series

258 – Westworld (TV Series 2016– )

westworld 1Westworld is an American science fiction western thriller television series created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy for HBO. It is based on the 1973 film of the same name, which was written and directed by American novelist Michael Crichton, and to a lesser extent on the 1976 sequel Futureworld. It is the second TV series based on the two films, the first being the short-lived 1980 series Beyond Westworld. Nolan and Joy serve as executive producers along with J. J. AbramsJerry Weintraub, and Bryan Burk, with Nolan directing the pilot. The first season premiered on October 2, 2016, concluded on December 4, 2016, and consisted of ten episodes.  In November 2016, HBO renewed the show for a ten-episode second season, planned for a debut in early 2018.

westworld 2The story takes place in the fictional Westworld, a technologically advanced Wild West-themed amusement park populated by android hosts. Westworld caters to high-paying guests, who may indulge in whatever they wish within the park, without fear of retaliation from the hosts.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475784/

movies

251 – Apocalypto (2006)

spacetime coordinates:  pre-Columbian Yucatan and Guatemala, 1502

apocalypto_xlg

Apocalypto is a 2006 American epic adventure film directed and produced by Mel Gibson and written by Gibson and Farhad Safinia.  Similar to Gibson’s earlier film The Passion of the Christ, all dialogue is in a modern approximation of the ancient language of the setting. Here, the Yucatec Maya language is used, with English and other language subtitles, which sometimes refer to the language as Mayan.

apocalypto_cover

Themes

Historical Accuracy

imdb

 

documentary

249 – El botón de nácar (2015)

el_boton_de_nacar_the_pearl_button-poster-large

The Pearl Button (Spanish: El botón de nácar) is a 2015 Chilean documentary film directed by Patricio Guzmán. The filmmaker has described the work as part of a triptych with Nostalgia for the Light (imdband potentially a third film focusing on the Andes.

It explores familiar Guzmán themes such as memory and the historical past, particularly that of history’s losers rather than victors, recording some of the last surviving members of the original Alacalufe and Yaghan tribes, the far north of Chile, the most waterless place on earth, where radio telescopes in the desert discover more about the cosmos each day. A departure for Guzmán is that it does not focus solely on Chile’s past under Augusto Pinochet, as the title was partly inspired by a shirt button discovered during a 2004 investigation by Chilean judge Juan Guzmán on a length of rail used to weight the bodies of Pinochet’s victims dumped in the sea and partly by the button after which the Yaghan native Jemmy Button was named when taken aboard HMS Beagle in 1830.

nostalgia-for-the-light-movie-poster-2010

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4377864/

animation, movies

224 – Small Soldiers (1998)

spacetime coordinates: 1998 Ohio 

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Small Soldiers is a 1998 American science fiction action film directed by Joe Dante. The film revolves around two adolescents who get caught in the middle of a war between two factions of sentient action figures, the Gorgonites and the Commando Elite.

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

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122718/

movies

222 – The Dead Lands (2014)

spacetime coordinates:   pre-European New Zealand – Aotearoa

dead_lands_poster_2014

The Dead Lands is a 2014 māori language New Zealand action film directed by Toa Fraser.  . The film follows a  young chief’s son seeking revenge for his father’s murder who teams up with a mystical, wiser warrior, to take out a small army of villains. The movie incorporates traditional weapons and fighting choreography.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3399916/

documentary, movies

176 – Kon-Tiki expedition

spacetime coordinates: 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands

Kon-Tiki (1950  documentary)

Kon-Tiki is a Norwegian-Swedish documentary film about the Kon-Tiki expedition led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl in 1947.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042650/

Kon-Tiki (2012 film)

Kon-Tiki is a 2012 historical drama film directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg about the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition. The film was mainly shot on the island of Malta. The role of Thor Heyerdahl is played by Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen. The film is an international co-production between Norway, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. It was the highest-grossing film of 2012 in Norway and the country’s most expensive production to date

kon_tiki_ver2_xlg

Historical accuracy

While much of the story is historically accurate, screenwriter Petter Skavlan and director Joachim Rønning both felt the need to make the story more exciting for their two-hour feature film. The fictionalized elements have been criticized; as film critic Andrew Barker commented, “It’s frustratingly ironic that Kon-Tiki’s most outrageously fantastical sequences are completely verifiable, and its most predictable, workaday conflicts are completely made up.”

kon-tiki 1

The film focuses on Heyerdahl’s theory that Polynesia was first populated with humans from Peru, but it ignores the Norwegian’s more ethnocentric speculations that the original Kon-Tiki voyage was undertaken by a race of tall white bearded people with red hair. Heyerdahl conjectured that Amerindian civilizations like the Aztecs and the Incas only arose with the help of advanced technical knowledge brought by early European voyagers, and that these white people were eventually driven out of Peru and fled westward on rafts.

kon-tiki 2

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The portrayal of the raft’s second-in-command, Herman Watzinger, proved controversial in Norway. Colleagues and relatives say Watzinger in the film is unlike the real-life Watzinger, physically or in his actions. Actor Baasmo Christiansen acknowledged the physical differences with a smile. “Watzinger was tall, dark, and Norwegian Youth Champion in the 100 meter. He was everything I’m not.” In the film, Watzinger disobeys Heyerdahl’s direct order and throws a harpoon at a whale shark under the boat, but it was actually Erik Hesselberg who harpooned the whale shark, with the crew cheering him on. The film’s Watzinger, worried about the hemp ropes’ ability to hold the balsa logs together for the entire voyage, tearfully begs Heyerdahl at sea to add steel cables Watzinger smuggled aboard but Heyerdahl’s book contains no such scene and Watzinger’s daughter has stated it never happened: “My father was a stout and confident man, and he never thought that way about the balsa logs and the ropes.” Thor Heyerdahl, Jr., who worked with Watzinger, concurred in the criticism of the film’s portrayal of Watzinger.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1613750/

movies, quotes

175 – Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

spacetime coordinates: 2012  southern Louisiana bayou community called the “Bathtub” (a community cut off from the rest of the world by a levee)

beasts of the southern wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a 2012 American drama film co-written, co-scored and directed by Benh Zeitlin. It was adapted by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar from Alibar’s one-act play Juicy and Delicious. 

…Meanwhile, in the Arctic, the frozen Aurochs in an ice shelf start drifting into the ocean…

beasts of the southern wild2

The fictional island of the film, “Isle de Charles Doucet” known to its residents as the Bathtub, was inspired by several isolated and independent fishing communities threatened by erosion, hurricanes and rising sea levels in Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish, most notably the rapidly eroding Isle de Jean Charles. It was filmed in Terrebonne Parish town Montegut.

imdb, wiki

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Hushpuppy: [about an emergency shelter] When an animal gets sick here, they plug it into the wall.