Tag Archives: Sunday NIght Movie

Revisiting: Aliens

Last night I pulled down by big blu-ray boxed set for the Alien films and selected 1986’s Aliens as my Sunday Night Movie. At the start the disc presented me with a choice; 1986 theatrical release or the 1992 Special Edition? I selected the Special Editions and settled in with my bowl of popcorn.

The film is as fast and as exciting as ever and I have seen the special edition before but on this viewing my connection to the film seemed somewhat different. I approved of the many scenes restored to the film that deepen and expand the Ellen Ripley. A character that lacked even a given name in the original classic film. However when it comes to the scenes depicting life in the doomed colony Hadley’s Hope before the parasite destroys them I found I had come to a different opinion that the one I had held for a number of years.

Films, just as with prose stories, have character points of view and Aliens is a story told from Ripley’s POV. If you look at the first film, Alien, it is told with several points of view a technique used by the screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusette to disguise which of the characters was the protagonist and thus they kept the audience off-balance as to who would liver and die. (A technique George R.R. Martin has been quoted as copying for his epic A Song of Fire and Ice.)

Aliens wisely doesn’t attempt to recreate this ambiguity. We have ridden with Ripley through the first horror and our identification with her is strong. Looking at it from that perspective the extended scenes that take place on Hadley’s Hope violate this film’s POV. Ripley is not there and there is no one to relay those scenes to her. It is information she will never know and as such it is information we should not know.

There are plenty of moments in the special edition that still work with Ripley’s POV, scenes she either directly participates in or where her relationship with characters in the scenes would allow her to reasonably be aware of the events and those I would advocate retaining, but I think all the Hadley’s Hope scenes should be excised.

Of course it’s not my film and so that’s not going to happen, but it is a peak into my thoughts on story structure.

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Sunday Night Movie: Gun Crazy (1950)

As many people already know I am a fan of film noir though there are many, many movies of that genre I’ve yet to see and Gun Crazy was one of those. Based on a short story Gun Crazy is about a pair of lovers, pistol trick shot artist, who enter into a life of 1-gun crazy001crime and hold-ups. It is surprisingly accurate to the short story, with only mild modifications. Made in 1950 when the production code remained in effect this film still manages to be a fairly straightforward piece that attempts to capture the addictive thrill of crime and anti-social behavior.

In the best tradition of the genre the plot is driven by a femme fatale, in this case the character if Anne Laurie Starr, a woman who has a vast appetite for an expensive life, action, and lethal undercurrent of anger in her personality. Doomed from the moment he met her is Barton tare. Presented in the film as the only man who has outshot Annie the film’s title actually references Barton and not Annie. It is his story that we really follow and his obsession with guns never has a clear genesis but if the defining characteristic of his personality — that and his inability to use a gun to kill. This deadly mix, a woman with an explosive anger and sharpshooter unable to fire on a living thing, place themselves in the worst possible life choices, becoming stick-up artists. They are likable but flawed characters, and the film is deeply engaging. Though produced on a modest budget the director Joseph H. Lewis manages a number of craftily staged pieces including a bank robbery that is shot in one continuous take and solely from a vantage point inside the get away car.

Of course a film made under the production code cannot end well for criminals. The Code required that all characters who engaged in crime met a just end by the film conclusion. Sometime that created forced endings, but with Gun Crazy the ending has the right tone and does not come off as moralizing. Rather like Lord and Lady Macbeth Bart and Annie are characters doomed by their natures and their choices.

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Sunday Night Movie: Predestination

predestination_ver2The reason I became a reader of science-fiction and eventually a writer of that genre is due to the work of Robert A. Heinlein. A grand master of the form his works influenced the arts and sciences for decades. Despite being a best-selling and ground breaker author very few of his works have been adapted successfully into films. The Puppet Masters became a mediocre film fatally damaged by a third act that abandoned the source material for cheaply ripping off other films. Starship Troopers practically ignored the source material and where it didn’t it engaged in a malicious misreading in favor of the director’s favorite obsessions. Given this background I approached Predestination with a healthy sense of apprehension.

