time machine // database // travel guide
spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Arizona, USA
The spiritual journey of a ninety-year-old atheist.
Lucky is a 2017 American drama / comedy film directed by John Carroll Lynch from a screenplay by Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja. It stars Harry Dean Stanton in one of his final on-screen roles before his death on September 15, 2017 (aged 91).
spacetime coordinates: 2044 Kansas City < 2074 Shanghai
Looper is a 2012 American science fiction thriller film written and directed by Rian Johnson, and produced by Ram Bergman and James D. Stern. It stars Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Emily Blunt. It revolves around criminal syndicates using contracted killers called “loopers” to kill victims sent through time travel.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276104/
spacetime coordinates: Sudbury, Ontario, in 2018
James vs. His Future Self is a 2019 Canadian science fiction comedy film, directed by Jeremy Lalonde. The film stars Jonas Chernick as James, a scientist researching time travel whose life is turned upside down when his older self (Daniel Stern) arrives from 17 years in the future to demand that he stop. The cast also includes Cleopatra Coleman, Frances Conroy, Tara Spencer-Nairn and Tommie-Amber Pirie. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: unnamed war-torn European city in “The Age of Reason” (late 18th century, Wednesday)
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a 1988 adventure fantasy film co-written and directed by Terry Gilliam, starring John Neville, Sarah Polley, Eric Idle, Jonathan Pryce, Oliver Reed, and Uma Thurman.
The film is based on the tall tales about the 18th-century German nobleman Baron Munchausen and his wartime exploits against the Ottoman Empire.
Drowning by Numbers is a 1988 British-Dutch film directed by Peter Greenaway.
The film’s plot centres on three married women — a grandmother, her daughter, and her niece — each named Cissie Colpitts. As the story progresses, each woman successively drowns her husband. The three Cissie Colpittses are played by Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson, while Bernard Hill plays the coroner, Madgett, who is cajoled into covering up the three crimes.
The structure, with similar stories repeated three times, is reminiscent of a fairy tale, most specifically ‘The Billy Goats Gruff‘, because Madgett is constantly promised greater rewards as he tries his luck with each of the Cissies in turn. The link to folklore is further established by Madgett’s son Smut, who recites the rules of various unusual games played by the characters as if they were ancient traditions. Many of these games are invented for the film, including:
In Drowning by Numbers, number-counting, the rules of games and the repetitions of the plot are all devices which emphasise structure and symmetry. Through the course of the film each of the numbers 1 to 100 appear, the large majority in sequence, often seen in the background, sometimes spoken by the characters.
The film is set and was shot in and around Southwold, Suffolk, England, with key landmarks such as the Victorian water tower, Southwold Lighthouse, and the estuary of the River Blyth clearly identifiable.
spacetime coordinates: Pacific Islands, 1849 // Cambridge/Edinburgh, 1936 // San Francisco, 1973 // London, 2012 // Neo Seoul, 2144 // Big Isle (Hawaii), 106 winters after the Fall (2321)
Cloud Atlas is a 2012 German-American science fiction film written and directed by The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. Adapted from the 2004 novel of the same name by David Mitchell, the film has multiple plots set across six different eras, which Mitchell described as “a sort of pointillist mosaic.” The official synopsis describes it as “an exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.” Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Jim Broadbent lead an ensemble cast.
Lana Wachowski stated “people will try to will Cloud Atlas to be rejected. They will call it messy, or complicated, or undecided whether it’s trying to say something New Agey-profound or not. And we’re wrestling with the same things that Dickens and Hugo and David Mitchell and Herman Melville were wrestling with. We’re wrestling with those same ideas, and we’re just trying to do it in a more exciting context than conventionally you are allowed to. … We don’t want to say, ‘We are making this to mean this.’ What we find is that the most interesting art is open to a spectrum of interpretation.”
spacetime coordinates: 2001-2002 New York City
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a 2011 American drama film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer, directed by Stephen Daldry and written by Eric Roth.
Brand Upon the Brain! A Remembrance in 12 Chapters is an avant-garde silent film directed by Guy Maddin and shot in Seattle with local actors.
Guy reluctantly returns to his childhood home, an abandoned Canadian island, where his parents ran an orphanage. As Guy fulfils his dying mother’s request to paint the lighthouse which served as the orphanage, memories of strange events there overpower him. An undercover investigation by child author/detective Wendy & a revolt by the repressed children, blew open a cover-up by Guy’s parents. Wendy disguised herself as her brother Chance and discovered that Guy’s inventor father performed outré scientific experiments on the orphans.
TimeSpace Warps 