Victoria Warmerdam, the writer and director of the short film, “I’m Not a Robot,” summarizes the plot of her 22-minute film as follows: The film “tells the story of Lara, a music producer who spirals into an existential crisis after repeatedly failing a CAPTCHA test—leading her to question whether she might actually be a robot. Through a dark comedic lens, [the film] explores themes of identity, self-determination, love, and technology in a world where the line between humanity and artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly blurred.” This past weekend, “I’m Not a Robot” won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short, marking the first time a Dutch short film received this honor. Distributed by The New Yorker, “I’m Not a Robot” can be viewed free online. We’re adding it to our collection of 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson may not be a film critic. But if you watch the video above from his Youtube channel StarTalk Plus, you’ll see that — to use one of his own favorite locutions — he loves him a good science fiction movie. Given his professional credentials as an astrophysicist and his high public profile as a science communicator, it will hardly come as a surprise that he displays a certain sensitivity to cinematic departures from scientific fact. His personal low watermark on that rubric is the 1979 Disney production The Black Hole, which moves him to declare, “I don’t think they had a physicist in sight of any scene that was scripted, prepared, and filmed for this movie.”
As for Tyson’s “single favorite movie of all time,” that would be The Matrix, despite how the humans-as-batteries concept central to its plot violates the laws of thermodynamics. (Over time, that particular choice has been revealed as a typical example of meddling by studio executives, who thought audiences wouldn’t understand the original script’s concept of humans being used for decentralized computing.) The Matrix receives an S, Tyson’s highest grade, which beats out even the A he grants to Ridley Scott’s The Martian, from 2015, “the most scientifically accurate film I have ever witnessed” — except for the dust storm that strands its protagonist on Mars, whose low air density means we would feel even its highest winds as “a gentle breeze.”
You might expect Tyson to poke these sorts of holes in every sci-fi movie he sees, no matter how obviously schlocky. And indeed he does, though not without also showing a healthy respect for the fun of filmgoing. Even Michael Bay’s notoriously preposterous Armageddon, whose oil-drillers-defeat-an-asteroid conceit was mocked on set by star Ben Affleck, receives a gentleman’s C. While it “violates more laws of physics per minute than any other film ever made,” Tyson explains (noting it’s since been outdone by Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall), “I don’t care that it violated the law of physics, because it didn’t care.” For a more scientifically respectable alternative, consider Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, the lesser-known of 1998’s two Hollywood asteroid-disaster spectacles.
If you’re thinking of holding a Tyson-approved sci-fi film festival at home, you’ll also want to include The Quiet Earth, The Terminator, Back to the Future, Contact, and Gravity, not to mention the nineteen-fifties classics The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Blob. But whatever else you screen, the experience would be incomplete without 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s joint vision of man in space. “Am I on LSD, or is the movie on LSD?” he asks. “One of us is on LSD for the last twenty minutes of the film.” But “what matters is how much influence this film had on everything — on everything — and how much attention they gave to detail.” If you’ve ever seen 2001 before, go into it with an open mind — and bear in it the fact that, as Tyson underscores, it was all made a year before we reached the moon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Even if you’ve never read Frank Herbert’s Dune, you may well have encountered its adaptations to a variety of other media: comic books, video games, board games, television series, and of course films, David Lynch’s 1984 version and Denis Villeneuve’s two-parter earlier this decade. But before any of those came Dune, the jazz-funk album by keyboardist and bandleader David Matthews. Released in 1977 on the popular jazz label CTI Records, it devotes its entire first side to a 20-minute suite ostensibly inspired by Herbert’s novel, consisting of the pieces “Arrakis,” “Sandworms,” “Song of the Bene Gesserit,” and “Muad’dib.”
You’ll notice that the typography on the cover of Matthews’ Dune seems awfully reminiscent of Star Wars, a film that had come out the very same year. It’s not exactly false advertising, since the album closes with versions of both Star Wars’ main theme and Princess Leia’s theme, supplemented by the theme from Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running and even David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” According to jazz historian Doug Payne, the concept was the idea of CTI founder Creed Taylor.
Taylor had originally hired Matthews as CTI’s chief arranger, the latter’s years of experience as James Brown’s musical director having promised the potential to imbue the label’s releases with disco appeal. In addition to Matthews on the keyboards, Dune also features heavy-hitting session players from the late-seventies jazz world like Randy Brecker, Steve Gadd, Grover Washington, Jr., Hiram Bullock, and David Sanborn. Fans of obscurantist hip-hop may also recognize Matthews’ “Space Oddity” cover as a sample source for MF DOOM’s “Rapp Snitch Knishes.”
