Life reflecting Art

Don’t know what you did New Year’s Eve…but in between the munching,crunching and champagne and the donations to the tsunami appeal , the laughter ,chatter and banter there was considerable talk about our weird weather and the constant number of disasters and how the world seemed like a movie or how someone had written a book about it earlier in time: Gordon Rattray Taylor‘s Rethink, CK Chesterton‘s The Thursday Man; C P Snow‘s The New Men and books by Dan Brown and Andy McNab and then, of course, the two obvious films:



“The earth consists of an external surface and a core; between the surface and the core is a mantle; in all, there are some 2,000 miles from the surface to the core. Solar winds are emitted, with temperatures that fry everything in their path, but the earth is protected from solar winds by an electromagnetic field (EMF) around the globe. The EMF, in turn, exists because the energy source is a natural nuclear reactor at the earth's core, which is the size of Mars, where uranium and other fuels have collected. If the core stops producing a magnetic field, the earth is doomed, and trace elements in recent volcanic eruptions show that the reactor is slowly running down, though the life expectancy of the planet may still be billions of years. So says J. Marvin Herndon in an essay in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published in early March 2003. The film The Core, released at the end of March, is based on a similar premise. Dr. Conrad Zimsky (played by Stanley Tucci) has been hired by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to develop a weapon that would cause massive earthquakes underneath an enemy country, Project Destiny, and there is a hint in the film that the project may have tested capabilities already. The movie begins in Boston, where an executive suddenly falls dead on arrival at a board meeting; indeed, two dozen or so persons die at the same time within a small area of the city. Soon, the DOD summons two experts to explain whether the event is a terrorist attack of some sort. The two experts are Professor Josh Keyes (played by Aaron Eckhart), a geophysicist, and Dr. Sergei Leveque (played by Tcheky Karyo), a weapons expert. Keyes immediately surmises that they all had pacemakers which were turned off due to an electromagnetic disturbance, so DOD loses interest.”

The rest of the article is here.

The Core


“Refreshing, the humans in The Day After Tomorrow are legitimately helpless. To the film’s credit there are no ridiculous contraptions built to counter Mother Nature’s plan: there are no missions to mars, no tunnelling to the centre of the Earth. They don’t even appear to be building bomb shelters. Instead the humans in this film helplessly run for their lives like scared rats trapped inside a nightmare laboratory, which allows for the kinds of images Roland Emmerich must drool over in his sleep.
The film’s high-profile special effects shots are alone worth the price of admission, but The Day After Tomorrow may be remembered as more than just a work of visual bravado. The final affirmation that this is a thoughtful blockbuster arrives at its conclusion, in which Emmerich must face the different task of resolving his film optimistically and realistically. Let the history books reveal that the director of Godzilla actually managed to pull it off.”

The rest of the article is here.

The Day after Tomorrow


There is also a film The Day After which was very controversial in its time.

The Man who was Thursday is here.