#bolivian films

[a-pint-of-j-and-b]

The Secret Nation (La Nación Clandestina) | Jorge Sanjinés | 1989 | Bolivia

[hividsmarttv]

Bolivian Movies

The Bolivian movie industry may not be as well-known as some of the bigger players in the global film market, but the country has produced some notable films and actors over the years.

Famous Names & Films

One of the most famous Bolivian actors is Reynaldo Pacheco, who starred in the 2007 film "La Teta Asustada" ("The Milk of Sorrow"), directed by Peruvian filmmaker Claudia Llosa. The film was a critical and commercial success and won the Golden Bear at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival. Pacheco has also appeared in several American films, including "Our Brand Is Crisis" and "The Dark Knight Rises."

Another Bolivian actor who has made a name for himself is Juan Carlos Aduviri, who starred in the 2010 film "Even the Rain" ("También la lluvia"), which was directed by Spanish filmmaker Icíar Bollaín. The film was an international success and won several awards, including the Goya Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Film Studios Bolivia

In terms of film studios, Bolivia has a relatively small industry, with only a handful of production companies. One of the most important is Cinenómada, which was founded in 2007 and has produced several award-winning films, including "Los Viejos" ("The Old Ones") and "El Corazón de Jesús" ("The Heart of Jesus").

Movie Snacks

When it comes to food, Bolivians enjoy a wide variety of snacks and treats at the movies. One popular option is popcorn, which is usually served with salt and butter, but can also be found in sweet flavors like caramel or chocolate.

Another popular snack is chicha, a fermented corn drink that is sweetened with sugar and flavored with cinnamon or other spices. It is often sold in plastic bags or bottles and is a refreshing choice for a movie beverage. Another popular drink is api, a hot beverage made from purple corn, cinnamon, and cloves, often served with a slice of cheese.

In addition to these drinks, Bolivians also enjoy traditional snacks like salteñas and tucumanas. These are baked pastries filled with meat and vegetables, similar to empanadas, and are often eaten as a mid-morning or mid-afternoon snack. In movie theaters, they are sold alongside other savory snacks like chicharrón, which is deep-fried pork, and bolitas de queso, which are small cheese balls.

Other common snacks include chicharrón (deep-fried pork), salteñas (a type of empanada filled with meat and vegetables), and tucumanas (similar to salteñas but with a different filling).

Overall, while the Bolivian movie industry may not be as well-known as some of its counterparts, it has produced some notable films and actors and continues to grow and develop. Keep an eye out for this rising star.

[andeanbeauties]

apparently there's a new movie out called utama!! i have really no clue what it's about but it takes place in bolivia, and it says it's available in spanish and quechua but I'm not entirely sure how much of the film is in quechua so i just thought I'd share ❣

Sulpayki!! Thank you for sharing! I didn't know about this movie being made or being released. After watching the trailer, I cannot wait to watch it! :) I am sure it will be a film that moves me deeply.

Synopsis: In the Bolivian highlands, an elderly Quechua couple has been living the same daily life for years. During an uncommonly long drought, Virginio and his wife (Sisa) face a dilemma: resist or be defeated by the environment and time itself.

[whatevergreen]

Blood of the Condor (Yawar Mallku), (1969), film poster. (director: Jorge Sanjinés)

"Ignacio (Marcelino Yanahuaya), the proud chief of a tribe of Quechua natives in remote Andean Bolivia, discovers that his wife cannot bear children. Like the other women of their village, she has been secretly sterilized against her will at an obstetric clinic operated by a purportedly beneficial aid group from the United States, with the covert help of the Bolivian government. Ignacio gathers the men of his tribe to exact revenge and bring justice to his people."

The story, which was based on accounts by indigenous people to Jorge Sanjines, provoked a public outcry which led to a government investigation about the Peace Corps' actions in Bolivia, ending in their expulsion from the country.

Part of an interesting albeit slightly flawed review on IMDB:

"... Molly Geidel, author of, "Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties" found documents decades later clearly showing that the Bolivia Peace Corps director and volunteers with the agency, inserted IUDs in indigenous Aymara women at the time, despite not always having medical credentials and not being able to communicate well with the women.

So, it would seem that it wasn't the large-scale premeditated sterilization of a people that this film would have you believe (that is debatable), but none-the-less, an incredibly problematic policy practiced by the U.S. Peace Corps. It's not a long walk from nonconsensual contraception to accusations of population control. But the true story gets more complicated.

Long after this movie was released, a 2002 report by Peruvian Health Minister Fernando Carbone suggested that the president of neighboring Peru, all around asshole Alberto Fujimor, was involved in the forced sterilizations of up to 300,000 Quechua and Aymara women between 1996 and 2000 as part of a population control program called "Voluntary Surgical Contraception".

