movies, Uncategorized

1717 – Kajillionaire (2020 movie)

timespace coordinates: present-day US

A 26-year-old woman, known as Old Dolio Dyne, is in a codependent relationship with her con artist parents, who treat her as an accomplice to their petty thefts and scams rather than as a daughter. The entire family pride themselves on being skimmers and living on the bare minimum income, unlike other people who worship money and try to be kajillionaires.

Kajillionaire is a 2020 American crime comedy-drama film written and directed by Miranda July

imdb

documentary

1704 – It’s Coming! (2020 documentary)

Warning: Adult material

It’s Coming! from Jessica Kingdon on Vimeo.

The future is here! Well, sort of.

Directed & Shot by
Jessica Kingdon & Nathan Truesdell

Produced and Edited by
Willy Berliner, Jessica Kingdon & Nathan Truesdell

Associate Producer
Vivian Qin

Color by
Cédric von Niederhäusern

Sound Design & Mix
Allison Wilson

Translated by
Vivian Qin
Beatrix Chu

via Felix Petrescu

books

1703 – Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin (2020 book)

Author: Janna Levin

What would happen if you fell into a Black Hole?

Black Holes are the most extraordinary phenomenon in the universe, but they are a riddle that confounds our intuitions.

Anything that enters them can never escape, and yet they contain nothing at all. They are bigger on the inside than the outside suggests. They are dark on the outside but not on the inside. They invert time into space and space into time.

Black Holes are found throughout the universe. They can be microscopic. They can be billions of times larger than our sun. Our solar system is currently orbiting a Black Hole 26,000 light years away at a speed of 200 km per second.

In Ten Tips for Surviving a Black Hole physicist and novelist Janna Levin takes you on a journey inside a black hole, explaining what would happen to you in there and why. In the process you’ll come to see how their mysteries contain answers to some of the most profound questions ever asked about the nature of our universe. (Goodreads)

Uncategorized

1702 – Wanderers (2014 short film)

Wanderers – a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo.

Wanderers is a vision of humanity’s expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. The locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available.
Without any apparent story, other than what you may fill in by yourself, the idea of the film is primarily to show a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds – and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there.

As some may notice I have borrowed ideas and concepts from science fiction authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke, just to name a few. And visually, I of course owe many tips of my hat to painter Chesley Bonestell – the legendary master of space art.

More directly, with kind permission from Ann Druyan I have also borrowed the voice of astronomer and author Carl Sagan to narrate the film. The audio I used are excerpts from his own reading of his book ‘Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space’ (1994, Random House, penguinrandomhouse.com/books/159735/pale-blue-dot-by-carl-sagan/) – needless to say, a huge inspiration for this film.

CREDITS:
VISUALS BY – Erik Wernquist – erik@erikwernquist.com
MUSIC BY – Cristian Sandquist – cristiansandquist@mac.com
WRITTEN AND NARRATED BY – Carl Sagan – from his book ‘Pale Blue Dot’ penguinrandomhouse.com/books/159735/pale-blue-dot-by-carl-sagan/, courtesy of Ann Druyan, copyright by Democritus Properties, LLC, with all rights reserved
COLOR GRADE BY – Caj Müller/Beckholmen Film – caj@beckholmenfilm.se
LIVE ACTION PHOTOGRAPHY BY – Mikael Hall/Vidiotism – mikael@vidiotism.com
LIVE ACTION PERFORMANCE BY – Anna Nerman, Camilla Hammarström, Hanna Mellin
VOCALIST – Nina Fylkegård – nina@ladystardust.se
THANK YOU – Johan Persson, Calle Herdenberg, Micke Lindgren, Satrio J. Studt, Tomas Axelsson, Christian Lundqvist, Micke Lindell, Sigfrid Söderberg, Fredrik Strage, Johan Antoni, Henrik Johansson, Michael Uvnäs, Hanna Mellin

THIS FILM WAS MADE WITH USE OF PHOTOS AND TEXTURES FROM:
NASA/JPL, NASA/CICLOPS, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, ESA, John Van Vliet, Björn Jonsson (and many others, of which I unfortunately do not know the names)

animation, series

1696 – Tigtone (2019 – animation series)

Tigtone is an American adult animated fantasy comedy television series that premiered on Adult Swim on January 13, 2019. It is based on the original characters of an independent short, The Begun of Tigtone, created by Andrew Koehler, Benjamin Martian, and Zack Wallenfang. They produced it through their own company Babyhemyth Productions.

The TV series is instead created by Andrew Koehler and Benjamin Martian — Zack Wallenfang isn’t involved — and produced by Babyhemyth Productions with other two companies, Titmouse, Inc. and Williams Street. The setting is a parody of clichés and tropes from the medieval fantasy genre, with occasional steampunk references.

In a medieval world, Tigtone is an intense and high-strung adventurer with a penchant for the over-dramatic and a murderous obsession for quests. He resides in the surreal, medieval kingdom of Propecia, ruled by its two-headed conjoined twin monarchs, King-Queen, who is regularly flanked by their effeminate man-child son Prince Lavender and their frequently put-upon attendant Command-Or Mathis. Joined by his trusty and expendable companion Helpy, Tigtone regularly accepts tasks and assignments that take him to various locations in Propecia, slaughtering numerous enemies along the way. (Wikipedia)

adult swim

movies

1695 – Let the Bullets Fly 让子弹飞 (2010 movie)

timespace coordinates: China during the warring 1920s

Directed by “Six generation”  Jiang Wen

“Poxy” Zhang (张麻子; Jiang Wen) leads a group of bandits, each of whom is numbered rather than named, and ambushes a government horse train carrying Ma Bangde (马邦德; Ge You), who is on his way to Goose Town (鹅城 E-cheng) to assume the position of county governor. Ma’s train is derailed, killing both his bodyguards and his adviser, Counsellor Tang (汤师爷 Tang-shiyeFeng Xiaogang). Ma has no money, having spent it all to bribe and buy his position. To avoid being killed by Zhang’s bandits, he lies to them claiming that he is Counsellor Tang and that his wife (Carina Lau) was the dead governor’s wife. He tells the bandits that, if they spare him and his wife, he will help Zhang to impersonate Ma and pilfer Goose Town’s finances.

imdb

documentary, Uncategorized

1693 – סטאלגים Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel (2008 documentary)

2008 documentary film produced by Barak Heymann and directed by Ari Libsker.

Stalag (Hebrew: סטאלג‎) was a short-lived genre of Nazi exploitation Holocaust pornography in Israel that flourished in the 1950s and early 1960s, and stopped after the time of the Eichmann Trial, because of a ban by the Israeli government.[1] These books did not include Jews to avoid taboos. They are no longer available for a reading today in terms of traditional publication, although the advent of the Internet has allowed for peer-to-peer file sharing.

The books emerged from the culture of silence that surrounded the Holocaust, especially in Israel, until the Eichmann trial. Many young people lived in the shadow of these events, but could find no answers to their inevitable questions, whether from their parents or their teachers. For most of adolescents, the only[dubious – discuss] answers they could find were in the book House of Dolls (1955) a novella by K. Tzetnik, a then-anonymous survivor of Auschwitz who wrote about women prisoners forced into prostitution by the Nazi guards. Although published as fiction, the book has been considered a partially truthful account based upon the experiences of the author’s sister. (Wikipedia entry on Stalags)

In 2003, the genre re-entered public debate in Israel with the research of popular culture analyst Eli Eshed

Thanks to Robert Schilling for recommending.