The Decade That Was: Oxhide Supplement (Co-written by Michael J. Anderson & Lisa K. Broad)

Pushing the shared formal preoccupations of the minimalist-realist mode in contemporary film practice as far as any works of the last ten years, Liu Jiayin's Oxhide (Niu Pi, 2005) and Oxhide II (Niu Pi Er, 2009) occupy an unassailable position on the leading edge of latter-day international art cinema. As incarnations of no-budget, independent DV filmmaking, they establish both aesthetic and logistical strategies for the production of an artistically laudable self-made cinema. That is, Liu has made a set of films that engage deeply with the cinematic art of her precise historical moment, while also offering a template for the creation of comparably viable work under the most profound of restrictions.

Working in what appear to be the greater circumstances of poverty, Liu's twenty-three shot, 110-minute first feature Oxhide, filmed in the director's micro-sized family apartment when Liu was only 23 years of age, graphically magnifies the extraordinary limitations under which the filmmaker produced her first work: for each of the film's exceedingly small number of set-ups, Liu limits her visual field to an extraordinarily small fragment of what is already a very small space (fifty square meters, according to the film's US home video distributor, dGenerate Films). Within these gravely under-lit, static interior set-ups, Liu (a.k.a. Beibei) and her parents, mother Jia Huifen and father Liu Zaiping, playing with notable charisma what are said to be "fictionalized versions of themselves," eat, sleep, work and discuss (at times rather comically) the merits of discount pricing, squeezing into and out of Liu's highly constricted compositions; in most instances, the trio of non-professionals are only partially visible, with a set of hands or midsection all that appears on-camera. In one especially restricted framing, Liu shoots only the surface of a sparely lit desk, with a photograph flanking one edge and a laser print heavily cropped on the other. Throughout this, the film's lengthy second shot, father and daughter are audible off-camera, with Zaiping directing his daughter as she composes an advertisement for her father's leather goods store. Ultimately, the filmmaker gives her viewers a variety of pay-off, visualizing what had been only described heretofore, as the printer drops the newly authored notices onto the ddsk's surface.

Indeed, it is Liu's emphasis on off-camera space, procured through an exceptional reduction of the on-camera visual field (especially in proportion to what is signified off-screen - in a manner that has been eclipsed perhaps only by Abbas Kiarostami's more recent Shirin, 2008) that foremost marks Oxhide's contribution to contemporary minimalist art film practice. Considered as an aesthetic intervention, Liu's strategies shift the core of realist filmmaking from unaltered visual reproduction to the registration and indeed creation of space through primarily auditory means. At the same time, Liu's Oxhide methods no less indicate a filmmaker who has invented a style out of practical necessity: namely, that in shifting the emphasis from the visual to the auditory by means of reducing the scope of what is seen and what is brought into view through the film's exclusive use of a very limited natural lighting, Liu in effect masks (at least in part) the poverty of her micro-budgeted production. Oxhide's exceedingly restricted frame accordingly proves a polyvalent metaphor for the film's - and Liu clan's - comparable modesty.

Oxhide II opens with a twenty-one-plus minute static take, initially presenting Zaiping exclusively, as he forges another of his artisanal purses. Though the frame remains relatively tight, Liu's higher grade digital format (and even an on-camera, adjustable desk lamp) signal material advancements over Oxhide's relative visual poverty. Huifen soon returns from the market - she is heard of course before she is seen - and with Zaiping's present work complete, the couple proceeds to rotate the family's work table toward the stationary camera, thereby producing a proscenium as the surface of the now perpendicular table comes to fill much of the screen. In so doing, Oxhide II inaugurates its own presentational metaphor to stand beside the under-lit, constricted framings of Oxhide, which once again inscribed the earlier effort's material conditions in an equally allegorical manner. On and around this 'found' stage, the same trio of non-professionals spend the remaining duration of the film's 132-minute running time preparing, cooking and finally eating a total of seventy-three pork dumplings. (Their frequent debates about proper dumpling technique prove a source of charming, unexpected comedy that brightens the literally 'kitchen-sink realist' milieu.) While the home-made food items visually rhyme with the leather good that Zaiping is producing as the film opens, the commencing action seems ultimately to refer more to the first Oxhide; Liu essentially offers a negative scheme, in the film's opening as in its prequel, against which the director will work throughout the remainder of Oxhide II.