Adapted for the screen and directed by the Spierig brothers a pair of Australian filmmakers Predestination overcomes Heinlein’s troubled history with adaptions to become not only the first film to faithful to the source material but a movie that also works well in its own right.

It’s difficult to discuss the plot of Predestination without an abundance of spoilers. This is a time travel film and one needs to go into the viewing with an open mind towards the crazy world of time paradoxes.

Ethan Hawke, returning to work with the Spierig brother again following their partnerships with the novel vampire film Daybreakers, is an agent with basically a time police agency. Hawke’s character is leaping through time in pursuit to another time traveller who is leaving a trail of nasty explosions in his wake. This entire cop and bomber plot is the invention of the filmmakers, yet they fold it into the narrative from the short story in a seamless and tonal consistent manner.

Sarah Snook plays in effect several parts, principally she plays a man who writes confession stories and drinks away his life nursing a grudge over the person who ruined her life. Hawke and Snook’s writer character form an unusual partnership with staggering implications.

The original story ‘All you Zombies…” was written many decades ago and of course its portrayal of the future has become horribly dated. Following in the footsteps of Zack Snyder and his adaptation of the graphic novel ‘Watchmen’ the Spierig brothers do not attempt to ‘update’ the setting or characters, but rather the entire story takes place in an alternate time-line where history, particularly space-travel, followed a different course. This works very well for me, but I’m not sure how many casual audience members would follow this construction.

A low budget film, Predestination, never got a full theatrical release; this is a shame. I think the brothers have shone again that they are able to realize amazing visions with limited resources. Especially in dealing with a film that jumps over 40 years of period, from 1945 through 1985, they pull it all off with style and realism. This is a film that is going to become part of my collection. I urge you all to view it at least one.

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Sunday Night Movie: Double Feature Edition

With respects to Richard O’Brien this is not a science-fiction double feature, but a main feature and a short one.

Sunday night my sweetie-wife and I settled in after dinner to watched a silent horror film. I had recently developed a hankering to watch ‘Nosferatu’ again and my sweetie indicated that she too would re-watched this classic of early German Cinema.

NosferatyuNosferatu made in 1922 is an early vampire movie and in the good tradition of vampire movies, lifted heavily from the classic novel Dracula. Unfortunately for the producers and the studio, Dracula was still under copyright in 1922 and they were sues for infringement. They lost the suit and a judicial order instructed them to destroy all copies of the film. Lucky for future film fans they were less than successful and the movie survived. The edition on Netflix is a restored version using source material from around the world attempting to recreate the original print.

If you are familiar with Dracula then if very broad stroke you are familiar with the plot of this film. A real estate agent is dispatched to the mountains beyond the forest to secure a transaction for a mysterious nobleman who is buying a building in a bustling metropolitan center. The estate agent endures horrors at the hands of his host and is nearly killed. The nobleman, a vampire, secure transport by sea, kills the crew enroute, because the undead have no concerns about travel safety, and arrives to begin spreading his deadly plague in his new home. The estate agent makes it home and the search begins to discover what is happening.

Unlike Dracula, in Nosferatu the vampire ‘s attack is not transformative and the victims remain dead. Where Dracula kept a tight scope on the action, dealing with a hand full of characters, Count Orlok is killing dozens and the entire city is threatened by the supernatural danger.

This film, while occasionally hampered by it distance from us in time, it is nearly a century old, still holds up and many considerable way. There are many interesting twists and hints of German Expressionism throughout the production. If you have an interest in film history and silent movies, this is worth the time.

Later, by myself, I watched a WWII training film ‘Resisting Enemy Interrogation.’

interrogationProduced during the war, I happened to catch the ending of this film on TV once. Now through the wonders of YouTube and that fact that all government films are public domain, I have finally taken the time to watch the entire movie.

The film is the story of 5 American airman, the crew of a ‘B-99’ (no such plane in WWII) that have crashed and are now prisoners. The crew have destroyed the aircraft and are determined not to talk. They will not provide the enemy with any useful intelligence. Their German captors, suspecting a major raid is about to occur, are racing the clock in trying to break the crew and glean the vital information. The German do not resort to torture and brutality, but cunning and classic interrogation techniques. Despite their best intentions the crew, one by one, fall prey to the tricks and in the give away the target of the next days raid, even though not one man among the crew know that.

