Oct 22, 2015

on Vhs?

 

Oct 22, 2015

Microwave 20p

can't find my vhs the new versions are looking haram

 

Oct 22, 2015

Persona Blu Ray is 20.99 on amazon for the people that don't own it yet.

 

Oct 22, 2015

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and Hook have uncanny similarities

 

Oct 22, 2015

posting some of my writing per @captain awesome request

Leviathan (Andrei Zvyagintsev)

Zvyagintsev’s highly praised, Leviathan, opens and ends with shots displaying nature at its most bleak and violent while he spends the time in between exploring the same concepts with people and civilization. The focus here is a rather small scale story of a man and his family who are on the verge of having their land seized by the local government, but it translates into a universal account that suggests our rights as human beings are often ignored by overpowering authority figures. Similar to the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man albeit much different in approach and tone, the film is a retelling of the Book of Job with Nikolay (Aleksey Serebryakov) as our simple man protagonist who sees his entire life crash down around him. Together with his second wife, Lydia (Elena Lyadova), and his son, Romka (Sergey Pokhodaev), Nikolay lives in a humble house near the sea that was passed down through several generations; everything he knows and lives for resides on this land and he’s not willing to admit defeat at the force of the despicable local mayor, Mer (Roman Madyanov). Nikolay calls upon an old army comrade, Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), who is now a big shot lawyer in Moscow to represent him in court. As expected, Nikolay’s attempt at pleading his defense gets brushed aside in court as the judge robotically reads off the verdict as if they didn’t even think of taking his defense into consideration. This brings Nikolay and Dmitriy back to the drawing board where Dmitriy assures the family that things will work their way out even if he has to resort to blackmailing the mayor with a folder full of political corruption evidence he prepared. The first stretch of the film feels a bit mechanical in setting up its premise but it slowly steers off into a more personal look at the effect the case has on Nikolay’s mentality as well as the state of the relationships within his family.

The unfortunate situation leads Nikolay to guzzling liters of vodka which only leads to more problems and a further disconnection from his wife and child who are not in the greatest spirits themselves. Romka hasn’t yet adjusted to the idea of having a new mother plus the inevitable changes to come and lack of immediate support from a parental figure only leave him more desperate. Lydia feels alone and distant in a household that doesn’t appreciate her efforts which drives her to make some poor decisions which work to further complicate their lives. It’s Elena Lyadova’s portrayal of Lyida that allows for an emotional connection as we’re able to sympathize with her even at her lowest moments. As the film progresses we gradually feel the situation taking its toll and what started as a bleak but sometimes humorous story turns into something unrelentingly dark and devastating. We switch back and forth between the family’s struggles and the political forces who bestowed their fate as we observe the nasty nature of human beings and how the craving for power and dominance will stop at nothing even if it means shattering others to reach the goal. The glorious photography from frequent Zvyagintsev collaborator, Mikhail Krichman, masterfully captures the haunting environment through which the characters move as well as that which surrounds them to create a fittingly dark atmosphere. Zvyagintsev’s refusal to spoon-feed the viewer makes for an engaging watch as we’re left to speculate on the outcome of certain scenes before we’re offered the pieces required to fit the puzzle. The approach here is admittedly distant and calculated but that didn’t stop me from being emotionally invested, perhaps it’s due to my familiarity with these sorts of happenings being from Eastern Europe but I don’t often leave a film feeling so deeply affected and depressed. This is through and through an exceptionally crafted work that is not easy to shake off and embodies precise relevance in today’s world.


A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour)

Ana Lily Amirpour’s feature film debut places us in the middle of the imaginative town of Bad City where the reality of everyday life is suspended as a ways of emphasizing on the loneliness and isolation each of its inhabitants faces. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was initially marketed as an Iranian vampire horror film but the film itself is actually less of a horror film and more of a romantic love story. The film certainly features some haunting elements but at its core it’s a simple tale of two lonely people coming together and finding comfort in one another regardless of their differences.

