Space out

Movies

Made of Wood
Plan 9 from Outer Space is such a bad film that it's been dubbed the 'worst movie of all time'. The flying saucer in it looks like a steel thali with a lassi glass placed upside down on top. The dialogue has lines like, "Future events such as these will affect you in the future." Even then, it's reached cult status over the years. Ed Wood directed it in 1959. He also wrote, produced and edited it on a budget of peanuts. Wood unleashed many other such horrors on Hollywood subsequently. But his resilience never wavered. That's what's admirable. His back was against the wall each time. Yet, Wood kept filming and carried on.

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Unsettle down
Mars Attacks! has a galaxy of stars in it. But the movie can go either way. People either laugh along or switch it off. Tim Burton directed the film in 1996. He roped in everyone from Jack Nicholson to Pierce Brosnan, though the film's highlight are the Martians with bulging heads wearing what looks like two red fire extinguishers on their backs. It's comical. But it can also be unsettling. Burton has that effect.

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Music

Trippy tune
I'm floating in the most peculiar way/ And the stars look very different today," Major Tom sings to Ground Control in David Bowie's 1969 anthem, Space Oddity. The jangling acoustic sound that gives way to skin-cutting lead guitars has given the tune path-breaking status in rock history, launching as it did five days before man's first mission to the moon. It also gave Bowie his first hit single, charting his path to stratospheric stardom.

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Books

Out of this world
The mind of Douglas Adams takes the reader all across the universe in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979). The earth, or at least what we know it to be, doesn't even exist anymore. Poetry-loving alien slime beings have destroyed it to build an intergalactic hyper-pass. And clueless survivor Arthur Dent is on a wild trip on a spaceship that's hiding the runaway President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, a character so reckless that even rock stars will throw in the towel.

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Questions remain
It's a controversy that will never die. Was Steven Spielberg's blockbuster ET inspired by Satyajit Ray's script for an unmade film called The Alien? Ray's movie had its roots in an earlier short story he had written, called Bankubabur Bondhu. It's about a misunderstood school teacher who befriends an alien. Ray later changed the teacher's character to a little boy when he wrote the film plot. This is documented in a book on the subject called Travails with The Alien. Spielberg has denounced the controversy. But the plot ceases to die out.

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A UFO in Norway?

Hardly anyone knows of an island called Espevaer in Norway. But Mumbai-based filmmaker/designer Dhaniya Pilo tells us of a strange sight she once saw there. "We trekked through forests to get to a lake. There was grassy vegetation all around. But one oval patch had nothing growing inside it at all, and the locals say that it was because a UFO had once landed there."

Name game

July 2 is marked as World UFO Day since this was the day in 1947 that locals saw a 'flying saucer' in Roswell, USA. Theories still abound as to what it was.

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