The Merchant of Venice is a 2004 romantic drama film based on Shakespeare‘s play of the same name. It is the first full-length sound film in English of Shakespeare’s play
The title character is the merchant Antonio (Jeremy Irons), not the Jewish moneylender Shylock (Al Pacino) who is the more prominent character. This adaptation follows the text, but omits much. Director Michael Radford believed that Shylock was Shakespeare’s first great tragic hero who reaches a catastrophe due to his own flaws. The film begins with text and a montage of how the Jewish community is abused by the Christian population of Venice and brings attention to the fact that, as a convert, Shylock would have been cast out of the Jewish ghetto in Venice.
(trivia) the bare-breasted prostitutes were not put in the film to make it more risqué, but rather to add a note of historical authenticity. Venetian law at the time required all prostitutes to bare their breasts because the Christian authorities were concerned about rampant homosexuality in their city.
Ida (pronounced [ˈida]) is a 2013 Polish drama film directed by Paweł Pawlikowski and written by Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Set in Poland in 1962, it is about a young woman on the verge of taking vows as a Catholic nun. Orphaned as an infant during the German occupation of World War II, she must now meet her aunt. The former Communist state prosecutor and only surviving relative tells her that her parents were Jewish. The two women embark on a road trip into the Polish countryside to learn the fate of their family.
Called a “compact masterpiece” and an “eerily beautiful road movie”, the film has also been said to “contain a cosmos of guilt, violence and pain”, even if certain historical events (German occupation of Poland, the Holocaust and Stalinism) remain unsaid: “none of this is stated, but all of it is built, so to speak, into the atmosphere: the country feels dead, the population sparse”. ( wiki )
Due to the increased interest in Kraków created by the film, the city bought Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory in 2007 to create a permanent exhibition about the German occupation of the city from 1939 to 1945. The museum opened in June 2010.
Stryker activates Wade, now known as Weapon XI/Deadpool, a “mutant killer” with the powers of multiple mutants.
X-Men (2000)
spacetime coordinate: usa, 2000
The film focuses on the mutants Wolverine and Rogue as they are brought into a conflict between two groups that have radically different approaches to bringing about the acceptance of mutant-kind
X2 (2003)
spacetime coordinate: usa, 2003
inspired by the graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills, pits the X-Men and their enemies, the Brotherhood, against the genocidal Colonel William Stryker . He leads an assault on Professor Xavier’s school to build his own version of Xavier’s mutant-tracking computer Cerebro, in order to destroy every mutant on Earth and to save the human race from them.
based on the 1982 limited seriesWolverine by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. In the film, which follows the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan travels to Japan, where he engages an old acquaintance in a struggle that has lasting consequences. Stripped of his healing factor, Wolverine must battle deadly samurai while struggling with guilt.
The story, inspired by the 1981 Uncanny X-Men storyline “Days of Future Past” by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, focuses on two time periods, with Wolverine traveling back in time to 1973 to change history and prevent an event that results in doom for both humans and mutants.
X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
spacetime coordinate:ancient Egypt, 1983 Cairo, East Berlin, New York, Communist Poland
The ancient mutant En Sabah Nur awakens in 1983 and plans to wipe out modern civilization and take over the world, leading the X-Men to try to stop him and defeat his team of renegade mutants.
Dark Phoenix (2019)
spacetime coordinates: 1992 New York
the twelfth installment of the X-Men film series, and the sequel to 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse.
spacetime coordinate: 2029 Texas, the Mexican border, Oklahoma City, North Dakota
It is the tenth installment in the X-Men film series, as well as the third and final Wolverine solo film following X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and The Wolverine (2013). The film, which takes inspiration from “Old Man Logan” by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven, based in an alternate bleak future, follows an aged Wolverine and an extremely ill Professor X defending a young mutant named Laura from the villainous Reavers and Alkali-Transigen led by Donald Pierce and Zander Rice, respectively.
The film takes visual, tonal and thematic inspiration from classic western and noir cinema, with director James Mangold having stated that Logan’s influences included “visual reference points” of cinema, citing Shane (1953), The Cowboys (1972), Paper Moon (1973), The Gauntlet (1977), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), and The Wrestler (2008).
Mangold spoke of cinematography-based framing, while noting that he does not necessarily think about the “comic-book” related sort, instead highlighting the variety of stylistic influences that went into Logan. These influences include film noir framings and classic Hollywood filmmaking styles, as well as the Germanic expressionist filmmaking style of the early part of the last century, which Mangold stated has a commonality with comic-book art. Mangold highlighted “Strong foregrounds, playing things in depth: you have to make an image say more within that one image.” Using the image of Logan at a funeral as an example of his stylistic logic, Mangold concluded by mentioning the aspects within modern filmmaking, primarily everything in close-up format. For Logan, his aim was to set frames that are descriptive, and evocative of comic-book panels and classical filmmaking
On April 29, 2017, James Mangold announced via Twitter that a black-and-white version of the film entitled Logan Noirwould have a limited theatrical run in U.S. theaters, an event set to begin on May 16, 2017. Mangold stated that it was shot as a color film, with awareness that it would play well as a black and white film. The film was re-graded and timed shot by shot for the Noir edition. This version of the film is included on the Digital HD release and also included in the DVD and Blu-ray Combo Pack. (wiki)
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spacetime coordinate: 40’s > 90’s, Saint Petersburg > New York
When asked in an interview whether he ever intended to return to his Motherland,Joseph Brodsky replied: “Such a journey could only take place anonymously…”
The creators of this film imagined that the journey in question was undertaken after all, selecting the genre of an ironic fairytale. The poet sails to the country of his childhood, and with him we traverse not only geographical expanses, but travel through time as well; stringing together a number of facts from the Nobel Prize Laureate’s biography, we return to the USSR of the 50s and early 60s, soaking up the atmosphere of the “European” city of Petersburg, to this day Russia’s cultural center. Along with live-action sequences, the film features animation, as well as documentary footage concerning Brodsky and his milieu.
Some of the animated sequences — of winged horses and flying sleds, of Brodsky as a farm animal on all fours drawing a cart — suggest Chagall. Other, more elegant pictures — of pianos and other musical instruments flying in formation while framed against the heroic architecture of St. Petersburg — are closer to Magritte’s surrealism. Visually, it is an ode to St. Petersburg (its museums, architecture and statuary are lovingly photographed), and to the Neva River, which runs by the city.
With its unabashedly nostalgic glow, the film belongs to what might be called the “rosebud” school (after “Citizen Kane”) of film biographies that locate the essence of a life in childhood memories. Recurrent images in the film are visual representations of the family’s house cat. The youthful Brodsky (Evgeniy Ogandzhanyan) is shown conversing with his father in meows and later subverting the solemnity of a school anthem sung by a chorus by substituting cat cries for words. He later confides to a friend that he wants to be reincarnated as a cat in Venice.
TimeSpace Warps 