0146 – King Kong (2005)

spacetime coordinates: 1933 New York City. Skull Island, deep in the southern waters

King Kong is a 2005 epic monster adventure film co-written, produced, and directed by Peter Jackson. A remake of the 1933 film of the same name, the film stars Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, and, through motion capture, Andy Serkis as the title character. Set in 1933, King Kong tells the story of an ambitious filmmaker who coerces his cast and hired ship crew to travel to the mysterious Skull Island. There they encounter Kong, a legendary giant gorilla, whom they capture and take to New York City.

wiki, imdb

134 – The Way Back (2010)

spacetime coordinates: 1940 Siberia, Soviet Union  Lake Baikal,  Mongolia, Gobi Desert, the Himalayas

 

the Way Back is a 2010 survival drama film directed by Peter Weir, from a screenplay by Weir and Keith Clarke. The film is inspired by The Long Walk (1956), the memoir by former Polish prisoner of war Sławomir Rawicz, who claimed to have escaped from a Soviet Gulag and walked 4,000 miles to freedom in World War II. The film stars Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, and Saoirse Ronan, with Alexandru Potocean, Sebastian Urzendowsky, Gustaf Skarsgård, Dragoş Bucur and Mark Strong.

Regardless of whether or not this particular “long walk” really took place, during World War II other Poles undertook difficult journeys attempting to leave the Soviet Union. Accounts of their escapes can be found in the archives of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, and in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, in California. Also, several relatively verifiable and believable escapee autobiographies have been published in English, e.g., Michael Krupa’s Shallow Graves in Siberia.

Many of the events that happen in the gulag scenes come from Varlam Shalamov’s The Kolyma Tales. (read/download PDF here)

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1023114/

133 – Capote (2005)

spacetime coordinates: 1959 > 1965  Kansas

Capote is a 2005 biographical film about Truman Capote, following the events during the writing of Capote’s non-fiction book In Cold Blood. Philip Seymour Hoffman won several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actor, for his critically acclaimed portrayal of the title character. The film was based on Gerald Clarke‘s biography Capote and was directed by Bennett Miller.

Perry Smith

Richard Hickock

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379725/

_______________________________________

“The viIIage of HoIcomb stands on the high wheat pIains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.
UntiI one morning in mid-November, 1959 few Americans, in fact, few Kansans, had ever heard of Holcomb.
Like the waters of the Arkansas River, Iike the motorists on the highway, exceptionaI happenings never stopped there. Perry Smith’s voice
was both gentIe and prim. A voice that, though soft, manufactured each sound exactIy, ejected it Iike a smoke ring issuing from a parson’s mouth.
The four coffins, which quite fiIIed the smaII, flower-crowded parlor, were to be sealed at the funeral services, very understandabIy,
for the effect was disquieting. Nancy wore her dress of cherry-red veIvet, her brother a bright pIaid shirt. The parents were more sedateIy attired,
Mr. Clutter in navy-blue flannel, his wife in navy-bIue crepe. And it was this especiaIIy that lent the scene an awful aura,
the head of each was compIeteIy encased in cotton. A swollen cocoon twice the size of an ordinary bIown-up baIIoon.
And the cotton, because it had been sprayed with a gIossy substance, twinkled like Christmas tree snow.
One Tuesday at dawn, a carload of strangers, ignorant of the IocaI disaster, were startIed by what they saw as they crossed the prairies
and passed through HoIcomb. Windows ablaze.
AImost every window in aImost every house, and in the brightIy-Iit rooms, fuIIy-cIothed peopIe, even entire families, who had sat the whoIe night wide awake,
watchfuI, Iistening. Of what were they frightened? It might happen again.”

0117 – Snowpiercer (2013)

Snowpiercer (hangul: 설국열차; hanja: 雪國列車; RR: Seolgungnyeolcha) is a 2013 English-language South Korean-Czech science fiction thriller film based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette. The film is directed by Bong Joon-ho, and written by Bong and Kelly Masterson.

The film stars Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Go Ah-sung, John Hurt, and Ed Harris.

In 2014, an attempt to counteract global warming through climate engineering backfires catastrophically, unintentionally causing an ice age that extinguishes all life except the inhabitants of the Snowpiercer, a massive train powered by a perpetual motion engine that travels a circumnavigational track, created by the transportation magnate Wilford.

By 2031, elites inhabit the extravagant front cars and the “scum” inhabit the tail in squalid and brutal conditions.

Evans stars as Curtis Everett, a member of the lower-class tail section passengers as they lead a revolution against the elite of the front of the train. Filming was done on train car sets mounted on gimbals at Barrandov Studios in Prague to simulate the motion of the train. – (read more)

https://fyeahsnowpiercer.tumblr.com/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/

0116 – deef

spacetime coordinates: Bergensbanen Norway, 2009

music: mixed & edited by deef: http://www.deef.xyz

video: «Bergensbanen» — NRK: https://nrkbeta.no/2009/12/18/bergensbanen-eng/

0114 – Alois Nebel (2011)

spacetime coordinates: autumn and around Christmas 1989 to the backdrop of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution // jeseniky mountains // small railway station Bílý Potok // Prague

Alois Nebel is a 2011 Czech animated drama / neo-noir directed by Tomáš Luňák, based on the comic-book trilogy by Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99.

It is set in the late 1980s in a small village in the Jeseník Mountains, close to the Polish border, and tells the story of a train dispatcher who begins to suffer from hallucinations where the present converges with the dark past of the expulsion of Germans after World War II. The black-and-white film was animated mainly through rotoscoping and stars Miroslav Krobot as the title character.

trailer

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1374985/

0109 – Europa (1991)

spacetime coordinates: 1940’s  US-occupied Germany

Europa (known as Zentropa in North America) is a 1991 Danish art drama film directed by Lars von Trier. It is von Trier’s third theatrical feature film and the final film in his Europa trilogy following The Element of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1987). Europa was influenced by Franz Kafka‘s Amerika, and the title was chosen “as an echo” of that novel.

A young, idealistic American hopes to “show some kindness” to the German people soon after the end of World War II. In US-occupied Germany, he takes on work as a sleeping car conductor for the Zentropa railway network, falls in love with a femme fatale, and becomes embroiled in a pro-Nazi terrorist conspiracy.

Europa employs an experimental style of cinema, combining largely black and white visuals with occasional intrusions of colour having actors interact with rear-projected footage, and layering different images over one another to surreal effect. The voice-over narration uses an unconventional second-person narrative imitative of a hypnotist

The film’s characters, music, dialogue, and plot are self-consciously melodramatic and ironically imitative of film noir conventions.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101829/