movies, quotes

0566 – Les aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010)

spacetime coordinates: Paris, c. 1912

adele-blanc-sec

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (French: Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec), released as Adèle: Rise of the Mummy in Malaysia and Singapore,  is a 2010 French fantasy adventure feature film written and directed by Luc Besson.

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It is loosely based on the comic book series The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec by Jacques Tardi and, as in the comic, follows the eponymous writer and a number of recurring side characters in a succession of far-fetched incidents in 1910s Paris and beyond, in this episode revolving around parapsychology and ultra-advanced Ancient Egyptian technology, which both pastiche and subvert adventure and speculative fiction of the period.

Les_Aventures_Extrodinaires_D'Adele_Blanc-Sec_poster2

The film incorporates characters and events from several of the albums, in particular the first, “Adèle and the Beast”, first published in 1976, and the fourth, 1978’s “Mummies on Parade”.

cartel(5)

wiki   imdb

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“In Cairo ten years ago, in the museum, I saw all the mummies, torn out of their tombs, stripped of their flowers and gods, and laid out in plain wood cases under glass with their blackened faces exposed; on the walls an American scientist had put his X-ray photos of their skeletons, and the urn containing the entrails of Queen Hapshetshut was split open and brightly illuminated.”  Dangerous Emotions Alphonso Lingis

games, Uncategorized

541 – Zeno Clash (2009 video game)

1 zeno 1Zeno Clash is a first-person fighting video game with elements of a first-person shooter set in a punk fantasy world. The game is played from a first person perspective and the combat is generally up close and brutal.  It is the debut game of developer ACE Team and uses the Source engine.  The developers stated that they have drawn a lot of inspiration from traditional fighting games—this includes “versus screens” sliding in before combat is initiated. Regarding the art style, they cited Hieronymus Bosch‘s paintings and John Blanche‘s “punk fantasy” illustrations as visual inspirations.

Experience a deep storyline set in a fantastic world. Play the role of Ghat, a man banished by his own brothers and forced to begin a desperate journey past the forbidden desert and to the end of the world.   Critics praised its strange yet robust setting and unique character designs. It was a finalist for Excellence in Visual Art at the 2009 Independent Games Festival, was named 2009’s Independent Game of the Year by PC Gamer, and PC Game of the Month by IGN in April 2009.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (minimum):  Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® XP / Vista / Vista64  // Processor: Intel® Pentium® 4 3.0 GHz  //  Memory: 1 GB RAM  //  Hard Disk Space: At least 3 GB of free space  //  Video Card: 128 MB, Shader model 2.0, ATI 9600, NVidia 6600 or better  //  Sound Card: DirectX® 9.0c compatible sound card  //  DirectX® Version:  DirectX® 9.0c, DirectX® 10

Zeno Clash Walkthrough HD

http://store.steampowered.com/app/22200/Zeno_Clash/

movies, Uncategorized

0425 – Centurion (2010)

spacetime coordinates:  117 AD Roman outpost of Pinnata Castra & Roman forts along the Glenblocker line and the Gask Ridge at the southern border of the Scottish Highlands

centurion-poster

Centurion is a 2010 British historical action-war film directed by Neil Marshall,  loosely based on the disappearance of the Roman Empire’s Ninth Legion in Caledonia in the early second century AD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Peutingeriana#Map

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020558/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picts

games

0424 – The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

the witcher 2 art-001

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (Polish: Wiedźmin 2: Zabójcy królów) is an action role-playing hack and slash video game developed by CD Projekt Red for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, OS X, and Linux. The game was released for Microsoft Windows in May 2011, for Xbox 360 and OS X in 2012, and for Linux in 2014.

It is a sequel to the 2007 video game The Witcher. Like its predecessor, the game is based on The Witcher series of fantasy novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. The player directs the actions of Geralt of Rivia, a monster hunter known as a Witcher. The fantasy world in which his adventures take place owes much to Polish history and Slavic mythology.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows XP/Vista/7 // Processor: Intel 2.2 GHz Dual-Core or AMD 2.5 GHz Dual-Core // Memory: 1.5 GB (Win XP), 2GB (Win Vista/Win 7) // Graphics: GeForce 8800 (512 MB) or Radeon HD3850 (512 MB). Resolution: 1280×720. // DirectX®: DirectX 9.29 has to be installed. // Hard Drive: 25GB

steam   wiki

animation, Uncategorized

0395 – Angel’s Egg (1985)

angels egg cover

Angel’s Egg (天使のたまご Tenshi no Tamago) is a Japanese OVA film released by Tokuma Shoten on 15 December 1985. It was a collaboration between popular artist Yoshitaka Amano and director Mamoru Oshii. It features very little spoken dialogue. Its sparse plot and visual style have led to it being described as “animated art rather than a story”.

