The definitive three-and-a-half hour documentary about the troubled creation and enduring legacy of the science fiction classic Blade Runner (1982), culled from 80 interviews and hours of never-before-seen outtakes and lost footage.
Roger & Me is a 1989 American film written, produced, directed by and starring Michael Moore. Moore portrays the regional economic impact of General MotorsCEORoger Smith‘s action of closing several auto plants in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, reducing GM’s employees in that area from 80,000 in 1978 to about 50,000 in 1992. As of August 2015, GM employs approximately 7,200 workers in the Flint area, according to The Detroit News, and 5,000 workers according to MSNBC. In 2013, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” (wiki)
timespace coordinates:rural northern England in the late Seventies and early Eighties
“Combining bittersweet comedy with mental illness can’t be easy but Jo Brand, making her feature-film debut as a writer and drawing on her years as a psychiatric nurse, does an impressive job with The More You Ignore Me.” Matthew Bond Director: Keith English
The majority of the film’s animation was completed through rotoscoping, a process in which live actors are filmed and the subsequent footage is used for animators to draw over. However, the film also uses a variety of other mixed media including water colors, computer graphics, live-action shots, and archival footage. (wiki)
Ambient 4: On Land is the eighth solo studio album by British ambient musician Brian Eno. It was the final edition in Eno’s ambient series, which began in 1978 with Music for Airports.
On Land is a mixture of synthesizer-based notes, nature/animal recordings, and a complex array of other sounds, most of which were unused, collected recordings from previous albums and the sessions that created them. As Eno explained, “… the making of records such as On Land involved feeding unheard tape into the mix, constant feeding and remixing, subtracting and “composting”. (…) “instrumentation shifted gradually through electro-mechanical and acoustic instruments towards non-instruments like pieces of chain and sticks and stones … I included not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the complete body of my own earlier work”.
Despite the music’s dark leanings, it is in a sense still highly “ambient” in that the tracks tend to blend into each other and thus fulfill all of Eno’s original expectations of what the term means. Nevertheless, there is still room for the occasional surprise, such as Jon Hassell‘s recognisable effect-laden trumpet in “Shadow“. Eno, cognizant of the deeper aural qualities, said, “On the whole, On Land is quite a disturbed landscape: some of the undertones deliberately threaten the overtones, so you get the pastoral prettiness on top, but underneath there’s a dissonance that’s like an impending earthquake”.
The album makes reference to definite geographical places, such as “Lizard Point“, named after the exposed, southernmost tip of mainland Britain, close to Land’s End in South-West England.
“Tal Coat” refers to Pierre Louis Jacob (1905–1985), aka Pierre Tal-Coat, a proponent of the French form of abstract expressionism, Tachisme. This interest in painting is reflected in his statement that the album was “… an attempt to transpose into music something that you can do in painting: creating a figurative environment. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art because it was abstract, not figurative. In contrast, my intention in On Land was to make music that was like figurative painting, but without referring to the history of music – more to a “history of listening””
“Lantern Marsh” was a place in East Anglia where he grew up. He remarks, “My experience of it derives not from having visited it (although I almost certainly did) but from having subsequently seen it on a map and imagining where and what it might be”.
“Leeks Hills“, Eno explains, “is a little wood (much smaller now than when I was young, and this not merely the effect of age and memory) which stands between Woodbridge and Melton. There isn’t a whole lot left of it now, but it used to be quite extensive. To find it you travel down the main road connecting Woodbridge and it lies to your left as you go down the hill”.
“Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960” is named after the once prosperous seaport of Dunwich, England, which eroded into the sea over a period of three hundred years. (wiki <3)
Mercury 13 is a remarkable story of the women who were tested for spaceflight in 1961 before their dreams were dashed in being the first to make the trip beyond Earth. NASA’s ‘man in space’ program, dubbed ‘Project Mercury‘ began in 1958. The men chosen – all military test pilots – became known as The Mercury 7. But away from the glare of the media, behind firmly closed doors, female pilots were also screened. Thirteen of them passed and, in some cases, performed better than the men. They were called the Mercury 13 and had the ‘right stuff’ but were, unfortunately, the wrong gender. Underneath the obsession of the space race that gripped America, the women were aviation pioneers who emerged thirsty for a new frontier, but whose time would have to wait. The film tells the definitive story of thirteen truly remarkable women who reached for the stars but were ahead of their time. A Netflix original documentary directed by David Sington and Heather Walsh. (rottentomatoes)
Ant-Man and the Wasp is a 2018 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics characters Scott Lang / Ant-Man and Hope van Dyne / Wasp. Produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, it is the sequel to 2015’s Ant-Man, and the twentieth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The film is directed by Peyton Reed and written by the writing teams of Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, and Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari. It stars Rudd as Lang and Evangeline Lilly as Van Dyne, alongside Michael Peña, Walton Goggins, Bobby Cannavale, Judy Greer, Tip “T.I.” Harris, David Dastmalchian, Hannah John-Kamen, Abby Ryder Fortson, Randall Park, Michelle Pfeiffer, Laurence Fishburne, and Michael Douglas. In Ant-Man and the Wasp, the titular pair work with Hank Pym to retrieve Janet van Dyne from the quantum realm. (wiki)