I respond to "Magnolia" instantly. There are some hypotheses about why some people don't like it.
For example, I suppose some critics aren't pleased with the way the characters
keep yelling heatedly. But to me this lack of restraint isn't a flaw.
1st, people (at least hot-tempered ones) scream when they're desperate
or angry, some critics may not like it because of the rule "show, don't
tell" but in reality people do that, and I do, when I'm in very bad
mood, I scream and yell and shout. 2nd, it has the effect of putting the
audience in the mindset of the characters, making us feel inflamed and
unbalanced just like the characters.
3rd, such dialogue might
have been ruined by another cast, or perhaps the same cast under a
different director, but that isn't the case because Paul Thomas Anderson
always knows how to work with actors and gets the best performances
from them- from Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano in "There will be blood"
to Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour-Hoffman in "The master", from
Philip Seymour-Hoffman in "Boogie nights" to Tom Cruise and other actors
and actresses in "Magnolia".
Besides, "Magnolia" may be (more or less) a mess, to some people. 1st, the film begins with a narrator telling 3 urban legends and questioning the chance factor in life.
This is 1 of them:
(my favourite)
Then the film has a fast, quite chaotic character intro, with loud music, that perhaps most people are unable to follow:
High speed, long takes, with voice-over, the sequence above and the one that introduces Stanley before the gameshow begins, are reminiscent of "Casino" by Martin Scorsese, but a bit more confusing.
(from 1:10)
Yet, even if messy, this film is brilliant (there are other films that are messy and at the same time brilliant, such as "Before the devils know you're dead" and "Memento"). Paul Thomas Anderson has a clever way of weaving together the stories of all these people and their problems and gripping our attention and intriguing us and making us care. Their lives are not necessarily intertwined, but all of them are distressed and they have similar problems. "Magnolia" is an ambitious work, dense and overwhelming and profound, and an underrated one. Through these people and their stories, Paul Thomas Anderson tackles themes such as dysfunctional families, irresponsible fathers, failed relationships, abandonment, cruelty, exploitation, loneliness, regret, self-loathing, emotional breakdowns, cancer, facing death...
In short, a film about humanity and human problems. A film about truth.
[Isn't it a curious thing that I watched "Magnolia", a film about broken families 4 days after writing "Thoughts on families"?]
Thursday, 10 October 2013
"Magnolia"
Paul Thomas Anderson once said, I don't know when, "... I guess the way that I really feel is that "Magnolia" is, for better or worse, the best movie I'll ever make."
It's 1.15am and I'm watching "Magnolia" at the moment, and I do not know whether I agree, whether "Magnolia" is as magnificent as or greater than "There will be blood", but there are 2 things that are certain now:
That this is brilliant and wonderful film, a gripping and powerful and moving tale, which, more than showing us a story of several distressed people, affects us directly and strongly and deeply, which takes us to that world he created and lets us experience the experience and feel the feelings.
That Paul Thomas Anderson is an amazing and talented filmmaker, a true auteur, a master, the best director of his generation, 1 of the few names that will still be mentioned in the next 50 years.
(Will discuss more later. This is my feeling while watching the film).
It's 1.15am and I'm watching "Magnolia" at the moment, and I do not know whether I agree, whether "Magnolia" is as magnificent as or greater than "There will be blood", but there are 2 things that are certain now:
That this is brilliant and wonderful film, a gripping and powerful and moving tale, which, more than showing us a story of several distressed people, affects us directly and strongly and deeply, which takes us to that world he created and lets us experience the experience and feel the feelings.
That Paul Thomas Anderson is an amazing and talented filmmaker, a true auteur, a master, the best director of his generation, 1 of the few names that will still be mentioned in the next 50 years.
(Will discuss more later. This is my feeling while watching the film).
Tuesday, 8 October 2013
Marty: On films and on Stanley Kubrick
Listening to film directors, especially the ones I love, talk about films and filmmaking is a great pleasure.
1/ The 1st part, a video, includes:
- Golden Globe's tribute to Martin Scorsese in 2010 (with his quotes and some movie clips).
- Martin Scorsese receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award from his collaborators/ friends Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro (by the way, Daniel Day-Lewis is in the crowd)
- His speech (William Faulkner's mentioned)
A touching and wonderful speech, and Marty simply makes me appreciate films even more.
