time machine // database // travel guide
spacetime coordinates: 2000’s Detroit, Michigan
Gran Torino is a 2008 American drama film directed and produced by Clint Eastwood, who also starred in the film. It is the first mainstream American film to feature Hmong Americans. Many Lao Hmong war refugees resettled in the U.S. following the communist takeover of Laos in 1975.
spacetime coordinates: village in the mountains of South Korea August 31, 2014 – February 28, 2015
The Wailing (Hangul: 곡성; Hanja: 哭聲; RR: Gokseong) is a 2016 South Korean supernatural horror film directed by Na Hong-jin about a policeman who investigates a series of mysterious killings and illnesses.
According to director Hong-jin Na, the movie was made on the base of folk religions in Korea, Shamanism in Nepal and Catholic faiths.
spacetime coordinates: 18th – 19th century Easter Island
“According to one early commentator, Rapanui songs expressed ‘the surprise of being alive and also the sadness of life.’”
spacetime coordinates: 1873 New Mexico Territory
Cowboys & Aliens is a 2011 American western science fiction film directed by Jon Favreau and starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde. The film is based on the 2006 graphic novel of the same name created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. The plot revolves around an amnesiac outlaw (Craig), a wealthy cattleman (Ford), and a mysterious traveler (Wilde) who must ally to save a group of townspeople abducted by aliens.
Favreau chose to film traditionally and in anamorphic format (widescreen picture on standard 35 mm film) to further a “classic movie feel” Measures were taken to maintain a serious Western element despite the film’s “inherently comic” title and premise.
Roger Guyett about the aliens: “They’re frontiersmen in a way: traveling to another place and having to deal with all the adversities of the climate. And in our case, we played up the fact that they weren’t comfortable in our world. There are flies all around them; they don’t like the light; and when they were wounded and exposed, a strange fungus grows around them.”
spacetime coordinates: 1990s New Mexico // Florida // Puerto Rico // Washington, D.C. // Wisconsin // Hokkaido
Contact is a 1997 American science fiction drama film directed by Robert Zemeckis. It is a film adaptation of Carl Sagan‘s 1985 novel of the same name; Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan wrote the story outline for the film.
Jodie Foster portrays the film’s protagonist, Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, a SETI scientist who finds strong evidence of extraterrestrial life and is chosen to make first contact.
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As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose. (read more)
“No civilization should ever announce its presence to the cosmos. Any other civilization that learns of its existence will perceive it as a threat to expand—as all civilizations do, eliminating their competitors until they encounter one with superior technology and are themselves eliminated. This grim cosmic outlook is called “dark-forest theory,” because it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.”
spacetime coordinates: 9th century
Ingelheim am Rhein – the cathedral school in Dorestad – the Fulda monastery of Benedictines – Rome
Pope Joan (German: Die Päpstin) is an international epic film produced by Bernd Eichinger, based on American novelist Donna Woolfolk Cross‘ novel of the same name about the legendary Pope Joan. Directed by Sönke Wortmann, it stars Johanna Wokalek as Joan, David Wenham as Gerold, her lover, and John Goodman as Pope Sergius II.
The popular story of the ‘female Pope’ that has become widespread since the Middle Ages and thereafter. Pope Joan has been mentioned in works that were released several centuries after her supposed reign. Most modern scholars have dismissed the stories as fictional, due to lack of contemporary documentation, and the debunking of indirect evidence. Many theories abound that the lack of evidence is the result of successful attempts by the Catholic Church to erase Joan’s existence from history. The matter therefore remains controversial.
spacetime coordinates: 1505 – 1530 Saxony, Holy Roman Empire
Luther is a 2003 biopic about the life of Martin Luther (1483–1546) starring Joseph Fiennes. It was an independent film partially funded by Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. The film covers Luther’s life from his becoming a monk to the Diet of Augsburg.
+The film takes place over the course of three decades. However, none of the characters show any signs of aging, including Luther and the youthful German emperor.+
TimeSpace Warps 