Welcome to KFP

Something amazing is on my desktop

And it isn't the MechaGodzilla in the background!  Though he is most impressive too (And well he should be, as he came here all the way from Japan via a curio gift shop in Nantes).  No, I'm speaking of the new full DVD boxed set of 1974's Ellery Queen TV series.  It's been unavailable up till now, and indeed I'd assumed I would never see it again till we were lucky enough to catch it running on BBC TV during our years in France.  As of this year, it's out on DVD and can be had from sources like Amazon for as little as $30.  And where it has an average of 5 Stars from 136 reviews, I might add, with nothing below a 4 star comment.

Ellery Queen is one of my favorite TV series of all time.  Why, you ask?  What appeal could there possibly be in a show set in the 40's but made in the 70's, full of 40's characters inexplicably sporting wide collars and bellbottom pants?  It's not in the stories or the acting or any of that, though all elements mesh very well, but is instead in the fact that Ellery Queen was the first (To my knowledge) interactive TV.  That is to say, you have to work your brain while watching it, and the best enjoyment doesn't come from sitting slack-jawed and passive while the show washes over you, but rather from watching it with a like-minded friend or spouse and working the mysteries yourselves.

You see, the hook is this - Unlike most other mystery shows where you're shown the killer, or the hero solves the problem using deux ex machina, Ellery Queen puts everything in front of you except the identity of the culprit.  Ellery investigates, and you get the clues as Ellery encounters them.  You're on an even footing with the TV detective until that magic point sometime around the 35-40 minute mark when Ellery breaks the fourth wall and turns to you, the audience, with his classic, "And suddenly I knew it - I knew who the killer was!  The clues were right there all along.  Did you get it?  Did you think it was the gardener too?  Or was that too obvious?  Let's see how you did."...  and then we're off to the suspect roundup and finish, when Ellery lays out the evidence and fingers the bad guy.

This works fantastically well on DVD, far better than it ever did on network TV thanks to the wonder of the pause button.  Watch this with a good friend and you're in for an hour of fun debate.  Watch.  Pause.  "Where did that guy just go?  How did he have a key to that door?"  Watch.  Pause.  "And look, he just walked past that door a few minutes later and it's standing open."  It goes like that.  You watch every interaction and every conversation, always on the lookout for those crucial slips that will point you to the murderer.  Emily and I have a grand time of this, going back and forth with a hundred crazy theories per episode.  And while the shows themselves are mellow and leisurely in pace, the tension mounts like mad in the living room as you're all watching the clock tick down towards that inevitable moment when Ellery will do his "Talk to the audience" schtick and you'll know there are no more clues forthcoming.  That's the worst of it, when you're back and forth on evidence and have NO idea who the killer was and seem to have missed everything, and you're literally two minutes away from Ellery's big speech.

So, as interactive TV goes, it's a big win.  Far ahead of its time.  It's the perfect evening's entertainment for any mystery-loving family or group of friends.  While the stories themselves may be standard mystery fare, it's the gimmick that (for once) is more than just a gimmick - It really is the raison d'être of the show.  And the coup de grâce lies in the show's stellar cast of guest stars - Every episode we are treated to walk-on parts from the likes of Vincent Price, Don Ameche, Dana Andrews, George Burns, Joan Collins, Eva Gabor, Roddy McDowall, Cesar Romero, and more.  And Jim Hutton's performance as the affable Ellery stands up to all these folks - It's a tragedy that he died so young, but we could all hope to leave behind such a memorial.
10/10 from me.


Oh, and by the way...  Did I even mention the excellent theme by none other than Elmer Bernstein?  Here's a typical intro, opening with the mystery layout and flowing into the marvelous opening music:

Moon

NetFlix
IMDB
My Rating: 7/10

An astronaut living alone on a lunar base is coming to the end of his three year work contract.  His years of isolation have left him craving human interaction, but as his final day approaches, he starts to discover disturbing things about his base and himself.

Here is a 2009 indie film that I think nearly all our KFP visitors would love.   It's the director's first feature, made on a measly budget of $5 million by a devoted fan of serious SF of the pre-Star Wars years.   I'm speaking of that non-flashy school of SF films that at least made some pretense of trying to be science fiction, from 2001 to Silent Running to Blade Runner to Outland.  That sort of SF seems to have pretty much died out in cinemas, despite brief exceptions like Gattaca.  It's the stuff that Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke grognards would call "real science fiction" instead of "space opera", dominated by ruminating on the possible impact of scientific advancement on our lives.

