Though the film’s title and story loosely resemble that of Abel Ferrara‘s 1992 film Bad Lieutenant, according to Herzog, it is neither a sequel nor a remake; its only commonality is a corrupt policeman as the central character. Nonetheless, the director of the original Bad Lieutenant film, Abel Ferrara, expressed dismay that the Herzog film was being made. Both Bad Lieutenant films were produced by Edward R. Pressman. (wiki)
The Fall of the House of Usher is an American gothic horror drama television miniseries created by Mike Flanagan. All eight episodes were released on Netflix on October 12, 2023, each directed by either Flanagan or Michael Fimognari, the latter also acting as cinematographer for the entire series.
Loosely based on various works by 19th century author Edgar Allan Poe (most prominently the eponymous 1840 short story), the series adapts otherwise-unrelated stories and characters by Poe into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. It recounts both the rise to power of Roderick Usher, the powerful CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company and his sister Madeline Usher, the genius COO of the pharmaceutical company, and the events leading to the deaths of all six of Roderick’s children. It stars an ensemble cast led by Carla Gugino as a mysterious woman plaguing the Ushers, and Bruce Greenwood as an elderly Roderick. (wiki)
The film follows a group of teenagers who discover they are able to contact spirits using a mysterious embalmed hand, only for things to go too far.
In August 2023, Danny and Michael Philippou revealed that they had already completed principal photography on a prequel film, with the story exploring Duckett’s backstory which leads into the character’s introduction in the original movie. Production was completed consecutively, from the perspective of screenlife storytelling through mobile phones and social media. Sunny Johnson features as Duckett. The filmmakers stated that they intend to release this project in the future. Additionally, the Philippous confirmed plans to develop a sequel, stating that they’ve already written sequences for the project. Later that month, A24 announced that a sequel titled Talk 2 Me was in development; with the studio releasing the official logo at that same time. Danny and Michael Philippou will return as co-directors, from a script written by returning writers Danny and Bill Hinzman. (wiki)
Avalon (Japanese: アヴァロン, Hepburn: Avaron), also known as Gate to Avalon, is a 2001 Polish-language Japanese science fiction drama film directed by Mamoru Oshii and written by Kazunori Itō.
The film stars Małgorzata Foremniak as Ash, a player in an illegal virtual reality video game whose sense of reality is challenged as she attempts to unravel the true nature and purpose of the game. Avalon was filmed in Wrocław, Nowa Huta, the Modlin Fortress and Warsaw. The 2009 film Assault Girls that was written and directed by Oshii, is a stand-alone sequel set in the same fictional universe as Avalon.
Players wear headsets which immerse their senses in the game world. The design of the headset and chair installation are influenced by the cult French science fiction short film La jetée. The headless statues also appear in this 1962 film.
The scene with Ash in the tramway is a live action recreation of a similar scene appearing in the 1999 anime feature film Jin-Roh, which Oshii wrote but did not direct. This scene is based on Oshii’s own teenage experience, when he used to spend entire days spinning in loop in the Yamanote Line. (wiki)
Philosopher Eugene Thacker (In the Dust of this Planet, The Global Genome, After Life, Biomedia, Tentacles Longer Than Night and many more) wrote in 2016 for The Japan Times a series of Black Illumination introductory (5 min) texts. They are behind a paywall, but saving them in Pocket you can actually read them all. His investigation of Japanese modernist estrangement, inhumanism and existential & cosmic (both somehow gazing into each other) pessimism is both brief, synthetic without spoiling the potential of these Japanese authors mangakas, philosophers, mad suicidal writers (Junji Ito, Keiji Nishitani, Osamu Dazai, Haruo Sato) for limitless collapse and vacuousness. In the words of my friend Bogdan Otaku Gorganeanu – Junji Ito won’t probably topple this one manga, it goes into regions far darker than those populated by Spirals and ambling arthropod sharks.
Gibney’s style is quite gonzo, yet also influenced by the Bunuel The Exterminating Angel approach that refuses a reductionist, simple analytical perspective and offers a more experiential one. I am tempted to say that pain -and tremendous suffering cannot be just measured – especially when it’s about the left behind & especially since it exists as such a vast scale. Pain has been coupled with blackouts with all those images of unknown worn-out people that rescuers just try to revive or try to inject in order activate their bodies again and again. It is impossibly sad but also important to face this reality. Probably this will be the definitive documentary on Big Pharma and specifically the so-called pain epidemic in the US. It is really a close look at how things got out of hand and how the slow creep of ever more powerful and addictive pills got legally distributed, prescribed and paid by health insurance companies producing some of the most successful IPOs at the stock market and undoubtedly the profitable businesses on this planet. One cannot ever ever imagine the level of craziness and impetus of pushing (better said dealing as in drug dealing) that 21st century Pharma has revved up. There is infinite growth and there is infinite painkiller growth.