In contradistinction to Oxhide, wherein Liu's static set-ups mark discrete, spatially and temporally unconnected narrative intervals, Oxhide II presents a single facsimile of real-time across its minimal quantity of breathlessly long, stationary takes. When Liu cuts in the latter film, she most frequently does so along a semicircular axis, rotating to a new vantage on the persisting action; Liu's circular strategies indeed conclude where they first began following the closing dinner. The set-ups themselves extend the earlier work's visual restrictions, with bodies again frequently cropped both above the image and below. Liu's compositions also rely on a very subtle choreography of movement, as in the first film, which ultimately reveals the logic behind particular shot locations well after the cut has occurred.

In terms of its formal emphasis, Oxhide II ultimately trades the earlier work's preoccupation with off-screen spatial articulation (though it is once again utilized in the sequel) for a far greater interest in the narrative possibilities of extreme temporality. Joining Béla Tarr and Lisandro Alonso especially - Oxhide and Oxhide II likewise follow the post-Kiarostami Alonso's La Libertad (2001) in blending fiction and documentary within the context of manual activity - Liu depicts her task in its complete duration, with Zaiping and Huifen carrying on a conversation that at times picks up where it leaves off followings gaps that on occasion span more than half-an-hour. In this sense, Liu's duration permits her parents, in their 'fictionalized' versions of themselves, to speak as they would in reality, as people who live together and spend large amounts of time around one another do in actuality. In this sense, Liu adds to the realist mode once more, in this case within a film that showcases noteworthy maturation from her already extraordinary work in the first offering in the series.

22nd May - Rapture Rapture Rapture!

Okay so the world didn't really end!

I got told the news yesterday as soon as I started making dinner, no offence God but you will wait until I finish making and eating my pasta bake before you cause havoc and mass destruction!

Now, I thought I'd combine posts from my everyday life along with modblog ones so people know whats going on in my modded life ^-^

This weekend has been rather lovely ♥

Its because I got to spend it with this wonderful man who makes my life complete <3
There is nothing more lovely and comforting than waking up next to him, feeling his beard scratch my face and his warm paws wrapped around my waist holding me tight and safe.

We had a lovely relaxing weekend mainly consisting of this!

And...

And some of this...

It was lovely :3 I also managed to get my feet tattoo booked for my birthday! 24th June and I'm getting more inkyink thanks to my amazing bubala ^___^

Now this week I have a lovely training course then after that a 2 week job placement in a hospital yay! Should be funfun :3


Mio x

£1 Million Pound Question - Granny?

Okay so recently I got asked a very common question and it actually got me thinking...

What are you going to look like when you're a granny? Are you gonna have all those holes in your face and tattoos? Are you still gonna be wacky?

 Or..

You're gonna look really out of place when you're old.

Now, people need to understand this as I've had a good think about it and it does make sense.

Your ideals of 'Granny' are these -

 

 

Blue Rinses, Neat, Prim, Proper, may smell of urine..... Either way people always sterotype this to be the Granny image which EVERYONE (apparently..) will become magically when they hit 70.

Now, what people seem to forget (and this is why the Granny question niggles me slightly) is that these 'Grannys' come from a TOTALLY different generation to us.

A generation where piercings and tattoos were taboo, unless you were in the army (even then they weren't that socially acceptable). A generation where Gay/Bi/Lesbian couples were frowned apon and suicides due to that were high. A generation where a woman belonged at home in the kitchen and a man worked. A generation totally alien to the generation in which we currently live in. They grew up in that generation, hence why they are the grannys they are.



My generation? Its a generation of teenage sex, pregnancy, drugs, drink, people happily gay and being accepted and violence. My generation? Piercings and Tattoos are common and becoming even more so. We see them all the time in the Music Industry, Piercing + Tattoo parlours everywhere! Everybody is getting them, some more than others, but it is common place.

