760 – Detention (2011)

timespace coordinates:  2011 – 1992 California

An apocalyptic fantasy, horror, science fiction, action- thriller, body swapping, time-traveling teen romantic comedy starring Josh Hutcherson, Dane Cook, Shanley Caswell and  Spencer Locke. Detention follows the local students of Grizzly Lake as they survive their final year of high school. Bringing even more angst to student life, a slasher killer has chosen their high school as his new home of slaughter. It becomes a race against time to stop the killer, which will in turn save the world – if only they can get out of detention. (rt)

“Insane, Hyperkinetic, Next Level Filmmaking.”

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“(…) for pop-culture pilgrims intent on discovering an underground prize, look no further.”

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“Smart, funny, and equally full of splatstick violence and heart, Detention isn’t just next-level horror–it’s next level everything, a senses-altering reaffirmation of cinema.“

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“a shockingly meaningful, potent film about the nature of meaninglessness and its damning effects on the younger generation”

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“manic throwback horror comedy for the Twitter generation.”

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“time traveling teen pop culture comedy Detention is a runaway freight train of frenetic energy!”

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“is Scream meets Scott Pilgrim with a dash or two of Kaboom, it makes for one wild cocktail.”

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Post-irony

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imdb

0735 – Deadpool 2 (2018)

Deadpool 2 is a 2018 American black comedy superhero Self-reflexive vigilante time travel film based on the Marvel Comics character Deadpool, distributed by 20th Century Fox. It is the eleventh installment in the X-Men film series, and a direct sequel to the 2016 film Deadpool. The film is directed by David Leitch from a script by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Ryan Reynolds, with Reynolds starring in the title role alongside Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Julian Dennison, Zazie Beetz, T.J. Miller, Brianna Hildebrand, and Jack Kesy. In the film, Deadpool forms the team X-Force to protect a young mutant from the time-traveling soldier Cable.

The first teaser poster, which pays homage to Norman Rockwell‘s 1943 painting Freedom from Want, was released that November. Justin Carter of Comic Book Resources found it “oddly appropriate for Deadpool 2 to co-opt [this] iconic work for a modern pop culture audience” as it is “true to Deadpool’s incredibly referential nature”.

The first footage from the film debuted at the end of a video where Reynolds (in-character as Deadpool) parodies Bob Ross and his television show The Joy of Painting.

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imdb   /   Céline Dion – Ashes

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018 – X-Men (film series)

618 – Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)

640 – Rabbit (2005)

A modern mystery film of lost innocence, greed and nature. A dreamlike but dark story of lost innocence and the random justice of nature, told with curious images from a distant childhood. A selection of 1950s educational stickers, discovered in a provincial junkshop 20 years ago, provide the ingredients for this adult fairytale.  Once they were new, delivering a simple message to those also young. Like us, however, they have grown older and now present a more complex meaning. Rabbit tells a tale of lost innocence, greed and the random justice of nature. When a boy and girl find an idol in the stomach of a rabbit, its magical abilities lead to riches. But for how long?

BACKGROUND INFO

Run Wrake found an envelope in a secondhand shop in the 1980s that contained sheets of educational stickers illustrated by Geoffrey Higham and published by Philip & Tacey Limited in the 1950s. The image of the idol was the primary inspiration for Rabbit’s storyline.

https://runwrake.com/       imdb

505 – Downsizing (2017)

spacetime coordinates: near future Norway / NebraskaDownsizing is a 2017 american science fiction  / high-concept social satire / comedy-drama film directed by Alexander Payne, written by Payne and Jim Taylor and starring Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, and Kristen Wiig. It tells the story of a couple who decide to undertake a newly-invented procedure to shrink their bodies so they can start a new life in an experimental community.

Starting with Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, there exists a rich literature as well as many films dealing with mini-humans usually called dwarfs. The idea of shrinking human bodies in order to reduce the consumption of raw materials available on earth necessary for the life of mankind was presented for the first time in the novel Das Miniatom-Projekt (2006) by Richard M. Weiner. In the novel the miniaturization takes place at CERN by decreasing the sizes of atoms with the help of the world’s biggest particle accelerator, while in the Downsizing film the shrinkage is performed by bio-medical methods, by decreasing the sizes of cells.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1389072/

498 – The Death of Stalin (2017)

spacetime coordinates:  1953 Moscow

The Death of Stalin is a 2017 political satire film directed and co-written by Armando Iannucci. Based on the French graphic novel La mort de Staline, it depicts the Soviet power struggles following the death of dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953.

A number of academics commented on the historical accuracy of The Death of Stalin. Historian Richard Overy noted in The Guardian that the film “is littered with historical errors”, which can be “viewed as cinematic licence“, but was most critical that the film did not appropriately honour Stalin’s victims. Director Iannucci stated that he “chose to tone down real-life absurdity” to make the work more believable.  Samuel Goff, at the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge, cited several justifiable historical inaccuracies with the ranks and roles of Stalin’s inner circle, but thought the film missed the overall point and was unable to locate any of the inherent humour contained in Stalinism.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/

0457 – The Square (2017)

spacetime coordinates: 2010’s  Stockholm

“The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.”

The Square is a 2017 Swedish satirical drama film written and directed by Ruben Östlund, and starring Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West and Terry Notary. The film is about publicity surrounding an art installation, and was partly inspired by an installation Östlund and producer Kalle Boman had made.

(development) Originally with the performance artist who entertains the affluent patrons, Östlund was considering modelling the character after G.G. Allin, but deciding that that would be too “extreme”, he fell back on his interest in animal imitations. In crafting the scene, his concept was: “this internationally recognized artist is pretending to be a wild beast. What happens when he enters a room full of people in tuxedos?” The scene was inspired by a real incident with the artist Oleg Kulik, who performs as a dog and had attacked people at a notorious event in Stockholm. Other artists parodied in the film include Julian Schnabel, Robert Smithson and Carl Hammoud.

Oleg Kulik “Reservoir Dog”  Zurich 1995

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4995790/

0083 – Ravenous (1999)

spacetime coordinates: 1840s in the Sierra Nevadas // the Mexican-American War 

Ravenous is a 1999 Czech-American black comedy horror-suspense film directed by Antonia Bird and starring Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, Jeffrey Jones and David Arquette. The film revolves around cannibalism in 1840s California and some elements bear similarities to the story of the Donner Party and that of Alferd Packer. Screenwriter Ted Griffin lists Packer’s story, as recounted in a couple of paragraphs of Dashiell Hammett‘s The Thin Man, as one of his inspirations for Carlyle’s character. The film’s darkly humorous and ironic take on its gruesome subject matter have led some to label it simply as a black comedy or a satire. The film’s unique score by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn generated a significant amount of attention.

watch trailer here

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the wendigo (Algonquian folklore)

imdb