Moon, like Triangle, is really hard to write a review about because I don't want to give away anything about the story. I would also REALLY avoid reading the IMDB page for this one if you might want to see it, because it is spoiler central with no regard whatsoever for the dramatic impact of the film's central thesis. Here's what is safe to say - The movie is about one astronaut responsible for solo operation of a lunar mineral harvesting station, who is coming to the end of his three year tour of duty and suffering from prolonged isolation. His only companion is the station's AI and helper robot, GERTY, voiced by Kevin Spacey. I will say nothing about the plot other than that it is good, gripping, and if you liked the general themes and ambiance of movies like "Silent Running" and "Outland", you will like this.   Lots of good ideas here about future tech, and not a laser pistol battle or space dogfight in sight.  Not that these things are bad, mind, it's just that a little brain protein in the diet helps make Johnny healthier than just consuming Twinkies all day.

In lieu of talking about the plot, I should mention some cool sidebar bits about the film. It is the first SF film made since forever that uses all miniature SPFX instead of CGI. The director has said there is CGI in the film but it's only in places where you can't notice it, instead of being the main show. The funny part is that the director had to find all these 70 year old dinosaur SPFX guys and haul them out of retirement to help with this, because all the effects houses currently running were too expensive and didn't know a thing about building models and using camera tracking and such. So, it gives the movie a unique look in this day and age, and it really looks quite good. It's the opposite of CGI in a way, because my eye would look at a rover and think, "That's a model", instead of looking at an entire scene and thinking, "None of this exists at all". For example:

Personally, I thought the effects work was terrific, though it is not an effects-dominated movie by any means. They also went to a lot of trouble to give everything a look of realistic tech, and "very used tech". 70's kids will be instantly comfortable with the design motif:

They really did a terrific job on a drink-cart budget.

I also have to give major kudos to GERTY, for general design and personality. GERTY is something like the station's housekeeper, responsible for keeping our hero alive and functional, and looking after the mining operations. GERTY is a great robot, one of the better ones, and combines the eerie AI of HAL with the sort of clumsy charm of the Silent Running droids. He also looks like a real robot, which gets extra points from me, in the sense that he looks absolutely nothing like anything but an extremely dexterous arm hanging from the ceiling and a box with a smiley screen on it. All the corridors have tracks in the ceiling so GERTY is constantly wired directly to the station and just glides around the halls like some giant robotic bat. His video screen, intended to facilitate emotional relations with humans, is both touching and creepy in equal parts, given that his emotional expression is done via smileys:

Going off on a tangent here... Just recently I saw a news article on the shiny new "home robots" from RoboDynamics (Article here).  They are beautiful things, lovely to be sure:

Yet despite all the press hoopla and "synergistic monetizing of cloud-based open sourcing" corporate-speak of the news stories, I find myself looking at this iRobot thing and wondering what the heck it can do.  It has no useful arms, it can't manipulate anything, it's too tall to work as an under-chair vacuum cleaner like the excellent Roomba...  I dunno.  GERTY, to my mind, is perhaps the best example of a useful household robot that I've yet seen in films, or at least the most realistic.  I've always tended to favor the practical robot designs, though - The droids in Silent Running and R2D2 both exemplified the look of a robot designed for a purpose, rather than to look pretty.  One of these days I will satisfy my deep robot craving and get myself a Roomba, if only for the fun of watching it chase the cats.

Back to the movie!  And yet... that's about all I can say about the film without going spoilerish. Neat old-style SPFX and a great robot. The movie was supposedly shown in advance screenings to NASA employees for their seal of approval, which isn't something you'd hear about the latest Star Wars prequel. Moon is out on DVD now. Here is the trailer from YouTube, which gives an excellent idea of what the film is like, but be warned that it is a *bit* spoilerific - It doesn't give away any major scenes or storyline, but it does show a couple of things that become the focus of the story, though you may not recognize them as they pass. Watch at your own risk, depending on how much of the premise you want to know before renting/buying:

I highly approve of this movie!


Suggested Accompaniment:  Ecigs.  Seriously, what else could you smoke during a near-future SF film but a near-future alternative to tobacco?