Memento's Christopher Nolan is at it again. In Inception, instead of playing with time only, his exploration of the human mind is also spectacularly spatial. The movie, an action-packed Borges-meets-the-Matrix blockbuster, manages to be both emotionally intense and philosophically deep, gathering film critics and audiences in almost unanimous praise. It traps you in its maze only to release you two and a half hours later, breathless, due to an amazing screenplay – almost ten years in the making – and visionary images, alternating plot-effective slow-motion a' la Matrix with metaphysic landscapes echoing Antonioni and De Chirico. (Read more…)
After last week's post about Demolition Man (1993) and the city of Los Angeles, today I'm writing about another action flick dealing with urban imagery, also come out the same year: Last Action Hero. Both movies are cop-tales, reterritorializing a way of dealing with crime and justice from one world to another. In Stallone's sci-fi exploit the change happens in time, while in the more sophisticated – and also more tongue-in-cheek – film starring future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the jump is twofold: from reality to fiction and, quite significantly, from New York to Los Angeles. Before we go further about the retorritorialization I mentioned before, a short introduction to the movie's plot is necessary.
Due to a mostly comedy-oriented film education as a kid, I had missed Marco Brambilla's action-classicDemolition Man (1993) back when I had the chance to catch it in its box-office semi-freshness (17 years ago it took a while before a movie passed from the movie theater to the TV screen). I have recently made up for this lack, and while the roughly-cut screenplay, the flat characters, and the unlikely fighting choreographies might have amused me much more when I was 10 years old, I have to be thankful I could enjoy a first impact with the movie after reading Mike Davis' City of Quartz and watching a couple of documentaries about the riots that shook Los Angeles in the 90s. In the analysis that follows, this article here has also been a big inspiration in terms of the movie's relationship with Hollywood and LA's urban and social landscape. (Read more…)
“Dreaming is work, you know – there I am in a comfortable bed, the next thing you know I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord. I want a dream of me watching myself sleep.” – Mitch Hedberg
What is probably the most fascinating thing about Deleuze and Guattari’s way of writing is the spatial vividity with which they literally build their concepts like organic sculptures. They place them in relationship to each other as suspended in a 3D space, taking form as they evolve from primitive solids into more sophisticated and combined abstract figures. In their last book What is philosophy?, almost a tutorial for designing philosophical interfaces, we can see this process clearly. The two French philosophers see what they do as creation rather than communication, and for this reason reading the first pages of the Anti-Oedipus can be at once confusing and liberating. But being the book a manifesto for schizoanalysis, this only makes it more consistent. (Read more…)
Arjun Appadurai’s considerations on the work of imagination in modern societies are some of the most interesting and compelling passages of his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. According to the anthropologist “imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies”.
Appadurai focuses in particular on collective imagination, as a tool to create diasporic public spheres through which globalized and often deterritorialized citizens share the same social imaginary.
As an Indian-born American academic, the scholar has been experiencing first-hand what it means to deterritorialize one’s ethnic and cultural background on a different context, and his particular case could be a perfect example of fulfilled American dream. But again the collective, massive dimension of imagination-induced agency is what really makes the difference in comparison to more ancient times: “the images, scripts, models and narratives that come through mass-mediation [...] make the difference between migration today and in the past”. Also, the American dream is all-too-real in our globalized times, and more in general “these new mythographies are charters to new social projects, and not just a counterpoint to the certainties of daily life”.
But migration to a richer country is not the only inherent phenomenon to the rise of imagination as a social practice, and the examples that Appadurai makes are not all positive. There are diasporas of hope, terror, despair.
In support of his thesis that modernity hasn’t seen a total victory of science over religion, as foretold by German scholars such as the Frankfurt school and Max Weber, he mentions Khomeini and the infamous outrage surrounding Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in the muslim world. We could easily add Al Quaeda and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy as other instances of diasporic rage, but what’s important here is the relationship between media and social imaginary. (Read more…)
This is a rare example of food-related article for this site. I wrote it for Ymag.
