"Face/Off": 90s sci-fi film predicts today's face transplant technology

“Face/Off” (1997, summer) is a bizarre science fiction film (Paramount), directed by John Woo, where the hero Sean Archer (John Travolta) has his face replaced with a transplant from arch enemy Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage), who has killed Sean’s son.

  

  

But Troy regains consciousness and soon the masked enemy is threatening to destroy LA.

  

The film was mentioned in an ABC 20-20 episode regarding a face transplant to a young man who had survived a suicide attempt by shotgun.

"Rising" from the Ad-Council: "Why does it take a disaster to bring us together?"

David Nutter’s short film “Rising” (11 min. written by Lena Waithe) and sponsored by the Ad Council channel, was advertised in the New York Times Thursday, link. 

  

The tagline is “Why does it take a disaster to bring us together?”

The film shows a Muslim family being rescued from a flood that might have referred to Hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017. 

  

The Ad Council has a number of other very short films on its YouTube channel.

"Ant Head": new set-piece horror short film by David Lynch

So there is a lot of buzz about a new short film in black and white from David Lynch, called “Ant Head”.

At 13 minutes, the film comprises a head of cheese with ants swarming on it. At about 8 minutes, the film goes negative, and a voice starts describing the mayhem inflicted by the ants, including flaying a man. The film goes into the head at the end.

The only characters – living souls, as my dad would have said – are ants.

The background of the still shot has catenary power wires above a commuter railroad. 

The film was posted by Sacred Bones Records and features a hyper percussive music score by Thought Gang, with “Frank 2000” and “Woodcutters” from Fiery Ships.  Angelo Badalamenti collaborated.

  

There is a writeup online by Andrew Todd.

 Of course, the title reminds one of "Eraser Head" (1979).  In heaven, everything is fine. Remember the Lady in the Radiator? 

"What Alien Life on Other Planets Would Look Like": do we care that they look like us?

“What Alien Life on Other Planets Would Look Like” from “Be Amazed” (12 minutes).

Well, not like Mark Zuckerberg.

Two of the most interesting ideas were “energy beings” inside stars, formed by nuclear molecules created by the strong force.  I think there was a horror film in the 1950s where lightning is alive.

Another idea is that carbon dioxide becomes a super-critical fluid at high pressure and could support earth-like (deep inside volcanoes) bacteria on dry planets.

The film thinks creatures could fly in the atmospheres of gas giants or brown dwarfs.

  

Convergent evolution suggests that a planet really similar to Earth could develop similar creatures.

     

So could your super Clark Kent teen alien really come from another planet through a worm hole?

  

But do we really care what he looks like if this is possible?  We want him to be a better version of us.    

You can still theorize that angels are aliens, or that Jesus was one. 

Note: the was an announcement of the discovery of a cold dry planet around Barnard's Star, 6 light years away, a red dwarf. 

"When Humanity Becomes a Spacefaring Civilization": Will Mars become "The New World"?

“When Humanity Becomes a Spacefaring Civilization”, by Computing Forever, is worth a look. A bit of a right-wing outlook, however. 

The speaker scoffs at treaties that claim that the entire solar system or even universe belongs to humanity.  He says that eventually a country (where from Earth or an alien planet or solar system light years away) that lands on another planet (even Moon) and can defend it will be able to claim legal title.

  

He also parallels the political process of colonization of the Moon and other planets (especially Mars) to the New World.  Living on Mars after terraforming, people will change physiologically in low gravity and simply become different. This could lead to new kinds of controversies parallel to those about race today.

"The New Politics": sci-fi short: what if your "alien" lover is a hologram and you don't even suspect it?

Joshua Wong presents Aleisha Rose as the heroine in a Dust sci-fi short film, “The New Politics”. Some of my Facebook friends say they want a break from politics now, for spiritual renewal.

Aleisha plays Zara, who is preparing for combat in the People’s games.  She can grow her clothes on her body and even her wristwatch or fitbit.

She doesn’t know she is a hologram and a character in a real human’s video games.

Of course, if she were a white male, it could be interesting, especially if “he” could teleport himself around the way Clark Kent does.  Lose the metal wristband watch. A mockingbird will get named after you.

  

What if your boyfriend were a hologram and you didn’t know.  Let “Next Door Mates” do a film on that theme.

"We Are Not Alone": Is Oumuamua a spaceship from a dead alien civilization?

“We Are Not Alone”,  Is Oumuamua an alien space ship?  Is the civilization that could have sent it still around? 

Clixroom presents an interview with a Harvard professor.

Interesting facts:  It accelerates more than the Sun can account for;  it has a constant spin so it is not outgassing like a comet.  It has the reflectivity of a light sail.

But we did not get signals from the objec

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The professor suggest we look for planets with dead civilizations.

The object seems to have come from an M-star, which may be one of the more stable ones without excess variation in solar radiation.  Such a star’s planets would be tidally locked.  That suggests such a planet would have been inhabited as a satellite civilization from somewhere else, a premise of Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” (2012).

Wikipedia attribution link for gif by nagualdesign, CCSA 4.0.