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  Streaming sci-fi B-Movie classic: "Dark Star"Jun 07, 2012 5:24 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Don't know about you but I just watched the 1974 (the year I was born!) sci-fi movie Dark Star over on (warning: auto-playing video with sound) AMC's streaming B-Movies site. [As I post this, that whole site appears to have gone blank, but eh I'm sure it'll be back shortly. >_>] It's pretty weird! Written by John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon--Carpenter of course went on to fame in the horror film genre, and O'Bannon, who passed away in 2009, did computer effects for a little film called Star Wars three years later, and then went on to write some films you may have heard of, including Alien (1979), two segments of Heavy Metal (1981), Blue Thunder (1983), Total Recall (1990), and Alien vs Predator (2004)--back when they were film students, and on a $60,000 budget they were able to squeeze out this bizarre dark comedy tale of a highly dysfunctional crew sort of trying to complete a questionable deep space mission on a damaged ship. Carpenter did the music, O'Bannon did the special effects and starred as one of the main crew members (the incredibly hapless "Pinback," who didn't even qualify for the mission but was selected in a case of mistaken identity), and while the bottom-of-the-barrel production values and highly wacky plot (engaging in existential arguments with their own planet-busting artificially intelligent bombs, for instance) solidly relegate it to B-movie status, it's...well, it's pretty fun if you go for this type of thing.
 
I tried to take some representative screenshots:
 
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Wikipedia says the student film was 45 minutes long, and a producer wanting to take it commercial paid to have them add 38 minutes to bring it up to feature film length for theatrical release--if that's so, I suspect the added part is the oddly long and otherwise pretty much plot-and-actor-isolated slapstick segment of Pinback (O'Bannon) vs "the alien." While the episode is patently and purposefully absurd, the theme of a bickering crew on an isolated space ship haunted by a rogue alien, not to mention a mission gone horribly awry, and AI that don't necessarily act in the best interests of the crew, would be reworked by O'Bannon into the wildly popular Alien. Dark Star, unsurprisingly, was wildly *un*popular--not being helped by the producer deciding to market it as a horror movie, which it most certainly is not.
 
The "science" in the movie is absolutely awful, except that some of the outer space landmarks they mention are real; one of their destinations, the Veil Nebula, for instance, is the large but very faint remnant of a supernova that exploded 5 to 8 thousand years ago; at maybe about 1500 light years away and having six times the diameter of the full moon, it is one of the brightest X-ray sources in our sky. Here are some photos of various parts of it:
 
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image by Jschulman555 (source)
 
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image by Hewholooks (source)
 
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false color multiwavelength image by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration (source)
 
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false color image by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State University) (source)
 
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Venus just crossed (or "transited") the Sun from our Earthly point of view, which got people excited since it won't happen again until 2117. A glance at the live stream on NASA's site the other day was predictably unexciting (a small dark dot on a big white dot), but their Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft in Earth orbit captured some rather stunning high resolution footage of the event at multiple wavelengths, which they've cleverly spliced together as a time-lapse music video sort of thing:
 
video on Youtube
 
Does that remind you of the Death Star headin' places, or what?
 
 
 
 
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