First importantly to understand that initially what seemed a good solution – a transition from traditional very brutal mental health therapy in the 1950s – shock treatment and lobotomy regulars in asylums at the time to a more humane, chemical (also say alchemical in tune with the Alchemical Cookbook movie) had much to offer. What started as finding a viable & more effective pain relief for terminal cancer patients that suffered from chronic (or constant) pain – that lead to some groundbreaking discoveries such as long release/extended release medicine ended up being readily available pipeline for anyone ache or no ache, with terrible consequences for the everbody. The 4h long investigation details the way regulatory institutions and a few health professionals strove without much success to warn everybody, shut down producers and try and bring health justice to the people that have been overwhelmingly blamed (the fault lies with you the patient, the addict, the lab rat). Many died because of this readily available and very profitable pill production. Since the developement of anestethics, there has been huge resistance, generally unjustified since doctors really believed patients should suffer or that bodies get purged by suffering – yet the current sitution is at the opposite pole. Pain has been transformed into No 1 enemy, entire clinics, methodologies, pain scale assesssments and pain lecture circuits (including lobbies & pain clinics) have been mushrooming. The result was exponential, the more available the more potent these pills became. Also big ignorance, or willful ignorance to what was happening not only in the private industry labs but also on the streets, the way ppl started circumventing, trafficking and how addicts in turn organizing their own DIY rings and local networks. The reality is much worse than the largely dystopian and conservative vision of Brave New World – in that pharmocracy is still largely highly patented full of patent trolls with no R&D investment.Oxy and the rest did encourage a maintenance of status quo, yet with no equilibrium steady state in view but a continuous disequilibrium, of heaped vulnerabilities latched on and gamed by systems that rarely recompose or manage to protect a majority smashed by decades of neoliberal depredation and legislative loopholes.
What is important is that is also makes clear that this is just one sequence of the story – of opiates and traditional opiate derivatives from poppy that was grown since antiquity. Once industrialized and processed opium became a weapon to open up new markets and balance out imperial trade deficits, most famously and disastrously (for China) during the Opium Wars it became an essential part of modern medicine. Those wars that European imperial powers forced on others in order to make them accept the very lucrative opium traffic in exchange for silver bullion had huge consequences. Generally when the Opioid crisis is mentioned, there is a sort of amnesia regarding the laissez faire economics and open door policies that basically got millions of Chinese addicted to opium traded by the British from the Indian Raj. China tried to fight and destroy these shippments of drugs, but the result was war and gunboat politics as well as territorial concessions by the Chinese, a shameful situation that lasted till 1990s in the case of HK.
One memorable aspect is the whole sales aspect of Pharma (Perdue or otherwise), in my experience one of the most surreal and most brash examples of marketing anywhere, in any industry, including tobacco or arms deals. There is this sequence of training videos for internal use – tactics destined for sales reps ob hip hop rap lyrics, aimed at those that are supposed to convince doctors trough any means (including honey traps or regular bribes etc) that they should continue over-prescribing or increase the dosage. It almost reminded me of Bulgakov based movie Morphineby Aleksei Balabanov with the slowly depedent provincial doctor in Siberia increasing his dosage in order to keep others supplied and face the horrible situation. This in turn has been feeding other more potent drugs in a feedback loop that also ramped up heroin use addiction. The whole is just the alchemy of hell that somehow manages to inundate all sectors, all ages and all problems, especially the Mid West section, former mining towns, rust belt, Appalachia etc
Nothing is a conspiracy because, as always legislation seems to be written in collusion with the makers, where Pharma representatives meet in restaurants with FDA to draft laws around the distribution and safety of these medication. Emails and papers made public speak volumes, yet they always arrive too late. There is also the important art collecting and philantropic aspect of the Sackler family (sponsors of Tate, Smithsonia, Museum of Natural History etc Guggenheim), that denied all responsibility. What I like about Gibney that he does not focus or zoom in just on the founders, of the particular details of the Sackler clan, but takes a broad look into lots of other corners and examples that are not so easy to tie down. Interestingly (for me) is the emphasis on “passion”- in the sense that it truly seems to be a some sort of addiction going on with the founders or CEOs as well. It is easy to demonize Pfizer and just latch onto colorful vaxxer imagination, but it is harder to represent or imagine the vast legal production and pill mill explosion that does not need a virus or an epidemic, or CDC approval, only just incentives by vast amounts of in-flowing money and expansion from cancer patients into new territories and unfettered free access to new bodies.
