0905 – Under the Silver Lake (2018)

timespace coordinates: 2011 Los Angeles

Under the Silver Lake is a 2018 American neo-noir mystery film written, produced and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Set in Los Angeles, it stars Andrew Garfield as a young man who sets out on a quest to investigate the sudden disappearance of his neighbour (Riley Keough), only to stumble upon an elusive and dangerous large-scale conspiracy.

Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out gave the film a perfect five rating, calling it “Hypnotic, spiraling and deliriously high” and stating “the ambition of Under the Silver Lake is worth cherishing. It will either evaporate into nothingness or cohere into something you’ll want to hug for being so wonderfully weird.” Eric Kohn of IndieWire gave a positive review, calling it “a bizarre and outrageous drama grounded in the consistency of Garfield’s astonishment at every turn. […] Aided by cinematographer Mike Gioloukas’ sunny visuals and a searching Disasterpiece score, the movie becomes a bittersweet ode to wanting answers from an indifferent world overwhelmed by superficial distractions. The homage can be irritating and some of the transitions work better than others across an unwieldy running time — but even the flaws speak to the movie’s beguiling raison d’être. It’s fascinating to watch Mitchell grasp for a bigger picture with the wild ambition of his scruffy protagonist.” 

Owen Gleiberman of Variety gave a positive review, calling it “a down-the-rabbit-hole movie, at once gripping and baffling, fueled by erotic passion and dread but also by the code-fixated opacity of conspiracy theory. The movie is impeccably shot and staged, with an insanely lush soundtrack that’s like Bernard Herrmann-meets-Angelo-Badalamenti-on-opioids. When it’s over, though, you feel like you’ve seen a meta-mystery made by someone who spent too much time scrawling notes in the margins of his frayed copy of Infinite Jest. (wiki)

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0899 – Blindspotting (2018)

timespace coordinates: 2010’s Oakland California

Blindspotting is a 2018 American comedy-drama film written, produced by and starring Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. Carlos López Estrada directs while Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Ethan Embry, Tisha Campbell-Martin, Utkarsh Ambudkar, and Wayne Knight also star. The plot follows a parolee with three days left on his sentence, only to have him witness a police shooting that threatens to ruin a lifelong friendship.

The screenplay for Blindspotting was written by Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs over a period of nine years. Daveed, who grew up in Oakland, and Rafael, who grew up in bordering Berkeley, California, felt that cinematic portrayals of the San Francisco Bay Area have constantly “missed something”. They wanted to draw attention to the culture, community, and sense of “heightened reality” that shape life in Oakland. The film addresses issues of gentrification, police violence, and racism. (wiki)

blindspotting.movie / imdb

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‘The country blooms – a garden, and a grave’, Oliver Goldsmith ‘The Deserted Village’.

Nick Groom – ‘Let’s discuss over country supper soon’ – Rural Realities and Rustic Representations

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“The whole ambition of the picturesque was to rework the natural world into a ‘landscape’ – a word that came to England at the end of the sixteenth century
from the German, via the Dutch. Early English uses of ‘landskip’ are strongly cultural – the word is used to describe paintings,
particularly the backgrounds of paintings, and thereby any view that could conceivably be painted.”

“The picturesque encouraged the critical appreciation of nature as a spectacle. Observers of a scene – the word ‘scene’ itself reveals the implicit theatricality of viewing – became an audience, by turns appreciative or critical.
Hence natural landscapes became part of culture, and were understood, judged, and painted according to artistic conventions and aesthetic theories.
For a growing proportion of the increasingly urban population, initial encounters with natural landscapes would be through the medium of art: representations delivered either by pastoral poetry or in picturesque images.”

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‘In grand scenes, even the peasant cannot be admitted, if he be employed in the low occupations of his profession:  the spade, the scythe, and the rake are all excluded.’ What was allowed was pastoral idleness:  the lazy cowherd resting on his pole . . . the peasant lolling on a rock’, an angler rather than a fisherman, and gypsies, banditti, and the occasional individual soldier in antique armour. The image of the countryside  presented therefore looked very much in need of improvement – slack, inefficient, indigent, lawless, and archaic. Moreover, once ‘improved’ the landscape was likely to be as empty of agricultural labour as the picturesque depicted it since nearly all the peasantry would have been forced off the land.

0849 – The Haunting of Hill House (2018 TV series)

timespace coordinates: 1992 – 2018 Massachusetts

The Haunting of Hill House is an American supernatural horror web television series created by Mike Flanagan for Netflix, produced by Amblin Television and Paramount Television. The series is based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson. The plot alternates between two timelines, following five adult siblings whose paranormal experiences at Hill House continue to haunt them in present day. The series also features flashbacks to 1992, depicting the events in Hill House leading up to the eventful night the family departed. The ensemble cast features Michiel Huisman, Elizabeth Reaser, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Kate Siegel, Victoria Pedretti, Lulu Wilson, Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas and Timothy Hutton. (wiki)

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“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

840 – Savages – The Story of Human Zoos (2017 documentary)

https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/067797-000-A/savages-the-story-of-human-zoos/

(available from 29/09/2018 to 28/11/2018)

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For more than a century the great colonial powers put human beings, taken by force from their native lands, on show as entertainment just like animals in zoos. The story of the savage treatment of people who were considered sub-human.

Director : Bruno Victor-Pujebet, Pascal Blanchard

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human zoo (wiki)

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0833 – The Wicker Man (1973)

timespace coordinates: 1973  remote Hebridean island Summerisle

The Wicker Man is a 1973 British mystery horror film directed by Robin Hardy. It stars Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento, Ingrid Pitt, and Christopher Lee. The screenplay by Anthony Shaffer, inspired by David Pinner‘s 1967 novel Ritual, centres on the visit of Police Sergeant Neil Howie to the isolated island of Summerisle, in search of a missing girl. Howie, a devout Christian, is appalled to find that the inhabitants of the island have abandoned Christianity and now practise a form of Celtic paganism.

In 2011, a spiritual sequel entitled The Wicker Tree was released to mixed reviews. This film was also directed by Hardy, and featured Lee in a cameo appearance. (wiki)

Potential graphic novel and third film   /   Wicker man   /   imdb

812 – I Think We’re Alone Now (2018)

I Think We’re Alone Now is a 2018 American science fiction drama film, directed by Reed Morano and written by Mike Makowsky. It stars Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning as two survivors of a worldwide epidemic that wipes out earth’s population. (wiki)

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