This is a particularly well made training film, with a fairly tight narrative arc. A couple of the actors went on to have quite successful careers. The biggest fault in the film, and the one that made me so interested in seeing it, is that the German are by definition the protagonists. The Germans have an active goal, discover the details of the coming raid, the German have the obstacles, the airmen who will not cooperate, and it is the German’s racing the clock against failure. When the German’s unlock all the secrets it is the climax of the story. While during the war it would have been difficult to feel sympathy for the enemy as they raced a clock, now with 70 some odd years separating us, it almost feels like you want cheer them on as they prove their cleverness.

Almost.

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Sunday Night Movie: Speed Racer (2008)

I had an amount of curiosity concerning this film when it was released. As a child I had watched the American-ized version of the television show and been entertained by the impossible antics of Speed and his racing family. My interest and fond memories people were not enough lure back into the theater for this baby-boomer bit of nostalgia. I had frederic_speed-racer-2008seen far too many properties from the baby-boom picked up and turned into utter dreck by producers, writers, and directors who had absolutely no respect for the original source material. So Speed Racer waited until I got around to it on Netflix, because that is one thing the service is great for, taking risky experimental leaps in your cinema viewing.

The Wachowskis; the sibling duo responsible for The Matrix franchise and the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, directed the film. Speed Racer displays all the visual style and experimentation one should expect from the Wachowskis. The story is simple, Speed and his family are a small independent racing team and motor car company. (Pops, play by John Goodman, builds the race cars in his home garage.) Speed’s older brother has been disgraced and killed in an earlier off road race. Speeds own inherent talent has brought him to the attention of a major motor-company mogul Royalton, played with villainous flair that seemed to strike a resonate cord reminiscent of the acerbic Christopher Hitchens by Roger Allam. Royalton tries to seduce Speed into signing on a corporate racer, and when rebuffed turns his energies to destroyed Speed and the Racer family.

If you have watched the 60’s animated show you know that the program constantly dealt in absurd impossibilities, cars that leap great distanced thanks to powered jacks, fantastic weaponry, amazing capable pet chimps, and so on. Adapting this sort of material into a film usually calls for eliminating as much as possible these cue that are acceptable in animation, but shattering to suspension of disbelief in photography; this was not the approach the Wochowskis employed. Rather they embraced the animated style, integrating into it the live-action performers, mixing CGI that had been rendered to reflect the style of animation and not photo-realism, while layering in the actors as real people. (Even Chim-Chim the chimp is real not a CGI character.) The final product is both mad-cap over the top, and layered with character moments and performances.

The film disappointed at the box officer and I think the stylistic approach is the final culprit. The animation elements, I believe in form the viewer the accept one level of reality and the live-action performances ask the viewer to accept quite a different level of reality. The dichotomy of these two very different expectations creates a jarring effect that is quite deleterious to suspension of disbelief.

That said, if you can find a way to let your mind work on the two levels simultaneously, the film has surprisingly entertaining moments. It was clearly crafted with an eye towards the source material. From my memory the Wochowskis nailed every major plot and character element of the show, while adding a level of story that the television program never explored. It was a bold, brash experiment that failed, but I salute them as artists for their vision and the risk taking. They could have made a bland cookie-cutter film, but instead that took real risks and that should be rewarded.

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Sunday Night Movie: Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

I am quite tardy in posting this essay, but I did finish the original franchise out as I had intended.

battle-for-the-planet-of-the-apes-noah-keenSo after the racie war implications driving the plot of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Fox, fearful that they had driven the kiddie away, took the next, and final, installment of franchise in a lighter and more optimistic direction. The screenwriter for the previous two sequel relinquished his duties, in part due to the dark nature of his proposed script and in part to ill health, while the husband wife team that penned the screenplay for The Omega Man came onto the scene.

