Proximity (2020) – imdb / rottentomatoes
“It’s like a mashup of The X-Files, Chronicle, Contact and some dopey evangelical-funded, made-for-TV movie.” (Leslie Felperin / theguardian)
1518
Tag: woods
1513 – Planet of the Humans (2019 documentary)
Planet of the Humans is a 2019 American environmental documentary film written, directed, and produced by Jeff Gibbs. It is backed and promoted by Michael Moore, who is also the executive producer. Moore released it on YouTube for free viewing (for 30 days) on April 21, 2020, the eve of the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.
One of the film’s main claims is that some environmental leaders and organizations in the United States who promote green energy have actually been promoting biomass energy, largely meaning burning trees instead of fossil fuels, which is neither carbon neutral, renewable, nor sustainable. The film also claims that wind power and solar energy cannot produce enough energy to save the planet from the climate crisis, and still require fossil fuels due to intermittency. The film has been widely critized for its misleading and outdated commentary.
Jeff Gibbs has said that the film is designed to prompt discussion and debate beyond the narrow issue of climate change and to look at the overall human impact on the environment, including issues such as human overpopulation and the contemporary extinction crisis in which half of all wildlife has disappeared in the last 40 years, and whether green technology can solve these issues. (wiki)
chemurgy
1511 – Castle of Illusion (2013 video game)
Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse is a 2.5D platform game developed by Sega Studios Australia and published by Sega. The game is a remake of the original 1990 Sega Genesis/Sega Mega Drive video game of the same name, which was the first title in the Illusion series of Mickey Mouse video games.
The game was released on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Microsoft Windows in September 2013, and later for iOS, Windows Phone, Android, and OS X. (wiki)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows Vista SP2+ / Processor: 2.8 Ghz Dual Core (minimum) / Memory: 2 GB RAM / Graphics: ATI 2600/Nvidia 8600 (minimum) / DirectX: Version 10 / Storage: 2 GB available space
1510 – Fantastic Fungi (2019 documentary)
Fantastic Fungi is a 2019 documentary film directed by Louie Schwartzberg. The film combines time-lapse cinematography, CGI, and interviews in an overview of the biology, environmental roles, and various uses of fungi.
[Reception] Critics praised Schwartzberg‘s time-lapse cinematography. Some critics found the narration unnecessary. (wiki)
Paul Stamets with Laricifomes officinalis aka agarikon
The Kingdom: How Fungi Made Our World (2018 documentary)
The Magic of Mushrooms (2014 documentary)
The Triumph of the Fungi: A Rotten History (2006 book by Nicholas P. Money)
1485 – 8: A South African Horror Story (2019)
timespace coordinates: 1977 South Africa
From writer/director Harold Hölscher comes a nightmarish plunge into the little-known corners of South African folklore. Starring Tshamano Sebe, Inge Beckmann, Garth Breytenbach, and newcomer Keita Luna.
1469 – KUSO (2017)
KUSO is an incredible, metaphysical splatter and body horror movie by Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus.
Kuso means ‘shit’ in Japanese.
Steven Ellison has been a long time admirer of Japanese extreme directors Takashi Miike, Shinya Tsukamoto and Takeshi Kitano, as well as lots of anime such as Cowboy Bepop, Evangelion, Dragon Ball, that he openly mentions in his interviews. But instead of mentioning Tokyo Gore Police of Meatball Machine Kodoku one should go see it without any list of references or any direct references.
Probably one of the most over the top, original, gory, splattery significant movies of the early 21st century. It abounds in the resplendent hideous and the manically scatological, lavishes in all things festering, pustulant, always brimming on the ecstatic, experimental and transformative also due to its music video affiliations. There were mass walkouts at its release at Sundance festival. It has been all too easy to hail it as the ‘grossest movie ever made’. It is definitely a superb example of WEIRD AESTHETICS and slime dynamics nowadays and it is relentless. It definitely does not settle into the old sublime/beautiful binome, but ventures into the territory of new aesthetic categories such as the icky or the ‘zany’ explored by Sianne Ngai in her seminal text (Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting 2015). This is also an afro-body horror that makes clear what are the stakes here – full hybridization, exploding all the codes of racial science and white fear, those panic buttons of asepsis and so-called ‘miscegenation’ that did seek to actively separate, contain, incarcerate and experiment upon non-white bodies.
It also makes clear there can allow for incredible pockets of abstractness even in the midst of all things squishy, oozing, overwhelming thingness, overripe wetware imagery. There are dozens of scenes that are filled with incredible tenderness, nonhuman, and inhuman eroticism, beauty and exuberance for the unruliness of matter and information, the normality and mundanity of the strange and at the same time does not cease to take one by surprise, to be completely unpredictable. A relentless channel surfing seems to transect the whole movie and tap into the virality of pay-per-view ads, broadcasting enormities and deformities, diving into an attention ecology modulated by the appetite for mindless violence and remorseless voyeurism.
An increasing portion of current media abounds in the biohazardous, the panic-stricken, horrifying, the untouchable, impure, the dirty, repulsive or what was even considered previously as evolutionary blasphemic and maladaptive – here cherished in its most unruly and in your face forms. It also draws on avant-garde Berlin Dada photomontage artists such as Hannah Höch(see her Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic 1919 for example) seeking to upend and agglutinate existing dichotomies and gender roles.
There is no way one can summarize this movie and this is its best proof of not bowing to matters of taste, plotline narrative rule or formal rigeur. There are incredible collage animations as well as tableaux vivants – real outer world (exo biological?) ecosystems, mutant dioramas and curious and explorative human -non human relationships. Meanwhile, all the body fluids run their course.
On TV or in a bedroom reality welcomes the bubonic, the chronic carrier state of patient zero becomes the rule. There is no quarantine for the realness of constant touch, smear, sporulation. The epidemic is somehow a state of matter, it is as it is, nothing can hide it, disinfect it or banish it to the pathological. There is always a sort of teratogenesis as world-building going on. There are interdimensional furries stoners on a couch, there are alien jungles with anal flesh flowers and sentient sphincters.
Openings are important in KUSO and lead to revisiting what we have considered a final story – the evo-devo metanarrative of why we bipedal vertebrates are here, why we have an up and down or a clear separation btw the excretory and all the plurivocal portals of bodies that have multiple backs and unknown forwards, not just an up mouth and a down mouth.
Cast: Iesha Coston, Oumi Zumi, Zack Fox, The Buttress (Bethany Schmitt), Tim Heidecker, Hannibal Buress, Regan Farquhar, Shane Carpenter, David Firth
here is a more in-depth review by addictedtohorrormovies.com
Here’s what IMDB has: “Events unfold after a devastating earthquake in Los Angeles.” Events indeed. The movie is broken up into three segments. The biggest segment, “Mr. Quiggle,” is the story of couple Kenneth and Missy, who have their active love life interrupted by Missy’s secret shame. Also, Manuel is scared of breasts, so he enlists the help of Dr. Clinton (George Clinton); his treatment involves singing into Dr. Clinton’s butthole and…I won’t spoil it for you. Further also, The Buttress and her alien buddies deal with her situation of being impregnated by a crazy stalker guy.
1458 – Without Name (2016)
timespace coordinates: 2010’s remote and unnamed Irish woodland
Without Name is a 2016 Irish eco-horror film directed by Lorcan Finnegan, based on a script by Garret Shanley. Without Name marks the director’s feature film directorial debut and stars Alan McKenna as a land surveyor who is sent to a mysterious forest harboring a strange secret. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 