timespace coodinates: 1980s rural Arizona rest stop
The Last Stop in Yuma County is a 2023 American crime thriller film written and directed by Francis Galluppi and starring Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue, Richard Brake, Faizon Love and Michael Abbott Jr. It is Galluppi’s feature directorial debut. (wiki)
timespace coodinates: 2020’s New York City
Problemista is a 2023 American surrealist comedy film written, directed, and produced by Julio Torres. It stars Tilda Swinton, Torres, RZA, Greta Lee, Catalina Saavedra, James Scully, and Isabella Rossellini.
The film follows a struggling aspiring toy designer from El Salvador who starts working for an erratic art-world outcast in New York City, hoping to stay in the country and realize his dream before his work visa expires. (wiki)
timespace coodinates: The series depicts the aftermath of the Great War of 2077, an apocalyptic nuclear exchange in an alternate history of Earth where advances in nuclear technology after WWII led to the emergence of a retrofuturistic society and a subsequent resource war. Many survivors took refuge in fallout bunkers known as Vaults. More than 200 years later in 2296, a young woman named Lucy leaves behind her home in Vault 33 to venture out into the dangerously unforgiving wasteland of a devastated Los Angeles to look for her father, who had been kidnapped. Along the way, she meets a Brotherhood of Steel squire and a ghoul bounty hunter, each has their own mysterious pasts and agendas to settle.
Fallout is an American post-apocalyptic drama television series created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet for Amazon Prime Video. Based on the role-playing video game franchise created by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky the series stars Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan, Moisés Arias, Xelia Mendes-Jones, and Walton Goggins. (wiki)
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)
imdb // rt // << How the Other Half Lives
timespace coodinates: somewhere in the 2000s USA
“An impoverished preacher who brings hope to the Miami projects is offered cash to save his family from eviction. He has no idea his sponsor works for the FBI who plan to turn him into a criminal by fueling his madcap revolutionary dreams.”(IMDB)
Altough it may appear completely preposterous this shows another facet of the FBI. Conspirative thought is the bread and butter of the Alphabet agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA to just name the most famous). Obsessing over anarchist conspiracy or internationalist anti-colonial revolutionary networks characterized the work of the British or French secret service very early on. Digital theoretician Alexander Galloway classified “conspiracy is a kind of network thinking, appropriate for a networked world.” – in this sense, the FBI is either a purveyor of conspiracies or – if need be a fabricator. We should also not consider the agencies as all-powerful, the bigger they are the bigger their footprint (not only carbon) the larger their propensity to fail miserably. One of the effects of the War on Terror has meant that a lot of vulnerable and poor racially discriminated communities practically got entrapped into playing the role of the terrorist and the baddie – and this movie pokes fun at this situation. The demography of the US is changing in universities (as the current protests demonstrated) and this is one of the lynchpins of the right manifested as ‘replacement’ bogus fears. What is being replaced is their sense of entitlement and laissez-faire that made sure inequality followed racial and heteronormative lines. In a sense, it speaks both of the ways these agencies work against the very citizens they aim to protect and of the way capitalism always finds a fall guy in those who are already in a sense marginal and powerless while protecting the brazen and unaccountable.
In the case of the Liberty City Seven – seven black construction workers and members of a small Miami, Florida-based religious group who called themselves the Universal Divine Saviors got baited by the FBI. I guess here is the agency of the almost all-powerful hegemonic US – representing the NSS as something more akin to a horrible farce (on those who had to pay with their lives or with prison). Russiagate, Epstein, Pizzagate, now TikTok CEO hearings or the president signing a bill that could ban Tiktok, seems to be all about the Paranoid Style in American Politics, an essay penned by US historian Hofstadter but also about the shadow of McCarthyism coming to haunt today’s geopolitical strains.