So, the answer to your question.

What am I going to look like when I'm a granny?

Hopefully the same way I do now, just with added wrinkles, grey hair and that musky smell you just can't explain.

The set ideals of 'Grannys' will change with time. They change with generations evolving and becoming different. The Grannys of the future, there will be ones who still have tattoos, holes from piercings and possibly still have crazy hair because of what they got in their youth. There will also be normal looking ones. And our childrens children? Their ideals of Granny will change as well to a more open-minded view (Hopefully!)

However the ideal that all Grannys will look sweet and natural is unrealistic as times changes and society itself changes as well. 

I just hope I can be like this granny (personality wise!)

Mio :3

New Film: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) + Blissfully Thai's Ploy (2007)

To add to an already thundering chorus, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) represents one of the more subtle, successful and indeed suitable applications of 3-D technology amid the current rebirth of the spectacle-oriented form: utilizing the augmented medium's palpable depth-of-field and tapping into its higher capacity to articulate volume, Cave of Forgotten Dreams conveys a feeling of the enclosed space's supreme vertical restrictions, while tracing the ample 30,000-year-old figures as they spread across the rippling stone. Though even in two dimensions it would  be possible to glean the genuine beauty of the Chauvet cave's nascent human representations - art attained a level of substantial accomplishment, it would seem, very early in its development, not unlike the point that cinema reached in the work of Auguste and Louis Lumière - the picture's powerful immersive impression, its admirable elucidation of one of the world's most singular places, in both its boneyard present and its proto-cinematic past, would wane without the technology's third dimension. Yet, even with this appropriately organic expansion of film form, Herzog understands that his art remains an experientially limited object as his non-fiction narrative sharply shifts momentarily to a master perfumer who processes the restricted setting through his prodigious sense of smell. 

Cave of Forgotten Dreams sustains its self-reflexive spotlight on the cinematic art form through the picture's concluding passage, whether it is the director's early apology for his crew's presence in the frame or Herzog's citation of movement within and over the interior's multiple iterations of animal form. Indeed, the discovery of a vaginal figure occasions both comparisons between the libidinal end of cave painting and mntion picture representation, while affording Herzog the opportunity of procuring a pornographic form of suspense in the lead-up to his graphic reveal. However, it is in the aforementioned closing scene, the film's "Postscript," where Herzog's self-consciousness becomes most conspicuous and cloying, as the director speculates on the mind of a mutated albino crocodile in his own signature manner - one it should be added that has long since become an irritating elite-pop culture cliché. Herzog's ravings burst the beautiful spell cast by the film's incantatory Chauvet setting. Though it is a misstep surely, an "unforced error" in the words of film scholar Lisa K. Broad, it is a strategy, nevertheless, that issues from the film's internal logic: Herzog's characteristically unhinged warning doubles the crooked little finger of art history's earliest auteur.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams accordingly joins fellow 2010 alum, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Lives, in detecting the origins of the cinematic medium within humankind's oldest form of artistic expression. The latter work, last year's best, will be presented May 22nd as part of the New York-based Asia Society's "Blissfully Thai" series (with Thailand's finest filmmaker scheduled to participate in a Q&A session following the screening of his dense masterpiece). Last night, "Blissfully Thai" opened with a screening from the second leading figure of the Thai art cinema, both in international reputation and on the level of artistic achievement, Pen-ek Ratanaruang. The rarely-presented Ploy (2007), from a screenplay by the director, finds Pen-ek working at approximately the same higher level of artistry that the filmmaker displayed previously in major-works 6ixtynin9 (1999) and Last Life in the Universe (2003) - and in formal territory that is familiar equally to both. In Ploy, as in Last Life in particular, Pen-ek belatedly suffuses an undifferentiated dream surreality within what had appeared an objective, existential present; the Pratt Institute-educated Pen-ek, like the "exquisite corpse" work of his Art Institute-trained countryman Apichatpong, borrows substantially from the West's Surrealist tradition. In thus subverting waking reality, Pen-ek manages to navigate generic registers, in the memorable pattern of 6ixtynin9, transforming Ploy over time (and from set-piece to set-piece) from marital melodrama to soft-core romance to serial-killer thriller.

