New Inverted Bob HairstyleWednesday, October 26, 2011
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
The 49th New York Film Festival: Goodbye First Love & Play
So too do the director's filmic antecedents, whether it is Assayas's Late August, Early September (1998), in which Hansen-Løve received her first screen credit (as an actor), and which increasingly feels generative of her entire body of work, or Eric Rohmer's corpus, with the "Comedies and Proverbs" and his supreme masterpiece The Green Ray (1986) especially key for Goodbye First Love. Hansen-Løve indeed replicates the latter's journal titles, its geographical precision - with the film's twinned on-screen maps signposting the foucs, while also tracing Camille's personal progress - and its rhetoric of chance and feminine indecision. Where Hansen-Løve falls short of Rohmer, however, is on the level of dialogue, which never rises to the grace and sophistication of the late director's, even when a heroine like The Green Ray's Delphine (subtly name-checked in Goodbye First Love) succumbs to inarticulateness. Hansen-Løve's conversations fail to live in the same way as Rohmer's; excepting Valérie Bonneton's mother, no one in Goodbye First Love is compelling by dint of what they say or how they express it.
Still this is not to say that the fine Goodbye First Love lacks life or at least verisimilitude, and the characters interest. Instead, it is the tenor and dynamics of Camille's relationships with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) and Lorenz that do much of the heavy-lifting - in addition, naturally, to the seventeen year-old Créton's undeniable carnal appeal - in the filmmaker's latest, whether it is the sexual intensity of the former or the more cautious, adult-coded approach of latter, with Lorenz admirably escaping the archetype of the lecherous collegiate instructor. Of course, in thus dividing Camille's romantic and intellectual compatibility between her two lovers, Hansen-Løve inscribes a comparatively rote and conventional dichotomy - while also inviting the viewer to wonder about the implications of the film's biographical subtext.
When the boys do eventually emerge from their captivity, even as their tormentors share a meal and an abusive crank call, the victimized trio become the object of police recriminations, just as the film's consequent homosexual vigilante fathers, talk about the modern face of Sweden, receive scorn from a well-intentioned, pregnant on-looker. Östlund's Play is a very difficult film to watch, though one that this writer would recommend, not only for its troubling real world-inspired subject and politically incorrect racial politics, but also for the act of defecation that one of the abused youths is forced to perform on screen. As site collaborator Lisa K. Broad describes it, Östlund's is a cinema of cruelty in which the filmmaker subjects his young actors not just to the above, but indeed to a series of physically and psychologically punishing trials that in essence penalize the children, of all races, for the sins of their parents.
However, for this viewer at least, it is even more disquieting that Play may just represent the future of both European cinema and the continent itself. That is, if fellow New York Film Festival main slate entry The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr* and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011) represents an endpoint for both the director's modernist art idiom and a Europe whose collapse he has been long heralding, Play offers a glimpse of what conceivably could follow, after the fall. After Tarr.
Note [*]: As a footnote to the Hansen-Løve narrative, and to bring this account full circle, it may be recalled that the real-life model for The Father of My Children's protagonist, Humbert Balsan, in fact committed suicide following his well-publicized difficulty in working with Tarr on the director's previous feature, The Man from London (2007).
Goodbye First Love will screen twice at the New York Film Festival, on Friday, October 14 at 9:00PM and Saturday, October 15 at 3:00PM, before being released on a limited basis by IFC Films. Play will screen once on Saturday, October 15 at 12:00PM.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
IMPERFECT ME STILL IS IMPERFECT
Ever heard of the word MEIZITANG? Read along and learn its relevance in love and relationship...
Everyone of us wants to be perfect especially in the eyes of our one true love. We do almost everything possible to look good for them, to fit their character, to love the same hobby, to be who they want us to be. Though in actuality there are times that we go overboard. We see ourselves lacking when they already are far more than contented and pleased with what we are.
STILL.
It's but natural that we feel that we are imperfect. People are people. Nobody can have everything. And so we see in the other what lacks in us and others see in us what lacks in them. Most often though, we see the physical attributes. The body is mostly seen when you think of romantic involvement. And so comes diet, exercise and all those other slimming options available in the market. Meizitang Diet is among the popular ones that most people lean to when they are in need of a lift in their weighing scale. This slimming capsule is said to help in reducing fat tissue. It accelerate fat metabolism and reduce absorption of fatty acids in the intestine. From the very name Meizitang you would know that it is Chinese in origin. Yes, t is composed of natural herbs but be wary that they also has side effects that can be harmful especially to pregnant women, infants, children under 18 years, those over 65 years old, hypertensives, suffering from heart ailments/cardiovascular disease, kidney and liver failure. As always, we seek professional guidance and consult before intake of any drug/medication.
In the eyes of a love one, you will always be perfect no matter the imperfections. But you can be a little vain or inclined to health to want to lose excess weight. And if you need to...why not use Meizitang if your doctor agrees?
MARRY YOUR FRIEND
"If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love."
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Monday, October 10, 2011
The 49th New York Film Festival: Pina
Shot in sparkling high-definition 3D, Wim Wender’s Pina (2011), a warm, engaging, and ingenious tribute to the late, German choreographer Pina Baucsh, cultivates a sense of immediacy and bodily presentness that seems entirely suited to the subject matter. In this respect, Pina has much in common with Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), which seeks to make unfathomably ancient cave-paintings accessible to only a few scientists and researchers available to the average cinema-goer. Unlike Herzog – whose musings and preoccupations color and frequently overshadow his spectators’ experience of the Chauvet caves – Wenders carefully effaces his distinctive authorial voice, in order to bring Pina’s unique artistic vision to the fore.On the whole, the film consists of a series of performance sequences interspersed with brief statements by each of the featured dancers, who intone Bausch’s name with the same hushed reverence. These talking-head inserts are presented as disembodied monologues over screen-test-like shots of their faces; the lack of synchronized dialogue lends the interviews a dreamlike quality that allows them to merge more-or-less seamlessly with the dance sequences. Pina, herself, is featured in a series of black-and-white video inserts that are projected within the space of the film; in a few instances, she appears as a spectral superimposition whirling on an empty stage.
While the film’s personal portrait of Pina Baush tends to canonize rather than humanize or demystify, it nonetheless provides an illuminating introduction to her work. As represented in Pina, Bauch’s choreography is high concept, physically demanding, and undeniably impressive. Over the course of the film, one discerns several of Bausch’s authorial signatures: a number of sequences utilize repetition in manner that conflates choreography and insane compulsion; others explore the ritualistic desire to infuse gestures with incantatory meaning. Some routines play with stiffness and fluidity in a way that recalls Charles Chaplin’s silent comedies. As we become acquainted with the personas of the various company members, we are able to appreciate the extent to which each routine is a marriage of Bauch’s overarching artistic vision and her dancers’ personal styles and physical strengths.
Wender’s sensitive us of 3D depth effects combined with subtle well-chosen camera movements helps to tease out the spatial relationships between the dancers and their environment and to transform bare theatrical spaces into fictional worlds. Conversely, some dance sequences shot in natural settings are less successful, transforming forests and mountains into flat, lifeless backdrops. One sequence, which places miniature dancers inside a doll-house sized version of Bausch’s Café Müller, makes a coy reference to digital 3D’s puppet theater effect. In a performance near the end of the film, Wenders uses simple trick photography to transform young dancers into their older doppelgangers; a charming moment of cinematic specificity that recalls the hybrid cine-dance form popular in the medium’s early days.
Pina will screen once at the New York Film Festival, Saturday, October 15 at 6:15 PM.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
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