2/ Martin Scorsese on Stanley Kubrick (source):
"When Eyes Wide Shut came out, a few months after Stanley Kubrick’s death in 1999, it was severely misunderstood, which came as no surprise. If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (except the earliest ones), you’ll see that all his films were initially misunderstood. Then, after five or ten years came the realization that 2001 or Barry Lyndon or The Shining was like nothing else before or since.
If Kubrick had lived to see the opening of his final film, he obviously would have been disappointed by the hostile reactions. But I’m sure that in the end he would have taken it with a grain of salt and moved on. That’s the lot of all true visionaries, who don’t see the use of working in the same vein as everyone else. Artists like Kubrick have minds expansive and dynamic enough to picture the world in motion, to comprehend not just where its been, but where it’s going.
Take Eyes Wide Shut. Many people were put off by the film’s unreality – the New York streets were too big, the orgy scene was a total fantasy, the action was slow and deliberate. All of this is true, and if the movie were designed to be realistic, it would be absolutely reasonable to judge these as failings. But Eyes Wide Shut is based on a Schnitzler novella called Dream Story, the story of a rift in a marriage told with the logic of a dream. And as with all dreams, you never know precisely when you’ve entered it. Everything seems real and lifelike, but different, a little exaggerated, a little off. Things appear to happen as if they were preordained, sometimes in a strange rhythm from which it’s impossible to escape. Audiences really had no preparation for a dream movie that didn’t announce itself as such, without the usual signals- hovering mists, people appearing and disappearing at will or floating off the ground. Like Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, another film severely misunderstood in its time, Eyes Wide Shut takes a couple on a harrowing journey, at the end of which they’re left clinging to each other. Both are films of terrifying self-exposure. They both ask the question: How much trust and faith can you really place in another human being? And they both end tentatively, yet hopefully. Honestly.
Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high? There are emotional passages and images and spaces in his films that have an inexplicable power, with a magnetic force that draws you in slowly, mysteriously: the boy’s rides on his Big Wheel through the endless corridors of the hotel in The Shining; the monumental silence of outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey; the inhuman pace of the first half of Full Metal Jacket, building up to its logical, murderous conclusion; the grandeur of the war room in Dr. Strangelove, at once scary and comical; the brutal pop future of A Clockwork Orange; the raw intimacy of the exchanges between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut.
I’m not sure if I can say that I have a favourite Kubrick picture, but somehow I keep coming back to Barry Lyndon. I think that’s because it’s such a profoundly emotional experience. The emotion is conveyed through the movement of the camera, the slowness of the pace, the way the characters move in relation to their surroundings. People didn’t get it when it came out. Many still don’t. Basically, in one exquisitely beautiful image after another, you’re watching the progress of a man as he moves from the purest innocence to the coldest sophistication, ending in absolute bitterness – and it’s all a matter of simple, elemental survival. It’s a terrifying film because all the candlelit beauty is nothing but a veil over the worst cruelty. But it’s real cruelty, the kind you see every day in polite society.
Stanley Kubrick was one of the only modern masters we had, and this final edition of Michel Ciment’s definitive book is an invaluable resource. Personally speaking, I’ve watched and studied Kubrick’s work repeatedly over the years. He was unique in the sense that with each new film he redefined the medium and its possibilities. But he was more than just a technical innovator. Like all visionaries, he spoke the truth. And no matter how comfortable we think we are with the truth, it always comes as a profound shock when we’re forced to meet it face-to-face."(2001)
"When Full Metal Jacket was first released, many viewers and critics were thrown off by the unusual structure. They wondered why director Stanley Kubrick had split the action in half — the gruelling and relentlessly-paced basic training scenes on Parris Island, and the more leisurely but ultimately devastating tour in Vietnam for Matthew Modine's Private Joker and his friends. But then, it's often taken about a decade for people to catch up with Kubrick. Neither 2001: A Space Odyssey nor Barry Lyndon nor The Shining were greeted with approval when they first appeared, and Eyes Wide Shut is still misunderstood.
What's interesting in Full Metal Jacket, which Kubrick and the great writer Michael Herr (the author of Dispatches) adapted quite faithfully from Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers (along with Hasford himself), is the way that the two halves seem so different, and the manner in which they finally converge: two different roads to eruptions of terrible violence. As in all Kubrick films, there is a profound sense of mystery at the core, but he's also exposing a deeply disturbing truth. The shaving of the young men's heads, the physical and psychological punishment of their training, the terrible humiliation perpetrated on Vincent D'Onofrio's Private Pyle, the horribly obscene language spouted by every single character, the callous attitude toward the dead and the dying, the ultimate horror of the battlefield….it's all violent, from start to finish, and you're left wondering to what degree war is embedded in our DNA.
