movies

16 posts under this tag.

Star
Why keep them? 2
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Jun
20

Nagiko: You’ve been reading my diary blog?
The Husband: Isn’t that why people keep diaries blogs? To be read by someone else? Otherwise why keep them?
Nagiko: To know about themselves!
Peter Greenaway, The Pillow Book

Old friends 2
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Jun
20

Harry: What does this song [Auld Lang Syne] mean? My whole life, I don’t know what this song means. I mean, ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot’? Does that mean that we should forget old acquaintances, or does it mean if we happened to forget them, we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot?

Sally: Well, maybe it just means that we should remember that we forgot them or something. Anyway, it’s about old friends.

When Harry Met Sally

IIBB: June 16, 2006 2
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6
Jun
16

“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll, Through the looking glass

Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast

Series Blenders

With the new 60GB DVDs hitting the markets, it is now possible to store an entire series in one disc and this presents many, many untold possibilities. Here’s one: you know the short clips at the beginning of a two-part episode in which they recap the previous one? Well what about if we make, say, a similar kind of recap but for an entire series worth of episodes. For, say, Gilmore Girls’s 130+ 40+min episodes you’d have a 2-hour episode summarizing everything that has transpired during the series. It would be a wonderful (albeit challenging) exercise in synthesis but I think it’d be interesting. You could make it so that hitting play during one of the clips will plunge you smoothly into that episode until you hit stop to return to the blender.
Quote Novel (or Movie)
I’ve wanted to do this for a long time but I’ve always felt I’m still too media illiterate: create a novel (or movie or short story) written entirely from quotes and excerpts from our media landscape. I mean entirely. Every dialogue a pastiche, every description a hodgepodge, every paragraph a potpourri. (In fact I would do it as an experiment of sorts. Of what? Of the erosion of self in our present and future.)
Internet in a box
What with that new movie or series or discography, these days I’m always letting the computer on overnight to keep downloading torrents. It seems like a big waste (and its fan-noisy too) so I wonder if one couldn’t outsorce the downloading business out of the cpu tower. It would ideally be just a small wiFi-enabled cube with at the most one or two status LEDs. You would usb it to your computer and interact with it through your monitor. At night you could turn off the computer and leave the little guy do its late night job. I’m no hardware expert whatsoever but it seems feasible to me. It’s the next leeching step.
iPod web

I guess it isn’t exactly a revelation but today it hit me as a fairly obvious thing: the next iPod in the family—iPod mini, iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod photo, iPod video—is going to be the iPod web. WiFi in mobile devices (cell phones, PDAs and whatnot) is gaining strenght and it is the (only?) logical next step for the iPod to take. If Apple manages to pull it off with grace and style, the iPod would truly become the one gadget to rule them all (just imagine the open-endedness of having the web in your pocket).

The device I envision is about the size of an iPod video, has a minimal, ultra-fast and responsive OS (mere scaffolding for the browser), a 100+ GB harddrive, a huge screen (say, 4X2.5 inches), and, most importantly, an updated, vastly more capable interface that is still as brilliant as the clickwheel. I only hope Apple has the vision to try it (soon).

Star
unsimulated liberty 2
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6
Jun
15


But the strongest outrage was reserved for the film’s final scene, in which Gallo’s character finally meets up with his ex-lover (Chloë Sevigny), and she performs unsimulated fellatio upon him.. Sevigny, already known for taking on controversial roles, had been a real-life girlfriend of Gallo’s. Notably, after the film’s release, the William Morris Agency dropped her as a client, claiming the scene made her unmarketable; she quickly signed with another agency and has continued her acting career despite fears to the contrary.
Wikipedia, The Brown Bunny
The quiet last line of this paragraph is a pearl of capitalist freedom that could so easily pass unnoticed, taken-for-granted. If Chloë was able to do what she did was only because she wasn’t tied to prude William Morris, one of the largest talent agencies in the world; it was only because there were other agencies more than willing to take her in.
Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his mercy.
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
What a wonderful world to live in, isn’t it? One in which puritans can be self-righteous while we enjoy watching a purdy gal blow her ex-boy.
noticed how the real was defined in terms of the simulated?—an “unsimulated” fellatio

Eggies in the basket 2
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Apr
24

I revealed myself a klutz this morning with my very first eggy in the basket (yup, after V for Vendetta!). I followed this (incredibly simple) recipe and everything was looking pretty good

Chep's one The very first one

until it came to the turning:

Star
Ayelet Zorer 2
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6
Feb
19

SpielbergWP, IMDB’s MunichAM, IMDB, WP is a great film; there’s not a scene I would change in this 164-minute movie. On the other hand, the man’s starting to scare me, I mean, how can he be so talented? Every film of his I’ve seen is a masterpiece, to the point that it seems almost unfair that someone should hoard so much talent. He embodies that Gap Paul Graham talked about in much of Hackers and Painters:

When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There’s a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once.

Paul Graham, Mind the Gap from Hackers and Painters

More to the point, Eric BanaWP, IMDB and Ayelet ZorerIMDB (sometimes called Ayelet Zu’rer or Ayelet Zurer) were the two Munich actors that impressed me most, and my favorite scene from the movie was the sex scene between their characters, Avner and Daphna. It is remarkable both for the long-during, extreme closeup on Daphna, and for the fact that she’s visibly pregnant all along. Closeups are one of the wonders of film, something unthinkable in theater, and this is one of the best ones I’ve seen: for over 30 seconds there’s only Daphna—beautiful and breathy and rhythmic and smelly and sweaty and lusty and doe-eyed and blushing and nubile. As for the visible pregnancy… well, I’m somewhat disturbed to find that very arousing, but I guess it’s all part of being a male homo sapiens at a reproductive age.

I couldn’t find any screenshots of this particular scene on the web—I seem to have very refined tastes—so I had to download the movie and take screenshots myself. Here they are: