movies, music, Uncategorized

777 – Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

timespace coordinates: 2691 – 1991 San Dimas, California 

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is a 1991 American science fiction comedy film, and the directing debut of Pete Hewitt. It is the second film in the Bill & Ted franchise, and a sequel to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). Keanu ReevesAlex Winter and George Carlin reprise their roles.

The film’s original working title was Bill & Ted Go to Hell and the film’s soundtrack featured the song “Go to Hell” by Megadeth, which Dave Mustaine wrote for the film. Despite mixed reviews from film critics, like its predecessor, the film has since gained a cult following thanks in large part to its spoof of Ingmar Bergman‘s 1950s classic film The Seventh Seal.

As was particularly common at the time, the soundtrack album focuses on the rock music heard throughout the film. An album of the full orchestral score by David Newman would not become available until 2007.  The song Bill and Ted play for the battle of the bands is “Final Guitar Solo” by Steve Vai, which he wrote to help blend into “God Gave Rock ‘N’ Roll to You II” by Kiss, although they appear similar in appearance to Dusty Hill and Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top There’s also a reference to the lyrics from “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison.

Sequel

In 2010, Reeves indicated that Matheson and Solomon were working on a script for a third film, confirming in April 2011 that a draft was complete.Winter said in March 2012 that he and Reeves both like the finished script, which revisits the two characters after the changes of the past twenty years. Despite the script being finished and satisfied by both parties, no specific filming dates have been named. In April 2016, Winter said that he hoped the film would begin production in 2017.  Reeves gave an update on the film in February 2017 and said a story has been written for the third film. “Basically, they’re supposed to write a song to save the world and they haven’t done that. The pressure of having to save the world, their marriages are falling apart, their kids are kind of mad at them, and then someone comes from the future and tells them if they don’t write the song it’s not just the world, it’s the universe. So they have to save the universe because time is breaking apart.” On May 8, 2018, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that a third film, Bill & Ted: Face the Music, was officially in pre-production with Dean Parisot directing. No release date has been announced yet. (wiki)

imdb

movies, quotes

772 – Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

timespace coordinates: 1900. girls’ private school, near the town of Woodend, VictoriaAustralia

“What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.”

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a 1975 Australian mystery drama film which was produced by Hal and Jim McElroy, directed by Peter Weir, and starred Vivean GrayDominic GuardAnne-Louise LambertHelen Morse, and Rachel Roberts. It was adapted by Cliff Green from the 1967 novel of the same name by Joan Lindsay, who was deliberately ambiguous about whether the events really took place, although the story is in fact entirely fictitious.

The plot involves the disappearance of several schoolgirls and their teacher during a picnic at Hanging RockVictoria on Valentine’s Day in 1900, and the subsequent effect on the local community.

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Marion stares down at the Picnic Ground and says, “Whatever can those people be doing down there, like a lot of ants? A surprising number of human beings are without purpose though it is probable they are performing some function unknown to themselves.”

documentary, quotes

771 – Robinson in Ruins (2010)

Robinson in Ruins is a 2010 British documentary film by Patrick Keiller and narrated by Vanessa Redgrave. It is a sequel to Keiller’s previous films, London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997). It documents the journey of the fictional title character around the south of England. (wiki)

title

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books, quotes, Uncategorized

770

The Weird and the EerieMark Fisher (2016)weird-and-the-eerie-9781910924389_hr


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.

Writers of the New Weird in Britain, like M. John Harrison and China Miéville, briefly rallied to this banner in 2003 before morphing into something else (although the critics still lumber around with the term). Philosophers such as Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker have proposed a “weird realism” — a rival term to “object-oriented ontology” — that replaces Husserl or Heidegger with Horror. One of the early signs of this shift was Mark Fisher’s own symposium on Lovecraft and Theory at Goldsmiths College in London in 2007. In film, David Lynch was always “wild at heart and weird on top,” from his early animated short films up to Inland Empire. On TV, True Detective was pretty weird, with its echoes of Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow and dark nihilistic mutterings lifted from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet: The Horror of Philosophy Volume 1. Stranger Things was quite weird, although a little too soft-focused and retro to be fully paid up, but The OA was definitely out-and-out weird. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy of books (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, all of which appeared in 2014), so far the major achievement of the American translation of the New Weird, will hit mainstream cinemas with Alex Garland’s film adaptation in 2017. Best get weirded up.

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-Žižekian Marxism and the radical anti-subjectivist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze entirely accessible. Only Fisher can enthuse about old Quatermass TV 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; Nigel Kneale TV series from the 1970s; the music of Joy DivisionThe 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 Surfacing and Christopher Nolan’s portentous quantum SF blockbuster Interstellar (which receives a great defense).” (read more here)


https://k-punk.org/

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/


The eeriness of the English countryside

(…) “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

(read more here)

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A suitable place for violence? Orford Ness, Suffolk. photograph by Emma Johnson
music, quotes

729

Too hot inside Too hot outside Lazy days when I said let’s go for a ride


CocoRosie / insta / twitt /

freak folk / New Weird America

documentary, quotes

691 – The Wonder of Weeds (2011)

“…when something does get labeled alien, an entire industry will spring up dedicated to its destruction.”

The Wonder of Weeds

Blue Peter gardener Chris Collins celebrates the humble and sometimes hated plants we call weeds. He discovers that there is no such thing as a weed, botanically speaking, and that in fact what we call a weed has changed again and again over the last three hundred years. Chris uncovers the story of our changing relationship with weeds – in reality, the story of the battle between wilderness and civilisation. He finds out how weeds have been seen as beautiful and useful in the past, and sees how their secrets are being unlocked today in order to transform our crops.

Finally, Chris asks whether, in our quest to eliminate Japanese Knotweed or Rhododendron Ponticum, we are really engaged in an arms race we can never win. We remove weeds from our fields and gardens at our peril.

YOUTUBE


“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

Inversnaid (1881)

Gerard Manley Hopkins

animation, Uncategorized

681 – Isle of Dogs (2018)

timespace coordinates: 2038 Japan

Isle of Dogs (Japanese: 犬ヶ島 Hepburn: Inugashima) is a 2018 stop-motion animated film written, produced and directed by Wes Anderson. Set in a dystopian near-future Japan, the story follows a young boy searching for his dog after the species is banished to an island following the outbreak of a canine flu. The film’s ensemble voice cast includes Bryan CranstonEdward NortonBill MurrayJeff GoldblumBob BalabanGreta GerwigFrances McDormandCourtney B. VanceFisher StevensHarvey KeitelLiev SchreiberScarlett JohanssonTilda SwintonF. Murray AbrahamFrank WoodKunichi Nomura and Yoko Ono.

Anderson said that the film was strongly influenced by the films of Akira Kurosawa, as well as the stop-motion animated holiday specials made by Rankin/Bass Productions. (wiki)

https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/23-29-april-2018/erica-dorn-on-creating-graphics-for-wes-andersons-isle-of-dogs/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5104604/