1149 – LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (TV series 2019– )

Love, Death & Robots (stylized as LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS) is an American adult animated anthology web television series on Netflix.  The 18-episode first season was released on March 15, 2019. The series is produced by Joshua Donen, David Fincher, Jennifer Miller, and Tim Miller. Each episode was animated by different crews from a range of countries. The series is a re-imagining of Fincher and Miller’s long in-development reboot of the 1981 animated science fiction film Heavy Metal. 

The cast includes Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Topher Grace, Gary Cole, Samira Wiley and Stefan Kapičić, with Grace and Winstead appearing in live-action roles, rather than animated.

In March 2019, Netflix revealed that it was experimenting with a new approach by including a different order of episodes to different users.  (*four unique episode orders, released to users at random.) (wiki)

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1146 – Baraka (1992)

Baraka is a 1992 non-narrative documentary film directed by Ron Fricke. The film is often compared to Koyaanisqatsi, the first of the Qatsi films by Godfrey Reggio for which Fricke served as the cinematographer. It is also the most recent film to be photographed in the 70mm Todd-AO format, and the first film ever to be restored and scanned at 8K resolution. (wiki)

Named after a Sufi word that translates roughly as “breath of life” or “blessing,” Baraka is Ron Fricke‘s impressive follow-up to Godfrey Reggio‘s non-verbal documentary film Koyaanisqatsi. Fricke was cinematographer and collaborator on Reggio’s film, and for Baraka he struck out on his own to polish and expand the photographic techniques used on Koyaanisqatsi. The result is a tour-de-force in 70mm: a cinematic “guided meditation” (Fricke’s own description) shot in 24 countries on six continents over a 14-month period that unites religious ritual, the phenomena of nature, and man’s own destructive powers into a web of moving images. Fricke’s camera ranges, in meditative slow motion or bewildering time-lapse, over the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the Ryoan-Ji temple in Kyoto, Lake Natron in Tanzania, burning oil fields in Kuwait, the smoldering precipice of an active volcano, a busy subway terminal, tribal celebrations of the Maasai in Kenya, chanting monks in the Dip Tse Chok Ling monastery…and on and on, through locales across the globe. To execute the film’s time-lapse sequences, Fricke had a special camera built that combined time-lapse photography with perfectly controlled movements of the camera. In one evening sequence a desert sky turns black, and the stars roll by, as the camera moves slowly forward under the trees. The feeling is like that of viewing the universe through a powerful telescope: that we are indeed on a tiny orb hurtling through a star-filled void. The film is complemented by the hybrid world-music of Michael Stearns. ~ Anthony Reed, Rovi (rottentomatoes)

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1104 – The Wandering Earth / 流浪地球 (2019)

timespace coordinates: In the future, the Sun has aged and is about to turn into a red giant, pushing the nations of the world to consolidate into the United Earth Government, a world government, to initiate a project to move the Earth out of the Solar System to the Alpha Centauri system, in order to preserve further human civilization. Enormous thrusters running on fusion power are built across the planet to propel the Earth. Human population is reduced severely due to catastrophic tides that occur after the planetary engines stop Earth’s rotation, and later as the planet moves away from the Sun, much of the surface is frozen due to lowered temperatures, forcing humans to live in vast underground cities built adjacent to the engines.

The Wandering Earth (Liu lang di qiu) is a 2019 Chinese science fiction film directed by Frant Gwo, based on the novella of the same name by Locus Award and Hugo Award-winning author Liu Cixin. It stars Qu Chuxiao, Li Guangjie, Ng Man-tat, Zhao Jinmai, Wu Jing and Qu Jingjing. (wiki)

According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Wandering Earth is China’s “first full-scale interstellar” film.

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0956 – Mortal Engines (2018)

timespace coordinates: Following a cataclysmic conflict known as the Sixty Minute War, the remnants of humanity regroup and form mobile “predator” cities. Under a philosophy known as “Municipal Darwinism”, larger cities hunt and absorb smaller settlements in the “Great Hunting Ground”, which includes Great Britain and Continental Europe. In opposition, settlements of the “Anti-Traction League” have developed an alternative civilization consisting of “static settlements” (traditional, non-mobile cities) in Asia led by Shan Guo (formerly China), protected by the “Shield Wall”.