Much like Bob James, his fellow mastermind of disco-inflected jazz, Matthews has created a body of work that lives on a hip-hop goldmine: his other samplers include Method Man, Redman, and The Notorious B.I.G. But it was in Japan that he found his most enthusiastic listenership. After leaving CTI in 1978, Payne writes, “Matthews went onto record a slew of records for mostly Japanese labels under a variety of guises including Japan’s number one selling jazz group, the Manhattan Jazz Quintet.” If you visit Japan, you may well hear Matthews’ music playing in a local jazz bar.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Denis Villeneuve’s recent film adaptation of Dune is generally considered to be superior to the late David Lynch’s, from 1984 — though even according to many of Lynch’s fans, it could hardly have been worse. In a 1996 piece for Premiere magazine, David Foster Wallace described Dune as “unquestionably the worst movie of Lynch’s career,” not least due to the miscasting of the director himself: “Eraserhead had been one of those sell-your-own-plasma-to-buy-the-film-stock masterpieces, with a tiny and largely unpaid cast and crew. Dune, on the other hand, had one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history,” marshaled by super-producer Dino De Laurentiis. But could even a master blockbuster craftsman have made cinematic sense of Frank Herbert’s original story, “which even in the novel is convoluted to the point of pain”?
With its two parts having been released in the twenty-twenties, Villeneuve’s Dune practically cries out for Youtube video essays comparing it to Lynch’s version. The one above from Archer Green first highlights their differences through one scene that was memorable in the novel and both films: when, being put to the test by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the young hero Paul Atreides, played in the old Dune by Kyle MacLachlan and the new one by Timothée Chalamet, inserts his hand into a box that inflicts extreme pain. Superficially similar though they may appear, the two sequences reveal defining qualities of each picture’s look and feel — Villeneuve’s is shadowy and full of ancient-looking details, while Lynch’s looks like a piece of retro-futuristic Jacobean theater — as well as the contrast between how they dramatize the source material.
The new Dune is “a very modern-looking film that goes for a realistic and grounded aesthetic, and it feels more like a serious prestige sci-fi movie,” says Archer Green, “whereas old Dune is more surrealist: it’s elaborate, grungy, and ultimately quite over the top.” Their having been made in different eras explains some of this, but so does their having been made at different scales of time. Viewed back-to-back, Villeneuve’s Dune movies run just over five and a half hours. Lynch openly admitted that he’d “sold out” his right to the final cut in exchange for a major Hollywood project, but he also seldom failed to mention that the studio demanded that the film be “squeezed” to two hours and 17 minutes in order to guarantee a certain minimum number of daily screenings.
This pressure to get the runtime down must have motivated some of what even in the nineteen-eighties felt old-fashioned about Lynch’s Dune, like its extended “exposition dumps” and its “having characters’ thoughts audibilized on the soundtrack while the camera zooms in on the character making a thinking face,” as Wallace put it. The film’s failure “could easily have turned Lynch into an embittered hack, doing effects-intensive gorefests for commercial studios” or “sent him scurrying to the safety of academe, making obscure, plotless 16mm’s for the pipe-and-beret crowd.” Instead, he took the paltry deal subsequently offered him by De Laurentiis and made Blue Velvet, whose success he rode to become a major cultural figure. In a way, Lynch’s Dune fiasco gave Chalamet the eventual opportunity to become the definitive Paul Atreides — and MacLachlan, to become Special Agent Dale Cooper.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Along with Astounding Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Magazine was one of the most important science fiction digests in 1950s America. Ray Bradbury wrote for it–including an early version of his masterpiece Fahrenheit 451–as did Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith, Jack Vance, and numerous others.
When Galaxy appeared in October 1950, it promised a kind of science fiction different from the space operas of previous decades. As an “annual report” written by publisher H.L. Gold proclaimed,
…other publishers thought the idea of offering mature science fiction in an attractive, adult format was downright funny. They knew what sold–shapely female endomorphs with bronze bras, embattled male mesomorphs clad in muscle, and frightful alien monsters in search of a human soul.
And while Astounding Science Fiction was focused on technology–suited for an America that had fundamentally changed since WWII–H.L. Gold’s Galaxy focused on ideas, humor, satire, psychology and sociology. It also had one of the best pay rates in the industry, and offered some of its writers exclusive contracts. And the writers responded in kind and followed their own obsessions–although Gold often pitched ideas.
(Ironically, though immersed in stories of inner and outer space, Gold was an acute agoraphobe, and stayed in his apartment, communicating by phone.)