In many ways this film is the most direct sequel of the entire franchise. Where Beneath the Planet of the Apes introduced a new astronaut the Ape Planet, nothing in the first film set up the silly concept of a rescue mission. Escape from the Planet of the Apes heavily violates continuity by introducing an unknown Ape genius “Milo” who is able to repair and launch Taylor’s crashed spacecraft. Conquest played buffet with elements put forth in Escape, picking and choosing what they wanted to tell a story with some of the same characters, and throwing away anything that didn’t fit. (retconning long before the term became standard in fandom.) That is not the approach with Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

Battle takes the situation and characters established Conquest and continues the story, playing mostly fair and extrapolating from the scenario already in motion. Despite this, or perhaps even because of it, Battle for the planet of the Apes is the least ambitious, least transgressive, and least daring of the franchise. The budget was again cut, and the situation reduced to the most simplistic elements. A colony of apes, lead my Caesar from Conquest, is building an ape community with humans as second-class citizens, but not slaves or property, amid the ruins of a nuclear war. Racial animosity against the human divides the apes, while a colony of surviving humans, scarred by the constant exposure to radiation in the bombed out city, led by a brutal security man from Conquest, plots a war of ape extermination.

The too small budget hampered the production, reducing the screenplay to one rather lackluster battle and a few set locales. The film ends on a note of optimism, putting it in direction conflict with the tone of the series while implying that the events of the first film were no longer possible.

While the franchise limped on with a short lived and poorly conceived television series, this film represented the end of the series until the terrible attempt at a reboot with Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. That failed and the franchise again went dead until the next film Rise of The Planet of the Apes, a success which in many ways was a rebooting of Conquest in that it told the story of how the planet got started on the path toward humanity’s fall and the rise of the apes.

This year saw the next film in the new franchise, Dawn of the Planet of The Apes, and in reality it is a rebooting of Battle, but done with real style, a real budget, and far better written. I will be interesting to see where this new franchise series goes.

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Sunday Night Movie: Conquest of the Planet of the apes

Now in my re-watch of the original Planet of the Apes franchise I have arrived at my conquest-the-black-mans-burdenfavorite film of the series, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. While I love me Planet of the Apes and it is wonderful film, more often than any other in the franchise I will pull out the blu-ray of Conquest and sit back to watch it over and over. Once I did get it on Blu-ray I also stopped watching the theatrical cut and exclusively watch the unrated directors edition. When the film was released in 1972 they had hopes of getting a ‘G’ rating, but thee scene of revolution were so intense the studio feared they might get an ‘R’ and ordered the ending re-written and the footage edited to be considerably less graphic.

Conquest is set twenty years after the end of Escape from the Planet of the Apes. During the twilight years of Bush 41’s presidency (that’s snark because the film is set 1991, now more than twenty years in out past) apes have become a slave population, having 1991thumbnailImageprogressed from pets, replacing the cats and dogs that died in a global pandemic into a servant and slaves. Armando, the kind hearted circus owner last seen saving the time-traveling apes’ baby has returned to the city, bring the circus for a need tour, and along with it the now adult intelligent ape Caesar. (Whom was named Milo as a baby in the last film but hey retcon is nothing new.) thing go badly and before long Ceasar is a slave himself, alone and friendless, subject to the same brutal treatment as his ape brothers and sisters, including the producer’s wife in appearance number 3 in the ape movies. In the end Caesar lives up to his new name and leads a revolt overthrowing the fascist power structure in a brutal, bloody, and revenge filled night. The film ends with images of the city burning and nearly all of our principle human characters dead.

It is grim, dark, and very deliberate metaphorical statement on violence generating more violence. This is an example of 70’s cinema that I truly enjoy. It is dark, it is grim, it is cynical, but it is also stuffed with ideas. This is a film that using the pretext of science-fiction and adventure tries to talk about the very real troubles and issues plaguing the United States then and today. SF films of the 70s really began to turn to adult themes and ponder serious questions, and even a film such as this one, with limited budget and an eye firmly fixed on the bottom line, did not jettison the idea for the spectacle. Today all too often SF movies are nothing more than extremely big budgeted action films devoid to content and thought. (I’m looking at you Transformers and pretty much anything from Michael Bay.) If you have not seen this film, or it has been many years, get the blu-ray and watched the uncut version. It’s quite a shocker. (next up, shudder, Battle for the Planet of the Apes.)

