Escapes! The Underworld! A Detective! ROBOT!!!!! All of those, and more, in a film serial from 1920!

Perhaps the first Science Fiction feature film in the UK, the 1913 re-imagining of A Christmas Carol is a silent film that explores the cold dead heart of a selfish man as it's re-heated. Perhaps influenced by the early Social Issues films that were popping up both in the US and UK, and most likely influencing them, it's a film with a soul and a lot of what we look for when we watch early silents. 

The most important Science Fiction Film ever made? We'll see about that!

Devotees will recall that The Drink Tank, which was my Hugo-winning fanzine which ran from 2005-2015, ran a series called 52 Weeks to Science Fiction Film Literacy which came out semi-regularly from 2010 to 2011. I was gonna try and turn it into a book, but instead, I realised it's much easier to speak than to re-type!

And then I went and changed things up! 

So, new films (About 1/3 of the previous edition will be back) and new takes on each. I'll also be doing a few interviews and including them as well. 

Registry - A Podcast will be slightly on hiatus (until the new National Film Registry list comes out in Dec) and which Three Minute Modernist will still be regular, this is gonna take a lot of my attention. 

The first episode, which will also start with A Trip to the Moon, will be out... shortly. 

Walt Disney's last great promotional video, EPCOT looks at a vision the company was never able to realise! Does it deserve a place on the Registry? Find out!

If you're like me, the voice of Paul Freas is what you think of when you hear the word 'authoritative'. His resounding tones speak of factuality, and thus you trust him. It may have something to do with his work on The Haunted Mansion in Disneyland.

​Here, we're presented with SCIENCE!!! Specifically, we're talkin' satellites. Say what you will about Walt Disney, but he was dedicated to producing science content, and a big part of the explosion in interest in space was due to his documentaries, which were advised by the legendary Werner von Braun. 

The film uses a wonderful formula - introduce with file footage, go to a comedic animated section, then speculative and informational stuff. It's gorgeous, of course, and Ward Kimbal's influence is all over the animation. 

The impact of Victorian catalog cutouts is a long trail that runs through several important filmmakers, most notably Lawrence Jordan and Terry Gilliam. The first feature film I can think of that used the technique, was Harry Smith's legendary film Heaven + Earth Magic, which was cut several times between 1957 and 1962. The Grand old man of Avant Garde, Jonas Mekas, was the one who gave it a name. 

This is not a non-narrative film, it tells a story of... well, all sorts of things. It's a fun, and surprisingly dark, film. I love the feeling it gives off, as if you're inside of one of Joseph Cornell's boxes, watching the rather disparate pieces interact in a fashion that defines the entire film as surrealist, as opposed to Dadaist. There is a meaning, a story of a fashion, but it's not one of our world, of our time, but of a timeless, world-less place, and that makes it phenomenally powerful. 

Of course, this brings me to Gilliam. Hiis Monty Python animations certainly show the influence of Smith's work, as well as Lawrence Jordan, and he took it to  a comedy place, toning down the artistic nature and playing it for laughs. Smith and Jordan's works are playful, but never comedic. 

Sometimes, film programmers make mistakes. It happens. Twice, while programming Cinequest, we discovered that we'd passed over films that were nominated for the Oscar. I once passed up a film by a legendary documentary director that just hadn't added the titles to their film yet. It happens. 

I passed on Sriracha.

Griffin Hammond's documentary that details the impact of my third favorite sauce made my long-list, but when we get two dozen documentaries that were all incredible (including an eventual Oscar nominee) you've gotta make the hard cuts. I believe my notes were pretty clean - "Starts amazingly strong, goes a bit too much into the voice of the director. Also, I know really wanna make my Chili-Garlic Chicken."

(OK, here's the recipe - 6 boneless, skinless chicken, one small jar Huy Fong Chili Garlic sauce, 1/2 cup dark brown sugar, salt and pepper. Throw the chicken into a zip-lok bag, add the sugar and sauce, massage it until it's all covered and put into the fridge for a day or two. Grill it up, add salt and pepper to taste before you serve)

The story of Sriracha is phenomenal, and fascinating, but as a film programmer, you've got to consider things like the tone of the program (in our Doc program that year, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb as we had a lot of heavy docs, and two comedy docs, but nothing that really played like a informational, which is what Sriracha is at its heart. The story is amazing, and some of the techniques employed are phenomenal, and as a Hulu view, it's more than ideal. It just didn't quite fit in with the doc program. Plus, it was longer than anything we programmed that year, which is also often on consideration. 

Still, go and watch it because it's really well-done (especially the intro segment) and will make you want to drown a bowl of pho in delicious spicy saucy goodness. 

You can find more at http://srirachamovie.com

Fan Films provide an important service. If a show goes away, often it is these films that best display the impact of the work. Sometimes, they show a completely ignored side of the work, as in Inspector Spacetime, a minor bit of Community that has taken off into its own fandom. 

Here, Fan-o-Rama takes Futurama and makes it into a live-action bit of strange. The production values are huge, and a couple of the characterizations are down-right creepy. 
The trailer shows that this will be an amazing piece of recontextualization, bringing the characters that are so closely tied to their animated forms into a 'real' world scenario, and if all goes well, a fun bit of story-telling. 

A wonderfully flawed film starring Lloyd Bridges kicks off our look at the science fiction films of the 1950s!