After a wobbly start graphics-wise, Gold hired Ed Emshwiller in 1951 to paint covers, whose often humorous style (e.g. this Christmas issue below) suited the humor inside the issue.
Confident in their stable of writers, Galaxy produced the wonderful birthday cover at the top, featuring caricatures of everybody from Bradbury to Asimov. There’s also a guide to see who’s who.
A series of editors–including Frederik Pohl–took over from Gold after a car accident in 1961, and by 1977–eight years after Pohl’s departure–the magazine was on its decline. There were more iterations, reprints, anthologies, and online versions, but the essential run is here. And those first ten years changed American science fiction forever, paving the way for experimental writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson.
You could start with the Ray Bradbury story (“The Fireman”) we told you about, or Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Puppet.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has been praised in all manner of terms since it came out more than half a century ago. An early advertising campaign, tapping into the enthusiasm of the contemporary counterculture, called it “the ultimate trip”; in the equivalently trendy parlance of the twenty-twenties, one could say that it “goes hard,” in that it takes no few bold, even unprecedented aesthetic and dramatic turns. The new video essay from Just One More Thing even describes 2001 as “the hardest film Kubrick ever made” — which, given Kubrick’s uncompromising ambitions as a filmmaker, is certainly saying something.
In one of the many interview clips that constitute the video’s 23 minutes, Steven Spielberg recalls his conversations with Kubrick in the last years of the master’s life. “I want to make a movie that changes the form,” Kubrick would often say to Spielberg. Arguably, he’d already done so with 2001, which continues to launch its first-time viewers into an experience unlike any they’ve had with a movie before. Unlike the more substance-inclined members of his generation, Spielberg went into the theater “clean as a whistle,” but “came out of there altered” nevertheless. It didn’t require drugs to appreciate after all; “that film was the drug.”
This isn’t to say that 2001 is purely or even primarily an abstract work of cinema. In collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick put a great deal of technical thought into the film’s vision of the future, with its well-appointed space stations, its artificially intelligent computers, its video calls, and its tablet-like mobile devices. Working in the years before the moon landing, says Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films author Paul Duncan, they “had to completely visualize, and make real, things that had never occurred.” Such was the realism of their speculative work (up to and including imagining how Earth would look from space) that, as Roger Ebert notes, the real Apollo 11 astronauts could describe their experience simply: “It was like 2001.”
Conceived in the heat of the Space Race, the film envisions a great deal that didn’t come to pass by the eponymous year — and indeed, has yet to materialize still today. “We haven’t quite gotten to artificial intelligence as portrayed,” says star Keir Dullea in a 50th-anniversary interview. “Almost, but not quite.” Still, even since then, the technology has come far enough along that few of us can ponder the current state of AI without sooner or later hearing the ominously polite voice of HAL somewhere in the back of our minds. The saga of astronauts currently stranded on the International Space Station does contrast harshly with 2001’s visions of stable and well-functioning life in outer space — but as a story, it might well have appealed to Kubrick in his Dr. Strangelove mode.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you haven’t heard of Hugo Gernsback, you’ve surely heard of the Hugo Award. Next to the Nebula, it’s the most prestigious of science fiction prizes, bringing together in its ranks of winners such venerable authors as Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Neil Gaiman, Isaac Asimov, and just about every other sci-fi and fantasy luminary you could think of. It is indeed fitting that such an honor should be named for Gernsback, the Luxembourgian-American inventor who, in April of 1926, began publishing “the first and longest-running English-language magazine dedicated to what was then not quite yet called ‘science fiction,’” notes University of Virginia’s Andrew Ferguson at The Pulp Magazines Project. Amazing Stories provided an “exclusive outlet” for what Gernsback first called “scientifiction,” a genre he would “for better and for worse, define for the modern era.” You can read and download hundreds of Amazing Stories issues, from the first year of its publication to the last, at the Internet Archive.
Like the extensive list of Hugo Award winners, the back catalog of Amazing Stories encompasses a host of geniuses: Le Guin, Asimov, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and many hundreds of lesser-known writers. But the magazine “was slow to develop,” writes Scott Van Wynsberghe. Its lurid covers lured some readers in, but its “first two years were dominated by preprinted material,” and Gernsback developed a reputation for financial dodginess and for not paying his writers well or at all.
By 1929, he sold the magazine and moved on to other ventures, none of them particularly successful. Amazing Stories soldiered on, under a series of editors and with widely varying readerships until it finally succumbed in 2005, after almost eighty years of publication. But that is no small feat in such an often unpopular field, with a publication, writes Ferguson, that was very often perceived as “garish and nonliterary.”
