This cryptic quote was found on an Acelon impromptu card. Someone thought it was so bad -- and believe me, there are enough bad prompts -- that he took the effort to cover it with a big black X. An ebony letter to mark the spot of this terrible prompt.
I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey yesterday, and strangely enough, this quote perfectly describes it. I'm not sure if I have much to say about the actual movie. It was a puzzling aural experience; it had its moments of spine-chilling eeriness. HAL 9000 is one of the creepiest characters ever put in screen, and its red eye(s) make the Eye of Sauron seem possibly tame. But what? I did not get it. The fourth segment lost me in its dizzy shifts in time and place. Gorgeous, visually and aurally, but esoteric. Something I need a lot more time to digest.
Showing posts with label Random Cinematic Thoughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Random Cinematic Thoughts. Show all posts
Monday, February 19, 2007
Monday, January 15, 2007
Paris. Berlin. Mexico City.
Hunkered down with Youtube and DVD for some lovely and romanticized traveling this weekend.
First destination was Paris via Youtube. Upon learning that the long-anticipated portmanteau film Paris je t'aime was bootlegged on youtube, my hot little criminal hands sought then out immediately. So yes, watching a 5 in screen surrounded by white space and ads is not the optimal viewing experience, but shame on US distributors for not putting it out in theaters or DVD. (Especially when this French movie has so many American directors and stars.) I haven't gotten around to watching them all -- it seems 6 years of French study has been for naught -- though I have been so far duly amused and touched.
Maybe it's just my short attention span, but I adore short films and short stories. It is a difficult art to capture something momentous in only a few minutes or a few pages. Brevity is the soul of wit, no? When done well, a short film is the perfect capsule of a sentiment. When done badly, it just seems very pedestrian. From the segments I've seen so far, Paris je t'aime is a mix of both. My favorite are by Tom Twyker and Alexander Payne (not, interestingly, my favorites directors at all): Fauborg Saint-Denis and 14e arrondissement. Least favorites are by Christopher Doyle and Wes Craven, the former tries unsuccessfully for Chinese-French punnage and the latter is just unsuccessful despite invoking the spirit of Oscar Wilde.
Sunday night, I turned my gaze eastward and backwards in time to 1980s Berlin. Wings of Desire was recommended to me by my UChicago interviewer, and since I recently received a nice email from her, I decided I needed to watch it now. But Wings of Desire is not an urgent movie. It languishes, it longs, it lingers. From its soaring aerial views to the cool black and white , it's a poetic meditation. I actually liked it quite a lot, but I need to rewatch it in a less detached frame of mind. I love the title Wings of Desire because it's haunting, and the same can be said about the film, but I need to let it "haunt" me more. The ending however, just totally lost me; I thought it was terrible and stopped listening.
By the way, on top of sharpening my French, I need to learn German too. The angels in Wings of Desire hear snippets of thoughts that are never translated in the subtitles--how infuriating! The opening lines of the film are echoing in my mind right now. Whoever said German was an angry language never heard enough German.
After a hemisphere change, I found myself in a rambunctious Mexico City. Sรณlo con tu parejga is a exuberant sex farce that manages to take on a rather serious topic: AIDs. Tomas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho -- creepy priest of Bad Education!) is a serial womanizer who gets a bitter pill when one of his conquests decides to take revenge. I adore the cover art - inventive, loopy, and rife with phallic symbols - sums up the film perfectly.
Now I am off to the utterly unlovely and unromantic Mathland.
First destination was Paris via Youtube. Upon learning that the long-anticipated portmanteau film Paris je t'aime was bootlegged on youtube, my hot little criminal hands sought then out immediately. So yes, watching a 5 in screen surrounded by white space and ads is not the optimal viewing experience, but shame on US distributors for not putting it out in theaters or DVD. (Especially when this French movie has so many American directors and stars.) I haven't gotten around to watching them all -- it seems 6 years of French study has been for naught -- though I have been so far duly amused and touched.
Maybe it's just my short attention span, but I adore short films and short stories. It is a difficult art to capture something momentous in only a few minutes or a few pages. Brevity is the soul of wit, no? When done well, a short film is the perfect capsule of a sentiment. When done badly, it just seems very pedestrian. From the segments I've seen so far, Paris je t'aime is a mix of both. My favorite are by Tom Twyker and Alexander Payne (not, interestingly, my favorites directors at all): Fauborg Saint-Denis and 14e arrondissement. Least favorites are by Christopher Doyle and Wes Craven, the former tries unsuccessfully for Chinese-French punnage and the latter is just unsuccessful despite invoking the spirit of Oscar Wilde.
Sunday night, I turned my gaze eastward and backwards in time to 1980s Berlin. Wings of Desire was recommended to me by my UChicago interviewer, and since I recently received a nice email from her, I decided I needed to watch it now. But Wings of Desire is not an urgent movie. It languishes, it longs, it lingers. From its soaring aerial views to the cool black and white , it's a poetic meditation. I actually liked it quite a lot, but I need to rewatch it in a less detached frame of mind. I love the title Wings of Desire because it's haunting, and the same can be said about the film, but I need to let it "haunt" me more. The ending however, just totally lost me; I thought it was terrible and stopped listening.
