scenario, still believing in the notional humor of trying to imagine the future, again.Ĭlaire Denis, on the other hand, is not noted for her humor. When asked some years ago how her sci-fi collaboration with Claire Denis was going, Zadie Smith sighed and said that it wasn’t: it seems the two women turned out to have very different ideas about what science fiction was for. “They ran in urine smell of shadow, they ran in clean ice smell of moon.”