Category: Sci-Fi

God Bless You, Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has died. He wasn’t young, and he was way older than he had a right to be, considering he never quit smoking, but it still sucks that he’s gone. Vonnegut wrote The Sirens of Titan, a book that l enjoyed reading very much, and he wrote the wonderful TV movie called Between Time and Timbuktu. It was produced by WGBH in Boston for PBS, back when it was called National Educational Television. The movie opened with Cousin Brucie, so I had to love it. It’s not available on video, sorry to say. The show also featured the comedy team of Bob and Ray, who got their start on Boston radio. Ray Goulding was absolutely hilarious in Between Time and Timbuktu as Walter Gesundheit, a parody of the legendary TV newsman Walter Cronkite.

Shameless, Thy Name Is Shatner

OK, OKLAHOMA gave you enough happiness. Now it’s time to be weirded out.

For decades, in hushed whispers at Star Trek conventions there were rumors uttered of something so utterly bizarre, so totally strange, that few believed its existence. For it was too offbeat, even for William Shatner, who has had so much to live down in his life — embarrassments, gaffs, bad toupees, awful attempts at singing matched only by Leonard Nimoy, the suspicious drowning of a wife… and more.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/APR07/IncubusPreview.flv 400 300]

And yet … and yet … there was something so undeniably irresistible about it. A movie. A horror movie that Shatner made before Trek. A movie spoken entirely in Esperanto. A movie called Incubus!

I’d forgotten all about Incubus long ago, so thanks go to my friend Tom for pointing out that it’s been released on DVD.

Netflix Fix

Red Dwarf

The latest update to the Netflix Watch Now player seems to have fixed a problem it was having with correctly determining the available space on my C: drive. Of course, what it should really have is the ability to look for other drives. It would find my D: drive much more spacious.

Netflix has added episodes of Red Dwarf, a British sci-fi TV series my brother-in-law Jim turned me onto years ago. If Black Adder shows up online, then I’ll really be happy!

An Audience of One

audienceofone.pngSometimes the story behind something is more interesting than the something itself. And there is no better example of that than the independently produced documentary An Audience of One, premiering this weekend at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, TX.

Made by Mike Jacobs, the something that An Audience of One is about is described as…

A Pentecostal minister receives a vision from God to create an epic science fiction movie based on the bible story of Joseph, sending he and his followers on a journey of extreme faith.

Click here for a 10-minute audio interview on NPR with the director of the documentary, and the preacher turned wannabe director.

The trailer that’s at the link provided above for the festival is in MPEG4 and Quicktime, which are both problematical formats, so I’ll post it here in friendly Adobe Flash video.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/MAR07/AudienceofOne.flv 400 300]