MOVIES: 15 Films In 15 Minutes

sI got this from a friend on Facebook - OlderMusicGeek

The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it - fifteen films that you've seen that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen that you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. - PS, If I tagged you, it's because I'm genuinely interested to see your list, cuz I think you might have good recommendations that I haven't heard before. :) Plz tag me back.



1. Star Wars: A New Hope (The most important film to me personally, not 100% sure why!)

2. It's A Wonderful Life (What can I say? I relate to Mr George Bailey!)

3. 2001 (one of the first films to really blow my mind)

4. Eraserhead (The film that has probably blown my mind the most. Still have no idea what it's about!)

5. Yellow Submarine (A great fun film with great music. It was kind of mind-blowing for the age when i first saw it!)

6. Wizards (Can't say I like it as much in my 40s as in my 20s. Bbut in my 20s, I went to every showing of that movie I could - Remember this was before vcr's and dvd's - That was the only way to see a movie!)

7. High Fidelity (Totally relate! Being the music geek i am!)

8. Wonder Boys (Again, I relate to both the kid and the old professor. I was/am like each!)

9. (500) Days Of Summer (Just an awesome film about boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy moves on.)

10. Bladerunner (Just a beautiful, well-made film, great message, great blend of film noir and science fiction.)

11. The Wizard Of Oz (Family would go to grandpa and grandma's to watch this cus they had a color tv! And fond memories of my daughter and i watching it!)

12. A Christmas Story (Do i have to say anything?!)

13. Fantastic Planet (Just another film that blew my mind when I first saw it. Still like it now, though not impressed as I was a teen)

14. Rust Never Sleeps (Another midnight movie of my youth. A great concert movie by Neil Young.)

15. Pink Floyd's The Wall (Great well-made movie with great music.)

MOVIES/VIDEOS, TELEVISION/VIDEOS and BOOKS: The Top 7 Most Embarrassing Moments In Science Fiction

This is from the blog, Slice of Scifi. - OlderMusicGeek

The Top 7 Most Embarrassing Moments in Science Fiction
Posted by Sam on Friday, 25 Apr 2008
Submitted by: Mike McCafferty (SoSF Guest Contributor)

A list! An internet list! Ooooh, Shiny! Clickey-clickey!

Let’s face it, despite our brains being larger than that of the general populace, even Sci-fi fans are drawn to internet lists like Mynocks to Kessel running smuggler ships. It would be easy to cobble together another “Top 10 best Sci-Fi series EVAR” that get pushed out by lesser websites, slap it on the site for people to howl that I left off their favorite show and call it a solar day. But that’s not how I roll, peeps.

Instead, I present the worst moments of Sci-Fi. We’re still in a golden age of Sci-fi where every network carries at least one show and we even have a channel that shows only Science Fiction (and wrestling…um, wha?), but that was not always the case. The Cause stumbled for many years and still has missteps of judgment where we all grimace as the skeptics nod their heads and proclaim that Sci-fi is just for kids. So I have cobbled together the top 5 moments, the ones that slow us down or stopped us altogether. They are actually in chronological order, but we do love lists so…

7 . Lost in Space – When they lost their nerve.

Mention Lost in Space nowadays and you instantly think “Danger, Will Robinson”, Dr. Smith’s bumbling idiocy and if that chimp they strapped the phony ears to ever went on a rampage and ripped off a cameraman’s face.

But did you ever watch the first 10 episodes? They were compelling, thoughtful, dangerous stories of a family that’s trying desperately to survive in a hostile universe. Watch the pilot episode and Dr. Smith actually KILLS a guy, and then tries to kill the Robinson family using the reprogrammed robot. Now that’s good sci-fi.

So what happened? Well, for one, it’s hard to justify keeping a guy on your ship who wants to kill you every episode, so the writers had to soften Dr. Smith down. The comedy trio/uncomfortable sexual grouping of Dr. Smith, Will Robinson and The Robot instantly appealed to the youth market and the network seized upon it. From that point on, it became dumbed down, space pirate, camp that resembled the Adam West Batman more than a survival series. Nonetheless, the short-term effect was ratings gold, GOLD I say Will!