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Sunday Night Movie: DOUBLE FEATURE Beneath the Planet of the Apes & Escape from the Planet of the Apes

The double feature does not represent a long night at the home video screen but rather last week’s and this week’s Sunday Night Movie feature combined into a single essay.

After watching 1968’s Planet of The Apes the idea struck me that I should watch all five of the original Ape movies in order. A coupe of years ago I scored a blu-ray box set that had all the films and tons of bonus feature, so logistically I saw no issues. That said I knew that meant I would be watching the crap with the imaginative. Oh well, I decided to do it.

 

beneath_1Beneath the Planet of the Apes is the hastily consider sequel to 1968’s smash box-office success Planet of the Apes. However due to financial troubles at 20th Century Fox and boardroom infighting the film suffered from a trouble production from the get-go. Heston, the star of the first film hated the very idea of any sequel and only reluctantly agreed to participate as a favor to Daryl Zanuck, but even this came at the price with Heston insisting that his character of Taylor — spoiler alert stop reading if you care, serious stop reading — be killed off in the story.

The plot of Beneath is one that makes little to no sense. Another crew has been dispatched following Taylor’s into space. Now Taylor’s team knew that they were on a one-way trip into the future, proving Dr. Hasslien’s theories. In this film Brent (James Franciscus) and his crew have been dispatched to find Taylor. (Apparently Landon, Dodge, and Stewart were utter berks and no one wants them back,) Brent crashes, and has a much abbreviated repeat adventure of Taylor’s first encounter with ape society. Escaping the apes, he and the mute animal/human Nova go into the forbidden zone searching for Taylor. They find mutant humans with psychic powers who are at war with the Apes. (First appearance of the Producer’s wife as the mutant Albina.) Taylor and Brent find each other, have a manly fight (thanks, mutants!) and then are caught there when the Ape army arrives. Everyone panics, there’s lot of gunfire, and a nuclear device that is over 2000 years proves that there is no beating American manufacturing when it goes off and destroys the world.

This film was a hit. It practically  relaunched the idea of major studio, major money sequel. Except for the Universal horror franchises, series films before Beneath were usually constructed like episodes, each film could be watched on its own and did not effect the continuity of other films. After the major success of Beneath, film sequels were seen not as episodes but a continuation of the same story. Quite a change.

escapeapeslandingI can clearly remember seeing Escape from the Planet of the Apes at the Sunrise Theater in Fort Pierce Florida. That was 1971 so I would have been 10 years old, and I remember laughing a full belly laugh as the ‘unmasking’ scene at the film’s open. Escape faced the challenge of crafting a continuation of the story when in the pervious film not only did your principle characters get killed, but the entire freakin’ world was turned to ash as a gravely toned narrator informed the audience that the world was now dead.

Hollywood turned to the now familiar trope, time travel. Thee apes, apes that in the first film believed flight to be a physical impossibility, have figured out the operation of an advanced spacecraft repaired it, launched it, and through a freak incident are thrown back in time to 1973. So instead of a story about men on a planet of apes, it is a story of apes stranded on a world of fearful humans. While there are a number of comical bits, this film does plumb interesting depths. What actions are morally justified to prevent a terrible future from coming into reality? What is the place of the outsider?

Something I only noticed on this viewing is the continuity of a secondary character. In Planet of the Apes the flight is done in part to prove Dr Hasslein’s theories, but not much more than that is mentioned of the good doctor. (Clearly a script stand-in for relativity and Einstein.) Beneath mentioned the good doctor not at all, but in Escape he is a principle character. (Played wonderfully by Eric Braeden, who also star in another 70’s SF film in my library, Colossus: The Forbin Project.)

The ape time-travelers quickly transit from curiosities, to celebrities, and into hunted fugitives. Though they find allies, second appearance of the producer’s while as a kind and sympathetic vet, in the end there are more enemies than friends. Like so often in film of the 1970’s it ends darkly, but the producers this time left themselves a thread for another film and this upcoming Sunday I’ll watch Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.

