Reasons why I love Youtube # 13

On rest of internesk you have to find movies yourself, but on Youtube, Soviet Russia funded Czechoslovakian 60s sci-fi movie that Alex Cox wrote about in The Guardian a couple of weeks back in his Rockets from Russia: great Eastern Bloc science-fiction films piece finds you! Cox's whole essay was fascinating but it was his talk of Jindrich Polák's Icarus XB 1 (also known as Ikarie XB 1 in eastern Europe and Voyage To The End Of The Universe in America, where it was colourised and apparently butchered with an alternate ending) that piqued my interest with the description of it as a bizarre 60s loose-in-space "high-art" sci-fi movie that "anticipated Solaris" and which features "a derelict spacecraft, inhabited by something so strange I can only say it seems to have drifted in from a Buñuel film." Here it is on the 'tube in its entirety as one easily digestable 1:22:48 chunk of a video :



(Click CC for the English subtitles if they're not already working.)

Look to Cox's words in The Guardian piece as the definitive love letter to Icarus XB 1 'cause I'm just bloggin', my G, but, whoa, this flick really is a sight to behold, and I'll make like Herzog if this wasn't as big an influence on the cream of 70s American sci-fi like Alien and John Carpenter's Dark Star as Cox suggests it was on Solaris and that ridiculously overrated pretty picture by the tubby geezer with the beard who was responsible for the worst Auteurist film in American movie history with Eyes Wide Shut until it was usurped from its position in the U-bend by The Tree Of Life.

Another reason why The Guardian should banish Laura Barton from the Film & Music supplement for good is the space she currently occupies could also be used for a more regular missives by Alex Cox. Isn't Barton an entity far more evil than Rebekah Brooks when her articles about shitty indie albums and why earnestness in music is a good thing are taking precedence over Cox's essays such as the ten greatest Spaghetti-Western death scenes and his tribute to Dennis Hopper with the story that John Wayne once wanted to kill Hopper after hearing a rumour he was a Commie or my proposed weekly concurrent columns by Anne Billson and David Thomson? Moreover, isn't The Guardian wilfully employing Tanya Gold a journalistic crime far more dastardly and offensive than the News Of The World hacking into the voicemails of Milly Dowler, the murdered Soham girls, 7/7 victims, Susie Lamplugh, Jamie Bulger, the anorexic bloke from the Manic Street Preachers, Lord Lucan, the 1986 Challenger space shuttle astronauts, D.B. Cooper, 2pac & Biggie, Red Rum and my pal's cat, Tiger, who vanished without trace when he went on holiday back in 1996?