“After the Ancients destroyed themselves in the Sixty Minute War, there were several thousand years in which nothing much happened. These were the Black Centuries. The great civilizations of the Screen Age had been utterly swept away, and humanity was reduced to a few scattered bands of savages’ ‘The Traction Codex’

Mortal Engines is a 2018 post-apocalyptic adventure film directed by Christian Rivers and with a screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, based on the novel of the same name by Philip Reeve, and starring Hugo Weaving, Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Jihae, Ronan Raftery, Leila George, Patrick Malahide, and Stephen Lang. An American–New Zealand co-production, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic world where entire cities have been mounted on wheels and motorised, and prey on one another. (wiki)

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0923 – Home (2009)

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Home is a 2009 French documentary film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The film is almost entirely composed of aerial shots of various places on Earth. It shows the diversity of life on Earth and how humanity is threatening the ecological balance of the planet. The English version was read by Glenn Close.

The film was financed by Kering, a French multinational holding company specializing in retail shops and luxury brands, as part of their public relations strategy. (wiki)

Yann Arthus-Bertrand said in a TED talk that the movie has no copyright.

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876 – Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures (Documentary | TV Mini-Series 2014)

Weird Wonders

Professor Richard Fortey journeys high in the Rocky Mountains to explore a 520-million-year-old fossilised seabed containing bizarre and experimental lifeforms that have revolutionised our understanding about the beginnings of complex life. Among the amazing finds he uncovers are marine creatures with five eyes and a proboscis; filter-feeders shaped like tulips; worm-like scavengers covered in spikes but with no identifiable head or anus; and a metre-long predator resembling a giant shrimp.

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Feathered Dinosaurs

Professor Richard Fortey travels to northeastern China to see a fossil site known as the ‘Dinosaur Pompeii’ – a place that has yielded spectacular remains of feathered dinosaurs and rewritten the story of the origins of birds. Among the amazing finds he investigates are the feathered cousin of T-rex, a feathered dinosaur with strong parallels to living pandas and some of the most remarkable flying animals that have ever lived.

Feathered dinosaurs. Conceptual artwork showing a feathered dinosaur (Velociraptor mongoliensis, center) attacking an early ancestor of the bird, Archaeopteryx lithographica. This velociraptor was a voracious predator that lived during the Campanian period (84-75 million years ago). It may have had a coating of feathers on its skin but it would not have been capable of flight. A. lithographica lived during the late Jurassic period, around 150 million years ago. It had feathered wings composed of three clawed fingers but retained some dinosaur characters, including small teeth and a long tail. The dinosaur group from which Archaeopteryx evolved is disputed.

TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY MARIETTE LE ROUX – An handout artist impression released on July 15, 2015 by Ministry of Land and Resources of China shows a reconstruction of the new short-armed and winged feathered dinosaur Zhenyuanlong suni from the Early Cretaceous (ca. 125 million years ago) of China. Depicted by movie-makers as mean, green, man-eating lizards covered in scales, velociraptors probably looked more like large, toothy turkeys, a study said on July 16. Close study of a newly-discovered cousin dubbed Zhenyuanlong suni, has revealed that velociraptors likely had large wings and feathery coats, according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports. AFP PHOTO / Ministry of Land and Resources of China / Chuang Zhao = RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE – MANDATORY CREDIT “AFP PHOTO / Ministry of Land and Resources of China / Chuang Zhao – NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS – DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS =Chuang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images

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The Mammal Hothouse

Professor Richard Fortey investigates the remains of ancient volcanic lake in Germany (Messel pit) where stunningly well-preserved fossils of early mammals, giant insects and even perhaps our oldest known ancestor have been found. Among the amazing finds are bats as advanced and sophisticated as anything living today, more than 50-million-years-later; dog-sized ‘Dawn’ horses, the ancestor of the modern horse; and giant ants as large as a hummingbird.

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Travel Through Deep Time With This Interactive Earth

875 – Ethnofuturismen (2018)

◊ The notion of a black secret technology allows Afrofuturism to reach a point of speculative acceleration. ◊ Blaccelerationism proposes that accelerationism always already exists in the territory of blackness, whether it knows it or not. ◊ Sinofuturism is a darkside cartography of the turbulent rise of East Asia; It connects seemingly heterogeneous elements onto the topology of planetary capitalism. ◊ Shanghai futurism ultimately depends on breaking free from the now common assumption about the nature of time. ◊ T he unfolding story of Gulf Futurism is a strange mitosis happening out of the sight of the master planners and architects; it’s the splitting of worlds, of then and later, us and them, real and unreal. ◊ The Dubaification of the world is already a thing of the present and the recent past, and has completed its ideological mission at lightning speed.

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