time machine // database // travel guide
spacetime coordinates: 2020’s Tokyo
Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (also known simply as Snake Eyes) is a 2021 American superhero film directed by Robert Schwentke based on Hasbro‘s G.I. Joe franchise, the film serves as an origin story for the title character, created by Larry Hama, in addition to being a reboot of the G.I. Joe film series. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: Warsaw, summer of 1944 / destruction of Warsaw
Warsaw 44 is a 2014 Polish war film, originally titled Miasto 44 (City 44). The film depicts the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 during the German occupation of Poland. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Montana wilderness
Those Who Wish Me Dead is a 2021 American neo-Western action thriller film directed by Taylor Sheridan based on the novel of the same name by Michael Koryta
The film follows a boy (Finn Little) who witnesses the murder of his father and goes on the run with a smokejumper (Angelina Jolie) in the Montana wilderness to escape a pair of assassins (Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen) hired to silence him; Jon Bernthal, Medina Senghore, and Jake Weber also star. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: late 2010’s Oregon forests / Portland
Pig is a 2021 American drama film co-written and directed by Michael Sarnoski in his directorial debut. It stars Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, and Adam Arkin, and follows a truffle forager whose beloved truffle-finding pig goes missing. (wiki)
The Boys is an American superhero streaming television series developed by Eric Kripke for Amazon Prime Video. Based on the comic book of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, which was originally published by DC Comics under their Wildstorm imprint before moving to Dynamite Entertainment; it follows the eponymous team of vigilantes as they combat superpowered individuals who abuse their abilities.
The series stars an ensemble cast that includes Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Laz Alonso, Tomer Capon and Karen Fukuhara as the titular vigilantes, and Antony Starr, Erin Moriarty, Dominique McElligott, Chace Crawford, Jessie T. Usher and Nathan Mitchell as members of the “Seven”, an official superhero group run by the conglomerate Vought International, who, while maintaining a lofty façade, are shallow celebrity figures prone to do horrendous things in secret. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 2019 farm in south-western France.
The Swarm (French: La Nuée) is a 2020 French fantasy-horror / drama film directed by Just Philippot. The film stars Suliane Brahim, Sofian Khammes, Marie Narbonne, Raphael Romand and Nathalie Boyer. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: London 2022
Then I fall asleep on the Tube and wake up all the way out at Heathrow Terminal 5. Feeling like lost luggage.
“The Dream City isn’t anything like real London unless you count the Square Mile – and then only in that both are full of swerves and unexpected openings. Making your way around is like playing a video game where the designers are having a laugh at your expense. There’s no map of it, no overview, and very little concession to reality. Streets can turn into canals and canals into bridges, and occasionally roads go around corners that are greater than 360 degrees with no apology. Yet somehow it all holds together.
For architectural chutzpah, the Dream City is like Singapore. Showy, extravagantly futuristic. There are neon bridges connecting the tops of buildings. There are fleets of cyclists riding point to point in transparent tubes. But when you explore on foot you find old parts underneath mossy cloisters of pitted stone with broken statues, canals that smell like ditchwater and plunge unexpectedly underground. You can ride through these dark tunnels poled by animal gondoliers who use recycled smartphones to light the way.
If you look, you can find railway-siding houses with piles of junk rotting in their back gardens just like in real London. But the back gardens in the Dream City are overshadowed by mysterious honeycomb towers whose structure looks like a cross section of bone under a high-powered microscope.”
(…) “Sometimes there are snorting horses drawing carriages over cobbles, and steaming reeks rise from manhole covers as if an underground machine is gearing itself up for a very rude belch. Sometimes the buildings are square and shiny plastic, as if they’ve drifted in from the archetypal sleeping Lego Republic.
Sometimes the city is muted to utter silence.
Sometimes the streets are metal grates over jungles that release a fume of fruit and rot and animal smells. You can’t get down there or see beyond the top of the canopy, but you can taste the moisture in the air of all that trapped life and you can hear the birds and insects in full cry.”
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