The Adjustment Bureau is a 2011 American romantic science fiction thriller film loosely based on the Philip K. Dick short story “Adjustment Team“. The film was written and directed by George Nolfi, produced by Chris Moore and stars Matt Damonand Emily Blunt. The cast also includes Anthony Mackie, John Slattery, Michael Kelly, and Terence Stamp. The film tells the story of a United States congressman who discovers that what appear to be chance events in his life are controlled by a technologically advanced intelligence network. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: 2054 Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia
Minority Report is a 2002 American neo-noir science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg and loosely based on the short story “The Minority Report” by Philip K. Dick. It is set primarily in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia in the year 2054, where PreCrime, a specialized police department, apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge provided by three psychics called “precogs“. The cast includes Tom Cruise as Chief of PreCrime John Anderton, Colin Farrell as Department of Justice agent Danny Witwer, Samantha Morton as the senior precog Agatha, and Max von Sydow as Anderton’s superior Lamar Burgess.
The film combines elements of tech noir, whodunit, thriller and science fiction genres, as well as a traditional chase film, as the main protagonist is accused of a crime he has not committed and becomes a fugitive. Spielberg has characterized the story as “fifty percent character and fifty percent very complicated storytelling with layers and layers of murder mystery and plot”. The film’s central theme is the question of free will versus determinism. It examines whether free will can exist if the future is set and known in advance. Other themes include the role of preventive government in protecting its citizenry, the role of media in a future state where technological advancements make its presence nearly boundless, the potential legality of an infallible prosecutor, and Spielberg’s repeated theme of broken families.
During pre-production, Spielberg consulted numerous scientists in an attempt to present a more plausible future world than that seen in other science fiction films, and some of the technology designs in the film have proven prescient. Minority Report has a unique visual style. It uses high contrast to create dark colors and shadows, much like a film noir picture. The film’s overlit shots feature desaturated colors which were achieved by bleach-bypassing the film’s negative in post-production. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: December 2004, small village in the Alaska wilderness (Keelut)
‘Green Room’ filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier’s art-horror adaptation of Arctic Noir novel is bloody, brutal, bleak and Freudian as hell” (rollingstone review)
Future Man is an American comedy web television series created by Howard Overman, Kyle Hunter, and Ariel Shaffir that premiered on November 14, 2017 on Hulu. The series follows Josh Futturman, a janitor by day and a gamer by night, recruited by mysterious visitors to travel through time to prevent the extinction of humanity.. It stars Josh Hutcherson, Eliza Coupe, Derek Wilson, Ed Begley, Jr. and Glenne Headly. On January 8, 2018, the series was renewed for a second season consisting of thirteen episodes. (wiki)
Initially, in October 2014, the studio announced the film would be the start of a trilogy. The sequel is set to be released on 16 November 2018, followed by the third on 20 November 2020. In July 2016, David Yates confirmed that Rowling had written the screenplay for the second film and has ideas for the third. In October 2016, Rowling confirmed that the series would comprise five films. In November 2016 it was confirmed that Johnny Depp will have a starring role in the sequel, reprising his role as Gellert Grindelwald. In April 2017, it was confirmed that Jude Law had been cast for the role of Albus Dumbledore at around the time he was the Transfiguration professor at Hogwarts. The second film will take place in the United Kingdom and Paris. (wiki)
“how often we ask for genuine experience when all we really want is emotion.”
First Reformed is a 2017 American drama film written and directed by Paul Schrader. It stars Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, and Cedric the Entertainer, and follows a Protestant minister faced with questions of faith and morality while serving as pastor of a dwindling historical church. (wiki)
Making Sense of “The Weird and the Eerie” By Roger Luckhurst
(…) “You have probably heard of “the weird” by now, but you may not quite know what it is, or why so many genre critics, cultural theorists, and philosophers are keen to engage with it. It might once have been quarantined as a subgenre associated with sullen Goths and all those arrested-adolescent readers of H. P. Lovecraft, but it has long slithered free of those confines, and now leaves a trail not just straight across the internet, but on the page and in mainstream TV shows and movie screens.
Fisher’s guide to this terrain is an excellent place to start your orientation. The book displays his signature knack for reading popular culture (principally music, fiction, and film) in an expressive, demotic way that is still vigorously political and philosophical. Somehow, Fisher magically renders post-Lacanian, post-ŽižekianMarxism and the radical anti-subjectivist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze entirely accessible. Only Fisher can enthuse about old QuatermassTV shows in terms of their “cosmic Spinozism” and still (mostly) make sense. With typical disdain for cultural boundaries, Fisher moves crab-wise from Lovecraft and H. G. Wells to the impenetrable mumblings of punk band The Fall; obscure Rainer Werner Fassbinder TV shows from Germany; Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Andrei Tarkovsky films; NigelKneale TV series from the 1970s; the music of Joy Division; The Shining; the unclassifiable fiction of Alan Garner and Christopher Priest; Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary avant-garde SF film Under the Skin; and surprising appearances of Margaret Atwood’s early fiction Surfacingand Christopher Nolan’s portentous quantum SF blockbuster Interstellar(which receives a great defense).” (read morehere)
(…) “In music, literature, art, film and photography, as well as in new and hybrid forms and media, the English eerie is on the rise. A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging”, and of the packagings of the past as “heritage”, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle.
Such concerns are not new, but there is a distinctive intensity and variety to their contemporary address. This eerie counter-culture – this occulture – is drawing in experimental film-makers, folk singers, folklorists, academics, avant-garde antiquaries, landscape historians, utopians, collectives, mainstreamers and Arch-Droods alike, in a magnificent mash-up of hauntology, geological sentience and political activism. The hedgerows, fields, ruins, hills and saltings of England have been set seething.”
“What are those pressing concerns, though, and what are the sources of this unsettlement? Clearly, the recent rise of the eerie coincides with a phase of severe environmental damage. In England, this has not taken the form of sudden catastrophe, but rather a slow grinding away of species and of subtlety. The result, as James Riley notes, is “a landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is present”. This awareness of absence is expressing itself both in terms of a vengeful nature (a return of the repressed) and as delicate catalogues of losses.”
“Digging down to reveal the hidden content of the under-earth is another trope of the eerie: what is discovered is almost always a version of capital. Keiller’s Robinson tracks the buried cables and gas-pipes of Oxfordshire, following them as postmodern leylines, and tracing them outwards to hidden global structures of financial ownership. Wheatley’s deserters rapaciously extract “treasure” from the soil, by means of enslavement and male violence. In his cult novel Cyclonopedia (2008), the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani figured oil as a sentient entity, developing Marx’s implication that capital possesses emergent and self-willed properties, that it is somehow wild.” / see: 771-robinson-in-ruins-2010
Hold the Dark is a 2018 American thriller film directed by 
TimeSpace Warps 