749 – Lucy (2014)

timespace coordinates: 2014 Taipei, Taiwan / Paris

Lucy is a 2014 English-language French Science-fantasy / Biopunk / Postcyberpunk action-thriller film written and directed by Luc Besson and produced by his wife Virginie Besson-Silla for his company EuropaCorp. The film was shot in Taipei, Paris, and New York City. It stars Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Choi Min-sik, and Amr Waked. Johansson portrays the title character, a woman who gains psychokinetic abilities when a nootropic drug is absorbed into her bloodstream.Luc Besson once called this film as “one part Léon (1994), one part Inception (2010) and one part 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)”. Many shots in the film were mirrored after these three films.

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The 10 percent of the brain myth is a widely perpetuated urban legend that most or all humans only use 10 percent (or some other small percentage) of their brains. It has been misattributed to many people, including Albert Einstein. By extrapolation, it is suggested that a person may harness this unused potential and increase intelligence. (read more)

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imdb   Lucy    mental time travel

741 – Dealer (2004)

timespace coordinates: 2000’s Budapest

imdb   youtube

0719 – A Prayer Before Dawn (2017)

timespace coordinates:  late 2000’s Chiang Mai Prison, Klong Prem Central Prison aka “Bangkok Hilton,” Thailand.

A Prayer Before Dawn is a 2017 internationally co-produced prison-/boxing-/survival-drama film directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, from a screenplay written by Jonathan Hirschbein and Nick Saltrese, starring Joe Cole. It is based on the book A Prayer Before Dawn: My Nightmare in Thailand’s Prisons by Billy Moore.

The true story of an English boxer incarcerated in one of Thailand’s most notorious prisons as he fights in Muay Thai tournaments to earn his freedom.

The inmates in the film are all played by real ex-inmates who have served time in Thai prisons.

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705

Do psychedelics give access to a universal, mystical experience of reality, or is that just a culture-bound illusion?

https://aeon.co/essays/is-psychedelics-research-closer-to-theology-than-to-science

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“Silicon Valley billionaires are putting their blockchain millions into funding psychedelics research, and corporates are preparing for a juicy new market. The counterculture has gone mainstream. Turn on, tune in, sell out. ”

“Perennialists tend to rank religions and mystical experiences hierarchically. All religions are one, but some are more one than others. Unitive non-dual experiences are more true, while dualist experiences (ie, personal encounters with God or a spirit) are less true. Accordingly, Buddhism, Hindu mysticism and Taoism are more true, while Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Shamanism are less true. The psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins follows this theological ranking. It uses the Hood Mysticism Scale to rate people’s psychedelic experiences – unitive experiences are scored as higher and more ‘complete’ than dualist experiences.”

“Western spiritual tourists can have a culturally naive idea that their experience of ayahuasca is the same as indigenous people’s experience, that everyone goes to the same Magic Kingdom where we all meet the same entity: Mama Ayahuasca.”

680 – The Endless (2017)

The Endless is a 2017 American science fiction horror film directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead and written by Benson. The film stars Benson, Moorhead, Callie Hernandez, Tate Ellington, Lew Temple and James Jordan. The Endless is a partial sequel to the Benson and Moorhead’s earlier film, Resolution  as it  shares the same creative universe and some plot points.

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665 – The Botany of Desire (2009 documentary )

The Botany of Desire is a two-hour program broadcast by PBS based on The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World is a 2001 nonfiction book by journalist Michael Pollan. Pollan presents case studies that mirror four types of human desires that are reflected in the way that we selectively grow, breed, and genetically engineer our plants. The tulip, beauty; marijuana, intoxication; the apple, sweetness; and the potato, control.

The stories range from the true story of Johnny Appleseed to Pollan’s first-hand research with sophisticated marijuana hybrids in Amsterdam to the paradigm-shifting possibilities of genetically engineered potatoes. Pollan also discusses the limitations of monoculture agriculture: specifically, the adoption in Ireland of a single breed of potato (the Lumper) made the Irish vulnerable to a fungus to which it had no resistance, resulting in the Irish Potato Famine. The Peruvians from whom the Irish had gotten the potato grew hundreds of varieties, so their exposure to any given pest was slight.

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Michael Pollan on twitter 

0662 – Blueberry (2004)

spacetime coordinates: Wild West in the 1870s

Blueberry (French: Blueberry: L’expérience secrète) is a 2004 French acid western directed by Jan Kounen. It is an adaptation of the Franco-Belgian comic book series Blueberry, illustrated by Jean Giraud (better known as Moebius) and scripted by Jean-Michel Charlier. However, the film has little in common with the source material. The film starred Vincent Cassel as the title character along with Michael Madsen and Juliette Lewis. Although the film is a French production, the film is in English to match the story’s setting in America’s Wild West in the 1870s.

Jean Giraud, the illustrator of the original Blueberry comics, appears in a cameo role in the film, while Geoffrey Lewis, who had appeared in several spaghetti Westerns and his daughter Juliette Lewis play a father and daughter in the movie.

The movie features several elaborate psychedelic 3D computer graphics sequences as a means of portraying Blueberry’s shamanic experiences from his point of view. Jan Kounen, the director of the film, drew upon his extensive first hand knowledge of ayahuasca rituals in order to design the visuals for these sequences, Kounen having undergone the ceremony at least a hundred times  with Shipibo language speakers in Peru. An authentic Shipibo ayahuasca guide appears in the film and performs a sacred chant.

The film has managed to build a reputation as a cult success and as a trip film. Tetsuo Nagata‘s cinematography is also referred to as ‘sublime’. Tripzine noted the film has “the best, most accurate, most lovingly crafted shamanic rituals and psychedelic visuals ever created for home viewing”, and praised Blueberry’s uniqueness among westerns for having a climax that revolved around shamanic ritual rather than a gun battle. (wiki)

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