Now Screening - What Are You Watching Right Now?

[struth]

Going to watch the second disc of Traffik tonight....quite a chilling drama this, and worth the watching if it comes back on tv.

[struth]

That was a fabulous series. 6 episodes in told....very powerful stuff; you forget just how when you have to seen it for a while. All the actors did a fantastic job.




....time to lighten the mood, so am now watching Red Dwarf....again..........Motzart wrote twinkle twinkle little star by the time he was 5.......I was barely toilet trained by then........

[struth]

Tonight, a little later than usual, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn go down the The Luangwa River in the African Queen to sink the German gunboat the Konigin Luise.
Made in 1951, and directed by John Huston, this original tale by C.S. Forester could not have been better done.

In "The Making of 'The African Queen,' or How I Went to Africa with Bogie, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind", (title containing references to Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and John Huston) Katharine Hepburn described the first day of shooting. Five cars and trucks were needed to take the cast, crew and equipment 3.5 miles from Biondo to the Ruiki river. There, they loaded everything onto boats and sailed another 2.5 miles to the shooting location. Press materials and contemporary articles detailed the perils of shooting on location in Africa, including dysentery, malaria, contaminated drinking water, and several close brushes with wild animals and poisonous snakes. Most of the cast and crew were sick for much of the filming. In a February 1952 New York Times article, John Huston said he hired local natives to help the crew, but many would not show up for fear that the filmmakers were cannibals.
To show her disgust with the amount of alcohol that John Huston and Humphrey Bogart consumed during filming, Katharine Hepburn drank only water. As a result, she suffered a severe bout of dysentery (that'll teach her for being down on whisky) . According to cameraman Jack Cardiff, Katharine Hepburn was so sick with dysentery during shooting of the church scene that a bucket was placed off camera because she vomited constantly between takes. Cardiff called her "a real trouper." In "The Making of The African Queen (1951)" Hepburn said she rushed for the outhouse only to find a black mamba inside, then ran to the trees.

With a $1 mil budget the African Queen made $11 mil at the US boxoffice alone, and was on of the most sucessful films of the year, concluding in Bogart winning an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role(his one and only, which is ridiculous now as he was imho the best actor alive in his time)

A myth has grown that the scenes in the reed-filled riverbank were filmed in Dalyan, Turkey. But Katharine Hepburn's published book (p. 118) on the filming states 'We were about to head... back to Entebbe, but John Huston wanted to get shots of Bogie and me in the miles of high reeds before we come out into the lake...". The reeds sequence was thus shot on location in Africa (Uganda and Congo) and London studios.

Most of the action takes place aboard a boat – the African Queen of the title – and scenes on board the boat were filmed using a large raft with a mockup of the boat on top. Sections of the boat set could be removed to make room for the large Technicolor camera. 'The African Queen' sank and had to be raised twice during filming of the movie. Lauren Bacall quoted "The natives had been told to watch it and they did. They watched it sink." (its the way I tell'em!)

Will be watching the recently released BLURAY Special Restoration Version from ITV Studios which includes commentary from cinematographer Jack Cardiff ...meant to say the restore was by far the best I have ever seen, and if you like this film then this is the version to go for as it looks like it was shot yesterday.

[struth]

Only one word for that "Stunning"


...now on to some Dwarf.....I need some vibes

[Spectral Morn]

Babylon 5 - Third Space

Wonderful story, creepy and haunting mixing elements of HP Lovecraft with space opera. One of the best B5 stories.


Regards Neil

[struth]

Getting the complete works for The Boy for his xmas pressie...He loves it.....have to say ashamedly I dont think I've seen it, but I dare say he'll give me a loan ......

[Spectral Morn]

Getting the complete works for The Boy for his xmas pressie...He loves it.....have to say ashamedly I dont think I've seen it, but I dare say he'll give me a loan ......

Its a great series though Season One is a wee bit weak in places and it is setting the scene for what is to follow.

Third Space is one of the movie specials, stand alone story about a very ancient artefact found that is a gateway to another reality - on the other side an entire armada of very xenophobic creatures that are about as nasty a bunch ever used in the series are waiting to wipe all life out.

In my opinion one of the best sci-fi series ever - hope you enjoy it Grant.


Regards Neil

[Gazjam]

Its a great series though Season One is a wee bit weak in places and it is setting the scene for what is to follow.

Third Space is one of the movie specials, stand alone story about a very ancient artefact found that is a gateway to another reality - on the other side an entire armada of very xenophobic creatures that are about as nasty a bunch ever used in the series are waiting to wipe all life out.