The United Nations and other international aid agencies supported this campaign, and yes, USAID provided funding and training for it. Whether these Western NGO's and Orgs were told that it was a voluntary family planning program (as the title suggested) or they knew it was a crime against humanity, I can't say.

The point is, the conspiracy theories this film uses to push its political agenda are based on either an eventual truth, or an ongoing truth that we simply don't have the full reportage of. So the movie's anger is prophetic or timely, but regardless, righteous."

Source:

[amber-tortoiseshell]

Hey did you hear we got the first ever footage of the Amazon/tropical weasel/Mustela africana two weeks ago?????

I didn't know this, it's so cool!

[theculturedmarxist]

Movie poster by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko for Ernesto (2017)

The first film in forty years to be co-produced by Cuba and Japan, it recounts the story of Freddy Maymura Hurtado who was a Bolivian man of Japanese descent. He joined the freedom fighters lead by Che Guevara in 1966 and was martyred at the age of twenty five. Aiming to rid his world of injustice and the gap between the rich and powerful and the rest of us the inspiring film reminds the viewer of the need for living with a purpose. Ernesto means 'serious,' but was also Che Guevara's first name.

[snooganshq]

.｡*ﾟ+.*.｡ STEPHANIE BEATRIZ GIF PACK

HALF MAGIC ( 2018 ) • 270x151 • 282 GIFS

click on the source link below and you’ll be led to a gif pack of stephanie beatriz in half magic ( 2018 ) ! stephanie beatriz is a bisexual woman of colombian, bolivian and caucasian descent and she is considered almost legally blind, so please cast accordingly ! she was thirty-four years old at the time of shooting this film. i made these from scratch, so please be sure to follow our rules + please like / reblog if you use, it would be greatly appreciated !! 

tw; kissing.

[justforbooks]

Raquel Welch, who has died aged 82, had only three lines as Loana in the 1966 film fantasy One Million Years BC but attained sex-symbol status from the role, in which she was dressed in a fur-lined bikini. The image made its imprint in popular culture and the publicity poster sold millions. The feminist critic Camille Paglia described the American actor’s depiction as “a lioness – fierce, passionate and dangerously physical”.

The tale of cavepeople coexisting with dinosaurs was Welch’s breakthrough film – and the beginning of a largely unsuccessful battle she waged to be taken seriously as an actor. When she arrived on set, she told the director, Don Chaffey, she had been thinking about her scene. She recalled his response as: “Thinking? What do you mean you’ve been thinking? Just run from this rock to that rock – that’s all we need from you.”

Ursula Andress, who had emerged from the sea in another famous bikini for the 1962 James Bond film Dr No, had turned down the role of Loana. It went to Welch, on contract to 20th Century Fox, when the American studio agreed to hire her out to the British company Hammer Films.

Welch had to contend with critics who believed her looks to count for more than any acting ability she possessed. It was true that the film was pure kitsch and noteworthy only for Ray Harryhausen’s remarkable special effects with stop-motion animation creatures – and for making Welch a star.

Nevertheless, Welch later showed her aptitude for comedy when she played Constance, the French queen’s married seamstress in love with Michael York’s D’Artagnan, in the 1973 swashbuckler The Three Musketeers, directed by Richard Lester. The performance won her a Golden Globe best actress award and she reprised the part in The Four Musketeers: Milady’s Revenge (1974).

She increasingly took roles on television and worked up an act as a nightclub singer that she took across the US. She showed her performing mettle when she made her Broadway stage debut, taking over from Lauren Bacall in the musical Woman of the Year at the Palace theatre (1981-83). In an updating of the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy 1942 movie of the same title, she gave a show-stopping performance as the TV news personality Tess Harding.

“When she makes her first appearance in a low-cut gold lamé gown, her attributes can be seen all the way to the mezzanine,” wrote the New York Times critic Mel Gussow, unable to ignore what Welch brought to the stage visually. “It would be inaccurate to say that Miss Welch is a better actress than Miss Bacall, but certainly at this stage of her career she is a more animated musical personality.”

Around that time, Welch said: “I have exploited being a sex symbol and I have been exploited as one. I wasn’t unhappy with the sex goddess label. I was unhappy with the way some people tried to diminish, demean and trivialise anything I did professionally. But I didn’t feel that from the public.”

She was born Jo-Raquel Tejada in Chicago, Illinois, the first of three children, to Josephine (nee Hall) and Armando Tejada. Her father, an aeronautical engineer, was Bolivian. When Raquel was two, the family moved to San Diego, California, and, five years later, she joined the city’s junior theatre, attached to the city’s Old Globe, as well as starting ballet classes.

She said her father was volatile and terrifying, and she never saw any tenderness between her parents. One escape from this unsettled childhood came through putting on plays in the garage for friends and neighbours, using bedspreads for curtains.