Prior to the production on Angel’s Egg, Mamoru Oshii lost his faith in Christianity. Senses of Cinema opined that the film “seems informed by the existential desperation caused by the collapse of one’s belief system”; Oshii himself has stated he does not know what the film is about.

Angels-egg-poster

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0208502/

Is Angel’s Egg an Overlooked Masterpiece? – Analyzed and Explained

movies

0300 – Wind River (2017)

Wind-River-film-poster-designed-by-Konrad-CloughWind River is a 2017 American neo-western murder mystery thriller film written and directed by Taylor Sheridan. The film stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tracker and an FBI agent, respectively, who try to solve a murder on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. According to Sheridan, the opening “inspired by true events” card was a reference to the “thousands of actual stories just like it” involving sexual assault of women on reservations, his primary motivation for writing the film.

wind river 2wind-river1wind-river-poster

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5362988/

movies, quotes

0280 – A Sound of Thunder (2005)

spacetime coordinates:  Chicago, 2055 > the cretaceous

A Sound of Thunder is a 2005 science fiction thriller film directed by Peter Hyams, and starring Edward BurnsCatherine McCormack and Ben Kingsley. It is a co-production film between the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and the Czech Republic.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/

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a classic example of “failed return” or “no return” cautionary tales is A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury published in 1952. on a personal level i love both the EC comic book adaptation with artwork by Al Williamson and the 2005 movie adaptation by Peter Hyams that was a box office flop and has receive mostly negative reviews by critics. the original story features one of the first instances of the butterfly effect, in particular as applied to time travel paradoxes and uncontrollable evolutionary/ political outcomes. this was way before it became a meteorologic mainstay of chaos theory after its use by Edward Lorenz to describe stormy ripple-like effects on nonlinear systems, seemingly very sensitive to minute initial conditions.

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the movie A Sound of Thunder features a time travel tourist agency from the year 2055. Time Safari Inc. is a chronocapitalist enterprise that organizes prehistoric retro-hunting expeditions to far-off epochs where dinosaurs roamed the earth. in order to do that, mankind is cheating on the big dinosaur mass extinction. long after humankind has killed most of the big game life on earth it tracks down other, more elusive and ferocious megafauna. the whole ‘hunting’ for the ultimate predator T-Rex (or an Allosaurus in the movie) turns out to be a very complex business. the paleo-poaching is based on hiding your acts under the cover of natural occurrences, trophy hunting pretending to be a mass extimction event. in order to fake the killing shot one must plan ahead every retro-killing move. practically Time Safari Inc. is cheating evolutionary history by trying to synchronize with ‘naturally’ occurring death events and extract entertainment value out of impossible inter-species encounters, normally separated by enormous gulfs of time. (…)

a-sound-of-thunder-illustrated-by-franz-altschuler-565-playboy-june-1956

geohistory becomes a perfect crime scene – where the time traveling expedition has to erase all traces – all influence that might otherwise impact the future with definite catastrophic (especially anthropic future) results. as often, humans are kind of role-playing hide and seek with natural selection. in this bizarre and strange inversion of the anthropocenic stratigraphic proof – masquerades as natural force, where a devious human causality is trying to hide behind a pre-human mass extinction event. it is almost the same principle guiding the climate denialist that pretends to hide behind previous catastrophic climate fluctuations.

sound of thunder

as one might expect, it’s a chronoclysm waiting to happen. all the clients of  Time Safari Inc. are prone to making mistakes, and not only do they leave marks (the absolute no 1 rule of time travel is non-intervention) but they also bring back something (the 2nd most important rule) basically invariably smuggling the prehuman past into the future. somehow a prehistoric dead butterfly makes it through the biofilter (a great example of what I would call New Wallace Lines) that is scanning every living reentry into the present, every possibility of warping the timelines. the alteration of the past produces a chronoclysm that manifests itself as a rhythmic, rapidly accelerating ‘time waves’ that transform the city and its denizens. more to the point in the Peter Hyams movie, the first divergence is a sudden appearance of teeming swarms of beetles and a gigantic strangler fig-like tree bursting through a Chicago high rise building, while the main characters Ryan and Rand make a narrow escape. it is by no means accidental that swarms and insect swarms in particular are associated with time waves. multiply proliferating and and highly distributed, swarms are chronoclysmic purveyors that help carry and suffer the radical effects of timeline distortion.

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there are reports of global increases in temperature and humidity and plant life seems to prosper, while this time warped climate change suddenly seems to be echoing sweltering hot pre-human conditions of long gone geological epochs and dead jungles. (…)

stefan tiron – Cosm/c Dr/ft & T3mporal D/vergence (2016)- EXIT THE PORTAL: The Strange Comeback to a Weird Earth