The long -term effect was to play into every skeptics hands that Science Fiction was silly, children’s fare. In this case they were right. Well, at least Star Trek was on the same years so it offset the…uh oh…

6. Star Trek – “Spock’s Brain”

Trek fans rejoice! Your long hours of letter writing (present day emailing), picketing NBC (present day sending nuts) and pamphlet circulating (er, blogs?) have done the impossible! You have actually saved your show in a first ever decision from a network! Huzzah, you’ve earned this! Here is the premiere episode of season three: A planet of intellectual morons, ruled by women (no jokes here!) steals Mr. Spock’s Brain and puts in a computer (huh?). Kirk and company beam down with the brainless body of Mr. Spock and are captured by the Sudoku challenged women (no jokes here!) and must free themselves and return Spock’s Brain to it’s body!!

Considered one of the worst of the 79 episodes, “Spock Brain” was the ridiculous, insulting episode served up to the fans following their tireless work to save the show. True, NBC did the series no favors by slashing the budget and shifting it to the Friday at 10pm time slot. Still, the sight of Spock, brainless but controlled by a hat like device, stumbling around put a bad taste in the fans mouths and guaranteed the show would be cancelled.

This of course left William Shatner time to…

5. Bill Shatner Performs Rocket Man.

In the pre-Star Wars 70’s, we almost lost the thread on Sci-Fi. SF Shows were few and far between and films were a joke. Even worse, someone let Shatner out of his cage and he went ahead and recorded his now famous album “The Transformed Man”.

He followed this up with a performance during the Science Fiction awards where he outdid his Star Trek episode “Two Kirks” bit with THREE SHATNERS. The universe shuddered that day as a sweaty Bill spoke his way through the song with two pretaped versions of himself (If they were real, then this becomes Sci-fi’s BEST moment.). The audience, shocked and disoriented mustered applause at the end, but were later found washing those same hands crying “dirty, dirty, dirty!”

I’m not sure many saw the broadcast, but you only need the disaster to happen once for the memories to linger. Speaking of that…

4. The Star Wars Holiday Special – It is the stuff of legend. Let’s see we got:
# 1. A story line set around a family of Wookies who DON’T speak English, leaving us to guess what they are saying.
# 2. Bea Arthur
# 3. A drugged out Carrie Fisher singing some terrible ‘festival of light’ song to the Star Wars theme music.
# 4. Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill sleepwalking through their performances.
# 5. Harvey Korman as a 4 armed cooking show host.
# 6. Art Carney as a friend of the Wookies (Bet you a million dollars he had no idea what a Wookie was before the show. Probably still didn’t after.)
# 7. Jefferson Starship (I can see the pitch “Hell, they got the name ‘Starship’ in their title!”) as a holographic rock and roll band.
# 8. Bea Arthur.

This was a franchise killer if there ever was one. It only aired once and Lucas wisely has destroyed every legal copy around. Unfortunately, for those of us who stayed up and WATCHED the thing, it is seared in our minds as only traumatic events can. Aside from the mildly interesting Boba Fett appearance, this show was a cheaply made, awkwardly produced money grab by Lucas and company. He learned his lesson…until…

3. Jar-Jar Binks! For all the Lucas haters out there, the line of incrimination begins at the Star Wars Christmas Special and runs through Jar-Jar. This cloying, irritating CGI abomination almost instantly reduced any goodwill from a Star Wars fan to the franchise by half. Aside from the fact that he was vaguely racist, he just wasn’t FUNNY, a prerequisite for characters billed as ‘Comic relief’. The only ‘relief’ came when Lucas wisely pushed Jar-Jar into the same vault as the Christmas Special and locked the key. The damage was done and the next two films had to work extra hard to escape the Gungan’s insidious plot to make the second trilogy unwatchable.

