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timespace coordinates: 2010’s Tokyo
Shoplifters (Japanese: 万引き家族 Hepburn: Manbiki Kazoku, direct translation Shoplifting Family) is a 2018 Japanese drama film directed, written and edited by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Starring Lily Franky and Sakura Ando, it is about a family that relies on shoplifting to cope with a life of poverty.
Kore-eda wrote the screenplay contemplating what makes a family, and inspired by reports on poverty and shoplifting in Japan. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: 2017 Boston
Surrogates is a 2009 American science fiction mystery film, based on the 2005–2006 comic book series The Surrogates. Directed by Jonathan Mostow, it stars Bruce Willis as Tom Greer, an FBI agent who ventures out into the real world to investigate the murder of surrogates (humanoid remote controlled robots). It also stars Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike, Boris Kodjoe, Ving Rhames, and James Cromwell.
The film’s main concept centers on the mysterious murder of a college student linked to the man who helped create a high-tech surrogate phenomenon that allows people to purchase remote-controlled humanoid robots through which they interact with society. These fit, attractive, remotely controlled robots ultimately assume their life roles, enabling people to experience life vicariously from the comfort and safety of their own homes. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: – – Southern California’s Salton Sea community
“An indie with one foot in the netting of social realism and another in the terrain of desolation fables, “Don’t Come Back From The Moon” offers up a tale of mass disappearance born of economic hardship: fathers in a depressed small town leaving their wives and children like something out of a Greek tragedy or a post-apocalyptic story. Or, as one could readily imagine, out of headlines from America’s rapidly dying, labor-driven towns.” (read review)
Don’t Come Back from the Moon is a 2017 American drama film featuring James Franco and Rashida Jones. It is based on Dean Bakopoulos‘ 2005 novel of the same name.
timespace coordinates: 1945 Kobe, Japan
Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓 Hotaru no Haka) is a 1988 Japanese animated war film based on the 1967 semi-autobiographical short story of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka. It was written and directed by Isao Takahata, and animated by Studio Ghibli for the story’s publisher Shinchosha Publishing. The film stars Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi, Yoshiko Shinohara and Akemi Yamaguchi. The film tells the story of two siblings, Seita and Setsuko, and their desperate struggle to survive during the final months of the Second World War.
The Grave of the Fireflies is commonly described as an anti-war film, but this interpretation has been denied by the director. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: June, 1944 Nazi occupied France
Overlord is a 2018 American war horror / period Nazi zombie shoot-’em-up film directed by Julius Avery and written by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith. It stars Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Gianny Taufer, Pilou Asbæk, and Bokeem Woodbine. The film was produced by J. J. Abrams, through his Bad Robot Productions banner, and Lindsey Weber. The plot follows several American soldiers who are dropped behind enemy lines the day before D-Day and discover secret Nazi experiments. (wiki)
The title of the film is, no doubt, in reference to Operation Overlord, the codename for the Allied operation for the Battle of Normandy, which launched the successful invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. This, alongside Operation Neptune, would become known as D-Day.
timespace coordinates: Following a cataclysmic conflict known as the Sixty Minute War, the remnants of humanity regroup and form mobile “predator” cities. Under a philosophy known as “Municipal Darwinism”, larger cities hunt and absorb smaller settlements in the “Great Hunting Ground”, which includes Great Britain and Continental Europe. In opposition, settlements of the “Anti-Traction League” have developed an alternative civilization consisting of “static settlements” (traditional, non-mobile cities) in Asia led by Shan Guo (formerly China), protected by the “Shield Wall”.
“After the Ancients destroyed themselves in the Sixty Minute War, there were several thousand years in which nothing much happened. These were the Black Centuries. The great civilizations of the Screen Age had been utterly swept away, and humanity was reduced to a few scattered bands of savages’ ‘The Traction Codex’
Mortal Engines is a 2018 post-apocalyptic adventure film directed by Christian Rivers and with a screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, based on the novel of the same name by Philip Reeve, and starring Hugo Weaving, Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Jihae, Ronan Raftery, Leila George, Patrick Malahide, and Stephen Lang. An American–New Zealand co-production, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic world where entire cities have been mounted on wheels and motorised, and prey on one another. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: 1945. Nazi Germany (the last moments of World War II)
The Captain (German: Der Hauptmann) is a 2017 German Art House & war drama film directed by Robert Schwentke.
The film tells the story of German war criminal Willi Herold, who assumed a stolen identity as a German officer and orchestrated the killing of deserters and other prisoners at one of the Emslandlager camps. (wiki)
Simultaneously a historical docudrama and sociological examination with undertones of the absurd, The Captain presents fascism as something of a game to be played by those most gullible and unscrupulous. (rt)
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