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This is such an interesting dissection of a very common trope in writing female characters that I never really thought about before, but it’s so prevalent and so obvious and so fucking disgusting.

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The Sacrifice (1986)

There you go, another film by Andrei Tarkovsky. In fact this was his last film that he wrote and directed while also battling wth cancer I believe.. In the film we witness the night that the third world war breaks out. Alexander, a journalist and former actor and philosopher, tells his little son how worried he is about the lack of spirituality in modern mankind before this. The tone is set.

This reminded me of a time when I was 14 years old and one damned evening I was reading online when I stumbled upon the writings of John Titor. He convinced me on several forum posts that he was a time traveler from the future, from around 2025 I believe. He told me everything about the next few years (it was 2002 at the time) and in 2005 the first signs would become visible of a world slowly spiralling out of balance. Only 1 billion people would survive the next 10 years. We’d all have to go back into the woods and live there, grow our own foods. The 14 year old me believed all of this because of his powerful, detailed and factual writings. ( I was also once talking to a person called Earthsister that told me she was held hostage by aliens by the way but that’s another story ). I developed at the time what I could call my first wave of anxiety. I didn’t sleep for 2 weeks. Only the positivity of the cartoon network cartoon ‘Rocket Power’ could keep my mood up. Everything I looked at, buildings, the city, shops, people, they were all to be drastically altered, destroyed or to be torn apart. Eventually after a few terribly difficult months I found out that the man was a hoax. I could sleep again. This was his time machine:

You could call me gullible, but I think I am simply not surprised to any possibility of life here on earth. I’m happy that no nuclear war broke out in 2015 in our timeline at least, but according to some science there must be an infinite number of universes where famine and war did break out. Worlds full of suffering.

Back to the Tarkovsky film. The main character prays to god whilst the bombs and nuclear disasters are getting closer and closer. He offers god to give up everything he has, to burn his house, his family, even his little boy. Then a friend enters his room and tells him he needs to lay with the woman on the other side of town. Maria her name is and she is a witch. If only he reaches her and has sex with her, they still have a chance of redemption.

He wakes up. Birds are singing outside. Warm sun-rays shine through the windows. His family is as chirpy as ever.

Alexander made a promise to god...

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Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Far before CGI became the Hollywood go-to tool to tell epic stories there was David Lean, standing in the desert with great groups of hundreds of horses, extra’s, weapons and explosions. The film is set in WW1, where the British are very present in Arabia to help them defeat the Turks. The film deals with a slice of history that really did not seem that important back during World War I, but the situations in the Middle East now are greatly due to T.E. Lawrence's acts (the main character) nearly a century ago. This film is both a very personal and a grande epic piece of cinema. It combines them both and didn’t bore all the way through the 220 minutes or so. Wonderful cinematography. An epic of this scale I have not seen very often.��

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The Swimmer (1968)

This film is about Neddy Merrill, a 50 year old handsome man who suddenly shows up at his neighbours swimming pool whilst in swimming trunks, ready to take a dive. He soaks in the sunlight and enjoys the clear blue sky almost as if he is enlightened. The neighbours are really delighted to see him, both the men and the women really seem to like him as he greets them warmly also. He then looks over the Connecticut landscape over the hills to all the other houses. He soon discovers that all the houses have swimming pools and he decides to swim home through all the neighbours pools. 

What follows is basically a chain of meetings with all Neddy’s neighbours. He flirts with the women. He greets the men. Every house he gets to seems to be more hostile and there seems to be more to Neddy’s relationship with these people then the viewer gets to see at this point. 

I think the Swimmer is about the isolation that people suffer through under our material society. The rat race, social structures, improved luxury and pleasures deprive the soul of life force and this becomes clear in the way the neighbours treat dear old Neddy. As the film progresses we feel he has made quite a mess of his life full of affairs and financial losses. He has found no spiritual enlightenment in the American Dream and others also turn their back on him. 

A beautiful film. 

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Total Recall (1990)

Classic Paul Verhoeven. It’s quite beautiful to see this Dutch man’s repertoire and how he made his way through Hollywood in the 80′s and 90′s. After Soldaat of Oranje got noticed by the people from Hollywood he got invited to come over on numerous occasions, but only after being bullied away from the Netherlands after his film ‘Spetters’, he made the jump. What followed is a colourful career in the States where he quickly developed his signature style characterized by all-revealing lighting, intense violence and special effect heaviness. 

Total Recall is no different in this regard. Douglas Quaid (Schwarznegger) decides to go for a memory implant after repeating dreams about mars. He chooses to be a secret agent in this memory implant but something goes wrong during his ‘implantation process’. The rest of the film is a thrill ride full of twists and turns where the viewer is not sure anymore wether he really is a secret agent or the whole story is nothing but an implanted ride. The film is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, just like Blade runner, although very different in style. 

Enjoyable and ofcourse a retro future vision is always funny to see. 7/10

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My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Director Gus van Sant got a great performance out of River Phoenix who died 2 years later in this film. Mike Waters (Phoenix’s Character) is a male prostitute with acute narcolepsy, which means he will loose consciousnesness and go stiff when his stress levels go up. A ironic combination. So his friend Scott (Keanu Reeves) helps him out often, who is also a male prostitute rebelling against his privileged family background. Together they are bound to Italy to find Mike’s real mother, and Mike falls in love with Scott, but the love is unrequited.