On leaving La Jolla high school, San Diego, in 1958, she won a scholarship to study theatre arts at San Diego state college, but dropped out after a year to marry James Welch and became a weather presenter on KFMB, a San Diego television station.

After giving birth to two children, Damon and Tahnee, she left her husband, intending to follow her acting ambitions in New York. In the event, she worked as a model and cocktail waiter in Dallas, Texas, before moving to Los Angeles.

She was screen-tested by the producer Cubby Broccoli, who had seen her in a Life magazine photo-spread, for a part in the 1965 Bond film Thunderball, and signed up by 20th Century Fox. But a technicality involving start dates and contract options ruled out the Bond film and she was cast in Fantastic Voyage (1966), a big-budget sci-fi submarine saga, clad in a wetsuit.

After One Million Years BC, Welch – again in a bikini – played Lilian Lust, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, alongside Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Bedazzled (1967), a comedy irreverently resetting the Faust legend in 1960s swinging London.

Burt Reynolds and Jim Brown were the stars when she brandished a shotgun in the 1969 western 100 Rifles – another action role. But Welch made clear to the director, Tom Gries, that she would not be following his instruction to run naked through the desert with the weapon. She also disregarded attempts to get her to shower under a water tower minus her shirt.

She returned to comedy for the satire The Magic Christian (1969) to play Priestess of the Whip alongside Peter Sellers’s millionaire who adopts the homeless Ringo Starr. She took top billing in Myra Breckinridge (1970), as a transgender movie critic, in a misjudged adaptation of Gore Vidal’s landmark novel.

Welch had the chance to shine in The Wild Party (1975), a period drama about the demise of silent pictures from the producer-director partnership of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, in which she was cast as Queenie, the lover of a fading screen comedian. But she fell out with Ivory over a number of issues, for example refusing to do a bedroom scene nude. “From nearly the first day, we were at loggerheads,” he recalled, “and no professional relationship, no working relationship, was ever established.”

Switching to television brought Welch cameos in everything from the sitcoms Mork & Mindy (in 1979, as a villain from outer space) and Evening Shade (1993) to Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (in 1995) and CSI: Miami (in 2012). She also comically played a temperamental version of herself attacking Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) and Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in a 1997 episode of Seinfeld.

She had a regular role in the comedy-drama series Date My Dad (2017) as Rosa, former mother-in-law of Ricky (Barry Watson), trying with his three children to find him love again following the death of his wife.

In 1997, there was another stint on Broadway, in the musical Victor/Victoria. She replaced Julie Andrews, who was undergoing throat surgery, for the final seven weeks of its run at the Marquis theatre. Variety described Welch as “at best a pleasantly passable singer”, suiting “the costumes better than she does the vocal and acting requirements”.

She returned to the cinema with a cameo role in the romcom Legally Blonde (2001), starring Reese Witherspoon. Her last film was How to Be a Latin Lover (2017).

Welch was married and divorced four times. She is survived by Damon and Tahnee, and by her brother, Jimmy.

🔔 Raquel Welch (Jo-Raquel Tejada), actor, born 5 September 1940; died 15 February 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[heavenboy09]

15 YEARS AGO TODAY ON NOVEMBER 14TH, 2008

FROM METRO GOLDWYN MAYER

& COLOMBIA PICTURES PRESENTS

THE 2ND CHAPTER OF THE LONG LASTING SECRET SPY 🕵️‍♂️ AGENT MOVIE / INTERNATIONAL ICON OF ESPIONAGE 🔫 OF ALL TIMES

IN THIS REBOOTED FRANCHISE

AFTER THE 1ST ENTRY OF THE MAN WITH A LICENSE TO KILL 🕵️‍♂️🔫🩸

FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF VESPER LYND

JAMES BOND 🕵️‍♂️

MAKES HIS NEXT MISSION PERSONAL......

THE HUNT FOR THOSE WHO BLACKMAILED HIS LOVER LEADS HIM TO HALF WAY AROUND THE WORLD TO

A RUTHLESS BUSINESSMAN NAMED DOMINIC GREENE

A KEY PLAYER IN THE ORGANIZATION WHICH COERCED VESPER.

BOND LEARNS THAT GREENE IS PLOTTING TO GAIN TOTAL CONTROL OF A VITAL NATURAL RESOURCE, AND HE MUST NAVIGATE A MINEFIELD OF DANGER AND TREACHERY TO FOIL THE PLAN.

