Aleksandra
28 October, 2008
All the color is drained from the world as all the promise is drained from the future in a place of persistent and inexplicable war.
It isn’t despair, it isn’t anything palpable. It simply is. Bleak and continual.
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies
26 October, 2008
There are things living in the walls, behind and under the world. They keep us moving, they keep us watching, they are waiting.
The Meaning of Life
26 October, 2008
Breathe. You are forgetting to breathe.
A Course L’Abime
26 October, 2008
Stop thinking you know what you are doing.
Elegy
24 October, 2008
Ben Kingsley and Dennis Hopper make out. I’ll repeat that, just in case you didn’t read it right the first time. Sir Ben Kingsley and Dennis Crazyeyes Hopper have a passionate, full tongue, seconds-long kiss that fills the entire screen. Dennis Hopper also brings Ben Kingsley breakfast in bed and feeds him eggs as though he were a child, making the choo-choo noise and everything. Oh, god, such absolute glee.
Anyhow. I’ve got that out of my system.
The film is superbly acted and almost incredibly good. I say almost because the ending is somewhat flaccid and lacks the zeal of the rest of the film, and a bad ending is near as disappointing as a bad beginning, and far more likely to stick with you. Peter Sarsgaard, as usual, is unexpectedly delightful; and sometime in the last year or so Penelope Cruz learned herself some acting skills. Hopper and Kingsley are, of course, brilliant.
Coixet shows incredible deftness, slipping into the male voice with an ease that most female directors lack- not to say that they are incapable of doing so, because to be a female director means to be capable of taking on a masculine persona, at least at this point in cinema. There is nothing tentative about it, and there is nothing in her approach that attempts to simplify the emotional life of men, which is quite frequently the failing point of many female directors- a tendency to reduce what they do not directly experience into something easily compartmentalized. The same thing that male directors frequently do with their female characters.
ANYHOW, after that unintentional sidetrack, all I really can say is the film is worth seeing. It is not perfect, but its imperfection is endearing and does not detract from the experience.
Phil Solomon
19 October, 2008
Brakhage practiced closed-eye seeing and Phil, Phil practices open-eye dreaming. Both are without equal and without comparison. Phil is simply closer to my heart because he is a part of my heart, a part of my soul without whom I could not live the life I lead.
His work is only available in abbreviated form on his website, but even that small gift is worth viewing.
Click on the ‘films’ title
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
19 October, 2008
The storytelling here is easy, the plot suggests itself. But visually, the Coen boys did something spectacular. There is such a supreme understanding of off-screen space. The frame is breached and re-asserted so many times it is difficult to keep track, the world within and beyond the frame is in a constant visual and auditory dialogue. There is very little wrong with the film, and it clearly served as exceptional grounding for their more serious recent work.
Nearly as impressive as their awareness of the frame is their awareness of their palette. The consistent muting of all colors, without playing tricks to make certain things pop, creates an overall more impressive effect than films in which the contrast between muted and bright hues serves to illustrate some superficial point. The subtlety of the color scheme lends an overall mood and an overwhelming sense of the general moral turpitude of every character in the film.
Nuit et Brouillard
19 October, 2008
You cannot film this. Not a recreation of it, not a representation of it, nothing. It can only be spoken of, hushed, and shown through first-hand documentation. You cannot film this horror in a way that does not demean or belittle it. You cannot and you must not. There are some things the camera cannot and should not do.
City of Ember
14 October, 2008
They make such pretty worlds, and then they freeze. They do not know what to do. So in these beautiful places they tell the same ugly stories- same winners, same losers. The stories never change. And the places tarnish, and are corrupted in the end, by the needs of the pocket and the public.
Mat i syn
12 October, 2008
In time all things pass. In time the moth, too, will die with the mother. The end comes with a scream and a sigh, lasts for a moment suspended forever. To remember her you forget yourself and you have been lost.