Everything what they make is with “passion”, and the quote from Sackler Sr about Art and Medicine I find magical in its imbecile purity and mantra like appearance. It has lots of insiders talking, sales reps that where scapegoated and somehow spilled over all that information about whole logic (dare I call it corporate philosophy), of how things actually worked in practice not just on paper. How did this long term persuasion exercise continue and how distributed it got till the end or how hard it is to actually separate state institutions from private interests. Gibney does not exculpate the Sacklers, yet he zooms in order to widen the net and this I appreciate. Revolving doors, people joining the enemy camp happen all the time, at the same time, there is also some sort of permanent watchdogs of the industry, there is also enduring scrutiny by people who are not anti-science or anti-medicine or anti- pills per se, but regular almost barfoot (like the Chinese countryside dr) health soldiers, local family doctors or ex DEA employees on a crusade against Big Pharma. Like always corporation prefer to settle out of court, pay fines (that are merely symbolic in most cases) and never admit wrongdoing.
spacetime coordinates: woods of Michigan sometimes after 2000
The Alchemist Cookbook is a horror film directed by Joel Potrykus. The film was released on the 7th of October 2016 in New York City. Sean” is an outcast who isolates himself from society to practice alchemy, accompanied by only his cat. As his mental condition deteriorates the line of what is real and what is not becomes blurred, and as his home kitchen chemistry turns to black magic, he instead summons a demon.The cast only contains two human characters starring Ty Hickson as Sean and Amari Cheatom as Cortez. Other notable characters include the Cat Kaspar and a possum. The cast is notable as it consists of only African American actors, a conscious choice to “take the white people out of the movie” by the director Joel Potrykus. (wiki)
There is no other movie about contemporary alchemy I would recommend more than this one. In a sense this genre breaking of horror, black commedy, supernatural thriller, demonic possession – sez something about the alchemical dabbling of its director that manages to establish these lonely figures not just as figures of pity, of just misguided or heavily medicalized labour force of today.
They all that as well as 21st c eremites, forever loners and over-qualified loosers that try to achieve the impossible which nowadays is fairly everything that was deemed possible only a few generations ago such as a decent job, some sort of stability and free health care.
What they get, is what Michael Taussig identified long ago in South America Columbia coca plantations as the new demonology of capital that maltreats, transform labour into dead labour, and possess everything. This demonology is at large in the woods of Michigan as well. Oxy and other Perdue Pharma products that have been choreographing the pain epidemic in the US Midwest are the sort of additives, the transformative blackout addictive and legal (FDA approved) substances, readily available alchemy that leaves nobody untouched. Potrykus seems to never aim for re-enchantment but somehow, in the midst of disaster and wilderness keeps us close to the low residues of broken quests.
And this is not the quest of Silicon Valley, of quantum computing or of immortalist future-addicted entrepreneurs, but of somebody who is trying to make ends meet and uses the most banal, lowly substances (fast food trash) – peanut butter, Doritos, all the toxic Cola sugary drinks dirge to enact the last invocation, to achieve some sort of disturbed and horrifying immortality in front of continuous demonic attacks, paranoia and hidden commands.
Being prone to nevrosis and increasing bouts of bipolar trouble (what was previously officially labeled as obsessive compulsive) gets a different urgency by being at the center of transformative and metamorphic processes. Some antrhopologists made an important observation – that there is lots of historians, people researching history and aware of changing historical timelines, but there is few who try to understand the processual nature of things, how one things becomes another and under what circumstances. How the change keeps on changing in its turn as Whitehead would say. There are certain alchemical processes at work here that keep on deteriorating, mutating and benumbing bodies and minds. In a sense there is nothing raw, everything is already alchemically modified the instant it is in contact with the elements, with weathering, oxidative or enzymatic non-human reactions. Yet we have arrived from the processed (pickled by bacteria and yeasts, dried by the sun, salted etc) to the age of ultra-processed products.
At the same time, it is an endless delight to compare and find parallels btw early imagery of alchemy and alchemists and this contemporary disciple.
TimeSpace Warps 