Episode 18, in which Julie watches a movie she does not like and Scott says, "Wha?" Contact, from a book by Carl Sagan, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Jodie Foster and rarely shirtless Matthew McConaughey.
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More stuff:
- Lucy's Laugh Enlivens the Solar System by Robert Krulwich. From Morning Edition, 2008.
- Confessions of an Alien Hunter by Seth Shostak
- Rocks of Ages by Stephen Jay Gould. Two other great books by Gould: Wonderful Life and Dinosaur in a Haystack
I must admit to being surprised when I first heard that Contact would be discussed on this show. Though I neither hated it or loved it, it wasn't a movie that sparked me in any way. Though I do think some of Scott's points about the film are valid in the way they portrayed the search was much better done than what we previously had. Though that is a rather low bar and includes Richard Dreyfuss and Mashed Potatoes. Also for a movie based on a Carl Sagan books, faith was much better handled than I would have expected and I think I saw the movie as I was just coming into faith.
ReplyDeleteOne thing though, the famous "billions and billions" is actually not a Sagan catchphrase since he never used it in the series Cosmos and only used it once in the book of the same name. Funny how those phrases like "Play it again Sam" become part of the culture while actually not being in what was referenced.
As for Stanislaw Lem he is a Polish not Russian author as I believe Julie stated. I was a great fan of Lem in my youth and he was full of interesting ideas. One of my favorite ideas of his in a book was forecasting the future by putting words together to guess on a future technology. Strangely though I have never read Solaris, but Audible recently made it available and I think I will get it next month. Even more interesting is that though an atheist he was a friend of Karol Wojtyla the future Pope John Paul II. They would have spirited conversations together in a coffee shop and elsewhere. Would have liked to have been a fly on the wall for those conversations.
I am also totally with Julie's love of Mars Attacks. While the movie was panned by many I thought it was a solid parody of the genre even if uneven at times.
Wow, Lem and Karol Wojtyla? That's wonderful.
ReplyDeleteI can't even imagine what those conversations would have been like ... I'm with you ... I'd love to have heard them! And that connection will hopefully help me remember that Lem is Polish! :-D
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