The girl referred to in the film’s title (Sheila Vand) is a vampire who lurks through the night watching over the people of Bad City and enforcing her moral code where she sees fit such as when she sees a local prostitute, Atti (Mozhan Marno), being taken advantage of by a smug d--- dealer, Saeed (Dominic Rains). Her eventual love interest is a young man named Arash (Arash Marandi) who strolls around town in his vintage Thunderbird, which he is proud to own after years of hard work, along with his new cat companion until he is confronted with trouble due to the debts his incompetent father, Hossein (Marshall Manesh), acquired through his drug addiction. We follow these central characters and quietly observe their lives and how they and those around them cope with existence, often turning to drugs and sex as an escape.

The story is told patiently with little use of dialogue while the visuals, sound design and use of music play an integral role in conveying its essence. Lyle Vincent’s lush black and white cinematography effectively captures the eerily luminescent aura of this run-down town and along with the diverse rock soundtrack infused with the western-influenced score, Amiropour creates an unshakable atmosphere that this wholly unique world she’s presenting thrives off of. Amirpour also has a brilliant eye for composition which is best represented in the film’s centerpiece “disco ball scene” in which our two lovers share their first intimate moment over the tune of the song “Death” by the band White Lies while a disco ball is rapidly spinning, projecting scattering lights on the wall as the characters gravitate towards each other.

Many critics have extensively noted the filmmakers from who Amirpour may have drawn influence from such as David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino but her vision is much more unique and refreshing than she is given credit for; you would be hard pressed to find another film with the defining image of an Iranian vampire girl wearing a chador while cruising on a skateboard down a dark, deserted street. It’s Amirpour’s thorough knowledge of both Iranian and American culture that allowed her to create something within the genre that stands apart from the rest, and her decision to set the film in Iran and s---t it in California put her in a position where her creative control could flourish and she could tell her story without any boundaries. The film is universally relatable as we have all felt lonely at one point or another in our lives and Amirpour’s impressive talents as a writer and director cement her as one of the most exciting and promising cinematic voices of her generation.


Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)

In recent years, Abbas Kiarostami has chosen to move away from the comfort zone of his home country Iran in order to get a better understanding of the world and its people on larger scale, yet the pictures he comes up with are every bit as personal and intimate as his previous films and he is perhaps able to further explore certain themes that have been recurring in his work throughout his career. In his second feature made outside of Iran after the Italy-set Certified Copy, he chooses to observe life in modern day Japan. Interestingly enough, Kiarostami had a script and the idea of shooting in Japan for a decade before the film was actually made but he chose to hold off because he didn’t feel he was at the right age to fully understand and relate to the film’s older character. The film revolves around the central character of Akiko who is a student by day and an escort by night and her interactions with an old writer, translator and retired professor who hires her for a night and her jealous fiancée who is suspicious of how she spends her time away from him. Kiarostami manages to create a powerful connection between the viewer and the characters by withholding any information we would typically get in a film such as backstory for the characters and instead presents each situation in the same way we would perceive real life; this way we have to gather what we can about the characters by observing only what is happening in the moment.