Ploy's surreal strategies likewise register the picture's broader attempt to manufacture the liminal experience of "jet-lag" shared by the film's married travelers. With Ploy's narrative largely confined to a Thai hotel in the hours immediately before and after daybreak, Pen-ek adeptly instantiates the muddled cognition of the moment; Ploy provides a crystalline portrait of sleep deprivation at dawn, when the bright white light of the early morning sun suddenly begins to blaze below a set of bulky hotel curtains. Pen-ek's work is no less infused with erotic feeling, with Apinya Sakuljaroensuk's eponymous nineteen year-old the primary conduit for the film's inscribed, very palpable heterosexual desire - even as its most explicit sexual encounters prove the products of Ploy's subjectivity. While further correspondences to Apichatpong and Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) obtain in the hotel's corridors especially, Ploy herself seems to suggest foremost the reincarnated presence of Faye Wong in Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994), with a pointed allusion to the expiration date of a romance a strong confirmation of the reference. Indeed, Wong, as scholar Broad has noted likewise, offers a valuable point-of-comparison for the highly achieved, if more middle-range art-cum-entertainment cinema of Pen-ek.

On Modern Romance (1981) & Albert Brooks's Reinvention of the Comedy of Remarriage

Having celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its release this past March, Albert Brooks's minor masterpiece Modern Romance (1981, Columbia) remains perhaps the definitive post-classical era reinvention of the Comedy of Remarriage, even if its marital restoration is nothing more than hinted at as a future possibility in the third of the picture's three concluding comedic titles. In fact, the film's literal marriage likewise appears only in this same set of on-screen updates, with the divorce following one month later - as is stipulated in title number two. Modern Romance accordingly plays as a slightly displaced, contemporary revision of the classical form, whereby the couple's break-up (that is, Brooks's Hebraic Robert Cole and Kathryn Harrold's W.A.S.P. Mary Harvard's) stands in for the sub-genre's defining marital split; their subsequent on-screen reunion - and retreat into California's Connecticut equivalent, Idyllwild - consequently marks marriage two and a second Midsummer's honeymoon. That their second on-screen tour as a couple - one of many the viewer presumes - ends in yet another split, however, gives lie, or at least modernizes the sanctifying break-up and reunion template of the studio period Comedy of Remarriage. In Brooks's later incarnation, the Catholic-coded faith that Cary Grant  finally develops in ex-wife Irene Dunne within The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey; 1937, Columbia) never seems to materialize.

Brooks's inveterately suspicious Cole displays a no more flattering indecisiveness, revealing itself primarily in Cole's unending stream of break-neck reversals. Throughout Modern Romance, Brooks's Cole immediately follows basically optimistic declarations with pessimistic about-faces, whether in conversation with his assistant film editor Jay (Bruno Kirby) or as he monologues ceaselessly at home. The latter passages not only serve to reflect Robert's discomfort in being on his own - while, of course, also facilitating Brooks's unique, especially verbal comedic style - but they additionally set up one of the screen's most excessively deferred punch-lines (outdoing even the strategy's greatest exponent Jacques Tati): when Cole thereafter picks up a date in his ubiquitous sports car, the two sit silently in his front seat as they set out for dinner. His verbal torrent, as such, has stopped, thereby transforming the aforementioned passages of verbosity into an elaborate set-up for the pair's awkward, wordless drive. Robert consequently pulls back in front of his date's apartment complex - changing, or perhaps more accurately, making up his mind - without another word, until he confesses to being unprepared to re-enter the dating world.

