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!
My sister Jean directed me to this BBC story, about the possibility of caves on Mars. Maybe they’ll find Commander Christopher Draper in one of them!
Sometimes 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]
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/MAR07/RCOM4.flv 400 175]
Here is the last half-hour of Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Director Byron Haskin can be heard at the end saying, “My God! A voice from Mars!”
My friend Bismo reports that he finally has the Netflix Watch Now service. I’ve had some trouble with it. Every so often it insists I don’t have enough available hard drive space, and that’s annoying. My 20 gigabyte C: drive is, I admit, tight but my 200 gigabyte D: drive is wide open.
The movie selection is still rather limited, but the service is a free add-on to the subscription. When the player isn’t telling me I don’t have enough hard drive space, and the connection speed measures high, the picture is DVD quality, as seen in this reduced frame from Fahrenheit 451.
My appreciation of Criterion Collection home video goes back to its beginning, when Citizen Kane and King Kong were released on the old Laserdisc format. The discs included a commentary audio track, and extras such as trailers and production stills. These features are now taken for granted, but 20+ years ago they were exciting and ground-breaking.
Criterion specializes in releasing high-quality specialty videos for titles that are hard-to-find and/or haven’t been presented properly. Mike Dobbs has posted some interesting background on a new Criterion set of low-budget horror and sci-fi movies, including a couple that feature Bill Pratt, aka Boris Karloff. I’ll be looking for these cheesy classics on Netflix, but when will there be a Queen of Outer Space DVD?