And, as always with Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket is a physically powerful experience. Once you've seen it a couple of times, every cut, every movement, every vista of the devastated city of Hue (recreated in an abandoned London gasworks) becomes indelible."(2006)
"When Stanley Kubrick set out to make a horror film, we were already terrified. Kubrick's films are terrifying enough as it is. What would he come up with? We saw the trailer, a single image of an elevator from which a torrent of blood slowly spilled and blanketed the screen...and the terror mounted. And, of course, as always with Kubrick, when the film finally came out, it was like no horror film ever made. Really, it almost didn't belong to the horror genre; it was like nothing we'd ever seen. But of course, that was Kubrick's genius: He created movies that were essentially unclassifiable, endlessly provocative and profoundly disturbing. And no matter how many times you see them, they remain disturbing.
Of course, many horror fans were put off by The Shining, and I don't believe that Stephen King, the author of the novel on which it was based, was ever very happy with the movie. Kubrick and his co-writer, the novelist Diane Johnson, kept many elements from King's novel, but they wrote their own work, turning to Freud's The Uncanny and Bruno Bettelheim's book about fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, for inspiration. In their film, the horror came from within the family — the violent father (Jack Nicholson) suffering from writer's block and having a hard time staying on the wagon, the mousy mother (Shelley Duvall) trying to believe that everything is okay for as long as she can and the quiet son (Danny Lloyd) with an extrasensory gift called "shining" that allows him to see terrors past and future. They're all cooped up in an enormous luxury hotel in Colorado that's been shut down for the season and where they've agreed to stay for the winter as caretakers. The halls and corridors seem to extend to infinity, like the shots of interstellar travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the sense of space itself is terrifying, particularly in those justifiably famous Steadicam shots following Danny as he careens down the corridors on his Big Wheel.
In The Shining, Kubrick made potent use of ambiguity. You never really know what's happening: Is the father hallucinating or is he the reincarnation of a murderer from an earlier era? Are there real ghosts in the hotel or are they imagined by the traumatized son? Is the son sensing the horrors that will be committed by his father or just projecting them onto him? Few movies create such a powerful feeling of unease.
I love the score for this picture, put together by Kubrick from a variety of pieces by Ligeti, Bartók and Penderecki (it's clear that the music inspired Johnny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood). I also love the visions—the maze, the elevator, Nicholson bouncing a rubber ball across the vast expanses of the hotel lobby to kill time, the enormous golden ballroom, the red Formica bathroom in which Nicholson "meets" the butler. And, perhaps most frightening of all, the vision of an ordinary American family, beautifully acted, who've wandered into deep psychic waters. Kubrick was a giant and I keep going back to most of his pictures, The Shining included." (2008)
3/ Marty's article: "The persisting vision: Reading the language of cinema"
"We were living through the emotional truths on the screen, often in coded form, which these films from the 1940s and 1950s sometimes expressed in small things: gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. These were things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our lives.
And that’s actually part of the wonder. Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life."
1/ The 1st part, a video, includes:
- Golden Globe's tribute to Martin Scorsese in 2010 (with his quotes and some movie clips).
- Martin Scorsese receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award from his collaborators/ friends Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro (by the way, Daniel Day-Lewis is in the crowd)
- His speech (William Faulkner's mentioned)
A touching and wonderful speech, and Marty simply makes me appreciate films even more.
2/ Martin Scorsese on Stanley Kubrick (source):
"When Eyes Wide Shut came out, a few months after Stanley Kubrick’s death in 1999, it was severely misunderstood, which came as no surprise. If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (except the earliest ones), you’ll see that all his films were initially misunderstood. Then, after five or ten years came the realization that 2001 or Barry Lyndon or The Shining was like nothing else before or since.
If Kubrick had lived to see the opening of his final film, he obviously would have been disappointed by the hostile reactions. But I’m sure that in the end he would have taken it with a grain of salt and moved on. That’s the lot of all true visionaries, who don’t see the use of working in the same vein as everyone else. Artists like Kubrick have minds expansive and dynamic enough to picture the world in motion, to comprehend not just where its been, but where it’s going.
