spacetime coordinates: 31st century Earth / human-populated space colony Nova Prime
After Earth is a 2013 American post-apocalyptic action film directed by M. Night Shyamalan, who co-wrote it with Gary Whitta, based on an original story idea by Will Smith. It is the second film after The Pursuit of Happyness that stars real-life father and son Will and Jaden Smith; (wiki)
Moonfall is a 2022 science fiction disaster film co-written, directed, and produced by Roland Emmerich. It stars Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Michael Peña, Charlie Plummer and Kelly Yu. It follows two former astronauts alongside a conspiracy theorist who discover the hidden truth about Earth’s moon when it leaves its orbit. (wiki)
imdb / megastructure / hollow moon / future
spacetime coordinates: 1937 Egypt
Death on the Nile is a 2022 mystery film directed by Kenneth Branagh from a screenplay by Michael Green, based on the 1937 novel of the same name by Agatha Christie. The film is a sequel to Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Tom Bateman and Branagh returning from the first film as Bouc and Hercule Poirot. The film is the third screen adaptation of Christie’s novel, following the 1978 film and an episode of the television series Agatha Christie’s Poirot broadcast in 2004. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: small isolated village in 1953 Soviet occupied Romania
Silent Wedding (Romanian: Nunta mută) is a 2008 Romanian comedy-drama film directed by Horațiu Mălăele about a young couple who was about to celebrate their marriage but they were ordered to desist by the occupying Red Army and Communist authorities because the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had died the night before. Since they could not openly celebrate, the wedding-goers try to party in silence. (based on actual events)
“For most of the 20th century, pocket size comic books (lianhuanhua 连环画, often literally translated as “linked images”) were an integral part of Chinese everyday reading culture, providing readers with entertainment, information and/or political instruction. Established as such throughout the 1920s and 1930s, after 1949 these comic books continued to range from adaptations of literary texts or films to hagiographies of socialist heroes like Lei Feng to stories propagating the usefulness of using fertilizer in agricultural production. Published as handy pocket-sized booklets, they were shared among children and adult readers alike to be read at street stall libraries or at work units after hours. Lianhuanhua production was massive, with an estimated 50.000 titles published since the founding of the PRC. Moreover, one in three books published in 1986 was a comic!”(READCHINA)
Chinese comic adaptation of Star Wars: https://www.nickstember.com/chinese-star-wars-comic-part-1-6
A comic adaptation of the scar literature short story Maple by Zheng Yi: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/maple
A lianhuanhua adaptation of the science fiction story Little Smarty Travels to the Future by Ye Yonglie: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/little-smarty-travels-to-the-future
I don’t care who you are. You’re my son. You’ll always be my son. Whoever you are.
Titane (2021) dir Julia Ducournau
“Following a series of unexplained crimes, a father is reunited with the son who has been missing for 10 years. Titane: A metal highly resistant to heat and corrosion, with high tensile strength alloys.” (imdb)
Director: Julia Ducournau
Music by: Jim Williams
Titane will still be probably my favorite movie of both 2021 and 2022. I know I am taking big risks here. Still, I consider J. Ducournau one of the best directors around and one of the few ones that is taking the French extreme cinema (also known as New French Extremism) farther afield. It comes as no surprise that it is produced by NEON. She is inheriting an unflinching, uncompromising Franco-Belge horror cinematography, yet I think she is unique altogether for her forays into what someone in a recent article aptly called “Being a Women is Full of Horror”. There is also a hint of J G Ballard out there (CRASH and Atrocity Exhibition) and Cronenbergian New Flesh.
There is nothing out there even closely comparable to this movie. Got first hint of Ducournau during her previous success – a cannibalism coming of age horror drama RAW (2016), while Titane is the final proof she will always have an ace up her sleeve.
Do not want to give any spoilers so I am going to restrict just to try and detail the way utter brutality is undermined – and imploded by some of the most tender and delicate scenes and enduring relations I have ever encountered on screen. Everything seems or feels impossible or made up – and somehow it appears strangely plausible. To me it brought back an incredible documentary mockumentary – The Imposter from a few years ago in this gender fluid way it approached family relations or inserting into a family or tacitly substituting for a disappeared son and it all makes perfect sense. There’s no judgment no condemnation here.
Fucking a car or getting pregnant with a car baby is after all not a far-fetched thing in a world of Holy Motors. There are scenes of absolute elation – ecstatic dancing and incredible fireman partie full of homoerotic charge. There are scenes that would put most slasher movies to shame. The imagery is super slick – almost videoclip (music video) like and this adds an entirely new quality to just having a plot. Its imagery and iconography seems entirely coherent inspired by a whole world burning – from California’s fiery hell to Australia’s unstoppable bushfires.
It’s hard to ignore that we seem yo be moving backwards – since the decoupling from Russian Oil dependence (politically justified) means another coupling and extractivism madness further afield. Beyond SAVE DIESEL bumper stickers (seen a few of those with my own eyes) or the all-powerful car industry lobby in Germany, there is an incredibly destructive death drive present, animated by a machinistic fetish car crash eroticism (one found in car advertising all over the world) one that has been rarely touched upon since cars became the skeleton in the closet. When we think of 1988 Akira anime we think of atomic energy – yet what is missing is that atomic energy rebranded as green – os supposed to make up for those fossil million year old sources under dictatorial control. Energy vampirism goes hand in hand with a pact with the devil and nobody seems to acknowledge this. A Kardashev level 1 civilization is being grilled, charred away – because what we have is self-combustion dependency, burn-out as a source of constant energy. Peak libido is following the price of oil while the West still cannot believe it depends on Russia or Saudi Arabia for running its motors (including war machines that are supposed to backup those oil reserves). The high-octane heroine Titane – survives a car crash, she’s the first plated cyborg that matches the exhaust pipes of our times. She is no inocent, she’s a killer, transformative and shape-shifting – yet protecting her machinic progeny (not clear if it’s real or just an effect of hallucinations caused by her prosthetics. Reducing with cars literally? No, it’s not a metaphor.
We love and live in a time when car manufacturers race to fake their own emissions and build artificially-sensitive systems that can distinguish btw the simulation and the real world conditions and avoid supervision and regulation and sell more (no matter what costs). Car manufacturers are primary authors of petrofictional cleanliness and carbon neutrality no?
They’re writing the end chapter of this petrofictional 21st c era that seems to want to circumvent any leftover human agency and decide in spite of government regulation, treaties, UN horror reports, climatologists consensus on climate crisis forums. YES (they seem to say) emperatures have to rise and Earth has to be transformed into a dessicated husk. I think one cannot embody or be attuned to these burning reality without such movies as Titane coming out of this bonfire.
TimeSpace Warps 