The very first shot of the film starts us in the middle of a scene where we’re in a café and the camera is fixated on people sitting at tables and talking, we’re unsure what to make of it until we hear an off-screen voice proclaim “I’m not lying” which turns out to be Akiko as she argues with her fiancée on the phone and we soon realize that she is in fact lying to him about her whereabouts. The conversation leaves Akiko annoyed and flustered and from that quick conversation and only hearing Akiko’s end of the line we are able to gain an understanding of the status of their relationship and that Akiko is clearly not happy with him. We are introduced to the next key character when a man sits down at Akiko’s table and begins to feed her advice before proceeding to persuade her into taking a job for an “important client,” we then realize that this is actually her p----, Hiroshi. Akiko endlessly refuses the task stating that she had plans to study and meet her grandmother who is in town visiting but Hiroshi won’t let up until Akiko eventually bursts out of anger and breaks the scene. The next shot is the first striking use of reflection in the film which has Hiroshi outside of the café taking a phone call with his figure being reflected on the café window as Akiko moves about inside gathering her belongings; this is the first instance that places two characters in the same frame while showing how disconnected they are from each other, this concept is later revisited in a shot inside the professor’s apartment which sees Akiko being reflected through an off TV as the professor struggles to converse with her and then again in the professor’s car as we see her reflection through the rear-view mirror while her fiancée is working under the hood. The following sequence is an incredibly heartbreaking one which features Akiko sitting in the backseat of a taxi listening to the voicemails her grandmother left her throughout the day as she rides to her destination. The emotional connection felt in this scene speaks levels for its execution as we don’t know much about Akiko at this point but we can see and feel the pain in her eyes as she stares out the window and listens to her grandmother’s voice. At one point, Akiko asks the driver to circle around the nearby train station in hopes of catching a glimpse of her grandmother before she takes off and by her unfortunate luck, she is rejected the opportunity of seeing her face as there is a van that blocks her point of view each go around.

The eventual confrontation with the professor, Takashi Watanabe, takes place inside his apartment where he and Akiko awkwardly try to make conversation as she playfully compares herself to the girl in a painting hanging on his wall as well as two women she sees in framed pictures around his apartment which we could assume are his wife and daughter. This all plays into the title, Like Someone in Love, which stands for the idea that these characters are “like” something but not quite the real deal. This is further explored the following day when the professor drops Akiko off at school and we are finally properly introduced to her fiancée, Noriaki, who mistakes the professor for her grandfather and he goes along with it as he feels that he is like a grandfather figure to her. The same could be said about Akiko and Noriaki’s relationship as Noriaki feels like he is in love with her yet it seems more like he’s using the idea of love and marriage as a ways of gaining control over her. Akiko is at a point in her life in which she is constantly feeling controlled by the men around her, whether it be her p----, her fiancée or now the professor, who doesn’t necessarily have bad intentions but might be using her as a replacement for his actual granddaughter who never visits him which is hinted at during a conversation Akiko has with his nosy next-door neighbor. All of this pressure placed on Akiko eventually comes crashing down in a harrowing finale that doesn’t feel much like an ending at all and leaves us with one of the most terrifying and lasting final shots of recent years.

Kiarostami takes his time with every scene and the film can’t be said to be very eventful but this sense of real-time allows for a more personal connection between the viewer and the characters and story. This can also be attributed to his handling of the actors as he claims that he refused to provide any of them with a full script but instead only gave them the few pages they were going to s---t each day which made the acting more natural and in the moment since the actors were never sure of where the film was headed. The actor in the role of the old professor, Tadashi Okuno, is a life-long extra who had never once spoken a word in a film despite appearing in numerous films throughout his lengthy career; but more than anyone else auditioned, Kiarostami was able to understand him and they built a spiritual connection that rubbed off on the film and gave it the pure and intimate quality that shines through. Kiarostami being a foreigner in the land of Japan gives him the role of an observer rather than that of a filmmaker who is in complete control over his surroundings; he’s there simply to attempt to capture some truthful moments in hopes of learning more about the culture and its people for himself. This completely honest expression strongly resonates with me because the idea of looking to unfamiliar parts of the world in order to learn more about one’s self and human nature is absolutely fascinating. Kiarostami has stated that he had a great time working with the Japanese crew and listed it as one of the most fulfilling filmmaking experiences of his entire career and it really shows in the final product as every piece blends together perfectly. The photography by Katsumi Yanagijima captures the rather limited locations in a subtle manner creating images that are at once simple and incredibly effective. There is a feeling of quietness apparent through most of the run time as music is only used at two different points; both instances use the song “Like Someone in Love” by Ella Fitzgerald and it fits wonderfully in both cases: it is first played quietly through a stereo in the professor’s apartment as he carefully arranges the dinner table for Akiko and himself and again in the end credits following the startling and abrupt ending which gives it a heightened effect. The film starts and ends in the middle of scenes attempting to mimic life situations as we don’t often have clear beginnings and endings in real life. Like Someone in Love shows that Kiarostami is still at the top of his capabilities and as excited as ever to engage with his audience and provide us with challenging cinema that causes us to rethink the art-form.