One of the first things that struck me when I first came to Amsterdam – once I accumulated enough expertise to find my way beyond the deadly tourist triangle of Damrak/Kalverstraat/Red Light District – was the way the city is so open and globalized, but at the same time manages to keep its own relatively-homogeneous feel. Since one of the symptoms usually associated with globalization are fast food chains, I was also surprised to find several local reinterpretations of the standard McDonald's burger stand. Maybe I'm paying more attention to it because I come from Italy, where burger culture doesn't really exist, but I think Amsterdam burgers can be an interesting allegory of the way the city is allowing the world in, while keeping the door keys at hand. The following examples represent a partial depiction of Amsterdam through the greasy lenses of burger-eating. (Read more…)
As you might have read somewhere (like here, here or here), Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez has just signed a deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures for a future feature sci-fi movie. Raimi was impressed by a short clip Alvarez created and posted on YouTube (see video above), immediately becoming a hit on the video-sharing platform. AtaqueDePànico shows some giant robots attacking the city of Montevideo and destroying all its landmarks, eventually exploding and reducing everything to rubble in a surprisingly good FX spree.
Little else happens in the short movie, which has nonetheless been compared to Neill Blomkamp's Alive in Joberg, the one that eventually led to District 9. Which one is better and YouTube's exact role in hi-jacking the attention of the Hollywood industry's talent scouts are debates I'll leave for other occasions. What I'm really curious about is: where will Alvarez's feature film be set?
As we've seen before, Peter Jackson's support to District 9 has been rather invisible and not patronizing, allowing Blomkamp's movie to become an unprecedented example of sci-fi imagery going global and enriching itself with unexpected locations and social actuality. Seeing Johannesburg taking the place of New York as the theater of human-alien confrontation was one of the reasons why I think the movie is significant: it was also an opportunity to legitimate the ascension of local geographies to the status of global imagery. (Read more…)
Unsurprisingly, yet another South Park episode has made the news recently. And as usual, the comments have ranged from praise and approval to shock (and even subtly worded death wishes?).
In pure South Park fashion, “Dead Celebrities” is a controversial mix of media/social critique and relentless celebrity-bashing, in shape of a Sixth Sense parody.
This time, the reason for media commentary is the daring politically incorrectness featured in the episode, which included a dead Michael Jackson finally realizing his dream of becoming a white girl in his afterlife and American TV salesman Billy Mays selling a washing product for blood-stained underwear (without mentioning a rather tactless appearence of David Carradine in stockings with a rope around his neck).
Parker and Stone’s fine-tuned postmodern pastiche formula didn’t fail to amuse and get the usual media coverage, but fan reviews are kind of mild and the accuses of poor taste/bad writing are no news. Most likely, there will hardly be any reference to “Dead Celebrities” in your newsfeeds next week. (Read more…)
“My nephew has HDADD: Hi-Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it’s unbelievably clear.” – Steven Wright
Since Twitter came out it was pretty obvious it was something else. Its minimal, quasi-zen approach (short haiku-style posts, ultra-light interface, a very “carpe diem” real-time nature) won many users over. But why would such a restrictive, limited social network become so popular? There are so many more things you can do via MySpace or Facebook, where you can easily embed everything possibly embeddable.
Nonetheless, although Mark Zuckerberg’s well-tested money-making machine is still bigger than Twitter (I’d go as far as to say it’s almost necessary for internet users), the social colossus has been learning a lot from its younger, smarter brother.
The “twitterification” of Facebook has raised some perplexities and the opening of that once closed and well-guarded environment wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing for their business. I like the definition of Facebook as a “gated community” (read here): you can easily do everything you need on the internet inside of it and forget about the outside web. This has been part of the network’s strenght in the past, one more reason why it is both scary and addictive.
While Twitter’s openness (making information public and searchable in real-time) has definitely played a major role in the social network’s rise to pop culture phenomenon, replacing Facebook as the next internet thing, I think there is another factor worth analyzing (and no, it’s not journalist A.D.D.). (Read more…)
