timespace coordinates: around 2001-2013, inspired by precise recent events in contemporary China, its vignettes take place in vastly different settings from bustling southern metropolis of Guangzhou and Dongguan to the more rural townships in the province of Shanxi.
directed by Zhangke Jia
“The film draws on the history of wuxia stories. The title in Chinese, 天注定 (Tian zhuding) is literally translated as “heavenly fate” or “fated doom,” while its English title is a reference to King Hu‘s 1971 action epic A Touch of Zen, one of the most influential wuxia films.
It revolves around four threads set in vastly different geographical and social milieus across modern-day China.
timespace coordinates: 2001 till about 2017 in the city of Datong bordering with Inner Mongolia, an old mining city that now has become poor since the price of coal dropped and then in the province of Hubei in central China where the city of Wuhan lies.
“It was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. The story is loosely based on the leader of a gang from Jia Zhangke’s childhood, whom he had admired as a role model.”(wiki)
“A story of violent love within a time frame spanning from 2001 to 2017.”(imdb)
timespace coordinates: somewhere in the present or near future in the city of Kaili in the southeastern province of Guizhou, People’s Republic of China.
Bi Gan was born in Kaili City in Guizhou Province in June 1989. He is an ethnic Miao.
“The film chronicles the return of Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) to Kaili, the hometown from which he fled many years before. Back for his father’s funeral, Luo recalls the death of an old friend, Wildcat, and searches for lost love Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), who continues to haunt him.
Director Bi Gan enlisted novelist Chang Ta-Chun as a consultant for the script, noting that Ta-Chun aided in the overall film structure as well as the division of the film into two parts. Of the two parts, Bi noted that “the title of the first part is Memory; that of the second is Poppy, in reference to Paul Celan’s poem Poppy and Memory. At some point, I even considered using this as the film’s title.”[7]
Bi stated that “I liked the idea that the first half would be in 2D, because I wanted it to feel as fragmented as time, with little bits of memory… With the second half, I wanted it to be real-time, and the 3D was the best way to create a spatial experience for that.” The 59-minute unbroken long take 3D sequence that closes the film took two months to prepare, as techniques had to be devised to move a RED camera through the complicated environment of the scene. It took seven attempts at shooting the sequence before Bi was satisfied.[8] The sequence was shot in 2D and converted to 3D in post-production because a 2D camera was lighter and therefore easier to move in difficult positions and small environments.
Bi drew inspiration for the film from the paintings of Marc Chagall, specifically The Promenade, as well as the novels of Patrick Modiano.”
(wiki)
“Many critics praised the final, hour- long dream sequence which was filmed in one continuous take. In his 4/4 star review for The Boston Globe, critic Ty Burr compared the sequence to his own dreams, noting that they are often “unsettling, unstoppable, and yet there’s often a logic within their illogic. This is precisely what Bi has re-created in the final hour of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a fluid and outrageously extended camera shot that, as with dreams, doesn’t need editing to cast its spell.”(wiki)
“Zhou Zenong, is the leader of a gang of criminals specialized in the theft of motorcycles, and has recently been released from prison. During an argument with a rival gang, Zhou accidentally shoots and kills a policeman, mistaking him for his enemy.
Hunted by the law and rivals, the man finds himself on the run.
The rest of the story revolves around Zhou and Liu Aiai, a prostitute (“bathing beauty”), whose pimp is a well-known associate of Zhou. It will be Liu, as not directly known to the police and therefore not suspicious, who will have to get in touch with Zhou about a bounty issue on him.”
AS HEARD ON NPR’S “SCIENCE FRIDAY”Discover the book that Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Daniel Pink, and Adam Grant want you to read this year, an “accessible, informative, and hilarious” introduction to the weird and wonderful world of artificial intelligence (Ryan North). “You look like a thing and I love you” is one of the best pickup lines ever… according to an artificial intelligence trained by scientist Janelle Shane, creator of the popular blog AI Weirdness. She creates silly AIs that learn how to name paint colors, create the best recipes, and even flirt (badly) with humans–all to understand the technology that governs so much of our daily lives. We rely on AI every day for recommendations, for translations, and to put cat ears on our selfie videos. We also trust AI with matters of life and death, on the road and in our hospitals. But how smart is AI really… and how does it solve problems, understand humans, and even drive self-driving cars? Shane delivers the answers to every AI question you’ve ever asked, and some you definitely haven’t. Like, how can a computer design the perfect sandwich? What does robot-generated Harry Potter fan-fiction look like? And is the world’s best Halloween costume really “Vampire Hog Bride”? In this smart, often hilarious introduction to the most interesting science of our time, Shane shows how these programs learn, fail, and adapt–and how they reflect the best and worst of humanity.
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You is the perfect book for anyone curious about what the robots in our lives are thinking. “I can’t think of a better way to learn about artificial intelligence, and I’ve never had so much fun along the way.” – Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals
Janelle Shane’s humor blog, weirdness.com, looks at, as she tells it, “the strange side of artificial intelligence.” Her upcoming book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place, uses cartoons and humorous pop-culture experiments to look inside the minds of the algorithms that run our world, making artificial intelligence and machine learning both accessible and entertaining.
According to Shane, she has only made a neural network-written recipe once — and discovered that horseradish brownies are about as terrible as you might imagine.
At some point in the early 2010s, variations of a pop-science news story about bird sexuality began to circulate online. study says pollution makes birds gay and gay by mercury, read the headlines. The story was about the fact that pollutants leaking into the environment are changing the hormone systems of animals and leading to new traits and behaviors. In the case that has gotten the most attention, high levels of mercury in wetland habitats are altering the ‘pairing behavior and reproductive success’ of a species of white ibis. Scientists observe that, rather than heterosexual coupling and reproduction, some white ibises now prefer same-sex relationships. One image accompanying a news item shows a pair of male ibises strolling together along a shoreline, looking very gay indeed.”
“As I will argue, the Nausicaä manga (1982-1994), continued by Miyazaki in the decade following the film’s release, systematically undoes the utopianism of its cinematic adaptation.[2] While the film ends with Nausicaä’s messianic rebirth as the mediator between humanity and nature, the manga continues on to disturb the very notions of an independent ‘humanity’ and an undisturbed ‘nature.’ Nausicaä discovers not only that the ‘natural’ world of the mushroom jungle is itself an anthropogenic creation meant to purify the earth, but that the pure earth would be uninhabitable for she and her fellow ‘humans’—because they too were altered to live in a toxic environment. As the monsters of the antediluvian world emerge from their crypts to destroy the earth once more, Nausicaä battles to save a world without a future.”
TimeSpace Warps 