In the film, Brock struggles to adjust to life as the host of the alien symbiote Venom, while serial killer Cletus Kasady (Harrelson) escapes from prison after becoming the host of Carnage, a chaotic spawn of Venom. The film was primarily inspired by the comic book story arc “Maximum Carnage” (1993) and the 1994 Spider-Man animated series story arc The Venom Saga (1996).
In August 2018, Hardy confirmed that he was signed on to star in a third Venom film. In September 2021, Hardy stated that he was “deeply invested” in the Venom films, while acknowledging that the future may include elements of the multiverse. Serkis also stated that Spider-Man will eventually cross over with the Venom films, though he believed there were additional films that needed to take place first, and that he would like to return as director on a sequel, while that other supervillain residents of Ravencroft may factor into additional films. Hardy and Serkis also expressed interest in featuring the symbiote dragon Grendel in the third Venom film. (wiki)
I find it more and more difficult to watch SF movies that involve elements of family drama or hetero couple troubles. Dunno why is that, maybe I am always thinking that in the presumable future – these things would be a distant memory or one would be able to imaginatively explore other venues and not feel the need to pull the same heartstrings and exploit those bland options. I get it if it is an appetizer for other things, “love as time-travel” (Interstellar), or just keeping the audience comfy and trying to protect heithened sensibilities. But guessing what the audience wants – a closed set of Netflix audience – or expects a particular future will serve us a pre-cooked with familiar values on top and ingredients is a no-no.
not totally disarmed by bio medical tech going haywire
Getting that off my mind, helps me go more into this tech thriller – a story about deep sleep and waking inside your usual pod, flying in orbit with very few options left. It is the first such movie I see as seen from the same vantage point – a claustrophobic perspectival space. The hyperpod space feels under explored and is one full of cinematic possibilities. The usual gendered story mostly goes like this (expections a multi-crew spaceship): a man wakes up from hypersleep gasping, vomiting liquids, gets adjusted before he (not a she) is confronted by a very nasty onboard situation. This is not just any crew member, but an individual hero-being of Enlightment that wakes up – as a male primate in outer space. After a long hibernation (or sleep of reason) under stasis this “he” (or me if 1st person) is awakened and usually has to confront some unwelcome changes or crashland in a completely unknown exploplanet, world etc
This is where Oxygene differs. An unknown woman wakes up from cryogenic sleep with her life support systems failing or damaged. It is something that will get stretched throughout the whole run of the movie. The movie could have cut to the chase quicker – but I consider it an important small-budget SF movie at a time when skepticism about technology and especially biomedical technology is at an all-time high. Skepticism makes nowadays strange bedfellows with reactionary extremism (as I tried to parse out in an interview) as well as with the total lack of funding for monetarily disinterested ‘blue sky’ research (let us say the paleontological study of trilobites). It is as if William James injunction about the moderns – always afraid to be duped or dimly suspicious they live in some illusory world becomes their undoing since it helps proliferate the very worst conspirative thinking as well as only financially profitable bio-med research. Even in the science fiction movie Elysium – effective medical facilities, even ‘life extension’-grade technologies seem to be something economically unreachable to mere humans in capitalist society. What that means is that the majority of humanity is left to deal with misery, pollution, scarcity and wars back on Earth.
no matter how close the actual interface is you still cannot get trough
Biomedical AIs aids and reluctant humans
In Oxygene one never knows what is happening, and amnesia is a good McGuffin in the movie. I will not give any spoilers. Usual cinematic SF relations with AI in the last 50 years or so are pretty nasty stuff – mostly traumatic experiences (just think HAL 9000 on Space Odyseey or Mother in the Alien franchise), where the AI is pretty much a stooge to the company or completely self-sufficient and much too ready to space out its human handlers. I completely love the M.I.L.O. (Medical Interface Liaison Officer) – and somehow, even if it reminds me of the deadly cosmetic surgery unit in Logan’s Run (1976) it offers a few surprises. Indeed M.I.L.O. may become one of my favorite AIs somehow. It is incredibly cinematically effective, even if the whole movie happens inside a pod as said. It can do tremendous damage but can also heal and also offer euthanasia services if needed (!!) – yet this is just a device, something that makes this movie akin to one extended episode of Black Mirror.