WHILE STILL CONSIDERING TO WORK ALONE ON THIS QUEST FOR VENGEANCE

HE WILL BE AIDED BY A FEW ALLIES HERE & THERE

& HE WILL FIND REGETS & DEATH AT EVERY STEP OF THE WAY

AIDING HIM IS FORMER ASSOCIATE OF MI6 WHO IS NOW WRONGFULLY BURNED BY BOND HIMSELF

A CIA AGENT FROM LANGLEY WHO HELPED BOND IN HIS LAST MISSION

& A LOST & ANGERED BOLIVIAN WOMAN, EX BOLIVIAN INTELLIGENCE ON A QUEST FOR VENGEANCE HERSELF

GOES BY THE NAME, CAMILLE MONTES

BOTH HER & JAMES HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON

REVENGE 🩸

BUT WHAT JAMES & CAMILLE WILL FIND WILL NOT BE SOMETHING TO HEAL THEIR WOUNDS OF PAIN.

BUT TO MAKE THEM UNDERSTAND THAT

EVERY PAST MISTAKE HAS A REASON TO AFFECT THOSE THAT STILL LIVE ON, WHILE OTHERS FADE AWAY.

THE REASON IS NOT VENGEANCE

BUT SOLACE ....

A SECRET ORGANIZATION IS BEHIND ALL THE STRINGS LEADING BOND TO HIS MOMENT OF DESTRUCTIVE RAGE.

THE QUANTUM ORGANIZATION 🔎

THEY WILL WISH THEY NEVER MESSED WITH HIM......

METRO GOLDWYN MAYER & COLOMBIA PICTURES PRESENTS

A MARC FORSTER FILM 🎥

DANIEL CRAIG

IS

IAN FLEMING'S

JAMES

BOND

& OLGA KURYLENKO

IN

007 : QUANTUM OF SOLACE

HAPPY 15TH ANNIVERSARY TO METRO GOLDWYN MAYER'S & COLOMBIA PICTURES

007 : QUANTUM OF SOLACE #007QuantumOfSolace #007 #JamesBond #CamilleMontes #DanielCraig #OlgaKurylenko

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this week (#169):

3 by forgotten [re-discovered?] Turkish director, Metin Erksan:

🍿  Dry Summer, a mesmerizing 1964 Turkish masterpiece I never heard of before. It tells of a greedy peasant who refuses to share the water on his field with his neighbors, as well as his scheme to steal his younger brother's new bride. (Photo Above). A rustic tragedy featuring one of the most insidious screen villains ever. Highly recommended. 9/10.

It was championed and restored by Martin Scorsese's 'World Cinema Project'. (I'm going to start chewing through their list of preserved classics from around the world.)

🍿 Time to love (1965) is a fetishistic, probably-symbolic, melodrama about a poor house painter who falls in love with a wall portrait of a woman, but who can't or won't love the real person. Lots of brooding while heavy rains keep pouring down, and traditional oud music drones on. Strikingly beautiful black and white cinematography elevates this strange soap opera into something that Antonioni could have shot.

🍿 "May Allah's mercy be upon her! May Allah's mercy be upon her! May Allah's mercy be upon her!"

In 1974 Erksan directed the cheesy Seytan ("Satan"), a plagiarized, unauthorized Turkish rip-off of 'The Exorcist'. It was a schlocky, nearly a shot-by-shot copy, and included the blood spurting, head spinning, cursing, stairs, a young actress that looked strikingly like Linda Blair, and even extensive use of Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells'. But it eliminated the Catholic element and had none of the superb decisions of the William Friedkin's version. 1/10.

🍿  

Agnès Varda's deceivingly blissful drama, Le Bonheur. Exquisite, subversive and beautifully simple, about an uncomplicated man who's completely happy with his idyllic life, his loving wife and two little children. But one summer day he takes on an attractive mistress, while still feeling uncommonly fulfilled and undisturbed. Varda lets the Mozart woodwind score do all the heavy interpretive lifting of this disturbing feminist take of the bourgeoisie. Just WOW! 8/10.

At this point, I should just complete my explorations of Varda's oeuvre, and see the rest of her movies. Also, I'm going to take a deep dive one day into the many terrific movies from 1965 (besides the many I've already seen, 'Red Beard', 'Simon of the desert', 'Repulsion', 'The spy who came in from the cold', 'Juliet of the spirit', 'Pierrot the fool'...).

/ Female Director

🍿

2 by amazing Bulgarian director Milko Lazarov:

🍿 Ága, my first Bulgarian film, but it plays somewhere in Yakutsk, south of the Russian arctic circle. An isolated old Inuit couple lives alone in a yurt on the tundra. Slow and spiritual, their lives unfold in the most unobtrusive way, it feels like a documentary. But the simplicity is deceiving, this is film-making of the highest grade, and once Mahler 5th was introduced on a small transistor radio, it's transcendental. The emptiness touched me deeply.

Together with 93 other movies, this was submitted by Bulgaria to the 2019 Oscars (the one won by 'Parasite'). How little we know; If selected, we might have all be talking about it. Absolutely phenomenal! The trailer represents the movie well. 10/10

(It also reminded me very much of the Bolivian drama 'Utama' from 2022, another moving story of an elderly Indian couple living alone in the desert, tending to their small flock of llamas.)