In hindsight, however, we can see Amazing Stories as a sci-fi time capsule and almost essential feature of the genre’s history, even if some of its content tended more toward the young adult adventure story than serious adult fiction. Its flashy covers set the bar for pulp magazines and comic books, especially in its run up to the fifties. After 1955, the year of the first Hugo Award, the magazine reached its peak under the editorship of Cele Goldsmith, who took over in 1959. Gone was much of the eyepopping B‑movie imagery of the earlier covers. Amazing Stories acquired a new level of relative polish and sophistication, and published many more “literary” writers, as in the 1959 issue above, which featured a “Book-Length Novel by Robert Bloch.”
This trend continued into the seventies, as you can see in the issue above, with a “complete short novel by Gordon Eklund” (and early fiction by George R.R. Martin). In 1982, Ferguson writes, Amazing Stories was sold “to Gary Gygax of D&D fame, and would never again regain the prominence it had before.” The magazine largely returned to its pulp roots, with covers that resembled those of supermarket paperbacks. Great writers continued to appear, however. And the magazine remained an important source for new science fiction—though much of it only in hindsight. As for Gernsback, his reputation waned considerably after his death in 1967.
“Within a decade,” writes Van Wynsberghe, “science fiction pundits were debating whether or not he had created a ‘ghetto’ for hack writers.” In 1986, novelist Brian Aldiss called Gernsback “one of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field.” His 1911 novel, the ludicrously named Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 is considered “one of the worst science fiction novels in history,” writes Matthew Lasar. It may seem odd that the Oscar of the sci-fi world should be named for such a reviled figure. And yet, despite his pronounced lack of literary ability, Gernsback was a visionary. As a futurist, he made some startlingly accurate predictions, along with some not-so-accurate ones. As for his significant contribution to a new form of writing, writes Lasar, “It was in Amazing Stories that Gernsback first tried to nail down the science fiction idea.” As Ray Bradbury supposedly said, “Gernsback made us fall in love with the future.” Enter the Amazing Stories Internet Archive here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague De Camp at the Navy Yard in 1944
Robert Heinlein was born in 1907, which put him on the mature side by the time of the United States’ entry into World War II. Isaac Asimov, his younger colleague in science fiction, was born in 1920 (or thereabouts), and thus of prime fighting age. But in the event, they made most of their contribution to the war effort in the same place, the Naval Aviation Experimental Station in Philadelphia. By 1942, Heinlein had become the preeminent sci-fi writer in America, and the 22-year-old Asimov, a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia, had already made a name for himself in the field. It was Heinlein, who’d signed on to run a materials testing laboratory at the Yard, who brought Asimov into the military-research fold.
Having once been a Navy officer, discharged due to tuberculosis, Heinlein jumped at the chance to serve his country once again. During World War II, writes John Redford at A Niche in the Library of Babel, “his most direct contribution was in discussions of how to merge data from sonar, radar, and visual sightings with his friend Cal Laning, who captained a destroyer in the Pacific and was later a rear admiral. Laning used those ideas to good effect in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, the largest naval battle ever fought.” Asimov “was mainly involved in testing materials,” including those used to make “dye markers for airmen downed at sea. These were tubes of fluorescent chemicals that would form a big green patch on the water around the guy in his life jacket. The patch could be seen by searching aircraft.”
Asimov scholars should note that a test of those dye markers counts as one of just two occasions in his life that the aerophobic writer ever dared to fly. That may well have been the most harrowing of either his or Heinlein’s wartime experiences, they were both involved in the suitably speculative “Kamikaze Group,” which was meant to work on “invisibility, death rays, force fields, weather control” — or so Paul Malmont tells it in his novel The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. You can read a less heightened account of Heinlein and Asimov’s war in Astounding, Alec Nevala-Lee’s history of American science fiction.
Their time together in Philadephia wasn’t long. “As the war ended, Asimov was drafted into the Army, where he spent nine months before he was able to leave, where he returned to his studies and writing,” according to Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews. “Heinlein contemplated returning to writing full time, as a viable career, rather than as a side exercise.” When he left the Naval Aviation Experimental Station, “he resumed writing and working on placing stories in magazines.” In the decades thereafter, Heinlein’s work took on an increasingly militaristic sensibility, and Asimov’s became more and more concerned with the enterprise of human civilization broadly speaking. But pinning down the influence of their war on their work is an exercise best left to the sci-fi scholars.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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