Take Eyes Wide Shut. Many people were put off by the film’s unreality – the New York streets were too big, the orgy scene was a total fantasy, the action was slow and deliberate. All of this is true, and if the movie were designed to be realistic, it would be absolutely reasonable to judge these as failings. But Eyes Wide Shut is based on a Schnitzler novella called Dream Story, the story of a rift in a marriage told with the logic of a dream. And as with all dreams, you never know precisely when you’ve entered it. Everything seems real and lifelike, but different, a little exaggerated, a little off. Things appear to happen as if they were preordained, sometimes in a strange rhythm from which it’s impossible to escape. Audiences really had no preparation for a dream movie that didn’t announce itself as such, without the usual signals- hovering mists, people appearing and disappearing at will or floating off the ground. Like Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, another film severely misunderstood in its time, Eyes Wide Shut takes a couple on a harrowing journey, at the end of which they’re left clinging to each other. Both are films of terrifying self-exposure. They both ask the question: How much trust and faith can you really place in another human being? And they both end tentatively, yet hopefully. Honestly.
Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high? There are emotional passages and images and spaces in his films that have an inexplicable power, with a magnetic force that draws you in slowly, mysteriously: the boy’s rides on his Big Wheel through the endless corridors of the hotel in The Shining; the monumental silence of outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey; the inhuman pace of the first half of Full Metal Jacket, building up to its logical, murderous conclusion; the grandeur of the war room in Dr. Strangelove, at once scary and comical; the brutal pop future of A Clockwork Orange; the raw intimacy of the exchanges between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut.
I’m not sure if I can say that I have a favourite Kubrick picture, but somehow I keep coming back to Barry Lyndon. I think that’s because it’s such a profoundly emotional experience. The emotion is conveyed through the movement of the camera, the slowness of the pace, the way the characters move in relation to their surroundings. People didn’t get it when it came out. Many still don’t. Basically, in one exquisitely beautiful image after another, you’re watching the progress of a man as he moves from the purest innocence to the coldest sophistication, ending in absolute bitterness – and it’s all a matter of simple, elemental survival. It’s a terrifying film because all the candlelit beauty is nothing but a veil over the worst cruelty. But it’s real cruelty, the kind you see every day in polite society.
Stanley Kubrick was one of the only modern masters we had, and this final edition of Michel Ciment’s definitive book is an invaluable resource. Personally speaking, I’ve watched and studied Kubrick’s work repeatedly over the years. He was unique in the sense that with each new film he redefined the medium and its possibilities. But he was more than just a technical innovator. Like all visionaries, he spoke the truth. And no matter how comfortable we think we are with the truth, it always comes as a profound shock when we’re forced to meet it face-to-face."(2001)
"When Full Metal Jacket was first released, many viewers and critics were thrown off by the unusual structure. They wondered why director Stanley Kubrick had split the action in half — the gruelling and relentlessly-paced basic training scenes on Parris Island, and the more leisurely but ultimately devastating tour in Vietnam for Matthew Modine's Private Joker and his friends. But then, it's often taken about a decade for people to catch up with Kubrick. Neither 2001: A Space Odyssey nor Barry Lyndon nor The Shining were greeted with approval when they first appeared, and Eyes Wide Shut is still misunderstood.
What's interesting in Full Metal Jacket, which Kubrick and the great writer Michael Herr (the author of Dispatches) adapted quite faithfully from Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers (along with Hasford himself), is the way that the two halves seem so different, and the manner in which they finally converge: two different roads to eruptions of terrible violence. As in all Kubrick films, there is a profound sense of mystery at the core, but he's also exposing a deeply disturbing truth. The shaving of the young men's heads, the physical and psychological punishment of their training, the terrible humiliation perpetrated on Vincent D'Onofrio's Private Pyle, the horribly obscene language spouted by every single character, the callous attitude toward the dead and the dying, the ultimate horror of the battlefield….it's all violent, from start to finish, and you're left wondering to what degree war is embedded in our DNA.
And, as always with Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket is a physically powerful experience. Once you've seen it a couple of times, every cut, every movement, every vista of the devastated city of Hue (recreated in an abandoned London gasworks) becomes indelible."(2006)
"When Stanley Kubrick set out to make a horror film, we were already terrified. Kubrick's films are terrifying enough as it is. What would he come up with? We saw the trailer, a single image of an elevator from which a torrent of blood slowly spilled and blanketed the screen...and the terror mounted. And, of course, as always with Kubrick, when the film finally came out, it was like no horror film ever made. Really, it almost didn't belong to the horror genre; it was like nothing we'd ever seen. But of course, that was Kubrick's genius: He created movies that were essentially unclassifiable, endlessly provocative and profoundly disturbing. And no matter how many times you see them, they remain disturbing.
