timespace coordinates: the Kitchen, dystopian near-future London
The Kitchen is a 2023 British science fiction drama film directed by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya from a screenplay from Kaluuya and Joe Murtagh. The film stars Kane Robinson, Jedaiah Bannerman, Hope Ikpoku Jr, Teija Kabs, Demmy Ladipo, Cristale, and BackRoad Gee. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: near-future Norco, Louisiana / other portions of the state around New Orleans.
NORCO is a text-based point & click adventure that immerses the player in the sinking suburbs and industrial swamplands of an increasingly surreal and distorted South Louisiana.
The game’s developer goes by a pseudonym, Yuts, derived from a nickname for his grandfather. Yuts spent his childhood and some of his later life in Norco. Growing up, Yuts was “frightened yet transfixed” by the landscape in and around Norco, which has been shaped by the petroleum industry and hosts a major Shell facility which has twice experienced catastrophic explosions.
The game grew out of a multimedia documentary work by Yuts and a friend, started in 2015.[3] The work incorporated writing, interviews, and audio-visual components, focused on the impact of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana and its landscape. In addition to Yuts, members of the development team, Geography of Robots, include Yuts’ sister, Aaron Gray, Jesse Jacobi, and pseudonymous musicians fmAura and Gewgawly I. Part of the multimedia project was a side-scrolling game in which a robot attempts to enter a refinery in Norco; this game became Norco, and the earliest version of the current game was created in 2016. Yuts and Geography of Robots designed the game in the pixel art style. Yuts relied on internet research to teach himself how to create the illustrations he contributed to the game.
Gewgawly I was Yuts’ original collaborator. Gewgawly I and fmAura worked to design the game’s soundtrack, attempting to “capture the… mood and ambience” of the River Parishes. The game incorporates field recordings by a friend of the development team, Matt Carney, taken around Baton Rouge.
Norco will be the first game in a trilogy.
(wiki)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows 7 / Processor: Intel i5 or AMD equivalent / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: Intel Iris/AMD Vega 8 or equivalent / DirectX: Version 10 / Storage: 4 GB available space
Superduck: Superduck is, what else?
A network.
A system of signals.
Wireless communication of locusts and frogs. Cypress roots. Disease vectors.
Internet of flesh. Biomimicry. Internet of internet. Radio towers.
spacetime coordinates: 1980s US (Illinois Indiana Kentucky Maryland Michigan Minnesota Nebraska Columbus, Ohio Virginia)
Bones and All is a 2022 Italian-American romantic horror road film directed by Luca Guadagnino based on the 2015 novel Bones & All by Camille DeAngelis. The film stars Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet as a pair of young cannibals who flee together on a road trip across the country and develop feelings for each other. Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon Green, Jessica Harper and Mark Rylance appear in supporting roles. (wiki)
The film’s score was composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. In an interview with TheWrap, Reznor and Ross explained that they had extensive discussions with Guadagnino regarding the score, who stated that he wanted it to be “a melancholic elegy, an unending longing. It needs to be a character in the film, a part of the landscape” and requested the use of acoustic guitars to complement the Americana visuals.
timespace coordinates: 1995 urban, nighttime Hong Kong
Fallen Angels is a 1995 Hong Kong drama film written and directed by Wong Kar-wai, starring Leon Lai, Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Charlie Yeung, and Karen Mok. As with the filmmaker’s other features, plot takes a back seat to mood.
Originally conceived by Wong as the third story for 1994’s Chungking Express, it was cut after he decided that it was complete without it. He instead decided to develop the story further into its own feature film and borrowed elements of Chungking Express, such as themes, locations and methods of filming. Wanting to also try to differentiate it from Chungking and to try something new, Wong decided along with cinematographer Christopher Doyle to shoot mainly at night and using extreme wide-angle lenses, keeping the camera as close to the talents as possible to give a detached effect from the world around them.
In an interview, Wong had this to say:
…To me, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are one film that should be three hours long. I always think these two films should be seen together as a double bill. In fact, people asked me during an interview for Chungking Express: “You’ve made these two stories which have no relationship at all to each other, how can you connect them?” And I said, ‘The main characters of Chungking Express are not Faye Wong or Takeshi Kaneshiro, but the city itself, the night and day of Hong Kong. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels together are the bright and dark of Hong Kong.” I see the films as inter-reversible, the character of Faye Wong could be the character of Takeshi in Fallen Angels; Brigitte Lin in Chungking could be Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. All of their characters are inter-reversible. Also, in Chungking we were shooting from a very long distance with long lenses, but the characters seem close to us.
In the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote:
The acme of neo-new-wavism, the ultimate in MTV alienation, the most visually voluptuous flick of the fin de siècle, a pyrotechnical wonder about mystery, solitude, and the irrational love of movies that pushes Wong’s style to the brink of self-parody.
wiki / imdb / rottentomatoes
The East is a 2013 thriller film directed by Zal Batmanglij and starring Brit Marling, Alexander Skarsgård, and Elliot Page.
Writers Batmanglij and Marling spent two months in 2009 practicing freeganism and co-wrote a screenplay inspired by their experiences and drawing on thrillers from the 1970s.
The American studio Fox Searchlight Pictures had bought rights to distribute Batmanglij’s previous film Sound of My Voice and also collaborated with the director to produce The East. With Ridley Scott as producer and Tony Scott as executive producer, Fox Searchlight contracted Scott Free Productions, headquartered in London, to produce the film. The East was filmed in two months in Shreveport, Louisiana at the end of 2011. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 