Brooks's characterization ultimately proves both courageous and commendable in the very lack of positive values bestowed by the writer-director - and especially in Brooks's willingness to eschew facile growth for his protagonist Robert. Brooks, likewise, does not permit himself scenes in which he is able to demonstrate an intellectual superiority to augment his lack of moral or interpersonal intelligence, save perhaps for his encounters with James L. Brooks's director. (James L. is directing a George Kennedy science-fiction vehicle that that provides the negative image of the Albert's real-world take on contemporary romance.) In these exchanges, film editor Robert possesses the practical common sense that the filmmaker lacks, thus endowing the former with an inherent superiority. Then again, as James L. Brooks's character shares Albert's real-life directorial professional, this apparent break with the picture's character strategies in reality provides another instance of the writer-director-actor's self-deprecating humor. Robert is never really allowed to be in the right, except when it means that the film's director is acting irrationally. The Albert Brooks of Modern Romance accordingly emerges as the most singularly self-critical hyphenated screen persona this side of Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan recasting in Sudden Impact (1983, Warner Bros.).

Modern Romance shares further qualities with those of the actor-director's corpus.  For one, Brooks's film represents a commensurate attempt to grapple with its historical moment. (At the time of this writing, Brooks has just authored his first novel, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, extending this strategy within the current debt crisis.) In the case of Modern Romance, this effort crystallizes in the fundamental, intrinsically contemporary flaw that continuously destroys Robert and Mary's relationship: that they, two work-oriented professionals in separate industries - unlike His Girl Friday's (Howard Hawks; 1940, Columbia) newspaper man and woman - have nothing in common. Second, the very fact that Brooks attempts to remake a 1930s-era battle-of-the-sexes generic archetype shares with Eastwood's recent efforts to renew the screwball form in The Gauntlet (1977, Warner Bros.) and Bronco Billy (1980, Warner Bros.). Brooks's film is no less than saturated in both Hollywood's past and in the workings of its post-studio present.

Finally, and most notably of all, Brooks utilizes a classical shooting strategy that like his compatriot only rarely shows markers of post-classical, intensified forms of continuity. In Modern Romance, Brooks always seems to cut unobtrusively on rhythm. The director introduces spaces through mobile establishing shots that segue into medium two's, which themselves become over-the-shoulder shots and their reverses. When Brooks does experiment with telephoto lensing - when Robert decides to get in shape on an outdoor track - the technique is utilized so that Brooks is able to run toward the camera, before peeling off in the direction of a nearby phone booth in a moment of characteristic reversal. In other words, when Brooks varies his formal strategies, as he does in this instance, the result is a visual joke; film style is placed in the service of comedy in Brooks's comparatively classical (post-classical) disassembling of the Comedy of Remarriage. In spirit at least, Brooks, like Eastwood, belongs to classical Hollywood's immediate aftermath - rather than to the afterglow of New Hollywood. Despite Brooks's Heaven's Gate punchline (Michael Cimino; 1980, United Artists).

FOR RICHER, FOR POORER

We heard these words, some even uttered them already. And the facts of life tells us that we can be on these situations. Those two status however need not be unmanageable. YOU CAN MANAGE THOSE FINANCES. The trials your relationship faces need not be the reason for hurting what you have tried so hard to build. Think back how blissful it was when you were madly in love with each other, when after those months the engagement happened because you cannot wait to proclaim to the world that you belong together, and that wedding...when you thank the heavens that this time "life would be so much better" because you will not be alone. There will be another half of you to face the world, winnings or loses, you have another clasping your hand to share the joy or the tears with.

The same goes with finances. You have someone with you, you are not alone. And there actually is another to continue to push up your hope and ease off your burden. The debt management UK can be there to hold the relationship together. There's no need to stress yourself thinking of a way out of those debts, how to manage it, what is the best way to do, etcetera. What you need is the help of experts in assessing all of them. Financial solutions will be provided, debt consolidation to simplify your finances and the likes, things your confused mind cannot digest anymore. Make it easy on you. Make it easy on your relationship. And anything that comes smooth, with less stress, will not make the treasured relationship suffer.