As Jameson put it in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, quoted by Galloway, the conspiracy means “a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility.” The cabal must be massive and interconnected, yet despite everything the plots remain somehow veiled, just beyond one’s grasp.” In the end, this movie is about systemic racism and economic relations in today’s world and the richest and most powerful nation on earth, and how easy it is to fabricate subversive groups while the biggest subversion (the subversion of Democracy with the help of techno-capitalism) remains in plain sight for all to see. The TW below has everything wrong in the title (Balaji never mentioned that he wanted to ethnically cleanse SF – but the more important takeaway is the way techno-libertarians right wants to appear endangered and under threat by ‘woke’ assimilation).
timespace coodinates: in 2018, Reality Winner was given the longest prison sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media after she leaked an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
The whole dialogue is based on an official transcript of the interrogation by the FBI agents.
It is probably one of the best movies I have seen this year. Why?
Simply because it offers such a stark look at the US National Security State and the Alphabet agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA, DEA, etc), one that does not embellish or romanticize it. Usually, we think in terms of mysterious, funny, and charismatic agents in US cinema we think of Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks or of Scully and Mulder in X Files, and there is countless others.
But I dare say after the Snowden files, after Wiki Leaks founder Julian Assange was indicted because he basically exposed the war crimes of the US, now awaiting to be extradited in the US, most techno-optimists and libertarians from the West have awoken to the cold truth that the NSS didn’t just wither away after the victory of liberal democracy in 1989. Reality Winner – perhaps encapsulates best the fate of many whistleblowers today. Again this is not about potential election tampering, nor is it about Russian interference or the obsession with Russian interference (real or not) in the election process. It is about secrecy and the culture of secrecy – during and after the Cold War. Official secrecy and security “clearances became a way to police behavior, such that homosexuals and others deemed to be deviant could be driven from government” or to ‘entrap’ with and paint poor black vulnerable groups as ‘dedicated fanatics’ such as in the case of Newburgh four, or in that other case Liberty City Seven, that also inspired a 2019 comedy directed by Christopher Morris.
Mishandling of classified documents is nothing new, and considering how the documents got stored at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, only one conclusion is possible: if you are rich and backed up by a powerful lobby, all lawyered upy, you can be super sloppy ( not saying this bc Reality Winner was sloppy or Joe Intercept handled her. For me it’s more about secrecy, making a case about nothing and how things can get easily turned around the leaker. If you are just a humble employee, a translator, and a woman, and even if you have an especially good track record, there isn’t much in your favor.
Another aspect is the fact that -in the whole world we are basically exposed to the domestic issues of the US. I am not talking about butterfly effects or fossil fuel methane and fracking here (altough that is an issue too), but about how various tensions and battles within American internal politics, bipartisan hearings, investigations, election campaigns, gerrymandering internal struggles – impact the rest of the planet. It is very funny that this already started in a fictional form with the Dallas soap opera series being streamed on Romanian National TV during the 1980s. It was an important moment and everyone in Socialist Romania, in the city or countryside, was familiar with the Texas-oil-rich Ewing family, with the machination of JR, with the troubles of Pamela Ewing, and practically fossil capitalism. So, in a sense, everyone has a stake in US politics, in who is going to be the next president. At the same time, the case of Reality Winner brings realism to this whole picture and re-situates this turmoil in the backyards of America for all of us to see. This is the NSS reality TV of our time!
timespace coordinates: October 31, 1977 Manhattan studio during the live broadcast of the sixth season episode of Night Owls with Jack Delroy
Late Night with the Devil is a 2023 supernatural horror film written, directed and edited by Cameron and Colin Cairnes, an international co-production of Australia, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates starring David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi, Ingrid Torelli, Rhys Auteri, Georgina Haig, and Josh Quong Tart.
Framed as a found footage film with a documentary prologue, it focuses on a Halloween night 1977 talk show episode in which the host, the ambitious Jack Delroy, invites a purportedly possessed girl onto the program in an attempt to boost ratings. (wiki)
This horror movie’s filmmakers ”The Cairnes Brothers” – Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes – have said of this picture in an official statement: “In the ’70s and ’80s there was something slightly dangerous about late-night TV. Talk shows in particular were a window into some strange adult world. We thought combining that charged, live-to-air atmosphere with the supernatural could make for a uniquely frightening film experience.”
TimeSpace Warps 