sleep dealer
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All the Work Without the Workers: Appreciating Sleep Dealer On Its Tenth Anniversary
Appraisal of the aesthetic and intellectual merits of science fiction, not to mention the sheer joy of encountering it, lately tends to be subsumed by talk of the perceived accuracy of a work and its predictions. We are living in the future allegedly imagined by William Gibson or Octavia Butler or Philip K. Dick, while films like Her and Gattaca serve as shopworn reference points in conversations about artificial intelligence and CRISPR. This veneration of the utilitarian function of science fiction at once demands too much from the work while denying its value apart from what might be gleaned from […]
by Joanne McNeil on Dec 20, 2018 -
“SLEEP DEALER” co-writer-director, Alex Rivera
Rasquachismo. Sleep Dealer is a science fiction set in Mexico. In the script I described everything from exploding buildings and fighter-jet dogfights to remote-control robots. The effects were never the focus of the film — they existed to give a politicized futuristic setting for my characters. When time came to actually produce the insanely challenging visuals, my amazing d.p. and VFX supervisor and I solved many, many problems with rasquachismo. Rasquachismo refers to a spirit in Latino communities of taking what’s at hand, cobbling it together, and making something wondrous out of it. Like using parts of one old car […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 14, 2008