 

Oct 22, 2015

No, but I think Nayak is one of my dad's favorite films. He loves movies that take place in trains haha. There are definitely world renowned actors/filmmakers out of India, especially from my dads era, but it just seems a majority of Bollywood is formulaic cash grabs..it's more about pure entertainment than "art" a majority of the time. And there's obviously quality to be found there too but it really puts a damper on taking that huge culture too seriously

 

Oct 22, 2015

I'm in an India diasporic English class this semester. Thought about bringing @Narsh in for show and tell

 

Oct 22, 2015

you should check out the Apu trilogy & Charulata, all lit like bic.

 

Oct 22, 2015

Its 100% the culture man, my dads talked me through it before. Escapism is the perfect term. He's literally yelled @ me multiple times re: my love to analyze s--- lol. "It's god d--- entertainment I don't give a f--- about the color schemes"


Also, if you don't mind me asking, how did you support yourself through a masters in film? I'm a neuroscience major currently but my post grad career needs to be as in tune w my tru self as possible lol, cuz this s--- isn't cutting it. I ultimately want to write for TV/film..something. And I'm trying to figure how to make that s reality

Follow up question, why are you guys who've gone to school for film not pursuing anything in the industry? Naive question, I know so well free to give me a wake up call if needed

 

Oct 22, 2015

f--- i want to rewatch turin horse now

 

Oct 22, 2015

Also definitely using these top 5 director s--- to get back into watching and writing about film. I've taken far too much time off being a fuckboy

 

Oct 22, 2015

 

Oct 22, 2015

greatest ever

 

Oct 22, 2015

I got into a good school. I had a fellowship and stipend. So I paid nothing for my tuition, and I was paid about $15000 for working as a TA + stipend, which paid for my rent etc.

I'd love to work in the industry, but it's a tough industry to crack when you only have cinema STUDIES under your belt. Not a lot of people care if you can analyze a film. Everything in the industry is business related. Even work at TIFF or some other cultural hub requires more business savvy than cinema knowledge. That said, I worked last year in an Art Gallery, writing up a book/inventory on public art in the city, which was somewhat along the lines of my field. I write regularly as a critic but any sort of compensation by one of several publications is too little and far between. I'd like to teach, as it seems the only option for Film Studies, but I'm afraid of doing 5 more years of grad school and leaving without a prospect.

That said, I definitely AM pursuing something in the industry. Or in the liquor industry. Just haven't realized anything concrete as of yet. Tough worlds to crack.

 

Oct 22, 2015

Joao Cesar Monteiro - Silvestre

 

Oct 22, 2015

I'll make it guys and i'll come back for ya

 

Oct 22, 2015

No you won't

Yeah I assumed as much man. I'm just hoping to move to LA or something based off the strength of this ubdergrad degree. I have a business minor, I don't mind a job in like marketing or advertising or something. Copywriting might actually be a great stepping stone. And once I'm in the "right" area, figure out pursuing further studies/career options.

Idk. Haphazard I know. Did you go to school to get ur masters right out of undergrad?

 

Oct 22, 2015

yeah well i wasn't gonna come back for you anyway. so u have nothing to worry about

 

Oct 22, 2015

Sarunas Bartas films:


Seven Invisible Men, 2005


Few of Us, 1996


Three Days, 1991


Indigene d'Eurasie, 2010


Corridor, 1995


A Casa, 1997

 

Oct 22, 2015

Uh this is what my post was implying to begin with