Sunday 7 February 2016

The Revenant

leading from

a) Intention to see it
The plan to see Revenant went ahead a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy . Was not particularly a fan of the idea of having to sit through the movie, but then the pile of cow skulls seem to be the pulling point in the trailer. Perhaps the rough comparisons to Tarkovsky have also caught the eyes by the corner.



b) Brief report of the movie
Having seen it, indeed it certainly looked at if the director was having a bit of a Tarkovsky obsession just to balance out the bloody grueling misery of the movie. Quite honestly it didn't matter who was slaughtered or how many after a while, but the photography was often very beautiful and there were some dream scenes.



c) Fragmented reveries of SPOILERS after The Revenant: 
However there were so many dead bodies of one kind or another, animal and human and at times the distinction between the different corpses in various quick shots was not entirely clear so the brain began to purposely misremember that there were corpses part human and part deer everywhere, that the new way for someone to ride a horse was to hide inside it as if the horse contained a special interior womb like space for humans to hide in. Perhaps actually I even wanted to think that it was Tom Hardy's character who became disemboweled and Leni di Caprio hid naked inside his emptied corpse for shelter. 

There were many other fragmented associations that could be made by mind that would like to mis-remember things and completely stretch things and stick things together in ways completely inappropriate.  Perhaps the horse falling down the side of a cliff just past a tree to its death might suddenly become confused with a memory of an American native being shot out of a tree to his death to the extent that the horse must have landed in the tree but earlier was seen hiding in the tree and was then shot dead itself. Perhaps although Tom gets a finger chopped off, I might imagine the whole arm with fingers being cut into pieces and being stuck back together again and Tom's corpse ought to have been used as a sledge in the icy wastelands, and this might be manifesting through the scene where Leni's character uses a branch to prop up the dead body of another character Captan Andrew Harvey. Perhaps Leni's character might even had found a hollow in the corpse of his son to take shelter in or at least bury his face in.

d) Chains of mental sodomy
The movie stretches the imagination by forcing one to want to get away from it while sitting through to the end. Because of these strange disconnected assocations one can make, it seems that the earlier reports about the trailer showing the bear sodomising Leo DiCaprio might as well be perceived as part of the whole film experience although it certainly didn't happen as what was on the screen. If someone told me that they thought that in the scene where Leo saves the American native woman, he saw the bear and then Leo cutting his way out of the body of the bear to reveal it to be a mysterious suit and when there was the American native woman being sodomised by a Frenchman and he comes up behind the Frenchman with a knife, and really what was happening was that the beat was sodomising Leo while he was sodomising the Frenchman who was sodomising the American native woman all at the same time, it might have been happening in some way.

Saturday 6 February 2016

Millenium Falcon inspired by Tutenkhamun's jewellry ?

leading from

Ertl kit representation of the Millenium Falcon

a) A slightly amusing piece of news recently in the Daily Mail about how ancient small scarab pendant found looked like a Star Wars Millennium Falcon, (See: Ancient Egyptian scarab seal is found on extinct volcano in Israel: 3,500-year-old carving represents Pharaoh Thutmose III (and it resembles the Millennium Falcon) However it forced me to cast my mind back in time and take note of what this space ship design was all about.

King Tutenkhamun's pectoral with Scarab and a model of the Millennium Falcon
b) However the other side to that is that once Lucas seemed to have come up with a hamburger with an olive idea for the space ship and a bite taken out of the front as a beginning point, it's likely that an Egyptian pendant perhaps a falcon pendant or this famous particular scarab pectoral with "desert glass" scarab belonging to Tutenkhamun would have served as inspiration for developing the final ship with all the details of its outer structure.


King Tutenkhamun's pectoral with Scarab


c)  Tutankhamun's Falcon Earrings
Another component from the Tutenkhamun jewelry to observe are the gold Falcon ear rings which were displayed in 1976 as part of the same collection.  Perhaps compare the circle on top of the spacecraft where the gun is found with the along with the long rectangle leading up to the front of the ship, to the bird with its ring display if wings and its long tail, and the head becomes the upper laser cannon










d) The name Millennium Falcon entered the revised fourth draft of the script for Star Wars, dated March 1976. What is interesting about the name is the fact that the Ancient Egyptians had this idea of the "boat of a thousand years" (sometimes the number could be a million years, but would also represent an uncalculable span of time) which carried the falcon headed god Ra, and then Millennium means a thousand. This pendant also inspired the likes of HR Giger around that general time with works such as Necronom II. 


Falcon headed Ra on his solar barque, the boat of a thousand years
e) The piece of jewelry also appears to have partially inspired a painting of a demonic face by HR Giger called Necronom II in 1976 , a painting that would inspire the face of the monster in the 1979 movie Alien. 
( See; Necronom II: Inspired by Egyptian winged scarab and Paintings that inspired the design of the Alien  at the Alienexplorations blog)

Necronom II
f) 1976 was the year that the The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition started off in America at the National Gallery of Art and this would have lead to magazine articles across the world since it was all about what was happening in America and an exhibition catalogue that year. And so this would have led the Millennium Falcon Designer and Giger finding decent images of the scarab pectoral presented before their eyes.