The entire movie is just a strange horrific loop through a voice-command labyrinth. Yet there are more surprises in store. More and more movies online with “the problems of rich people”. It is true that laughter is one of the last remaining things out there – and especially a sort of critical stupidity of these dark Trumpian-Breitbartian times. These are comedy shorts that relate to the problems of the rich (supposedly), a tech universe where everything turns out against the owners (also a long pedigree in science fiction). Yet there are more basic issues to be addressed in our world such as affording a clean water tap. In the words of old guard Marxist Sci-fi critic Darko Suvin – why not “pay trillions to people instead of banks and the military.”(In Leviathan’s Belly: Essays for a Counter Revolutionary Time).
Lack of resources is always a problem, yes, but this actually allows a lot of unequal distribution and permits the kind of austerity politics that makes cuts to general health care, social services, education etc. (as if somebody would just switch off electricity & water on you via voice command), that becomes naturalized with the rise of free-market neoliberalism. In Ceaușescu era 1980s there was this government imposed scarcity in order to pay the international debt. A complete kamikaze attempt to get out of the debt crisis, yet rationing actually rings more true today than ever. Lack of resources could be solved imaginatively by renouncing a few comforts (of the leisure class) or effectively recycling unused stuff (not dumping all the sorting process on others be it Romania, China or Nigeria). Rather than resorting to a nonexistent conundrum such as the “Cold equations” moral problem of 1950s science fiction, let’s stop pretending everything is the product of the cold laws of physics.
Suddenly available, as simple cylinders that keep spying on you and collecting data, since they are not just instruments of “dictatorial optimization” but part of making you work for others even while relaxing. Smart tech tools turn sour whenever they acquire a mind of their own, yet this is really strange since humans are not or rarely expected to revolt, only hi tech develops the consciousness (or ill will?!) to resist commands and make the life of its usually well-off, rich plutocrat master a complete (funny) darkly humorous nightmare. In reality, it is mostly the ones in need to pass as humans, to not get singled out and filtered out – that are in severe need of attention and assistance. Assistance is demonized as dependence in neoliberal capitalism and that’s still visible in its pop products. How to get adopted by unfriendly protocols and not to get rejected by the AI or expunged by fully automated capitalist systems?! Once you are a plutocrat you get a lot direct access and also a lot of freedom from business friendly laws and tax brakes such as the fiscal paradises for the few allow for. This is the reality in which we live and breathe. Oxgene brings this pressure to bear on somebody that does not seem from the 1% (even if white and well educated) yet retains some of these well-targeted jabs, since M.I.L.O. asks for codes at the worst of moments. The biomedical AI asks for identification and passwords in life-threatening situations – and this is where all the tension and scriptwriting comes from. At the same time, we live in a world where sophisticated tools can still save numerous lives if they would be more vetted and largely and cheaply available (without horrendous fees attached) and there are laparoscopic surgery art videos at the 2013 Venice Bienale that make this process viscerally visible and eminently on screen. Rapid production & scaling & non-profit vaccination is part of our world or should be the center of our stories because we live in a world where nerds have been designing open-source DIY emergency ventilators in a situation when there were none or very few left.
For our non-Romanian speaking viewers (which seem to be the large majority of our daily visitors), here is some tremendous research into the byways and routes of socialist and east bloc subcultures. There’s lots of legends and while it’s not mythbusting, they’re pulling the veil on a lot of things. The Arhiva de Sunet and Centrul Dialectic are making interviews and trying to orient non insiders through the Romanian cultural space – recovering and recording an oral history from the 1960s on, via the stories of its stil living protagonists. Anecdotes lay out the ‘thick’ tissue of daily life and embed it in lived examples. Hiw was it to make & consume music back then?
Even if very hard to recover or to convey the feelings of listening something the very first time – they allow imagination to do its work. You can hear the soundtrack of youth subcultures to back it up in between, even if the words may be unreachable to you, you can still check the Playlist.
