A Forever Question: Half Full

“Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born, I have awaited a question."

Sir. In wrestling is there a move called a drill press?

Where's Winter?

The temperature here in Toronto hit 16 degrees Celsius (61 Fahrenheit) today. Apparently it broke a record set in 2011.

Christmas songs on the radio distort reality.

300,000 Big Ones

One night last week my blog/website received its three hundred thousandth hit. This makes me happy. Any writer scribbles in the name of creativity and "keeping the pencil sharp" without thinking about any popularity contest, but, it's still nice to be read.

Special thanks to all the readers... and electronic scoopers: it's hard to believe that the following post has actually received over twenty-eight thousand discrete hits:

Dorothy "DC" Fontana (1939 - 2019)

https://www.simonstlaurent.ca/2019/12/dorothy-dc-fontana-1939-2019.html

Maybe....

A Forever Question: Zoom In, Eh?

“Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born, I have awaited a question."

Sir. Are we on Michael Snow's wavelength?

A Special DVD Edition at Bay Street Video in Toronto (Repeat)

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things scared me when I saw it at the Terra Theatre in CFB Borden.

That was the first half of a double feature.

Part two was my second screening of Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls, which spooked me when I saw it at the base's Astral Theatre. I had to sit through it again?

That was quite the fright night.

A Trek Forty-Two Years Ago Today

Last evening I was reminded by a tweet that Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released forty-two years ago today. How could I have forgotten? It was a memorable night.

Picture a dozen teenagers meeting at the big picture house to see one of the most anticipated pictures ever. Try and imagine our disappointment when the end credits rolled: not that we wanted the show to go on, but more a case of "that was it?"; or as friend Mike said after he turned to me from the seat to my left: "I thought it would be better than that."

The next morning I shuffled to the living room, where siblings were watching "Wink of an Eye". Is this some sort of joke? An editorial on what I saw last night? You thought this episode was bad? Last night's event flick made "Wink of an Eye" look like a masterpiece?

The passage of time has been kind to ST:TMP.

A Double Feature Challenge (Rescreening)

Watching a home-programmed double feature of Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams movies is easy. We know what we're getting.

On the weekend I went random, self-programming two disparate, in time and place (and style), narrative feature films.

Beyond the Time Barrier (1960 - Edgar Ulmer)
True Stories (1986 - David Byrne)


The first picture I saw a few times in my childhood as it played often on television and at least once at my local movie theatre (the Astral in CFB Borden, Ontario). Watching it as an adult makes one appreciate its themes. For a child it was more about the interesting visual stylings, and chills. (Those horrific mutants.) The environmental theme is up front: testing of nuclear weapons 'back' in the early 1970s led to a horrible plague, all but decommissioning the human race. The survivors moved underground; the human birthrate eventually dropped to zero. There's more, all leading to a memorable ending -- I remembered it for decades. This time, Beyond was better overall than I had remembered it being. The passage of time helped. By the way, the X-80 rocket plane, which flies star Robert Clarke to the astounding year 2024, is in fact a Convair F-102 Delta Dagger.

In the mid 1980s I was a bit of a fan of the band Talking Heads, so it made sense that when band leader David Byrne released his True Stories I would arrive at Toronto's (now gone) Uptown Theatre with bells on. I left slightly disappointed. About a dozen years ago I gave the film another shot, this time on VHS. The loosely connected stories about the quirky but human inhabitants of a fictitious Texas town called Virgil resonated more with this viewer that time around. Spinning the Criterion 2018 DVD release made me appreciate True Stories even more. And there're those always cool Talking Heads tunes.

After my double feature finished I realized that both flicks were filmed in Texas. True Story.


PS: What's next? Maybe Aguirre, the Wrath of God and The Endless Summer.

A Forever Question: Key

“Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born, I have awaited a question."

Sir. Is there a passcode to enter the afterlife?

CD: The Definitive Benny Goodman

The Definitive Benny Goodman

Sony Music Entertainment Inc.

2000

CD: Music from the Hammer Films (TPO)

Music from the Hammer Films

- James Bernard, Christopher Gunning, David Whitaker -

The Philharmonia Orchestra

conducted by

Neil Richardson

Silva Screen Records Ltd.

1989

Picturing: CN Tower Glistens

Book: The Brothers Grimm (Grimm)

The Brothers Grimm

- 101 Fairy Tales -

Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm

Canterbury Classics

2012

Book: Last Stop, The Twilight Zone (Engel)

Last Stop, The Twilight Zone

- The Biography of Rod Serling -

Written by Joel Engel

Antenna Books

(this version)

2019

Book: John Cassavetes Interviews (Oldham)

John Cassavetes

- Interviews -

Edited by

Gabriella Oldham

University Press of Mississippi

2016

Picturing: Pigeons' Obsession

By the time I managed to pull out my camera quite a few pigeons had left the scene. I'm not sure why they were going so squirrelly for this patch of soil. They made a lot of noise.

Film Design: Science Laboratory - Earliest Sketches (Repeat)

Yesterday I posted a piece about my search for a set flat painted pattern. Film Design: Set Wall Panel Patterns featured some of my sketches for a television pilot/demo I independently produced a few years ago.

Affixed above is a very early set sketch for the same show and illustrates how the flats would be positioned in the studio. The flats at this point "floated" and were not interconnected -- that came later. Over pints of beer with a friend (and production partner) I recounted the Time Tunnel set from the old, and very bad, Irwin Allen television series The Time Tunnel.  I liked the idea of a laboratory accessed by some sort of bridge or walkway, which informed my first approach.


My Time Tunnel sketch (click to enlarge)....

And the science laboratory idea from my own project....

A Forever Question: Pomp and Circumstance

“Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born, I have awaited a question."

Sir. In the animal world, are cats royalty?

Documentary on Elwy Yost is Now Streaming

Last night TVOntario premiered its one-hour documentary Magic Shadows, Elwy Yost: A Life in Movies. It was good, the subject matter helped, but it could have been twenty or thirty minutes longer. While I very much like the one-hour doc format -- it works for many subjects -- it can suffer from a broken and fragmented structure when trying to cover a lot of ground.

But, it's definitely worth watching. For those of us who watched faithfully the OECA/TVO programmes Magic Shadows and Saturday Night at the Movies, the memory circuits flooded and oozed last night.

Sunday Fun: Toronto's Got Snow!

This reminded me that last winter Toronto did not get a lot of snow. There were no snowstorms... and no cold snaps, outside of the odd cold day. Apparently, this year we are targeted for more of the white stuff and ice stuff.

A Special Documentary to Air This Coming Saturday

Magic Shadows, Elwy Yost: A Life in Movies is to air on Saturday, November the 27th. And I'm to sit in front of my "tube" tuned to TVOntario at 8pm Toronto time (ET).

Two weeks ago I wrote a little piece on this hot doc.