documentary, movies

176 – Kon-Tiki expedition

spacetime coordinates: 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands

Kon-Tiki (1950  documentary)

Kon-Tiki is a Norwegian-Swedish documentary film about the Kon-Tiki expedition led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl in 1947.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042650/

Kon-Tiki (2012 film)

Kon-Tiki is a 2012 historical drama film directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg about the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition. The film was mainly shot on the island of Malta. The role of Thor Heyerdahl is played by Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen. The film is an international co-production between Norway, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. It was the highest-grossing film of 2012 in Norway and the country’s most expensive production to date

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Historical accuracy

While much of the story is historically accurate, screenwriter Petter Skavlan and director Joachim Rønning both felt the need to make the story more exciting for their two-hour feature film. The fictionalized elements have been criticized; as film critic Andrew Barker commented, “It’s frustratingly ironic that Kon-Tiki’s most outrageously fantastical sequences are completely verifiable, and its most predictable, workaday conflicts are completely made up.”

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The film focuses on Heyerdahl’s theory that Polynesia was first populated with humans from Peru, but it ignores the Norwegian’s more ethnocentric speculations that the original Kon-Tiki voyage was undertaken by a race of tall white bearded people with red hair. Heyerdahl conjectured that Amerindian civilizations like the Aztecs and the Incas only arose with the help of advanced technical knowledge brought by early European voyagers, and that these white people were eventually driven out of Peru and fled westward on rafts.

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The portrayal of the raft’s second-in-command, Herman Watzinger, proved controversial in Norway. Colleagues and relatives say Watzinger in the film is unlike the real-life Watzinger, physically or in his actions. Actor Baasmo Christiansen acknowledged the physical differences with a smile. “Watzinger was tall, dark, and Norwegian Youth Champion in the 100 meter. He was everything I’m not.” In the film, Watzinger disobeys Heyerdahl’s direct order and throws a harpoon at a whale shark under the boat, but it was actually Erik Hesselberg who harpooned the whale shark, with the crew cheering him on. The film’s Watzinger, worried about the hemp ropes’ ability to hold the balsa logs together for the entire voyage, tearfully begs Heyerdahl at sea to add steel cables Watzinger smuggled aboard but Heyerdahl’s book contains no such scene and Watzinger’s daughter has stated it never happened: “My father was a stout and confident man, and he never thought that way about the balsa logs and the ropes.” Thor Heyerdahl, Jr., who worked with Watzinger, concurred in the criticism of the film’s portrayal of Watzinger.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1613750/

movies

174 – giants

Colossal (2016)

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imdb     wikipedia

I Kill Giants (2017) 

i kill giants posterI Kill Giants is a 2017 American fantasy thriller film directed by Anders Walter with a screenplay by Joe Kelly, based on Kelly and Ken Niimura’s graphic novel of the same name. The film stars Madison WolfeImogen Poots, Sydney Wade, Rory Jackson and Zoe Saldana.

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movies

167 – Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

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Brand Upon the Brain! A Remembrance in 12 Chapters  is an avant-garde silent film directed by Guy Maddin and shot in Seattle with local actors.

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Guy reluctantly returns to his childhood home, an abandoned Canadian island, where his parents ran an orphanage. As Guy fulfils his dying mother’s request to paint the lighthouse which served as the orphanage, memories of strange events there overpower him. An undercover investigation by child author/detective Wendy & a revolt by the repressed children, blew open a cover-up by Guy’s parents. Wendy disguised herself as her brother Chance and discovered that Guy’s inventor father performed outré scientific experiments on the orphans.

brand upon the brain

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movies

0086 – Poll (2010)

spacetime coordinates: 1914 Estonia

The Poll Diaries (German: Poll) is a 2010 German drama film directed by Chris Kraus  loose adaptation of the diaries written by poetess Oda Schaefer combining a coming-of-age story about a precocious 14 year-old girl with the apocalyptic end of an era.

In the summer of 1914, fourteen-year-old Oda von Siering (Paula Beer) leaves Berlin to join her family and an assortment of German and Russian aristocrats on an estate in Estonia. The von Siering family home is a character in its own right, a hulking, neoclassical manor that hovers on stilts above the sea.


imdb

movies, quotes

0067 – The Rum Diary (2011)

spacetime coordinates: San Juan, Puerto Rico, the 1960s

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The Rum Diary is a 2011 American film based on the novel of the same name by Hunter S. Thompson. The film was written and directed by Bruce Robinson and stars Johnny Depp.

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Paul Kemp: [Kemp and Sala are wandering down a pier late at night, high on hallucinogens] I thought I was losing grip in there. What did we take?

Sala: I don’t know.

Paul Kemp: We need to get some more. [stops to stare at a tank full of lobsters]

Paul Kemp: [quietly] That explains it… doesn’t it?

Sala: Explains what?

Paul Kemp: The world… and us. [he stares deep into the eyes of one particular lobster]

Paul Kemp: [voiceover] I wonder what it is you might think about our different worlds. He looked at me kinda sideways and said, “Human beings are the only creatures on Earth who claim a God, and the only living thing that behaves like it hasn’t got one. Does the world belong to no one but you?” And when he said it, I was taken aback. Not because of who was doing the talking. Because I finally understood the connection between children scavenging for food, and shiny brass plates on the front doors of banks.


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movies

037 – Amer (2009)

Amer is a 2009 Belgian-French thriller horror film written and directed by French directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. The film is a giallo in three parts. The plot of the film follows the sexual development of Ana who lives on the French Riviera. The film focuses on her oppressive teenage years leading to her womanhood.

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wiki