Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Alice in Wonderland



March 2010 cannot come soon enough.

And it looks like the girl from In Treatment is Alice. Excellent casting.

Slitage (2008)

Slitage is a shortfilm by Patrick Eklund, that can be found temporarily here.

If you understand swedish you will find it hilarious, I am sure!

The acting, the colours, the humour, the manuscript : SWEET

My friend, Daniel Rudstedt, plays the guy in a wheelchair.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Cat People (1942)


My first post in almost a year.

Movies used to be a greater source of fulfillment I guess. Now they seem demanding somehow. Watching movies alone can be a great privilege, but I'm not often in that mindset.
So tonight, i crossed over a from weekend of seclusion into the first hours of a challenging Monday with a movie from 1942 called Cat People. I had a lot to choose from and almost started watching "W", but decided against it. Might watch that with my parents. 
Two reasons mostly for watching Cat People. First, Movies from this era tend to be a simple reality. No superfluous dialogue and solid story. Second, I also have the remake (at least i think it is) from 1982, the year I was born, featuring music by Giorgio Moroder, and I intend to watch that another night.
I loved this film. Great cast, first and foremost, Simone Simon (pictured). The atmosphere is luring and suspenseful, cinematography is beautiful, especially the chiaroscuro.The most pleasing thing for me was how the simple exterior gave the fantasy element a deeper, scarier quality, Highly recommended.
Oh and interestingly, this is the second film in a short time where the main character is working in fashion, the other one was, "Single White Female", also very good.
Boas





Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Things I Love, Things I Hate

A short film by Jean Pierre Jeunet I watch pretty much nearly everyday, for a laugh and inspiration.

I like the little things.

Margot at the wedding

I dont think this trailer does this movie justice, but I definetely think you should see the movie. it is really fucked up, but in a wonderful way. the acting here literally blew my mind. BEAUTIFUL cinematography aswell..

I liked this movie even more than I liked the squid and the whale, and I liked that one a lot.



MARGOT AT THE WEDDING

Happiness / Schastye

I wrote the following 15.May 2008

this is the movie I stumbled upon when I randomly bought a ticket in cinemateket the other day. cinemateket just recently changed their programme to one where one can hardly read anything anymore about the movies. (I used to love the layout of their programme. I even praised it out loud) now to save money or paper, or make us non-film-students feel silly and out of place/uninformed, they made it much tinyer/slimmer. I dont really know the intention. I only know that they stopped bringing us any valuable information on the movies. (of course you could check it out online, but I have been a computerless girl for weeks.)

I therefore showed up 5 minutes before the movie started, asked the girl behind the counter what this was. she answers:
"a russian silentmovie from 1932".
I say "ok. Is it any good?"
"yes. and it has live music."
"ok. fine, I'll have a ticket then."

there I was, alone, buying a ticket for a russian silentmovie from 1932 about communism that was accompanied by live piano playing written by Arvo Part. pretentious? well.. it seemed intriguing enough. and I had never watched a movie with live music before. I was excited as I entered the cinema.

Inside the cinema I laughed and laughed and laughed. this movie turned out to be a silent movie comedy about a farmer named khmyr and his wife. khmyr is the typical antihero who cannot seem to do anything right, and is constantly experiencing bad luck. a bit painful to watch at times, but with a humorous twist nonetheless funny. Slapstickhumour wrapped in socialistic everyday drama accompanied by the live piano playing turned out to be quite a hit with me, and I left the cinema feeling both enlightened, and enrichened. Such an experience it was!

I wanted to try to find the trailer or I thought I might even be able to find the whole movie online and put it in here, but no such thing. I could hardly actually find any information on it online, nearly no screenshots, and most definetely not any film to embed. what I did manage to dig up was this torrent.

and this picture:


one guy reviewing the movie on imdb states that this is a pro kolkhoz movie, I am not so sure that I agree to that. appearantly the director was affiliated with the communist party. but I interpreted most of the movie as quite anti. until the very end where I guess it turned around a bit.

Angels in America

13.february 2008 I went to Cinemateket to watch the lovely tv-series Angels in America. I watched it for the second time.. My first time around was while working in a videostore in Iceland. I associate watching it with being sick. I believe I was really sick the first time I watched it, which fits the theme of the whole series that evolves around sick people. Most of these have AIDS. However, that is not what I had when I watched it, and I think that helped me put things in perspective. Afterall I wasnt that bad off. Some people have to deal with much, much worse, and be much, much braver..

Angels in America is so much brilliance. Espescially the character Harper Pitt (Mary-Lousie Parker) who engage in the most wonderful conversations with her imaginary friend, Mr. Lies. My favourite parts are when they are in imaginary Antarctica, but I havent been able to dig up that many quotes from there.

But here are some of my favourites:

Harper Pitt: I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you. There's your breasts and your genitals... They're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs. They don't get it, they just want him. Want him.

Harper Pitt: I burned dinner.
Joe Pitt: I'm sorry.
Harper Pitt: Not my dinner, my dinner was fine. Your dinner. I put it back in the oven and turned everything up as high as it could go and I watched 'til it burned black. It's still hot, very hot, want it?
Joe Pitt: You didn't have to do that.
Harper Pitt: I know, it just seemed like the kinda thing a mentally-deranged sex-starved pill-popping housewife would do.

Harper Pitt: I wish I could go traveling. Things aren't right with me.
[Harper opens cabinet door in bathroom to remove pill container. She closes the door which reveals Mr. Lie's reflection in the mirror. She gasps. ]
Mr. Lies: Cash, check, or credit card?
Harper Pitt: You startled me.
Mr. Lies: Cash, check, or...
Harper Pitt: I remember you. You're from Salt Lake. You sold us the plane tickets when we flew here. What are you doing in Brooklyn?
Mr. Lies: You said you wanted to travel.
Harper Pitt: How thoughtful!
Mr. Lies: Mr. Lies of the International Order of Travel Agents. We mobilize the globe. We set people adrift. We are adepts of motion, acolytes of the flocks. Cash, check, or credit card, name your destination.
Harper Pitt: Antartica, maybe? I want to see the hole in the ozone. I heard on the radio...
Mr. Lies: We'll arrange a guided tour. Now?
Harper Pitt: Soon, maybe soon. I'm not safe here, you see. Weird stuff happens.
Mr. Lies: Like?
Harper Pitt: Like you, for instance. Just appearing. Or last week. Well, nevermind. People are like planets, you need a thick skin. Joe stays away and now, well look, my dreams are talking back to me.
Mr. Lies: The price of rootlessness, motion sickness. Only cure, keep moving.
Harper Pitt: I'm undecided. I feel that something's going to give. It's 1985... fifteen years to the third millennium. Maybe Christ will come again or maybe the troubles will and the end will come. And the sky will collapse and there'll be terrible rain and showers of poison light. Or maybe my life is really fine... maybe Joe loves me and I'm only crazy thinking otherwise. Or maybe not. Maybe it's even worse than I know. Maybe I want to know, maybe I don't. The suspense, Mr. Lies, it's killing me.
Mr. Lies: I suggest a vacation.

Harper Pitt: I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.