timespace coodinates: late 19th century Italy / New York City
Cabrini is a 2024 American biographical drama film directed by Alejandro Gómez Monteverde. The film depicts the life of Catholic missionary Francesca Cabrini, portrayed by Cristiana Dell’Anna, as she encounters resistance to her charity and business efforts in New York City. Cabrini explores the sexism and anti-Italian bigotry faced by Cabrini and others in New York City in the late 19th century. (wiki)
Zeros and Ones is a 2021 American-Italian thriller film written and directed by Abel Ferrara. It stars Ethan Hawke, Cristina Chiriac, Phil Neilson, Valerio Mastandrea, Dounia Sichov, Korlan Madi, Mahmut Sifa Erkaya and Anna Ferrara. (wiki)
I decided to repost my thread with first thoughts on Abel Ferra’s remarkable last production. Altough hard to encapsulate and probably not a success with the critics – Ferrara’s late foray into current world affairs is one of the most visionary & contemporary things out there. It’s impossible for me to sum up but it as if he took wll our daily digital supper, all the aberran and yet so real and hard to encapsulate -apocalyptic moods and made them into a movie. My tw were posted as sort of personal notes freshly after watching it online and reading just Steven Shaviro’s blog review (he’s a big Ferrara fan). I stumbled on Ferrara almost by chance, wachted Bad Lieutenant with my father as an adolescent. We were both blasted apart. There was nothing to compare it with. Will never forget his academic vampire movie (The Addiction) – a total and welcome radical reworking of old horror tropes.
Watched Abel Ferarras ZEROS and Ones (2021). Incredibile piece of work – almost an anti war, conspiracy & spy genre movie. It's like nothing I've seen coming out of COVID era. Filmed almost entirely at night in Covid Rome.https://t.co/Ze5nXWyCmD
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
Everything else seems passé or cliché in comparison, completly missing the pulse of the times. Vatican explodes (implodes?). Feeds of video streams & online blackmail material is ubiquitous. A complot without a plot. Explanations are superfluous.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
Ethan Hawke (as an ex- soldier merc? with an anarchist twin brother) stumbles trough the looking glass. Pawn gone rogue, muddled & completly dissociative, praying in mosques & churches. Higher forms of corruption (like friend @IonD sez), utterly impervious & black boxed.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
The slick & vacuous corporate ruthlessness of Ferrara's New Rose Hotel (1998) gave way to ceaseless military industrial machinations, gagging orders deceptions & smoke screens. Water boarding & hand sanitizers are part of the very same world. [Julian Assange gets extradited :(].
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
It has been going on since 1000 years, but no one seems to know precisely what, apart from mullahs & anti imperialist homeless suicide bombers. Almost everyone seems to act against their own best interests. "Jesus was a soldier but nobody knows on who's side."~voicever
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
In the wake of Pentagon's new approved aberrant military budget – A. Ferrara's ZEROS and Ones – lets the whole preemptive, self actualizing illogic of War on Terror infuse every corner of life. Stripped of its makeshift ideological facade – collusion & complicity widen the maze.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
Ethan Hawke's character pandemic rules seem both strict & lax at the same time. Everything is mediated technologically: the torture, honey traps, backroom deals, confessions under truth drugs. Feverish self immolation & enlightenment ideals both gush out during interrogation.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
(Zeros and Ones made me think of Sadie Plant's 1997 groundbreaking cyber feminist clasic) Ferrara acknowledges this digital (video) ubiquity and near instantaneity of special ops, transmissions, being one step ahead. Computer screens get shot. Warnings spoken through video call.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
Night lit monuments of Rome filmed as with a phone camera. Documentary style long shots of lonely streets get mashed with closeups & grainy, almost night vision camera or even (?) CNN bombarded skies over Baghdad, zoom blackmail, pixelated explosions by unknown terror bombings.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
Remarkable movie by a director in his 70s. Not going to find any narrative – if that's what youre looking for. Even Ethan Hawke's (as himself) prologue & epilogue framing, maintains contradictions + unnerving incompatibility – a key duplicity you might say almost intact.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
One of my favorite lines from Ferrara's Zeros and Ones – (beside many others "no worries they're negative") Ethan Hawke's brother ranting under truth serum: "Your strippers are Marxist!"
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 13, 2021
Red Notice is a 2021 American action comedy film written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. It stars Dwayne JohnsonRyan Reynolds and Gal Gadot. With a $200 million production budget the film became the most-viewed film on Netflix during release day.
Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds is a 2020 documentary film directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer. The film explores the cultural, spiritual, and scientific impact of meteorites, and the craters they create around the globe. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 