1123 – Twelve Monkeys (1995)

timespace coordinates:  2035,  subterranean compound / ruins of Philadelphia (after a deadly virus released in 1996 wipes out almost all of humanity, forcing survivors to live underground) > 1990 / 1996  Baltimore + battlefield during ww1

12 Monkeys, also known as Twelve Monkeys, is a 1995 American neo-noir science fiction film directed by Terry Gilliam, inspired by Chris Marker‘s 1962 short film La Jetée, and starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt, with Christopher Plummer and David Morse in supporting roles.

TWELVE MONKEYS, Bruce Willis, 1995. ©Universal

References to time, time travel, and monkeys are scattered throughout the film, including the Woody Woodpecker cartoon “Time Tunnel” playing on the TV in a hotel room, the Marx Brothers film Monkey Business (1931) on TV in the asylum, and the subplots involving monkeys (drug testing, news stories and animal rights). The film is also intended to be a study of people’s declining ability to communicate in modern civilization due to the interference of technology. (Memory,_time,_and_technology)

12 Monkeys is inspired by the French short film La Jetée (1962); as in La Jetée, characters are haunted by the images of their own deaths. Like La Jetée, 12 Monkeys contains references to Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo (1958). Toward the end of the film, Cole and Railly hide in a theater showing a 24-hour Hitchcock marathon and watch a scene from Vertigo. Railly then transforms herself with a blonde wig, as Judy (Kim Novak) transforms herself into blonde Madeleine in Vertigo; Cole sees her emerge within a red light, as Scottie (James Stewart) saw Judy emerge within a green light. Brief notes of Bernard Herrmann‘s film score can also be heard. Railly also wears the same coat Novak wore in the first part of Vertigo. The scene at Muir Woods National Monument, where Judy (as Madeleine) looks at the growth rings of a felled redwood and traces back events in her past life, resonates with larger themes in 12 Monkeys. Cole and Railly later have a similar conversation while the same music from Vertigo is repeated. The Muir Woods scene in Vertigo is also reenacted in La Jetée. In a previous scene in the film, Cole wakes up in a hospital bed with the scientists talking to him in chorus. This is a direct homage to the “Dry Bones” scene in Dennis Potter‘s The Singing Detective. James Cole is a notable Christ figure in film. The film is significant in the genre of science-fiction film noir, and it alludes to various “canonical noir” films.

After the release of The Zero Theorem in 2013, claims were made that Gilliam had meant it as part of a trilogy. A 2013 review for The Guardian newspaper said, “Calling it [The Zero Theorem] the third part of a trilogy formed by earlier dystopian satires Brazil and Twelve Monkeys [sic]”; but in an interview with Alex Suskind for Indiewire in late 2014, Gilliam said, “Well, it’s funny, this trilogy was never something I ever said, but it’s been repeated so often it’s clearly true [laughs]. I don’t know who started it but once it started it never stopped”(wiki)

imdb   /  12 Monkeys (TV series)

1120

The Professor and the Madman (2019)

timespace coordinates: England, 1871 – 1910

The Professor and the Madman is a 2019 Irish biographical drama film, directed by Farhad Safinia (under the pseudonym PB Shemran), from a screenplay by Safinia, and Todd Komarnicki, based on the 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester. It stars Mel Gibson, Sean Penn, Natalie Dormer, Eddie Marsan, Jennifer Ehle, Jeremy Irvine, David O’Hara, Ioan Gruffudd, Stephen Dillane, and Steve Coogan. The film is about the famous professor, Sir James Murray, who in 1857 began compiling the Oxford English Dictionary and led the overseeing committee and W. C. Minor, a doctor who submitted over 10,000 entries while he was undergoing treatment at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. (wiki)

imdb

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Fatman (2020)

timespace coordinates: 2020’s US > Christmas present shop on a farm near the town of North Peak, Alaska.