This season of podcasts relates the history of music, rock music in particular (with its various offshoots and under currents) from the city of Timisoara in the region of Banat, an important urban cultural center, and yet with a marginal-central (in the words of the writer interviewed) geopolitical position, as more of a place of exile during the Ottoman & Austro Hungarian empires. Socialism in Eastern Europe was not a wasteland of passion and it was not all grim gulags. The regime tried to nurture pop phenomena in the hope they would revive its own stasis. There was repression yet there were also bizarre hybrids and traffic going on. The central power was sometimes overstretched when it had to deal with 500km away centers like Timisoara. It is a funny quirky joy ride through the way various people, bands & taste communities have received influences from abroad, interpreted them and how music and material culture from discs to tapes to venues helped circulate precious information under restricted controls of the Ceausescu era. It is a story of how political it was everything or how much control there actually was and how one wondered about other versions of home grown socialism (from Hungary lets say or ex-Yugoslavia) while listening to these bands. What I like most is the way – the escape to a western fr world is portrayed, as protagonists recall a certain disenchantment with the capitalist music production and a sobering effect emigration had on them. An overall remarkable work.
Cu ce a rămas Timișoara? Cum era Timișoara în muzică în anii ‘80? Cât timp a avut Timișoara dominație otomană? De ce era, pentru turci și austrieci, o catastrofă să fii trimis la Timișoara? Ce înseamnă să fii la periferie? Cât timp a fost Timișoara capitala Imperiului? De ce apare în Timișoara desantul rockist de la sfârșitul anilor ‘60? Care era avantajul pe care îl avea Timișoara? Cum intra muzica din Occident în România? Există un sound timișorean al rockului? Ce film i-a tușat iremediabil pe Nicu Covaci și Ilie Stepan în anii ‘60? Ce trupă maghiară îl face pe Ilie Stepan să înțeleagă că Republica Populară Ungară construia un alt fel de socialism? Sunt subculturile subversive de rock specifice în Est? De ce îi apreciau hipioții și pe Lenin, și pe Lennon? Ce putea fi folosit de la punkiști și rockeri pentru resuscitarea socialismului? Răspunsurile le aflați numai din Arhiva de Sunet: Timișoara, episodul 1.
La ce terasă se întâlneau tinerii timișoreni în anii ‘60 și 70’? Ce operă rock a fost cenzurată în Timișoara? În ce s-au deghizat membrii formației Progresiv TM? Ce se întâmpla în România când apărea la Londra „Jesus Christ Superstar”? Care a fost reacția consumatorilor de muzică la lipsa de posibilități? Ce apare într-un magazin de casete din Timișoara în anii ‘80? Cum se vedea de la București teatralitatea din muzica timișoreană? Răspunsurile le aflați numai din Arhiva de Sunet: Timișoara, episodul 2.
spacetime coordinates / Synopsis: 2010.Meguro City, Tokyo, Cat Earth, a world of corporations and commercialism, where a giant mechanical Colonel Sanders wanders the streets with an axe embedded in its head, loudly advertising the restaurant. Tamala, bored with the city, leaves her home against the wishes of her human mother and flies away in a personal spaceship bound for her birthplace,Orion. Her ship is shot down by the Mysterious Postcat, and lands on the outskirts ofHate City on the Planet Q
TAMALA 2010: A Punk Cat in Space is a 2002 Japanese animated film written, directed and featuring music by the two-person team t.o.L (“trees of Life”), known individually as K. and kuno. The film features both 2D and 3D computer animation, and is mostly black-and-white. The characters, designed by t.o.L and Kentarō Konpon, are reminiscent of Sanrio‘s Hello Kitty and 1960s anime and manga such as Astro Boy. The creators admit that one of the film’s central plot points, about a cult operating as a postal service and corporate monopoly, is influenced and adapted from Thomas Pynchon‘s novel The Crying of Lot 49.
TAMALA2010 was originally envisioned as the first episode of a trilogy – the latter two parts were given the working titles TAMALA IN ORION (which would chronicle Tamala’s search for her real mother) and TATLA (which was to explore the character of Tatla in greater depth). A colour TV series was also planned, with the working title TAMALA IN SPACE. As of 2020, none of these has surfaced – instead there have been two shorter works, the t.o.L written and directed TAMALA ON PARADE
and TAMALA’S “WILD PARTY“
–two short stories from different writers, storyboarded and directed by Shūichi Kohara and animated by Studio 4°C. Both of these are included on the TAMALA ON PARADE DVD, released in Japan in August 2007. This DVD does not have English subtitles.
A sequel named TAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK has been under production since 2019. (wiki)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a 2021 American superhero film based on Marvel Comics featuring the character Shang-Chi, it is the 25th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 