706 – Sacred Games (TV Series 2018– )

timespace coordinates: 70’s – 80’s – 90’s – 2010’s Mumbai

Sacred Games is an Indian web television series by Netflix based on Vikram Chandra‘s 2006 thriller novel of the same name. The series was produced in partnership with Phantom Films. The novel was adapted by Varun Grover, Smita Singh and Vasant Nath, and all eight, hour-long episodes were directed by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane. All eight episodes were made available for streaming on 6 July 2018.

Sacred Games tells the story of Sartaj Singh (Saif Ali Khan), a jaded police inspector living under the shadow of his deceased father and seeking validation from a police force he nevertheless loathes for its corruption. When Singh receives an anonymous tip-off regarding the whereabouts of Ganesh Gaitonde (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a notorious crime lord who has been missing for 16 years, it initiates a chain of events that burrows deep into India’s dark underworld.

जन्नत तोह मैं हो

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The episode titles are inspired by Hindu mythology. The first episode titled “Aswatthama”, was based on the namesake character from the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. He was cursed with immortality by Krishna after the Kurukshetra war. In the series, Gaitonde calls himself immortal like Ashwatthama, but later commits suicide. “Halahala”, another episode, was named after a poison of the same name, which was retrieved from Samudra manthan. Aatapi and Vatapi were two demons who used to trick travellers with hospitality and kill them. Brahmahatya means killing of a Brahmin, which is a crime in Hinduism. In the episode, the Hindu Gaitonde agrees to try to attract Muslim votes for Hindu politician Bhosale. Sarama is referred to as a dog. Pretakalpa learns the rites of a Hindu to perform the cremations. In this episode, Katekar is killed and Sartaj cremates him. Rudra is the angered version of Shiva. Gaitonde’s wife Subhadra is killed in this episode; he takes revenge by murdering her killers. Yayati was king cursed with premature old age.

imdb

0671 – Beirut (2018)

spacetime coordinates: 1972 – 1982  Lebanon

Beirut, also known as The Negotiator (UK), is a 2018 American period political thriller film directed by Brad Anderson and written by Tony Gilroy. Set in 1982 during the Lebanese Civil War, the film stars Jon Hamm as a former U.S. diplomat who returns to service in the titular city of Beirut in order to save a colleague from the group responsible for the death of his family. Rosamund Pike, Dean Norris, Shea Whigham, Larry Pine and Mark Pellegrino also star.

Taglines:   Beirut: 1982 – The Paris of the Middle East Was Burning   imdb

669 – The Shining (US. version) (1980)

spacetime coordinates: 1921 – 1980  the isolated historic Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies.

The Shining is a 1980 horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written with novelist Diane Johnson. The film is based on Stephen King‘s 1977 novel of the same name.

Response_by_Stephen_King

Social_interpretations: Native_Americans

Ambiguities_in_the_film

Sequel      imdb

668 – Ready Player One (2018)

spacetime coordinates: 2045 Columbus, Ohio

imdb

cultural references

The film was noted to have significant differences from the book, with some critics calling the film’s plot an improvement over the source material. 🙂

650 – Guest of Cindy Sherman (2008)

Cindy Sherman von Philipp Kaiser

Analyzing his relationship with the reclusive artist Cindy Sherman leads filmmaker Paul H-O (Hasegawa-Overacker) to confront his own identity in this personal and unexpectedly humorous documentary. Paul H-O became a fixture of the New York art scene in the 1990s with his public access show “GalleryBeat.” Armed with a video camera, he attended art gallery openings, intriguing many with his candid, witty assessments of the work and winning fans in the process. Among the latter was Cindy Sherman, the press-shy art superstar, who invited Paul to her studio for a series of exclusive filmed interviews. In these sessions, he gains insight into her artistic process and a romantic relationship blossoms as they fall in love. Their initial bliss takes a turn when Paul gets caught up in the aura of Cindy’s celebrity and he is subordinated to a role as Cindy’s guest at the star-studded openings and dinners she regularly attends. Spanning over 15 years and with unprecedented access to the great artist, including interviews with a veritable who’s who of the art and entertainment world, the film paints a vivid picture of the contemporary art scene and provides a witty, illuminating look at celebrity, anxiety, and art. (rottentomatoes)

Cindy was initially supportive, but later opposed the project.

imdb

0641 – La planète sauvage / Fantastic Planet (1973)

Fantastic Planet (French: La Planète sauvage, Czech: Divoká planeta, lit. The Wild Planet) is a 1973 animated science fiction film directed by René Laloux and written by Laloux and Roland Topor. Topor also completed the film’s production design and it was animated at Jiří Trnka Studio in Prague. The entire animation team was composed of women.

The film was an international co-production between companies from France and Czechoslovakia (The animation was started in Prague but had to be moved to Paris to avoid interference by the Communist authorities who were in power at the time).

The allegorical story, about humans living on a strange planet dominated by giant humanoid aliens (blue Draags) who consider them animals, is based on the 1957 novel Oms en série by French writer Stefan Wul. (wiki)   imdb   Interpretations

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612 – Davi Kopenawa, Bruce Albert, Alison Dundy – The falling sky – words of a Yanomami shaman

The Falling Sky is a remarkable first-person account of the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon. Representing a people whose very existence is in jeopardy, Davi Kopenawa paints an unforgettable picture of Yanomami culture, past and present, in the heart of the rainforest–a world where ancient indigenous knowledge and shamanic traditions cope with the global geopolitics of an insatiable natural resources extraction industry.

In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation and experience as a shaman, as well as his first encounters with outsiders: government officials, missionaries, road workers, cattle ranchers, and gold prospectors. He vividly describes the ensuing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. To counter these threats, Davi Kopenawa became a global ambassador for his endangered people. The Falling Sky follows him from his native village in the Northern Amazon to Brazilian cities and finally on transatlantic flights bound for European and American capitals. These travels constitute a shamanic critique of Western industrial society, whose endless material greed, mass violence, and ecological blindness contrast sharply with Yanomami cultural values.

Bruce Albert, a close friend since the 1970s, superbly captures Kopenawa’s intense, poetic voice. This collaborative work provides a unique reading experience that is at the same time a coming-of-age story, a historical account, and a shamanic philosophy, but most of all an impassioned plea to respect native rights and preserve the Amazon rainforest. (amazon)

“When I come back from a trip among the white people, the dizziness leaves my eyes after a while and my thought be-comes clear again. I no longer hear cars, machines, or airplanes. I only lend an ear to the tooro toads and krouma frogs that call the rain in the forest. I only hear the rustling of the leaves in the wind and the rumbling of the thunders in the sky. The ignorant words of the city politicians gradually vanish in the quiet of my sleep. I become calm again by going to hunt and making my spirits dance.

The forest is very beautiful to see. It is cool and aromatic. When you move through it to hunt or travel, you feel joyful and your mind is slow-paced. You listen to the chirping of the cicadas in the distance, or the cries of the curassows and the agami herons, and the clamor of the spider monkeys in the trees. Your worries are eased. Your thoughts can then follow one another without getting obscured.”