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The Founder is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by John Lee Hancock and written by Robert Siegel. The film stars Michael Keaton as businessman Ray Kroc, and portrays the story of his creation of the McDonald’s fast food chain. Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch co-star as McDonald’s founders Richard and Maurice McDonald.
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Childhood’s End is an American television miniseries based on the novel of the same name, by Arthur C. Clarke, and developed by Matthew Graham. It premiered on Syfy on December 14, 2015.
After peaceful aliens invade earth, humanity finds itself living in a utopia under the indirect rule of the aliens, but does this utopia come at a price?
“…Consider, again, the highly dichotomous film Avatar, which sets itself against the managerialism of modern man. The military forces that are the villains of the narrative are oriented towards a single object — unobtainium — and use instrumental reason and technology to achieve their desired end, regardless of the means, and regardless of the more complex and distributed forces that they will need to encounter to secure unobtainium. Pandora’s Navi’I, by contast, inhabit a world that is—in the words of the sympathetic character portrayed by Sigourney Weaver — structured like a “neural network.” The Navi’I communicate with the animals they ride and their surrounding fauna not by command, but by touch. The film is at once a post-humanist manifesto—targeting the man of technology and reason in favor of an affective, interconnected and communal whole — at the same time as it is an ultra-humanist reaction formation: the Navi’I are indeed avatars, images of a new ideal of humanity. What renders the Navi’I ultrahuman rather than inhuman is that they exemplify the values of responsive selfpresence that have always defined man against the mere inertia of things. This is not a haptocentric world, in which a privileged being is elevated due to its capacity for self-presence, while all else is left out of touch. Rather, everything is proximate to everything else, in one grand self-communicating whole.
When Bruno Latour opened his compositionist manifesto by referring to Avatar, and linked the film to the Gaia hypothesis, he reinforced a widespread thesis of mindfulness: the world is not inert matter blessed with the capacity to be represented and known by subjects. The world itself possesses living and self-organising properties. More importantly, the world as it is known follows from its capacity to affect, just as our being — our identity — emerges from the various ways in which we are affected. The world of Pandora in Avatar is a post-human (ultra-human) eco-utopia, not simply because it is composed of affective relations, in which bodies relate not by way of externally imposed systems (logic, language) but by affective communication and proximity, but also because it is like a neural network. There has been a reaction against the isolated and
distanced man of reason, who affects himself in order to be present to himself, along with a turn towards the neural paradigm. The brain, formerly and mistakenly perceived as a computer, is now — we are constantly reminded — not a central command centre, but a responsive, adaptive, distributed, dynamic, affective and embodied system. This new neural paradigm was articulated in the works of Maturana and Varela, who
tellingly also referred to Buddhism’s model of an ego-less consciousness that is nothing other than its relation to the world. The legitimated and science-based theories of the brain as less like a computer and more like a coupled and responsive system intersect with a wide range of fictional and non-fictional genres, such as Avatar but also popular science, mysticism and contemporary cultural production…”
Wonderful Days (also known as Sky Blue) is a South Korean animated science fiction film, released in 2003, written and directed by Kim Moon-saeng. The film deals with environmental destruction, pollution and class struggle.
Wonderful Days is set in 2142. Environmental pollution has led to a breakdown of human civilisation. A technologically advanced city named Ecoban was built and it harvests energy from the DELOS System, which uses pollution in a carbonite catalysed reaction to generate power. Carbonite extraction is carried out by people who live outside the city in the surrounding wasteland.
“I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above; / Those that I fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love; / Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, / Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, / A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds; / I balanced all, brought all to mind, / The years to come seemed waste of breath, / A waste of breath the years behind / In balance with this life, this death.” (W B Yeats from the DVD cover)
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The story starts when Min, a botanist who spent her childhood as an orphan, comes to intern at the botanical gardens under her new instructor, Chen. It is there that she meets An, Chen’s daughter, and finds herself falling in love in a time and place where same-sex relationships are an unforgivable crime.
Since it delves into a topic considered taboo in China, the government refused to allow for the film to be shot or even shown in the country (it was ultimately filmed in Vietnam)
Dai Sijie (director) “I felt that the deep love that brought these two young women together was extremely romantic. In my mind, these women weren’t so much ‘lesbian’ – since they didn’t really possess a recognition of knowledge of themselves as such – but rather they just were determined to love each other dearly. That unwavering surety of pure love just tears at the heart. Also, what really got to me was the fact that these were women denied their freedom. They were justified in their love and there should be no reason why they shouldn’t be able to continue in it–so one has to wonder, why do they not have that right? Since I have experienced losing the right to my own expression, I know what it feels like to not be able to be who you are in your own country. I felt close to both of them, because to me it seemed like we were all outsiders.”
The Chinese Botanist’s Daughters Interview with Dai Sijie in Tokyo Wrestling
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Safe — sometimes written as [safe] or [SAFE] — is a 1995 British/American drama film written and directed by Todd Haynes, and starring Julianne Moore. The story is a character study of a suburban California housewife whose life deteriorates under the stress of “environmental illnesses” and seeks hope from “New Age” practitioners with whom she becomes involved. Safe was voted the best film of the 1990s in the 1999 Village Voice Film Poll.
Set in an affluent neighbourhood of the San Fernando Valley in 1987, the film recounts the life of a seemingly unremarkable homemaker, Carol White who develops multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS, also known as “Twentieth-Century Disease”). MCS is a medically controversial diagnosis in which a person develops mild to severe non-specific symptoms and believes that these symptoms are triggered by chemicals found in everyday household and industrial products.
TimeSpace Warps 