I’ve been hanging on to these for much too long… now I’m going to post an article with so many links out that Google will probably decide that the blog is a link farm and stop indexing it…

Today is the day before Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” goes into limited release in the US (on Wednesday, November 14th), and wide release this Friday, November 16th.

Richard Kelly, you may recall, wrote and directed “Donnie Darko”, the (dare I say) dark, funny, somewhat-science fiction film that I want to say launched Jake Gyllenhaal on the world, except that it wasn’t his first film and not many people saw it. The film involved time travel, possible hallucinations, a man in a rabbit suit talking about the end of the world, and disenfranchisement, and suffered from being released soon after September 11th, 2001 - a major plot point in the film involves falling aircraft pieces.

This is all very timely for me as I had the good fortune to see a stage adaptation of “Donnie Darko” by the American Repertory Theatre this weekend (held at the wonderfully named “Zero Arrow Theatre” - it’s at 0 Arrow St.). The production was surprisingly good.

Kelly’s new film - “Southland Tales” seems to follow on similar themes. Sarah Michelle Gellar is cast as a porn star trying to break into mainstream film (”Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted”), pitching her script through an amnesiac action star played by “The Rock”, Dwayne Johnson. The film takes place in a Los Angeles in the near future, after nuclear attacks in Texas have propelled the USA into becoming more of an in-denial-police-state.

The film famously was booed at its premiere at Cannes in 2006. Sony Entertainment picked it up and Richard Kelly cut the film by 25 minutes.

Three graphic novels are available as a prequel to the film: “Southland Tales Book 1: Two Roads Diverge”, “Southland Tales Book 2: Fingerprints” and “Southland Tales Book 3: The Mechanicals”. The three are also collected together in a single volume: “Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga”. They follow the main characters and explore the setting, presumably leading up to the events of the film.
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There’s no shortage of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic media - comics, movies, TV, books… though post-apocalyptic music or plays are fairly rare. One such play - “Canned Peaches in Syrup” - ran in Los Angeles a few weekends ago.

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Who says YouTube is only for pirated video?

Harkening back to an entire 9 days or so ago, the completed video of zombies doing yoga is now live. You can find it here on YouTube or watch it embedded after the cut.

The video is a trailer for the new book: “The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead”

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Millennium was one of my favorite TV shows. Ever.

Dealing in apocalyptic themes, secular and religious, the show follows the life of Frank Black (played perfectly by Lance Henriksen), a former FBI agent who left the Bureau after a breakdown. Frank Black sees flashes through the killer’s eyes. He’s now working for the secretive Millennium Group, which employs several former FBI agents, and living in Seattle with his wife and daughter.

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Most people probably hadn’t heard of sarin gas before the 1994 and 1995 attacks in Japan by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

Sarin is an odorless, colorless gas which damages your nervous system if you inhale it or get it on your skin. It inhibits the mechanism by which your body allows its muscles to relax, leading to convulsions and a loss of bodily control, inability to breath and likely death.

The only good thing about sarin is that it doesn’t store well, which makes it difficult to stockpile for use as a weapon.

“Aum Shinrikyo” used sarin in two terrorist attacks in Japan, in 1994 and 1995, killing a total of 19 people.

WFMU describes Aum Shinrikyo’s beliefs as “a wild mixture of Buddhism, Hinduism, Nostradamus, and the Book of Revelations” - something which I normally would respond to as “you can’t get there from here” - but apparently you can.

Informed by everything from buddhism and anime to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, they started out studying yogic meditation (the Wikipedia article on them uses another unlikely combination of words, “elite meditation boutique”), they became more militant over time, driving around in an armored Mercedes, until finally they involved themselves in terrorist attacks, kidnapping and microwave incineration.

In a Buckaroo Banzai-like twist, their mostly blind leader, Shoko Asahara, not only masterminded their transformation from meditators to terrorists, but also recorded music.

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Dark Horizons reports that Guy Pearce (of “The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert”, “L.A. Confidential”, “Memento”, “The Time Machine”, and one of my all-time favorite horror films, “Ravenous”) has joined the cast of the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”.

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“When a man eats your eye / like a big pizza-pie / that’s a zombie!”

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A little something for spooky-day: we haven’t even seen it yet, but George A. Romero’s “Diary of the Dead” has already been approved for a sequel, written and directed by Romero (of course).

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Warren Ellis shared a link to a brief apocalyptic film on YouTube. “Silent City” by Ruairi Robinson. Robinson was nominated for an academy award in 2001 for a 3 minute short animated film called “Fifty Percent Gray” (see it on YouTube) about a soldier who wakes up dead. While that nomination didn’t substantially help his career, “The Silent City” apparently did, netting him an agent.

“The Silent City” is a seven minute seven second film of a violent post-apocalyptic world that’s anything but silent. The embedded YouTube video follows. It features Don Wycherley, a few seconds of Cillian Murphy, and Garvan McGrath.

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Steampunk: Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction which came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England…

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