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spacetime coordinates: July 1967, Detroit
Detroit is a 2017 American period crime drama film directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal. Based on the Algiers Motel incident during Detroit’s 1967 12th Street Riot, the film’s release commemorated the 50th anniversary of the event.
Louis Theroux visits three American cities and examines a uniquely devastating human crisis in each – opioid and heroin addiction in Huntington, sex trafficking in Houston, and murder in Milwaukee.
spacetime coordinates: 80’s 90’s Compton, California, Los Angeles
Straight Outta Compton is a 2015 American biographical film directed by F. Gary Gray, depicting the career of gangsta rap group N.W.A. Titled after N.W.A’s 1988 debut studio album, the film focuses on members Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre, and the rise and fall of the group. Members of N.W.A were involved in making the film, including Ice Cube and Dr. Dre as producers, as was Eazy-E’s widow, Tomica Woods-Wright, while MC Ren and DJ Yella served as creative consultants. Ice Cube is portrayed by his son, O’Shea Jackson Jr., with Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre and Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E. Paul Giamatti also stars as N.W.A’s manager Jerry Heller.
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.
spacetime coordinate: 1961, the segregated West Area Computers division of Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia
Hidden Figures is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by Theodore Melfi and written by Melfi and Allison Schroeder, based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly about African American female mathematicians who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Space Race.
A group of Boston-bred gangsters set up shop in balmy Florida during the Prohibition era, facing off against the Italian Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan.
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