DANCE IN THE RAIN

Nothing is too weird to LOVE. Anything you do with the love of your life means a lot. You don't see playing tag in the beach too childish, you don't feel foolish wearing exactly the same clothes and stick with one another as if you're Siamese twins, you don't get bothered dancing in the rain...you simply don't think of what others may think as long as you're both happy and that what you are doing is strengthening the bond that you mean to keep bonded forever.

Yes, these foolish things others believe they were were not foolish at all. They are wise things to do to keep the relationship going and to continue to create spark and interest with one another. These activities you do are common to friends, and you are friends! It is a way of continuously knowing one another because as you start of a relationship there are still so many to learn about each other. You want to know the other as deeply as you can so you both can gauge the adjustment you both have to make to be perfect for the other, or to simply know if you did found the perfect match of living your forever with someone who can fit with who you are.

NO ONE IS TOO SHORT TO DATE!

Who says being short is a hindrance to finding someone to date and to love? Definitely not me, nor this short people club.

If you ask me, I honestly can tell you that more often than not, it is just us thinking the negative. We are so self conscious at times that we decide it on ourselves that "there is no use". Even with this height issue. How can you think that your height matters? Well, not to all. And there is just a great percentage of the population having the same height as you do, or maybe even shorter. And there also are some who prefers petite ladies no matter how tall the other is. The body is made to fit, and so does the thoughts and the heart.

Short men is never hopeless unless all you do is talk about being short. Be who you are and your confidence will bring out the best in you. Ladies are not always in for the height or the looks or the money. Ladies are in for the personality, the attitude, and how one carries himself. To them it is sexy being all those qualities you have even though you are below the height you hope to have. And to increase your chances of finding that peace with in you, why not meet short people and build confidence too? Either you date short people like you or if you're tall, date those cute short people many prefers. With short people dating you will find that short lovable one you are looking for. Someone that fits you perfectly! BUT REMEMBER ALWAYS...IT'S NOT JUST THE HEIGHT!!!

BRIDGE THE DISTANCE

It seems that I see more and more family separated by miles stretch of land and water nowadays. People, no matter what the status in life is, goes abroad and stays there to work. And though it keeps them away from their family, they still do so due to the demands of the economy.

"Long distance love affair" therefore is even more common. Married and unmarried couples alike experience this difficult situation. BUT unlike before, this kind of love affair have higher chance of surviving now than before. Thanks to technology!!!

I remember during my childhood, it's snail mail and infrequent overseas calls due to its high cost. In our time, there's the text messaging that travels far and wide in seconds. Calls are cheaper. And the best thing that happened is now you can see each other while you talk to one another. Skype is one way of doing that. Not as busy as the Yahoo Messenger, the delay in Skype is way too little as compared to the other network. Video phone calls also is possible, but for me, it is Skype.

BACK HER UP

Life indeed is stressful nowadays. We live in a fast pace environment, we twirl around a whirl wheel of activities. The moment we wake up until we turn off the lights at night, there almost is no stopping.

Women more today than women in the past centuries are up in their toes with all their responsibilities. If before it's just the family, the kids and the husband, and house chores...now its the family, the house chores,plus the demanding needs of the job to add to the family earnings. The man? Still, as before, just the earning a living, the job. LIFE IN THIS WORLD CHANGED...and so should we all.

In a husband and a wife, PARTNERSHIP is vital. But a woman was made to have a heart of a responsible mother and wife. It is within her to nurture and to care. But present economy demands that she also work. Highest pay is what we all look for today. And nursing job is one of the most popular. And if you show her this wonderful nursing scrubs it will give you that appreciation you deserve. Because these scrubs will somehow ease work a little with the comfort it provides. Free movement for the demands of her job will be less of a burden to her already stiff bones and muscles with all those stress. Inform her of http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/categories/Scrubs/Scrubs-for-Women/, that this is where to buy cheap scrubs and you will doubly please her with the help you are giving her in budgeting finances.

Back her up in everything she does and every pain, tiredness, burdens will all fly away. They will not matter because YOU ARE THERE FOR HER. And together you can have a happy family and strong relationship amidst all the world trials and hardships.