In my opinion one of the best sci-fi series ever - hope you enjoy it Grant.


Regards Neil

Agree with Neil, it was a landmark in TV sci-fi. Was blown away by it when I first saw it.
Ahead of its time, mainly down to the great writing I thought.

Had a direct effect on me as being a computer nerd when younger I couldn't believe the special effects were done on an Commodore Amiga!
Got into digital art and 3D because I saw B5 and thought I might have a bash at that...

[struth]

Watching the cruel sea on film 4. Made in 1952 and starring Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden. Stanley Baker loved his "snorkers". Apparently he did in real life

[struth]

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey is tonight's film. Starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester and Douglas Rain as Hal 9000 Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.


The film is structured into four distinct acts. Daniel Richter plays the character "Moonwatcher" in the first act, and William Sylvester plays Dr. Heywood R. Floyd in the second. Keir Dullea (as Dr. David Bowman) and Gary Lockwood (as Dr. Frank Poole) star in the third act as the two astronauts on their voyage to Jupiter on board the spacecraft Discovery One, with Douglas Rain as the voice of the sentient computer HAL 9000 who has full control over their spacecraft. The fourth and final act of the film follows the journey of astronaut David Bowman "beyond the infinite".

Budget was about $10 mil but incredibly it returned $190 mil in the world boxoffice. Various locations as diverse as the Western Isles and Monument Valley were used by Stanley Kubrick to make what has been said to be "the picture that science fiction fans of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed that the industry might some day make.
Music is mostly to the fore here with dialogue at a premium. Khachaturian's Gayane, Strauss's The Blue Danube Richard Strauss's tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra are among the classical pieces on offer. Alex North had been commissioned to do a score but Kubrick decided to ditch it and go with the classic classics. North did not know of the abandonment of the score until after he saw the film's premiere screening (he apparently said ).

Kubrick was the first director to use front projection with retroreflective matting in a main-stream movie, Kubrick chose the technique to produce the backdrops for the African scenes showing ape-men against vast natural-terrain backgrounds, as traditional techniques such as painted backdrops or rear-projection did not produce the realistic look Kubrick demanded. In addition to the "Dawn of Man" sequence, the front-projection system was used to depict astronauts walking on the Lunar surface with the Moon base in the background. The technique has been used widely in the film industry since 2001 pioneered its use, although starting in the 1990s it has been increasingly replaced by blue/green screen systems.
The coloured lights in the Star Gate sequence were accomplished by slit-scan photography of thousands of high-contrast images on film, including op-art paintings, architectural drawings, Moiré patterns, printed circuits, and crystal structures. Known to staff as "Manhattan Project", the shots of various nebula-like phenomena, including the expanding star field, were coloured paints and chemicals swirling in a pool-like device known as a cloud tank, shot in slow-motion in a dark room. The live-action landscape shots in the 'Star Gate' sequence were filmed in the Hebridean islands, the mountains of northern Scotland, and Monument Valley (U.S.A.). The strange colouring and negative-image effects in these shots were achieved by the use of different colour filters in the process of making dupe negatives.

Stanley Kubrick an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and the film also won 4 BAFTA's.

In 2002, the French film maker William Karel (after initially planning a straight documentary on Stanley Kubrick) directed a mockumentary about the supposed Stanley Kubrick involvement in faking the NASA Apollo Lunar landing titled Dark Side of the Moon. He had the cooperation of Kubrick's surviving family and some NASA personnel (all of whom appear using scripted lines) and used recycled footage of members of the Nixon administration taken out of context. The film purported to demonstrate that the NASA Lunar landings had been faked and that the footage had been directed by Stanley Kubrick during the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In discussing the film, director Karel said

Navigating carefully between lies and truth, the film mixes fact with pure invention. We will use every possible ingredient: 'hijacked' archive footage, false documents, real interviews which have been taken out of context or transformed through voice-over or dubbing, staged interviews by actors who reply from a script ...

This is not an 'ordinary' documentary. Its intent is to inform and entertain the viewer, but also to shake him up, make him aware of the fact that television can get it wrong (intentionally or not). We want to achieve this aim by using a universally known event (the landing on the Moon) that is surrounded by question marks (which is a fact) and spin some tale around it, that sounds plausible but isn't a fact (although there are elements in it that are real!).

When the film was shown to a group of undergraduate sociology students taking a course on conspiracy theories, many of them mistakenly believed that this was an earnest and serious film. Do it well and you can sell ice cream to the Eskimo's