2. The Matrix Reloaded

When The Matrix came out, the singularity of Science Fiction had arrived. With amazing special effects, badass fight sequences, Star Wars like mythology and trendy people in trendy (black) clothes, The Matrix showed the world that Sci-Fi could be mainstream and cool.

Then they made a sequel.

Reloaded isn’t terrible, just self-indulgent. Gone was the lean, sharp story telling; replaced now with a bloated plot, too many characters (Jada Pinket? Really?) and too much CGI. What was once a simple story of “Beat the bad guys”, morphed into keymasters, dreadlocked twins and French dudes that we just didn’t care about.

Of course, what I’m really building up to is this: The rave.

Yup, an entire franchise was sacrificed so that hip, trendy people living underground could dance in a sweaty sexy montage. This was when Sci-Fi fans just lowered their heads in their heads in the movie theater and shook it slowly.

1. January 1st, 2001

I’m not talking about the classic Stanley Kubrick movie, I’m talking about the actually date. See the movie 2001 is a masterpiece of Science and Fiction – a best guess as to how the future could/should turn out from one of the world’s smartest scientists and authors. With moon bases, commercial space flight to orbiting space stations and a manned mission to Jupiter, it seemed logical and desirable. After all, the very next year we landed on the Moon. The Frelling Moon!

January 1st, 2001 is embarrassing to all Science fiction fans because we’re still stuck on Earth. 32 years after that film came out and 29 since the last Apollo mission, we still haven’t gone back to the Moon, much less landed on Mars (But we have probed Uranus!) Sure we have the internet, Xbox and the carpool lanes but the basic tenet of Science Fiction to explore has fallen by the wayside and as guardians of the future, we have to take a little blame for it. We can only look to the hazy sky now and know that we missed a golden opportunity. There will be no real life Star Trek, Star Wars or 2001 for our generation. Most people recovered from bad hangovers January 1st, 2001. Science Fiction fans sighed and pulled out their copies of 2010 and 3001, hoping maybe they’ll get one more shot.

Well, there it was. You know what the best part of internet lists are? They’re always right! Let’s print this baby out and put it in a time vault for the next generation to learn from. This is pure gold pressed latinum!

Wuzat? You have a better list?! Well, there’s a comment section on this site, Admiral, use it! Take me to task or tweak the list but be warned: bring your “A” game or you just might make next years list. That is, if there is an internet next year…

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BOOKS: The End of a Science Fiction Great

Arthur C. Clarke led at least three different, extremely successful lives. As a scientist, his work with satellites led to the coining of the term a "Clarke orbit." As a visionary award-winning science fiction author he influenced several generations of writers, became an icon of the SF subculture, and had an award named after him. And, in his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke also became part of movie and pop culture history. - from Jeff VanderMeer's Arthur C. Clarke: An Appreciation of a Life Well-Lived on Omnivarious: Hungry for the Next Good Book

Arthur C Clarke died on March 18th.

And being a big science fiction fan, I was a big appreciator of his work. And I will miss him.

To me, Arthur C Clarke was the best of the "hard" science fiction writers. The ones that dealt with strongly with science and technology. Strangely enough, even though he was writing about science and technology, his books could take on a rather mystical bent, as Childhood's End obviously showed.

He was one of the few writers, in my opinion, whose work improved as he got older. Some people will complain about him writing a bunch of sequels and remakes, but the sequels and remakes had some interesting new ideas - and the plot, characterizations, mood and just plain storytelling was much better than in the earlier work. His best ideas for stories may have been in the past, but his best STORIES were the later ones!

Below are some excerpts from remembrances written for him. - OlderMusicGeek

The Science Friday Blog
Thank You, Arthur C. Clarke
posted by Ira Flatow on Tuesday, March 18. 2008

Arthur C. Clarke, author of more than 100 books including the one that made him known to many more millions, "2001: A Space Odyssey," has passed from us.

Thank you for your passion and your prose. Thank you for your vision.
Thank you for speaking out on important issues, for not keeping silent.

We all have favorite scenes, chapters or quotes from his novels or movies.