Of course, many horror fans were put off by The Shining, and I don't believe that Stephen King, the author of the novel on which it was based, was ever very happy with the movie. Kubrick and his co-writer, the novelist Diane Johnson, kept many elements from King's novel, but they wrote their own work, turning to Freud's The Uncanny and Bruno Bettelheim's book about fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, for inspiration. In their film, the horror came from within the family — the violent father (Jack Nicholson) suffering from writer's block and having a hard time staying on the wagon, the mousy mother (Shelley Duvall) trying to believe that everything is okay for as long as she can and the quiet son (Danny Lloyd) with an extrasensory gift called "shining" that allows him to see terrors past and future. They're all cooped up in an enormous luxury hotel in Colorado that's been shut down for the season and where they've agreed to stay for the winter as caretakers. The halls and corridors seem to extend to infinity, like the shots of interstellar travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the sense of space itself is terrifying, particularly in those justifiably famous Steadicam shots following Danny as he careens down the corridors on his Big Wheel.
In The Shining, Kubrick made potent use of ambiguity. You never really know what's happening: Is the father hallucinating or is he the reincarnation of a murderer from an earlier era? Are there real ghosts in the hotel or are they imagined by the traumatized son? Is the son sensing the horrors that will be committed by his father or just projecting them onto him? Few movies create such a powerful feeling of unease.
I love the score for this picture, put together by Kubrick from a variety of pieces by Ligeti, Bartók and Penderecki (it's clear that the music inspired Johnny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood). I also love the visions—the maze, the elevator, Nicholson bouncing a rubber ball across the vast expanses of the hotel lobby to kill time, the enormous golden ballroom, the red Formica bathroom in which Nicholson "meets" the butler. And, perhaps most frightening of all, the vision of an ordinary American family, beautifully acted, who've wandered into deep psychic waters. Kubrick was a giant and I keep going back to most of his pictures, The Shining included." (2008)
3/ Marty's article: "The persisting vision: Reading the language of cinema"
"We were living through the emotional truths on the screen, often in coded form, which these films from the 1940s and 1950s sometimes expressed in small things: gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. These were things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our lives.
And that’s actually part of the wonder. Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life."
Ylvis
Bård and Vegard Ylvisåker, 2 Norwegian comedians of the talkshow "Ylvis" on TVNorge.
Music video "The fox", currently trendy in many countries (it should be noted that this video, albeit compared to "Gangnam style", is not meant to be a song, but a joke, a parody of some sort and therefore it, with its silly lyrics, shouldn't be put in the same league with "Friday" and similar songs).
Elevator pranks from their show.
And here is a fake trailer:
I like these guys. The elevator pranks are hilarious as hell. Proof that Norwegian humour ain't so bad after all.
Music video "The fox", currently trendy in many countries (it should be noted that this video, albeit compared to "Gangnam style", is not meant to be a song, but a joke, a parody of some sort and therefore it, with its silly lyrics, shouldn't be put in the same league with "Friday" and similar songs).
Elevator pranks from their show.
And here is a fake trailer:
I like these guys. The elevator pranks are hilarious as hell. Proof that Norwegian humour ain't so bad after all.
Sunday, 6 October 2013
"Memento". Is Christopher Nolan the new Stanley Kubrick?
I saw "Memento" a few days ago.
The film is about a guy who has anterograde amnesia, i.e he loses the ability to make new memories after he and his wife are attacked. The memories before the incident remain intact, he still has his identity, but the last thing he remembers is his wife dying and afterwards, he always has to carry photos and notes and has to tattoo things on himself in order to 'remember' important things.
That's the idea. Obviously, the most brilliant ideas can also be destroyed if not executed brilliantly. That, fortunately, is not the problem of this film- it has a good script and very brilliant editing and interesting narrative techniques. A great film, in short. I don't hesitate to call it the best Christopher Nolan film and 1 of my favourite films of all time.
