Posts

Contact (1997)

  Contact (1997)   I think everyone who loves SF started with loving Spaceships. As we grew, we might’ve been drawn to other narrative Sub-Genres more, Near-Future, Post-Apocalyptic, Time-Travel, etc, but in the English-speaking world it was almost always about the Spaceships, and there are Historical reasons for this.   Between 1937 and 1949, there was virtually no SF cinema in the English-speaking World except Children’s Serials, and the most beloved of these was the Space Opera “Flash Gordon” (Serial Film Franchise began in 1936, continued to 1940, and there were many imitators that followed). Film Serials, brought into a new media, became the cornerstone of SF on TV when that technology first became culturally important in the USA (around 1948) and the first regularly broadcast, original to TV, SF program in the USA was “ Captain Video”  (first aired 1949) which was one of those “Flash Gordon” imitators.   SF would return triumphantly to cinema w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Twelve Monkeys (1995)

  Twelve Monkeys (1995)   James Cole to Kathryn Railly : “I want the future to be unknown. I want to become a whole person again. I want this to be the present. I want to stay here this time, with you. ” -           From “Twelve Monkeys”   Probably the boldest, zero-budget, SF film ever made was Writer/Director Chris Marker’s “La Jette” (1962). It was short film, shot in B&W, and presented as a Slideshow with Narration ( Jean Négroni , the only voice we hear), yet captivated Art House Audiences around the World with its tale of Time Travel and the Inescapability of Fate. It plays with the Confounding and often Fatalistic Concept of a Causal Time Loop, which one of the ways of addressing the narrative issue of a Time Paradox, something no SF Author dare ignore if you have your Characters Time-Travel into the Past, because if you do, you risk changing the Past, and if you change the Past, you’re almost inevitably c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Evolution (2016)

  Evolution (2016)   Among the many cultural transformations that came after WWII (ended 1945) was pressure on parents to speak to their children more realistically about Sex and Reproduction. Under this pressure, I don’t think many parents totally came to the plate as well as they should’ve, but at least silly Myths like Storks Bring Babies started to disappear. My mother trained as a Nurse towards the end and immediately after the War and was influenced by the Writings of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s landmark book was “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” (1946); she was blunt her children; she might not think we were old enough to learn certain things yet so there were questions she wouldn’t answer, she would never tell us the nonsense her mother told her. This obviously is all well and good, but the Mysteries of these things were still overwhelming, perhaps made even weirder because the Lies or Myths that needed to be unlearned later were at least easy to process, whi...
Post a Comment
Read more