🍿 Milko Lazarov made only one earlier film, the minimalist Alienation in 2013. It tells of Yorgos, a middle age Greek man, (impassively played by the father from 'Dogtooth'), who crosses the border to Bulgaria to buy a newborn baby. But it's not as bad as it sounds, because he's actually helping the impoverished surrogate mother (who looks like young Tilda Swinton) who can't effort to keep him. Another stark and snail-like drama about quiet people who barely speak, told with the masterful language of a true poet. Like 'Ága', it too opens with a stunning close up of a lengthy incantation in an unfamiliar language. I wish he made more movies. 8/10.

🍿  

2 more arctic dramas:

🍿 The original movie about indigenous Inuks, Nanook of the North, from 1922, was the first feature-length documentary to achieve commercial success. An engaging slice of life of an Inuit family, even if some of the scenes were staged. 💯 score on Rotten Tomatoes.

🍿 "Many of the scientists involved with climate change agree: The end of human life on this planet is assured."

Another fascinating Werner Herzog documentary, Encounters at the end of the world. About the "professional dreamers" who live and work at McMurdo Station in Antarctica; divers who venture to explore life under the the ice, volcanologists who burrow into ice caves, etc. Herzog's 'secret sauce' is finding the most outrageous, interesting spots on earth, and then just going there and letting his camera do his bidding.

🍿

2 fantastic shorts by Hungarian animator Réka Bucsi:

🍿 Her 2014 Symphony No. 42 consists of 47 short & whimsical vignettes, without any rhyme or rhythm; A farmer fills a cow with milk until it overflows, a zoo elephant draws a "Help me" sign, a UFO sucks all the fish from the ocean, wolves party hard to 'La Bamba', an angry man throws a pie at a penguin, two cowboys holding blue balloons watch a tumbleweed rolls by, a big naked woman cuddle with a seal, etc. Earlier than Don Hertzfeldt's 'World of tomorrow' and my favorite Rúnar Rúnarsson's 'Echo', it's a perfect piece of surrealist chaos. 10/10

My happiest, unexpected surprise of the week!

/ Female Director

🍿 Love (2016), a lovely meditation on nature, poetry and cats in the cosmos. 8/10.

/ Female Director

🍿

Françoise Dorléac X 2:

🍿 Her name was Françoise ("Elle s’appelait Françoise") is a fluff bio-piece about the utterly gorgeous model-actress, who died at a fiery car-crush at 25, and who left a legacy of only a few important films. It includes previously-unseen, enchanting clips and photos from her short life. But then is cuts into her and sister Catherine Deneuve practicing their "Pair of Twins" song-and-dance from 'The Young Girls of Rochefort', the most charming musical in the world, and life is sunny again.

/ Female Director

🍿 That man from Rio, her breakthrough film, was a stupid James Bond spoof, inspired by 'The adventures of Tintin'. Unfortunately, it focused on protagonist Jean-Paul Belmondo, and used Dorléac only as eye-candy. It's the first film I've seen from Brasília, just a few years after it was constructed. 2/10.

🍿

Paintings and Film X 3:

🍿 'Painting Nerds' is a YouTube channel by 2 Scottish artists, putting up intelligent video essays about the art of painting. Paintings In Movies: From '2001: A Space Odyssey' to 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' is an insightful meditation which explores the relationship between the two art forms. Among the many examples it touches on are the canvases in Hitchcock's 'Rebecca' and 'Vertigo', 'The French Dispatch', 'Laura' and 'I'm thinking of ending things'. They even made a Wellesian trailer for that essay, When Citizen Kane met Bambi : The Lost Paintings of Tyrus Wong!

🍿 So I decided to see some of the movies mentioned above, f. ex. Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry from 1955. Famous for being Shirley MacLaine's film debut, his first collaboration with Bernard Herrmann, and this being his only "real" comedy. However, the only engaging element among the idiotic machinations on screen were the stunning VistaVision landscapes, painted in true Vermont autumn colors.

🍿 All the Vermeers in New York is my [5th film about Vermeer, and] my first film by prolific indie director Jon Jost. The Scottish essay above interpretated it as a "Charming mirroring of art and life, but also a deeply sad film... The gallery scene shows the transmission of feeling from painting to person, and ultimately, the vast amount of space between them. It plays out the entire drama of the film in microcosm.." But that Met Gallery scene was the only outstanding one in an otherwise disjointed experiment about the NYC art world. The abrasive stockbroker who falls for a French actress at the museum and mistakes her for a woman from the painting was mediocre and irritating. 3/10.

🍿

First watch: Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, an homage to Melville's Le Samouraï. An RZA mood piece about a ritualistically-chill black assassin / Zen Sensei, who communicates only with carrier pigeons, and who drives alone at night in desolate streets on mafia missions. 'Live by the Code, die by the Code'.

