NEWS
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SF in film and TV Mars in Vogue An article in the Sept. 27th Los Angeles Times summarizes the various Mars projects currently underway in Hollywood. (This link will only be valid for a day or two.) All the projects focus on the first manned mission to Mars, and have aspirations of achieving realism and technical accuracy.
* Music for Robots The same musical team that scored James Cameron's film Titanic, whose soundtrack album became a 10 million copy bestseller, is at work again on the film version of Isaac Asimov's story ''The Bicentennial Man''. Composer James Horner, singer Celine Dion, and lyricist Will Jennings have recorded a romantic ballad for the Chris Columbus film Bicentennial Man. Horner is composing the instrumental score for the balance of the film. Starring Robin Williams in a robot suit, the film opens this December. * Moments from Movies Entertainment Weekly's September 24th ranking of the 100 ''greatest moments'' in movies (from 1950-2000) includes several from SF, fantasy, and horror films. Ranked in 2nd place is Janet Leigh's shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). In 6th place: the jump-cut from bone to spacecraft in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Most of the selections don't focus on such specific moments; Star Wars is ranked 4th for the impact of its special effects, and The Godfather is ranked first in its entirety. Other notable selections: E.T. 17th; A Clockwork Orange 40th; Dr. Strangelove 45th; Sigourney Weaver in Aliens 54th; Charlton Heston seeing the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes 92nd; and The Blair Witch Project (1999) 86th, for the role the Internet played in its success. * Movies from Novels A discussion in New York City on Thursday Sept. 23rd considered the question of how well Hollywood adapts novels into movies. Authors Walter Mosley, E.L. Doctorow, Scott Turow, and Russell Banks participated in the panel called ''Mangled at the Movies?''. The event was covered both by the New York Times (Sept. 25th) and CNN. Banks recalled director Paul Schrader's observation that films with smaller budgets are most likely to be successful in maintaining the spirit of the book: Somewhere around $14 million you put white hats on the good guys and black hats on the bad guys. [With a lower budget] you can still have ambiguity, explore things that are painful to many people.And Doctorow remarked, ''The absolute ideal thing for me is to have the book bought and never made into a movie''. * New Age Horror A Sept. 16th Salon essay by Michael Sragow contrasts this summer's popular occult/horror films, Stigmata, The Sixth Sense, and Stir of Echoes, with Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, a series where the endings of the episodes aren't always happy or unhappy. Much of the time they are uncertain: They don't reassert the status quo, and they rarely rub your nose in religiosity.Whereas, The fledgling horror moviemakers literalize everything, both to impart an unearned gravity to their scripts and to foster the illusion that, beneath the anarchy and ephemera of millennial life, we're still part of a Great Chain of Being. It's as if they want to bear out our suspicions that the world has gone to hell and uplift us with a glimpse of peace in paradise. * Theater for Cyberpunks A stage version of William Gibson's story ''Burning Chrome'' is currently playing in Los Angeles at Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Drive, Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m., ending October 16th. For information call (310) 281-8337. *
(Mon 27 Sep 1999)
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