But my favorite remains this one not published in any novel: Years after missions to the moon had ended, Clarke was asked what he thought was the most amazing part of the whole race to the moon.

What's most amazing to me, he said, was that we could go there...and not go back.

Posted by Ira Flatow on Tuesday, March 18, 2008, 3:40 PM | Comment (1)

From BBC News...

British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in his adopted home of Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

"Sir Arthur has left written instructions that his funeral be strictly secular," his secretary, Nalaka Gunawardene, was quoted as saying by news agency AFP.

She said the author had requested "absolutely no religious rites of any kind".

He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and foresaw the concept of communication satellites.

When asked why he never patented his idea for communication satellites, he said: "I did not get a patent because I never thought it will happen in my lifetime."

In the 1940s, he maintained man would reach the moon by the year 2000, an idea dismissed at the time.

"I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these, I would like to be remembered as a writer."

Clarke says goodbye to fans in 2007

From CNN....

David Eicher, editor of Astronomy magazine, told CNN that Clarke's writings were influential in shaping public interest in space exploration during the 1950s and '60s. Watch how Clarke stands among sci-fi giants »

"He was very interested in technology and also in humanity's history and what lay out in the cosmos," Eicher said. His works combined those "big-picture" themes with "compelling stories that were more interesting and more complex than other science fiction writers were doing," he said.

More from Jeff VanderMeer's Arthur C. Clarke: An Appreciation of a Life Well-Lived on Omnivarious: Hungry for the Next Good Book...

Over his lifetime, Clarke received many honors, including being knighted and having the Apollo 13 Command Module and the Mars Orbiter both named "Odyssey" in appreciation of his work. Clarke remained a vital force up until his death. He authored books, made appearances via videophone from his home in Sri Lanka, and continued to deny the polio that had kept him mostly wheelchair-bound for two decades.

Arthur C. Clarke's fiction embodied a fundamental optimism about the future, tempered by a healthy skepticism about the human condition and an ongoing fascination with certain forms of spirituality. Unlikely to indulge in dystopic visions, but rarely sentimental or unrealistic, Clarke was, quite simply, curious about the world.

From the New York Times....

An Appraisal: For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: March 20, 2008

Such apocalypse is the bread and butter of science fiction, but sometimes with Mr. Clarke it is also the communion, the sharing of a moment of transcendence in which some destiny is fulfilled, some possibility opened up. Hence the fetus of “2001.” That transformation may also not be something to be desired by current standards. The prospects are just too alien, like the ineffable Overmind in “Childhood’s End” that propels humanity to a new evolutionary stage, inspiring as much horror as awe.

This side of Mr. Clarke’s work may be the most eerie, particularly because his mystical speculations accompany an uncanny ability to envision worlds that are eminently plausible. It is Mr. Clarke who first conceived of the communication satellites that orbit directly over a single spot on Earth and allow the planet to be blanketed in a network of signals. There are many other examples as well.

But acts of reason and scientific speculation are just the beginning of his imaginings. Reason alone is insufficient. Something else is required. For anyone who read Mr. Clarke in the 1960s and ’70s, when space exploration and scientific research had an extraordinary sheen, his science fiction made that enterprise even more thrilling by taking the longest and broadest view, in which the achievements of a few decades fit into a vision of epic proportions reaching millenniums into the future. It is no wonder that two generations of scientists were affected by his work.

For all his acclaimed forecasting ability, though, it is unclear whether Mr. Clarke knew precisely what he saw in that future. There is something cold in his vision, particularly when he imagines the evolutionary transformation of humanity. He leaves behind all the things that we recognize and know, and he doesn’t provide much guidance for how to live within the world we recognize and know. In that sense his work has little to do with religion.

But overall religion is unavoidable. Mr. Clarke famously — and accurately — said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Perhaps any sufficiently sophisticated science fiction, at least in his case, is nearly indistinguishable from religion.

A remembrance for Arthur C Clarke from NPR's All Things Considered
A remembrance for Arthur C Clarke from NPR's Morning Edition