🍿

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Scorsese's only melodrama with a female protagonist (? - haven't seen 'Boxcar Bertha' yet). It opens in a tinted Wizard of Oz scenery, and tells of an ordinary single mom who dreams of becoming a singer. Hardly a feminist story, as she navigates between one unloving husband, an abusive lover and eventually bearded Kris Kristofferson, who ends up beating her son and promises not to do it again. 3/10.

[I finally watched it because of this clip of 15-year-old Jody Foster singing Je t'attends depuis la nuit de temps on French television].

🍿

The new well-made HBO documentary The Truth vs Alex Jones. About the collective mental sickness that is Amerika. It's hard to imagine how insane are the crazies over there. 💯 score on Rotten Tomatoes.

🍿

3 more shorts:

🍿 The Most Beautiful Shots In Movie History, a little mash-up clippy from The "Solomon Society" with an evocative Perfect day cover.

🍿 Joana, a beautiful tribute of a Spanish father to his little daughter. Reminds me of better times and another daughter.

🍿 From hand to mouse, a mediocre 1944 'Looney Tune' short from Chuck Jones, with the same dynamics that the Coyote & Road Runner did much better.

🍿

Ramy Youssef X 3:

🍿 I discovered first-generation Egyptian-American stand-up comedian Ramy Youssef. In his funny 2019 special, Feelings, he comes across as a sweet dude, a sensitive, observant Muslim, on a complicated spiritual quest in New Jersey. Recommended!

🍿 Ramy was his A24 TV-series that expanded on the themes. It had more of a sitcom vibes, reminiscent of 'Master of None', another one that dealt with an unexplored ethnicity, previously marginalized. I only watched the first season, and liked how unapologetic he was in having large part of the dialogue in other languages, Arabic, French, Etc. Episode 7, "Ne Me Quitte Pas", starring his screen-mom Hiam Abbass was a terrific stand-out.

🍿 “Where were you when the floods happened in Pakistan?”

More feelings, his brand new stand up which just dropped is dark and gentle. It opens with some dark truths from his friend Steve who wants to die, and moves right into the situation in Palestine.

(Later: He hosted Saturday Night Live this weekend.)

🍿  

(My complete movie list is here)

[archive-of-artprompts]

Send in a film trope and I'll draw or write an OC/Character with that prompt

tropes from tvtropes

All in the Eyes - Emphasizing the eyes by dimming everything else.

Animal Eyes - Eyes resembling those of an animal.

The Bad Guy Wins - When the villain wins instead of the hero.

Bolivian Army Ending - Did they die or not?

Color-Coded Eyes - Colour symbolism through the eyes.

Color Wash - Saturating the colors on the film.

Creepy Asymmetry - Something about this character's body is uneven and unnerving.

Creepy Blue Eyes - A villainous or anti-hero with blue eyes.

"Oh, My Back!" - The pains of old age.

Dark World - A Mirror Universe with a dark twist.

Deliberately Monochrome - Black and white, but on purpose

Deliberate VHS Quality - The film looks like it was filmed on VHS to make it seem more retro.

Disney Acid Sequence - A surreal scene in a movie

Gorgeous Period Dress - A colorful dress to show off the fancy new color films

Hollywood Costuming - When Hollywood doesn't bother researching historical costumes

Infectious Enthusiasm - Enthusiasm sweeps up everyone, including the one who disdains involvement.

Little Dead Riding Hood - Dressing up people in red is bad

Your Makeup Is Running - When crying, your makeup, usually mascara, drips down your face.

Token Romance - Needless romantic subplot.

Wheel of Decisions - A Wheel of Fortune method of deciding a matter.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Butch: What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful. Guard: People kept robbing it. Butch: Small price to pay for beauty.

- William Goldman, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Screenplay (1970)

In a brilliant William Goldman script peppered with memorable lines, the first exchange sets the tone of this classic Western movie. Butch looks around a bank at closing time, chatting with the security guard as he perhaps sizes up his next job.

“What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful.” “People kept robbing it.” “That’s a small price to pay for beauty.”

Right away, Goldman establishes Butch as a charismatic mouthpiece for the quip-ready screenwriter, contrasting nicely with the Sundance Kid, Robert Redford’s taciturn sharpshooter. But he’s also created two heroes who break the western mold, neither justice-seeking white-hats nor grizzled, sneering black-hats, and not as traditionally masculine as either party. Butch is a man who appreciates beauty and art, but doesn’t have the stomach for violence; it’s not until late in the film that we (and the Kid) discover that he’s never shot a man before and he looks sickened to have to do it. He’s a pleasure-seeker above all else: robbing banks and trains are his way to make an easy living and enjoy whatever sinful freedoms his vocation affords him.

