I remember clearly a bit of frustration from my youth. I had read the Isaac Asimov novelization of the film “Fantastic Voyage” and I desperately wanted to see the movie. I have always been a fan of film and fantastic genre fiction particularly so. The problem was that this was the 1970s. There were no Blu-rays, DVDS, VHSs or Betamaxes around to sate one’s entertainment cravings.
The town I lived in did not have a revival theater, and all I could do was searched the listing on the weekly TV Guide and hope that some station like TBS , which aired a lot of films, would pay it.
I remember weeks of searching the guides, with no indication of an upcoming presentation, only my fondest hopes for one. It didn’t appear.
This weekend on a whim while scanned through the instant view option at Netflix I started watching Fantastic Voyage. Now I had seen it in the intervening years, so I was not watching to to satisfy that unscratched itch from decades past. It was just a way to pass the time and look at the filmmaking of years gone by.
However it did get me thinking about those months when I forlornly hoped against reality that it would appear in the listings.
We truly live in an age of Science-Fiction, so many treasures await our pleasures. We are approaching a film lover’s paradise.
From my basic knowledge of the facts I did not spot any glaring inconsistencies and the film was written and produced with a minimum of political bias.
say good-bye to their patrons and Lawrence was Saturday’s. In a happy turn of events, the landlords and the business found common ground, apparently after the ground-swell of support from the community, and the Ken will not be closing, so these special presentations became a celebration rather than a wake.
been a choice of mine and I do not regret that, but when I arrived I knew no one in this town. First the first few months my only recreation were movies and one of my favorite places to visit, though the bus ride was tedious, was the revival house, the Ken Theater.
however proved to be too lengthy for the time I had to watch a film. I settled on a classic Samurai movie, Yojimbo.
films of the later 50’s and early 60’s. It was filmed in black-and white, with highly restricted locales to capture that low budget sensation so prevalent in the films it lovingly mocks. The film’s charm works best if you have, like myself, instead of developing normal social skills, wasted your youth watching SF and horror movies late night on the weekends. The special effects are absolutely non-special, the acting is so deliberately bad that it makes most local high school productions appear to be the Royal Shakespearean, (Though it must be said it is not easy to act bad and let everyone in on the joke. ) and the dialog sets back the cause of intelligence and sexual equality. All of this make the film funny and in my opinion well worth the time.
mother and brother in a trailer park in the boonies of California. The location is so isolated and so very little happens that even an event so minor such as Alex breaking the record on an arcade video game will draw a crowd.