Fatman is a 2020 American action film written and directed by Eshom & Ian Nelms and starring Mel Gibson, Walton Goggins and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The plot follows an unorthodox Santa Claus who must fight off an assassin sent by a vengeful naughty kid. (wiki)

imdb

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1119 – Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

timespace coordinates: dystopian 1984. war-torn London ruled by Oceania, a totalitarian superstate

“Under the spreading chestnut tree / I sold you and you sold me”

Nineteen Eighty-Four, also known as 1984, is a 1984 British dystopian science fiction film written and directed by Michael Radford, based upon George Orwell‘s novel of the same name (published in June 1949). Starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, and Cyril Cusack,

the film follows the life of Winston Smith, a low-ranking civil servant in a war-torn London ruled by Oceania, a totalitarian superstate. Smith (Hurt) struggles to maintain his sanity and his grip on reality as the regime’s overwhelming power and influence persecutes individualism and individual thinking on both a political and personal level. The film, which features Burton’s last screen appearance, is dedicated to him. (wiki)

imdb   /   Newspeak

1117 – Woman Walks Ahead (2017)

timespace coordinates: 1890, the Standing Rock Agency – Dakota Territory

Woman Walks Ahead is a 2017 American biographical drama film directed by Susanna White and written by Steven Knight. The film is the story of Catherine Weldon (Jessica Chastain), a portrait painter who travels from New York to Dakota to paint a portrait of Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes) in 1890. Chaske Spencer and Sam Rockwell also star.

historical inaccuracies   /   imdb   /    Ghost Dance movement

1116 – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

timespace coordinates: 1963 Oregon

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a 1975 American tragicomedy-drama film directed by Miloš Forman, based on the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. The film stars Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy, a new patient at a mental institution, and features a supporting cast of Louise Fletcher, William Redfield, Will Sampson, Sydney Lassick, Brad Dourif, and Christopher Lloyd in his film debut. The producers decided to shoot the film in the Oregon State Hospital, an actual mental hospital, as this was also the setting of the novel. Considered by some to be one of the greatest films ever made, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is No. 33 on the American Film Institute‘s 100 Years… 100 Movies list. (wiki)

Jack Nicholson sitting on bench with Will Sampson in a scene from the film ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’, 1975. (Photo by United Artists/Getty Images)

rottentomatoes critics consensus: The onscreen battle between Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher serves as a personal microcosm of the culture wars of the 1970s — and testament to the director’s vision that the film retains its power more than three decades later.

imdb

1115 – Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

Koyaanisqatsi (English: /koʊjɑːnɪsˈkɑːtsiː/), also known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, is a 1982 American documentary / experimental film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke.

The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating “it’s not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It’s because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.”  In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means “unbalanced life”/ “crazy life”.

The film is the first in the Qatsi film trilogy: it is succeeded by Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). The trilogy depicts different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature and technology. Koyaanisqatsi is the best known of the trilogy and is considered a cult film. (wiki)

imdb

1110 – Iron Sky

timespace coordinates: 2018 – 2038 New York City, Washington, D.C.,  the far side of the Moon, Antarctica

Iron Sky (imdb) is a 2012 Finnish-German-Australian comic-science-fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola and written by Johanna Sinisalo and Michael Kalesniko. It tells the story of a group of Nazi Germans who, having been defeated in 1945, fled to the Moon, where they built a space fleet to return in 2018 and conquer Earth. (wiki)

As The Hollywood Reporter noted, “the score by Laibach adds character, mixing pastiche pop with symphonic elements“. (www.laibach.org/iron-sky-soundtrack)

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Iron Sky: The Coming Race (imdb) is a Finnish-German comic science fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola, released on 16 January 2019 in Finland. It is the sequel to Vuorensola’s 2012 film Iron Sky. The film was crowdfunded through Indiegogo.

Like its predecessor, the movie refers to several motifs of post-war Esoteric Nazism, such as the Hollow Earth theory. The movie’s title is most likely a reference to Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s novel The Coming Race (1871) that is commonly regarded as the origin of the so-called Vril myth. The film teaser features the Vril symbol that was designed by the Tempelhofgesellschaft in the 1990s. (wiki)

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Götterdämmerung   /  Fourth Reich   /  helium-3   /  Reptilians   /   Agartha   /   Nuclear holocaust   /  Moon Nazis   /   Jobists   /   ironsky.net