Colin Cantwell, Rocket Man. This morning, I woke up to read that Colin Cantwell–a name I’ve known since my teens, and a man I had the pleasure of meeting three years ago–passed away at age 90, after a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. No, his name may not be a household name in special effects, like…
Tag: #2001:ASpaceOdyssey
Preparing to meet thy “Dune”; how and why I’m seeing it at home, too…
Dune It Yourself. The highly anticipated “Dune” adaptation from director Denis Villeneuve (“Blade Runner 2049,” “Arrival”) is out in theaters today, and it is also being streamed until November 21st on HBOMax (no extra fees or codes needed beyond an existing HBOMax subscription). With the highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus still wreaking havoc…
At-home projection: How I learned to love my movie collection all over again…
The Early Years… Viewing movies at home is hardly a new thing; the technology has been commonplace for around 40 years now. But I’m old enough to remember when it wasn’t common at all. In fact, for most of my childhood, up until about age of 16 or so (circa 1983), television was, in my…
“2010: The Year We Make Contact” (1984): 35 years of a future past…
*****MONOLITH-SIZED SPOILERS AHEAD!***** Back in 1984, the Cold War was in full swing. Soviet Russia (before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union) was the binary enemy of the United States; they were the ‘commie pinkos’ and we were the ‘capitalist swine’ (even in those days, I never bought that propaganda). The US space shuttle…
Revisiting “2001: A Space Odyssey” theatrically for its 50th anniversary…
First, I want to apologize to any regular readers for the lack of fresh content for the last couple weeks (feels like forever ago to me). Between Halloween (a very big deal at my house) and most of an Election Day week spent nauseously nervous, things have been a bit crazy around here. Secondly, I…
San Diego Comic Con 2018: Day One Megapost…
Last night was Preview Night; the champagne bottle breaking on the four-day geek mecca known as San Diego Comic Con. Today was Day One. Let the revelry begin! Earlier this year, I wrote a 50th anniversary salute to one of my favorite movies of all-time; “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Today I attended an anniversary panel for the film….
“2001: A Space Odyssey”: 50 years of a future that never was…
Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) is (truly) one of my favorite movies of all time. If I could take only three DVDs with me to a remote island (assuming I had a DVD player that ran on coconut juice), this movie would be one of them. Now I don’t mean it’s the best…
Retro-futures: reimagining the future from the past up…
Having recently been awed by the superior sequel “Blade Runner 2049” I was intrigued that the future depicted in the film’s 2049 was not a future based from our current 2017. BR2049 shows a 2049 projected from the 2019 we saw in the original “Blade Runner” of 1982. A future complete with ads from now defunct…
Why Sci-Fi?
This post is going to be a personal exploration as much as an exposition, since I’m not quite sure what the final answer to the headline will be, but I’m curious to find out: why do I enjoy science fiction so much? There are certainly plenty of other genres out there. There’s comedy, horror, drama,…
Visions of Futures Past…
We’re a few years shy of two decades into the 21st century, and I’m a graying, spectacled, middle-aged geek who’s now living in the “future”of his childhood. And so far it’s not quite the future I imagined in my youth. Parts of it still amaze me, but the bulk of it is very underwhelming and more…