YouTube is here. Look at Tony’s big ol’ lip!
This week, we get into the weeds a bit about Star Wars. That’s William’s fault. Then we get into the weeds a bit about several other topics. That’s Tony’s fault. Enjoy!
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1. I can’t believe we didn’t mention the incomparable Sidney Poitier when we talked about Sneakers. We also forgot Ben Kingsley (which I find less surprising).
2. It was Mary McDonnell, not Annette Bening.
3. Whistler (the blind guy) was played by David Strathairn. I don’t think I’ll ever remember his name without looking it up.
4. In a binge trilogy that features Hackers (1995) and Sneakers (1992), I think the third film should be Johnny Mnemonic (1995). Thoughts?
Yeah, I thought of Sidney Poitier later.
Hmm… I see what you’re going for, there. It might be a good third choice.
This sounds like a great question for the Hat!
Damn…Sidney Poitier…
🙁
Yeah.
I hadn’t heard he passed until after the 1/7 post.
He leaves quite a legacy after 94 years.
Wiki says he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1974. I hadn’t known that… but now I wonder… he was born in Miami, but that was only because his Bahamian folks were there on business (he was born prematurely, so they had no expectation that he’d be born while they were there). His birth in the US entitled him to US citizenship, but I think he was also considered a citizen of the Bahamas, and therefore a citizen of a British Crown colony. So… would that have permitted him to use the “Sir” honorific? Everything I’m seeing online suggests no, but I’m not seeing the rationale… why wouldn’t he be Sir Sidney Poitier?
Has a nice ring to it, for sure…
“To Sir With Love” 🙂
I read an appreciation of him that pointed out that there was a sense of tension that he brought to many of his roles (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Lilies of the Field were mentioned) – a tension that signalled an unspoken anger in the face of implicit bias like his prospective father-in-law’s condescension in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. I thought that was great – that his acting gave him the ability to address something in a physical way that we only recently began to deal with explicitly.
I love David Strathairn’s character in The Expanse.
I haven’t seen Hackers or Johnny Mnemonic, but I love Sneakers. Another one I’d nominate for a binge trilogy would be War Games.
I think that movie Swordfish was kind of trying to be in the same vein as Sneakers and failed pretty miserably.
Yeah, he was good in The Expanse.
I was trying to stay in the mid-90s with my binge picks, but War Games (1983) is phenomenal, so I’ll allow it. 😀
Swordfish (2001)… was just… so bad… 😀
Time Travel stories – I was trying to think of the earliest one I know of. In Dr. Faustus, Faust conjures up versions of people from the past but I’m not sure if we know if they are real or illusions. In Goethe’s Faust, he actually does bring Helen of Troy to life – but is that more like a resurrection? There are very early stories about people falling asleep or going to another realm only to return and find hundreds of years have past. And there’s an 18th century story called Memoirs of the 20th Century in which a man in the 18th century receives letters from the 20th delivered by an Angel.
Some of the best time travel stories I can think of were written by Robert Silverberg. I like the short story “Needle in a Timestack” in which time travel is possible but almost impossibly expensive. And every time someone time travels there are changes to the present from minor to major alterations. Whenever a change takes place, people have a feeling that the alteration is about to happen. Then after the alteration, they forget their past life and remember the altered one. There is a short period in which they retain the memory of what’s about to be altered. That’s the set-up. I won’t reveal more about what the story is actually about.
There’s another short story I like called “Red Letter Day” in which people cannot time travel but objects can. And there is a tradition that when people graduate high school they receive a letter from their future self. There’s some set age for people to write the letter (I think in their 30s?). And the main character is a counselor for the kids who especially has to deal with those who don’t receive a letter.
Would extra-sensory accounts of the past or future count as time-travel narratives?
Like… oracles that can recount events of the forgotten past or the unknown future… prophets and the like…
I mean… such stories do imply a concept of linear time where some mechanism allows one to transcend said line and study it like a filmstrip… and time-travel-like themes are examined, such as the consequences of an oracle imparting knowledge of the future (“Would this thing have happened if the oracle hadn’t warned me about it??”)…
Hmm…
I am/was a big Silverberg fan. I really should go back and read some more. I was a big fan of the original Majipoor trilogy, and read a lot of his short stories. And a really weird book called Kingdoms of the Wall.
Silverberg’s collaboration with Asimov on a novel version of “Nightfall” was very good. It’s a favorite in our house, anyway!
I thought of two more. 🙂
These are all collected in “The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF.”
Walk to the Full Moon – In this one, there is a separate branch of human evolution in which the humans learned to walk through time (forward and backward and at different rates). The story is a young woman from prehistory who is captured before she can return to her own time. I think they need enough space to walk (or run) a distance before they can travel so the fact that she is held in a facility keeps her from immediately returning.
And “The Truth about Weena” – which retells the events of The Time Machine with Weena being a much, much more interesting character.
Happy Birthday Tony! Apparently it’s 4 weeks after Christmas Eve.