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Sunday Night Movie: Planet of the Apes(1968)

I guess my essay series on influential SF films has –eh hm – influenced my selection for this week’s Sunday night Movie.
planet-of-the-apesReleased in 1968 Planet of the Apes would certainly be on the short list for best SF movies of that or any decade, but I can tell you that it is not one of the two films I selected as most influential from the 1960s.
While Planet of the Apes spawned 4 direct sequels, two television series’, 1 re-make and 2 sequels to the remakes, I would say that it’s impact beyond the franchise is limited primary to its advancement of special effect make-up.
The said it is a marvelous piece of political parable, taking the explosive issues of race relations and dealing with it under disguise of SF adventure.
The film concerns a crew of astronauts launched from Earth in the early 1970’s, ah the halcyon optimistic days when we simply assumed that our trajectory in space exploration would bend upward as sharply as a Saturn V thrusting for the moon, that through traveling at near the speed of light and by the use of cold-sleep, find themselves thousands of years in the future, crashed on a planet orbiting a star in the constellation Orion.
The surviving crew is made up of a scientific idealist who would ‘walk naked into a volcano’ if it meant he learned something no one else every knew, a egotist for whom glory has driven him to this one-way mission, and a misanthropist for whom mankind is something to be despised and dreams of finding something better than humanity amongst the stars.
Aside from a crashed ship, limited supplies, and inter-personal conflict, the mission is threatened when the crew discovers that this planet has humans, but one that have never progressed beyond mute animals, and that the dominate life are apes.
Captured and experimented upon, it reduces down to one survivor who eventually unlocks the puzzle of the planet, and despairs as the answer.
Truly a classic film, this one is well worth the viewing, and I am quite happy to have it on blu-ray. (As part of a boxed set containing all five of the original films.) If you have never seen it, crawl out from under that rock you hide under and do see it at once.

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Sunday Night Movie: Logan’s Run

So last night I settled in for something a little meaty and without a lot of the fast paced editing, pointless explosions, and gratuitous action that so plagues genres films today, Logan’s Run.

logans_runLogan’s Run is a 1976 Science-Fiction film made before that great behemoth Star Wars derailed Science-Fiction films for a generation. The film, based on a novel of the same name written by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, is set in a utopian 23rd century. Crime, disease, hunger, war, and pollution, are all problems of a literally forgotten past. The story is set in an unnamed city, protected from the war-torn hell that scars the Earth by massive domes, where the citizens lead lives dedicated to frivolity and hedonistic pleasures. Families no longer exist, and people are raised in crèches without ever knowing their parents. All their needs are met, the city is government by a benevolent computer system called the Network, and it all works seamlessly.

Of course if it all worked seamlessly there would be no conflict, no plot, and no story. Logan 6, the main character, is a Sandman. He is a Blade Runner long before that term ever came into existence, except he doesn’t hunt down wayward androids with dreams of electric sheep, he hunts down people who refuse to willing die on their ‘last day.’ You see this perfectly machined society works in total balance because everyone dies at thirty. The crystal in your hand flashes and it’s time for you to ride the carousel, where in theory you have a chance or resetting your clock, but in reality it’s where you die. If you don’t ride the Carousel you run, and then the Sandmen chase you down and kill you.

The system isn’t as perfect as everyone accepts and Logan is soon charged with finding the hiding place of over a thousand runners who have successfully evaded the Sandmen and vanished from the Network’s omniscient eye. To do this He’ll have to play the part of a runner, that most dangerous of assignments for any cop, undercover with the enemy.

The movie stars Michael York as Logan 6, Jenny Agutter as Jessica 5 a woman who knows something of the hidden runner (and I saw her in a feature film just this year, can you name it?), and Richard Jordan as Francis 7, Logan’s best friend and fellow Sandman. While many of the effect are truly dated, this is a film that has something interesting to say. It is a film made during that time when SF was growing up in Hollywood and many of the plots stopped being for children or teenagers and turned to truly adult themes. Sadly that period ended under the crushing weight of Star Wars’ box office take.

 

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