0553 – Warcraft (2016)

coordinates: Draenor // Azeroth

Warcraft (alternatively known as Warcraft: The Beginning) is a 2016 American action fantasy film directed by Duncan Jones and written by Charles Leavitt and Jones. It is based on the video game series of the same name. The film stars Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper, Toby Kebbell, Ben Schnetzer, Robert Kazinsky, Clancy Brown and Daniel Wu. The film portrays the initial encounters between the humans and the orcs and takes place in a variety of locations established in the video game series.

Duncan Jones said that the Warcraft universe is very “High Fantasy” and planned to make it feel more grounded in reality though at the same time keep the look and feel of the games in the film. Chris Metzen, the lead story writer at Blizzard Entertainment and the voice of many key characters in the Warcraft series, is also in charge of the story of the film.

imdb   //   Sequel

551 – John Carter (2012)

spacetime coordinates: 1868 > 1881  Arizona Territory / dying planet of Barsoom – Red Martian city of Helium, predator Walking City of Zodanga

John Carter is a 2012 American science fiction action film directed by Andrew Stanton from a screenplay written by Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon.

The film is largely based on A Princess of Mars (1917), the first in a series of 11 novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs to feature the interplanetary hero John Carter (and in later volumes the adventures of his children with Dejah Thoris). The story was originally serialized in six monthly installments (from February through to July 1912) in the pulp magazine The All-Story; those chapters, originally titled “Under the Moons of Mars,” were then collected in hardcover five years later from publisher A. C. McClurg.

kinopoisk.ru

John Carter stars Taylor Kitsch in the title role, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Mark Strong, Ciarán Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy, and Willem Dafoe. The film chronicles the first interplanetary adventure of John Carter and his attempts to mediate civil unrest amongst the warring kingdoms of Barsoom.

Image converted using ImgCvt

Conceptual Art of the moving City of Zodanga

“JOHN CARTER” In Burroughs’ books, massive airships sail on rays of light on Mars. ©Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

“JOHN CARTER” Airship ©2011 Disney. JOHN CARTER™ ERB, Inc.

“JOHN CARTER” ©2011 Disney. JOHN CARTER™ ERB, Inc.

Several developments on a theatrical film adaptation of the Barsoom series emerged throughout the 20th century from various major studios and producers, with the earliest attempt dating back to the 1930s. Most of these efforts, however, ultimately stalled in development hell. In the late-2000s, Walt Disney Pictures began a concerted effort to develop a film adaptation of Burroughs’ works, after a previously-abandoned venture by the studio in the 1980s. The project was driven by Stanton, who had pressed Disney to renew the screen rights from the Burroughs estate. Stanton became director in 2009; this was his live-action debut, as his previous directorial work for Disney included the Pixar animated films, Finding Nemo (2003) and WALL-E (2008).

Due to the film’s poor box office performance, Disney cancelled any plans for a sequel (titled John Carter: The Gods of Mars) and trilogy Stanton had planned.

Cancelled sequel   

concept art   imdb

549 – 12 Strong (2018)

spacetime coordinates: 2001 Afghanistan12 Strong (also known as 12 Strong: The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers) is a 2018 American war drama film directed by Nicolai Fuglsig and written by Ted Tally and Peter Craig. The film is based on Doug Stanton‘s non-fiction book Horse Soldiers, which tells the story of CIA paramilitary officers and U.S. Special Forces, in addition to USAF Combat Controllers, sent to Afghanistan (to fight alongside the Northern Alliance leader, Abdul Rashid Dostum) immediately after the September 11 attacks. The film stars Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Michael Peña, Navid Negahban, Trevante Rhodes, Geoff Stults, Thad Luckinbill, William Fichtner, and Rob Riggle.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1413492/

0533 – 1944 (2015)

spacetime coordinates:  Estonia 1944

In “1944” Director Elmo Nyuganena portrays the real events on the Eastern Front in Estonia in 1944, from the Battle Of Tannenburg Line, the July fighting on the Sinimäed Hills, until November, when the Sõrve peninsula was already conquered by the Soviet Army. The war is shown through the eyes of participants in the events on both warring sides – the Estonians who fought on the side of the German Army in the 20th Estonian division Waffen-SS, and as part of the 8th Estonian Rifle Corps of the Soviet Army.