There's 1 flaw that makes me not call "Memento" a masterpiece. Several times the leading character speaks the themes directly to the audience. Which reminds me of this article:
http://whatculture.com/film/9-indisputable-reasons-christopher-nolan-is-a-bad-director.php
("themes as lectures" is no.6)
I don't know how it started but at some point somebody compared Christopher Nolan to Stanley Kubrick and it has been common ever since. The comparison is discussed here:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2010/jul/15/christopher-nolan-stanley-kubrick-inception
http://iamtheprotagonist.com/blog/2010/07/25/on-nolan-kubrick-and-expectation
http://www.timeout.com/london/film/why-christopher-nolan-is-not-the-new-stanley-kubrick-1
http://www.mastersofcinema.net/2012/08/critiquing-the-critics-of-christopher-nolan/
And in many other places.
Is Christopher Nolan, thus, the new Stanley Kubrick?
In my opinion, no.
Actually, there should not be such a question in the 1st place. People like to compare and like to call somebody the new somebody, and most of the time the comparison is rather lame. Stanley Kubrick wouldn't be called a master nor hailed as 1 of the greatest directors of all time if it were easy to find a 2nd Stanley Kubrick some decades later. His immense talent is unlikely to be met again any time soon, and he's unique.
[Does anybody notice that Stanley Kubrick didn't do sequels/ prequels?]
In my mind the question is whether Christopher Nolan can be in the same league with Stanley Kubrick, or whether he is a great film director. Having seen 6 of his 8 films, I think "The dark knight rises" is quite boring, "Insomnia" has created no impression on me except the certainty that I have watched it, while "Inception" is admirable in lots of ways but I can't claim it to be a favourite because I truthfully didn't understand what was going on. Among the other 3, "The dark knight" and "The prestige" are quite good and "Memento" is awesome.
Overall, it's a bit too strong to say Christopher Nolan is a bad director (as in the 1st link above), the man's not without talent. He's much better than directors like, say, Michael Bay or Baz Luhrmann. He is similar to Stanley Kubrick in the sense that he makes very different films of different periods and settings and genres. He's extremely talented when it comes to techniques- watch the Batman films and "Inception". But technology isn't everything. It has always been clear that I lean towards Clint Eastwood, David O. Russell, Sidney Lumet, Jim Sheridan..., away from Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson... His films do have flaws, such as his weakness at dealing with personalities and emotions (Batman's personality, if any, is absolutely flat), or his tendency to let characters speak the themes directly to the audience. And after all, what are his films about? He makes commercial films and doesn't go for big ideas. In the end, the films that stand the test of time are not the ones that put lots of focus on technology. Technologically Stanley Kubrick was revolutionary, which can be seen in "2001: A space odyssey" or "Barry Lyndon", but that's not the reason he's acclaimed. Steven Spielberg also makes commercial films but he makes serious films as well, such as "Lincoln", "Schindler's list", "War horse", "The colour purple", etc.
The new Stanley Kubrick? Definitely not. A great film director, 1 of the greatest of all time? I don't know. I would place him below some other 'young' directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, David O. Russell, David Fincher... (even though he has greater diversity and adaptability).
But he surely has talent. I just wish he would make more films like "Memento" instead of those blockbusters.
Now, how's it going to be- his upcoming film "Interstellar"?
Saturday, 5 October 2013
Ode an die Freude
I can't say why this video brought tears to my eyes, but it did. This is wonderful.
[One may ask, what makes me love this 1 video much, much more than tons of other flashmobs on youtube? I suppose it's because I love Beethoven, because I love his symphony no.9- especially 2nd and 4th movements, because I love the way it was arranged that some people looked as though they heard the music and went out of their houses with their own instruments to join the orchestra, because I love the way people- particularly the kids- reacted and responded to the music, because I love the way music unites people (which interestingly fits the lyrics) and because this video is very European and I love Europe. Beethoven would have loved this, even when unable to hear a thing.]
Friday, 4 October 2013
Beethoven's symphony 7 and Handel's "Sarabande"
This is the 2nd movement of symphony 7 by Beethoven:
This is "Sarabande" by Handel:
This is "Sarabande" by Handel:
See, I mean, hear the similarities?
Which reminds me of this fascinating article written about Bach's and Handel's influence on future generations:
http://www.musicanthology.org/?p=5
Which reminds me of this fascinating article written about Bach's and Handel's influence on future generations:
http://www.musicanthology.org/?p=5
Wednesday, 2 October 2013
Tuesday, 1 October 2013
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