The Day There Was No News

15 sci-fi movies, 15 famous architectural locations

‘Brutalist’ architecture seems to be an unwritten law of sci-fi location scouting. I automatically remembered the odd portuguese sci-fi movie, Solveig Nordlund’s Low Flying Aircraft, which was set mostly in the Torralta Towers, since then demolished (notice the Wile E. Coyote eye on our Prime Minister 2 minutes into the video).
That movie has another scene - the ‘futuristic stormtroopers creating havoc’ scene present in 85% of sci-fi - set in the CGD headquarters in Lisbon, which is absent but I think should top the list for architectural Orwellian creepiness (in a tacky, early 90s kind of way).

For a couple of months now I've been reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It's a big book, and a tough one to read. Like the work of José Saramago, the style of Pynchon's writing turns reading it into work, made worthwhile by the golden nuggets scattered about (clever observations, plot twists, etc). But, writing density aside, Pynchon's work is quite different, full of postmodern style shifts and surreal episodes, some hardcore enough to make Pier Paolo Pasolini blush. Still, I'm writing all this because of the following passage from Gravity's Rainbow:

“And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide..."

'Nuff said.