Audiences in 1969 were all too happy to embrace the light, quippy irreverence of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid after a turbulent summer, and Goldman, director George Roy Hill, and the two impossibly handsome stars made them feel cool for doing it. True Grit had performed well earlier in the year as a throwback to the genre’s past, giving John Wayne a proper victory lap, but Butch Cassidy was thoroughly modern, a star-making vehicle for Newman and Redford that reflected a need for the genre to turn the page and that feels as much of its time as it does authentic to Wyoming in the late 1890s. With Katherine Ross at the centre of a love triangle between friends, the film attempted to bring a French Jules and Jim vibe to the American mainstream, taking a lesson from the French new wave on how to revive old Hollywood craft.

It still works spectacularly well. There’s an alchemy up and down the production. Redford possesses easy charm, which parries so well with Newman’s smarts that the two would run it back again with Hill a few years later in The Sting.

The pop doodling of Burt Bacharach’s musical score is about as far from a traditional western score as possible, but it somehow meshes with the sepia sheen of Conrad Hall’s photography, which burnishes the legend of these two men while their story is still being told. And while Goldman’s screenplay dances on the edge of glib, it’s lively and sophisticated, with a strong theme about the capitalist forces that really tamed the Wild West.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is such a rollicking good time that it takes a while to notice it’s about the end of the line for its heroes, whose celebrity is already widespread when the film opens and ultimately hastens their demise. “Your times is over and you’re gonna die bloody,” warns a sheriff, prophetically, in an early scene, and the film is mostly about Butch and Sundance getting chased out of America by hired guns and dying at the hands of the Bolivian army. 

They’re mostly guilty of stealing from the wrong guy: EH Harriman, the railroad tycoon, spends more trying to catch them than they rob from his safes, but it’s an opportunity for a powerful man to send a message about who’s really in charge. Guys like Butch and Sundance can handle local lawmen and half-hearted posses, but they can’t fight progress. The EH Harrimans along with the the Rockefellers, JP Morgans, and the Carnegies and of the world - the original robber barons - would make certain of that.

[streets-in-paradise]

“ El complejo del aguayo consiste en que esa mujer que has amado desde niña, que la has olido y la has creído tu mamá, a los siete años tu familia te enseña a despreciarla. Y el dolor que te produce eso es imperdonable. [...] Es muy doloroso cuando te preguntas de niña ¿por qué no la puedo querer? ” 

“ The aguayo complex consists in the fact that the woman you have loved since you were a child, that you have smelled her and thought she was your mother, at the age of seven your family teaches you to despise her. And the pain that this causes you is unforgivable [...] It is very painful when you ask yourself as a child. ´Why can’t I love her?´ ”

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui 

I wanted to share with you this sociological concept from a bolivian academic that blew my mind since the first time I read her. Although it describes a microsocial aspect of how colonialism is experienced in Bolivia through the domestic bonds, it has been ( and keeps being) a great inspiration for me to imagine the social dynamics in mycenaean greece slavery for my Troy fic. 

The relationship I’m developing for the mycenaean princess and her trojan slave is a resolution of the aguayo complex that takes the route of resistance. From my understanding of the theorizations I have read, the expected outcome of this complex ( a parallel to the societal ruling cultural aspect of the Oedipus complex ) is the biological family succeeding on imposing classist (and racist, for the bolivian context) hate through the figure of the kid’s caretaker. Wet nurses in the old times and workers of domestic services in current times are the targets,through the despective attitudes of the family towards them the privileged kids are supposed to learn the prejudices that societal expectations assign to them to reproduce their role in colonial society later as adults.

The painful experience the author describes regarding this comes from the fact that kids are trained to despise half of their cultural inheritance ( because in their bonds with the wet nurse/ babysitter/housekeeper, etc who raised them, they acquire her culture along with their parents’) and, by extension, half of themselves. It explores inter class cultural mixing from a really interesting angle that is still relevant to look at in any stratified society. 

The family dynamics I’m building in the fic are a reflection of all of this, I’m doing the reverse cultural journey and taking the latin american concept to a mycenaean greek context that is part of greek mythology. The author herself, although she points out the aguayo complex is an eternal struggle in an analogical way to how the oedipus one is never fully resolved in freudian theory, has chosen the way of resistance and develops a beautifully crafted exhortation to embrace cultural mixing and bilingualism. 

Now speaking about the movie, Troy (2004) has a strong component of anti imperialist criticism in the way it handles the trojan war. Greeks and Trojans are presented as antagonistic societies with kings that are complete opposites and hold on to different cultural values. I know in reality they weren’t that much different, but the plot of the film builds them as opposite powers in a semi Cold War situation( semi, because previous greeks attacks are mentioned by Andromache in a director’s cut scene) until Helen flees with Paris. 

