0124 – Deepwater Horizon (2016)

spacetime coordinates:  April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon, an oil drilling rig operated by private contractor Transocean, Gulf of Mexico

Deepwater Horizon is a 2016 American biopic disaster film directed by Peter Berg, written by Matthew Sand and Matthew Michael Carnahan, and starring an ensemble cast including Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, Gina Rodriguez, Dylan O’Brien and Kate Hudson. It is based on the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

An oil rig was built just for this film, this rig is located in Chalmette, Louisiana where filming mostly took place. It has been coined as the largest set piece ever built.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1860357/

122

119 – Legion (TV series 2017– )

Legion is an American cable television series created for FX by Noah Hawley, based on the Marvel Comics character David Haller / Legion. It is connected to the X-Men film series, the first television series to be so, and is produced by FX Productions in association with Marvel Television. Hawley serves as showrunner on the series.

Dan Stevens stars as Haller, a mutant diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age. Rachel Keller, Aubrey Plaza, Bill Irwin, Jeremie Harris, Amber Midthunder, Katie Aselton, and Jean Smart also star.

as a director Hawley wanted the series to be highly stylized, describing his vision for it as “a 1964 Terence Stamp movie”. It was not feasible to literally translate Bill Sienkiewicz‘s iconic artwork of the character to the screen, and Hawley wanted the series to have “its own visual aesthetic to it, and part of that is being a story kind of out of time and out of place”. He stated that “the design of a show has to have its own internal logic”, and compared this sensibility to the series Hannibal, which he said was “a great example of something that had this almost fetishistic beauty to everything that you saw, whether it was food or violence.” Hawley elaborated that the design choice of 60s British films came about because “this whole show is not the world, it’s David’s experience of the world. He’s piecing his world together from nostalgia and memory and the world becomes that.”

At New York Comic-Con 2016, Donner said that the series is “far from the X-Men movies, but still lives in that universe. The only way for X-Men to keep moving forward is to be original and to surprise. And this is a surprise. It is very, very different.” Hawley explained that because the series is depicting the title character’s “subjective reality”, it would not have to address any connections to the films straight away, at first “had to stand on its own feet” before exploring those connections more;  He did state that “you can’t tell this story without” acknowledging that Legion is the son of Charles Xavier, who appears in the films. (read more – shared universe connections)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5114356/

0116 – deef

spacetime coordinates: Bergensbanen Norway, 2009

music: mixed & edited by deef: http://www.deef.xyz

video: «Bergensbanen» — NRK: https://nrkbeta.no/2009/12/18/bergensbanen-eng/

0098 – Elysium (2013)

spacetime coordinates: 2154. the ruins of Los Angeles / Elysium

Elysium is a 2013 American science fiction film produced, written and directed by Neill Blomkamp. It stars Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Alice Braga, and Sharlto Copley. The film takes place on both a ravaged Earth, and a luxurious space habitat (Stanford torus design) called Elysium.

The film itself offers deliberate social commentary which explores political and sociological themes such as immigration, overpopulation, health care, worker exploitation, the justice system, and social class issues. Blomkamp has stated that it is a comment on the contemporary human condition.”Everybody wants to ask me lately about my predictions for the future,” the director has said, “No, no, no. This isn’t science fiction. This is today. This is now.” (The film’s Earth-bound scenes were shot in a dump in the poor Iztapalapa district on the outskirts of Mexico City, while the scenes for Elysium were shot in Vancouver and the wealthy Huixquilucan-Interlomas suburbs of Mexico City.)

director Neil Blomkamp expressed some regrets regarding Elysium, commenting: “I feel like I fucked it up, I feel like ultimately the story is not the right story.. I still think the satirical idea of a ring, filled with rich people, hovering above the impoverished Earth, is an awesome idea. I love it so much, I almost want to go back and do it correctly. But I just think the script wasn’t… I just didn’t make a good enough film is ultimately what it is. I feel like I executed all of the stuff that could be executed, like costume and set design and special effects very well. But, ultimately, it was all resting on a somewhat not totally formed skeletal system, so the script just wasn’t there; the story wasn’t fully there.”

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imdb

0097 – The Neon Demon (2016)

spacetime coordinates: 2015 Los Angeles

The Neon Demon is a 2016 psychological horror film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, co-written by Mary Laws, Polly Stenham, and Refn, and starring Elle Fanning.

The plot follows an aspiring model in Los Angeles whose beauty and youth generate intense fascination and jealousy within the industry. Supporting roles are played by Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Desmond Harrington, Christina Hendricks, and Keanu Reeves.

imdb

0096 – Drive (2011)

spacetime coordinates: 2011 Los Angeles

Drive is a 2011 American neo-noir crime film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and written by Hossein Amini, based on the 2005 novel by James Sallis. It stars Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, Oscar Isaac and Albert Brooks.

Journalists and reviewers have called Drive a “classic Los Angeles heist-gone-wrong story”, a “tribute to the genre of car films” in the vein of movies like Bullitt (1968). As a character study, Drive examines themes of “loyalty, loneliness and the dark impulses that rise up even when we try our hardest to suppress them.” It combines comic gore, film noir and B-movie style and Hollywood spectacle, resulting in “a bizarre concoction…reminiscent of David Lynch‘s Mulholland Drive…Quentin Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction, and [with] angst-laden love scenes that would not be out of place in a Scandinavian drama”.  – read more about  Style and inspiration – 

the film contains abundant, evocative, intense images of Los Angeles. from the little seen back streets of downtown LA to the dry arid outposts on the peaks of the desert landscape surrounding it, LA is re-imagined all the way down to the rocky cliffs by the sea.

While Drive is set in the present day, it carries a heavy 1980s atmosphere that is cautiously set from beginning to end and is underlined not only by the vehicles or music and clothes, but also by its architecture. The parts of the city seen in the Valley and by downtown Los Angeles are cheap stucco and mirrored glass. Refn avoided certain areas to preserve the gloomy atmosphere often leaving out more contemporary buildings. Drab background settings include the Southern California commercial strip. As the Los Angeles Times pointed out, whenever gleaming buildings are shown, it is because they are being seen from a distance. Refn shot those scenes from a helicopter at night in Bunker Hill, Los Angeles.

imdb   /   wiki