(Originally posted on Ymag)

Photo by Erik Krikortz

Emotional Cities, by Swedish artist Erik Krikortz, is a pretty interesting project. In the past I’ve written here how the new augmented reality mobile apps can be seen as the future of psychogeography, but in this case the sheer scale of the aesthetic outcome required much bigger fundings and much higher connections to take place. Nevertheless, I think the idea is so simple and beautiful that it’s worth it.

First of all, the project is rooted on the web. By visiting and signing up on the Emotional Cities website, you can place your daily mood on a rainbow-scale, from a desperate purple to a joyful red. You also fill in the city and the country you live in, and you can see a visual statistically-calculated color average of your location over time. Is that it? No.

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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.

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Due to a mostly comedy-oriented film education as a kid, I had missed Marco Brambilla's action-classic Demolition 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. (more…)

I originally published this article on Ymag.

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. (more…)