By the way, on top of sharpening my French, I need to learn German too. The angels in Wings of Desire hear snippets of thoughts that are never translated in the subtitles--how infuriating! The opening lines of the film are echoing in my mind right now. Whoever said German was an angry language never heard enough German.
After a hemisphere change, I found myself in a rambunctious Mexico City. Sรณlo con tu parejga is a exuberant sex farce that manages to take on a rather serious topic: AIDs. Tomas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho -- creepy priest of Bad Education!) is a serial womanizer who gets a bitter pill when one of his conquests decides to take revenge. I adore the cover art - inventive, loopy, and rife with phallic symbols - sums up the film perfectly.Now I am off to the utterly unlovely and unromantic Mathland.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Casino Royale
Oh, I watched this yesterday too. Because this blog needs some pretty and Daniel Craig + Eva Green are pretty personified. Okay fine, Craig is not pretty per se but he is manly, rugged, and totally bringing the Bond sexyback. Eva Green is just too gorgeous.
I really hope I get to writing a full review where it's not just my hormones doing the talking. Still, Casino Royale is all about the visceral, no?
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
The Bluest Eye
"Then she stopped staring at the green chairs, at the delivery truck; she went to the movies instead. There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as a possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assess in it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scales one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the long roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and white images came together, making a magnificent whole--all projected through the ray of light from above and beyond."
Silly girl, this does not happen to you, does it? My dad actually accused be of this a while ago, telling me I was lost in a fantasy world. Seeing that this accusation came from my dad, I immediately leapt into a defense without thinking about the possible truth in his words. I still don't think it's true, but maybe I should at least consider the possibility. As much as I revel in the depressing and the abstract , I've realized that many films I love are unrealistic. Amelie? Pure whimsy. Wes Anderson? Encased in his little hermetic world. But then there is a strain of the bleak and oppressive: Brazil, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Fat Girl. Perhaps the opposite is true of my father's words: cinema has aged and jaded me to the world.
As for The Bluest Eye the novel, I think I've encounter one of the formative books of my reading. Yes, that's a little hyperbolic, especially considering I hated and promptly wiped it from my memory when I read it 2 years ago. Silly sophomore then. It's funny how I so wholly repudiate my past selves, always establishing my present person as the most superior. I also think I sound like a douchebag right now. It wasn't until Dan and Katie remarked on the stilted vocabulary that I realized how pretentiously I write. Ack.
So for more disjointed thoughts (or stream of consciousness as more literary types would call it), the irony of Crick lecturing us on black "funkiness" and "vitality" is rather. . . disconcerting. New England high school valedictorian, Harvard grad wants to teach us the black american experience of poverty? What? I have to say though, he's a very competent English teacher even if discourses on "funkiness" seem pretty hokey coming from Crick.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assess in it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scales one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the long roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and white images came together, making a magnificent whole--all projected through the ray of light from above and beyond."
Silly girl, this does not happen to you, does it? My dad actually accused be of this a while ago, telling me I was lost in a fantasy world. Seeing that this accusation came from my dad, I immediately leapt into a defense without thinking about the possible truth in his words. I still don't think it's true, but maybe I should at least consider the possibility. As much as I revel in the depressing and the abstract , I've realized that many films I love are unrealistic. Amelie? Pure whimsy. Wes Anderson? Encased in his little hermetic world. But then there is a strain of the bleak and oppressive: Brazil, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Fat Girl. Perhaps the opposite is true of my father's words: cinema has aged and jaded me to the world.
As for The Bluest Eye the novel, I think I've encounter one of the formative books of my reading. Yes, that's a little hyperbolic, especially considering I hated and promptly wiped it from my memory when I read it 2 years ago. Silly sophomore then. It's funny how I so wholly repudiate my past selves, always establishing my present person as the most superior. I also think I sound like a douchebag right now. It wasn't until Dan and Katie remarked on the stilted vocabulary that I realized how pretentiously I write. Ack.
So for more disjointed thoughts (or stream of consciousness as more literary types would call it), the irony of Crick lecturing us on black "funkiness" and "vitality" is rather. . . disconcerting. New England high school valedictorian, Harvard grad wants to teach us the black american experience of poverty? What? I have to say though, he's a very competent English teacher even if discourses on "funkiness" seem pretty hokey coming from Crick.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
A Clockwork Orange
My retinas have been permanently sheered with terror by A Clockwork Orange. I will never viddy Singin' in the Rain the same again. This is the creepiest guy ever.
Friday, July 28, 2006
GASP! FAINT! ORGASM!
This SUMMER 2006, Sony Pictures Classics will present 8 classic Pedro Almodovar films. The film series, VIVA PEDRO, will include presentations of LAW OF DESIRE, MATADOR, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, FLOWER OF MY SECRET, LIVE FLESH, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, TALK TO HER and BAD EDUCATION.
There's going to be an Almodovar retrospective? Sarah's favorite living director? With new prints on the big screen? OMG! The only thing that could make me happier would be winning the lottery so I can afford it.
And the giddest thing, guess which film is coming out October 6. Oh the sweet irony: sneaking into a NC-17 movie on my 17th birthday.
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