For this precuel fic I loved the idea of making my invented mycenaean princess be a mixed translator that makes both cultures her own via her own resolution of this societal-cultural-psychological complex in her relationship with the slave woman who raised her. For so, she is not a mere rejector of societal rules for the sake of making her a more modern character in tone with our views. There is a complex and understandable reason for her antagonism with Agamemnon. 

She is not an unicorn person who magically aligns with our views because this is a reader insert fic and it has an identification factor, she is a twisted product of the form the aguayo complex presents in her own society. 

[scotianostra]

The Biologist and explorer James Murray was born in Glasgow, on July 21st 1865.

Murray began the study of medicine, but gave that up to study sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art. After travelling in the United States and Europe, he returned to Glasgow and became a member of the Natural History Society of Glasgow, publishing papers on flora and fauna.

In 1902, Murray was appointed biologist on the Scottish Loch Survey, while engaged in this work, he was selected as biologist and naturalist on the British Antarctic Expedition, 1907-1909 led by Ernest Henry Shackleton) During the absence of the two parties attempting to reach the South Magnetic and Geographical Poles, Murray was placed in charge of the winter quarters, Cape Royds, and spent much of his time examining the flora and fauna of the surrounding district.

On his return from the Antarctic, Murray joined the Bolivian Boundary Commission as naturalist, publishing notes on his scientific work in the region. He joined the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913-1918 led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, as oceanographer in Karluk. The ship was originally attached to the Northern Division of this expedition, and assigned the role of establishing a base for Stefansson and the scientists on the north-western fringe of the Canadian Arctic archipelago. However, after transporting Stefansson to Alaska, Karluk became beset in the ice and sank. Led by Captain Bob Bartlett, a camp was established on the ice at the site of the wreck. In February 1914, Murray, with three companions, left in an attempt to reach land, and was last seen approaching Herald Island.

Any film buffs out there might remember the Scottish character in The Lost City of Z played by Angus Macfadyen, well he played Murray in the film, although he wasn’t painted in a great light we have to remember it was Holywood, just like another film Angus starred in……now what was that called again….

There’s an article about the Shackleton expedition on the link here https://oceanwide-expeditions.com/.../the-disastrous...

[nonesuchrecords]

Here's Bolivian-born singer and multimedia performer Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Chicago expat jazz drummer Frank Rosaly's "DESTEJER," from MESTIZX, their debut full-length album as co-composers, arrangers, and musicians, due May 3 on International Anthem / Nonesuch Records. The video was filmed near Ferragutti’s hometown in Cochabamba, Bolivia, by director Espectador Domesticado.

[jedusaur]

good things this week:

my boys took out the defending champs and then took Dallas to game 7 and that... is a good thing I guess :/ no but seriously they did spectacularly well this season and I'm really proud of them and excited to see what happens next year

the Firebirds are still killing it though! my man Joey Daccord! 60 saves in triple OT! Western Conference finals up next! let's go!

hit 6 months with Steph on the same day the Kraken got eliminated so we decided to reschedule date night for a day I was not busy lying on the floor staring at the ceiling in despair, so we did our date last night and it was lovely and I love my girl a lot

UNCLE'S DAY OMFG

my brother wears red/orange/yellow tie-dye shirts pretty much every single day and he also likes Ted Lasso so I decided to get on video chat with the fam in Chicago while they watched this week's ep and it was nice to check in with them (they asked somewhat dubiously if I always watch the episodes more than once lololol)

it was my sister-in-law's birthday this week so a bunch of us filmed tasks for her to judge Taskmaster-style and I maaay have taken it a tad more seriously than some others >.> I have not received the final points breakdown but I did get to see the compilation of videos and I am certainly a contender at least

the temperature hit 90 on Monday so I got rocket bae's air conditioner set up and holy christballs my life is going to be SO much better this summer than it was last summer

made iced tea and stuck in a couple sprigs of mint from the garden and that was very nice on the hot days

one of my closest friends started watching Ted Lasso recently and in S1 she was extremely dubious that she could ever like Jamie and yesterday she got to the Amsterdam ep and messaged me that she now loves "one (1) little asshole" :D :D

had to make an important phone call about my health insurance that could have been massively tedious and difficult but actually went very smoothly and for once nobody fuckin called me ma'am

discovered a local business that looks like a great concept but the website desperately needs a copyedit, so I e-mailed them like "any chance you guys wanna hire me freelance to clean up your site" and they actually seem interested! did not really expect that, maybe I should be cold-contacting more often

made stirfry with peanut sauce and cauliflower curry and creamy fettuccine and a super tasty cheese board and then used the leftover blueberry-lemon-thyme goat cheese on a blueberry bagel with fresh basil from the garden (Mom's suggestion) and Bolivian rose salt, and all of it was delicious good job me

some of my plants are starting to emerge! got tiny lil baby radishes, snap peas, chives, and cantaloupe \o/

painted my nails sparkly gold and they look amazing in the sun