The film has been banned in the Russian Federation.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3213684/

0528 – The Aviator (2004)

spacetime coordinates: 1927–1947 California / Connecticut

The Aviator is a 2004 American epic biographical drama film directed by Martin Scorsese, written by John Logan. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, and Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner. Based on the 1993 non-fiction book Howard Hughes: The Secret Life by Charles Higham, the film depicts the life of Howard Hughes, an aviation pioneer and director of Hell’s Angels. The film portrays his life from 1927–1947 during which time Hughes became a successful film producer and an aviation magnate while simultaneously growing more unstable due to severe obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD).

In an article for the American Cinematographer, John Pavlus wrote: “The film boasts an ambitious fusion of period lighting techniques, extensive effects sequences and a digital re-creation of two extinct cinema color processes: two-color and three-strip Technicolor.” For the first 52 minutes of the film, scenes appear in shades of only red and cyan blue; green objects are rendered as blue. This was done, according to Scorsese, to emulate the look of early bipack color films, in particular the Multicolor process, which Hughes himself owned, emulating the available technology of the era. Similarly, many of the scenes depicting events occurring after 1935 are treated to emulate the saturated appearance of three-strip Technicolor. Other scenes were stock footage colorized and incorporated into the film.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338751/

0525 – Cold Skin (2017)

spacetime coordinates: desolate South Atlantic island the edge of the Antarctic Circle 1914, just after of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination that eventually caused World War I

Cold Skin is a 2017 French-Spanish fantasy adventure /  sci-fi horror film directed by Xavier Gens based on Albert Sánchez Piñol’s novel of the same name. The film owes a good deal to HP Lovecraft’s tales of Innsmouth folk.

“cinematographer Daniel Aranyó takes the pebble-strewn shores and grey skies of the island and fills them with uncertainty, finding in all that bleakness something that beguiles and something that chills. The waves that swirl up against the shore can be cool, clear turquoise or a deep, obscure blue-black, and either way they could be hiding something deadly just beneath the surface. Though at times we glimpse an awful tide of grey flesh like that once said to have pursued a man who stayed overnight in an Innsmouth hotel, there’s a sense that the real horror here is just out of sight – perhaps because we dare not look at it. And still, when morning comes, we can almost taste the salt air and the sweet fresh water from the fountain by the shore: the island is undeniably beautiful.”  Review by Jennie Kermode

---

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034385/

---

The Shadow Over Innsmouth – read by Mike Bennett (YouTube)

0506 – Saul fia / Son of Saul (2015)

spacetime coordinates:  Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, Poland  6 – 7 October 1944

Son of Saul (Hungarian: Saul fia) is a 2015 Hungarian drama film directed by László Nemes and co-written by Nemes and Clara Royer. It is set in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, and follows a day-and-a-half in the life of Saul Ausländer (played by Géza Röhrig), a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando. The film’s many historical sources included the personal accounts of Schlomo Venezia and Filip Müller, the records of Miklos Nyiszli, a Romanian-Jewish doctor who was forced to work in the crematoria, and Claude Lanzmann‘s Shoah (1985).

During the preparation, director László Nemes, cinematographer Mátyás Erdély and production designer László Rajk made a pledge to stick to certain rules, or a “dogma”, which included: The film cannot look beautiful. // The film cannot look appealing. // We cannot make a horror film. // Staying with Saul means not going beyond his own field of vision, hearing, or presence. // The camera is his companion, it stays with him throughout this hell.

The film took five months of sound design, where human voices in eight languages were recorded and attached to the original recording of the production. Sound designer Tamás Zányi described the sound in the film “as a sort of acoustic counterpoint to the intentionally narrowed imagery”. The music score by László Melis is intentionally kept so subtle that viewers won’t even notice it. (read more: imdb, wiki)

The film follows the same stylistic approach as László Nemes’ first and most successful short film Türelem (2007). In the short, the camera follows a woman proceed with her daily work routine with a very narrow focus and vision, until she walks up to a window and sees a group of Jewish prisoners stripped down by Sonderkommando prisoners and SS officers. The short is available online HERE.