My own Private Idaho is about finding a home, and finding a place to belong. One can find it in love, or in living a conventional mainstream life. The couple start out in a drug induced environment, amongst the lowest rung of people doing everything for a quick buck. No perspective often causes a blind spot for belonging, this film shows again what a damaged childhood can cause for the rest of peoples lifes. The relationship between Mike and Scott is what keeps the movie together. There is some Shakespearean poetic dialogue in the film that I couldn’t quite grasp, bit the film itself was enjoyable enough. 

6.5/10

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Solaris (1972)

Kind of hard to write anything about this intellectually challenging film. It’s slow. It’s 3 hours long. It’s Russian. It was hard not to fall asleep. Very hard. It was also hard to extract any philosophical dilemma from the dialogue. I think it was written and spoken in a symbolic language that I don’t understand. Goed verhaal. So if I’d to make a wild guess I’d say that it was about the look for truth as humankind. Sort of like the you don’t know what you don’t know story. This film is not for me.

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Tarkovsky - The Mirror (1975)

So I started my classical film study year with The Mirror by Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky used a nonlinear and unconventional way of telling his loosely autobiographical story. The film unfolds as a stream of consciousness and is full of poems, visual scenes, images and symbolic imagery. Ofcourse I was often lost because of the art films loose narrative. But in those cases I try to just take it in and feel. And feeling is what I did. When the end scene finished and the credits came on it was one of those times that I couldn’t really move much for a few moments. The beautiful and innovative cinematography in this film is even for todays standards intimate, alarming and incredibly strong. Tarkovsky’s use of Fire, wind, water and mirrors really moves something inside, it’s a very visceral experience. Perhaps it has something to do with the evolutionary programming of these motions inside our human brains. We’ve always witnessed these motions of fire, water and wind. I will not pretend as if I understand a lot about the film, but what I did love was the nostalgic emotions that carried all the way through the film. I really thought that the young boy looking in the mirror was looking into a portal towards other times where he was connected with his older- or younger self. An awareness of time passing and mortality even at a young age. The famous burning barn in the beginning of the film made a strong impression too, that long take is one of the best takes in cinematic history. The colours and tone of the colour-scenes made me think of the soft sunlight coming through the window and curtains when I was only a little child, with some glasses on the table, a cat around, some grass, lots of wood. Really connected me to some sort of nostalgic trip. 

The whole film is a visual poem ofcourse, so I won’t judge it as a conventional narrative film, I can’t. We are allowed to fill in the gaps of the illogical film and I’m grateful for it. Tarkovsky plead that his films did not contain too much symbolism. What does everything mean then? To answer this I want to quote someone on the IMDB forums: 

There isn't much to a Tarkovsky film all by itself, I would say, the film needs you to complete the sentence, and without that it's just a tree falling in a forest far away from ears. 

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Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

Amazingly romantic and sad film from director Mike Figgis about total acceptance within relationships. Nicolas Cage’s character is a fallen screenwriter who has a severe problem with alcoholism. When he looses his job and receives a nice leaving package from his old boss he decides to go to Vegas to drink himself to death. Once there he meets the charming prostitute Sera. Ben (Cage) asks her to join him for the night but does not want sex from her, all he wants is a little company. Sera quickly falls for his kindness and unhinged attitude, he is a man that she hasn’t got many of around. What follows is a relationship that is destined to fail, which is something Ben repeatedly makes clear. He wants to die and he is going to. I liked the structure of the film. We hear a deep jazzy soundtrack composed by the director himself almost throughout the whole film. This reminds us a bit of the film noir genre. The romantic scenes between the couple are intercut by Sera explaining to her psychotherapist later about their relationship. This keeps a hindsight perspective and almost tells us from the beginning about the inevitable.  I loved to have this insight in a by gone era of the 90′s. A modern time between our current internet-age world and the 70′s and 80′s with their freedom and sense of adventure. But to really not try to change one another in a relationship is a beautiful thing to witness in this film, and I understand why it’s considered a classic.

Spoiler: The performance of Sera the prostiture portrayed by Elisabeth Shue is phenomenal and it makes me think that she is the protagonist of the film. She is leaving las vegas trough to the kindness and acceptance of Ben who entered her life. She transforms, she is believable, even when she seems way to beautiful and charismatic to be a prostitute, and is enigmatic. 

7/10

[tomgeraedts]

Student of film.

I made a list. It’s time. I’m 28 years old now, I think I’m ripe to see a lot of classical movies that I’ve been waiting to see. http://www.imdb.com/list/edit?list_id=ls062037775

This is the list. I will watch one of these classic cinematic pieces every week. I will write about them, do a little research about them beforehand, and put my thoughts right here on the blog. 

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us, over time, passing by. 

motion by the glitch

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Ghibli Art 1

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Spotlight (2015)

Great momentum, great buildup, great acting. Just watched two films today, first I started with ‘Brooklyn’ Then ‘Spotlight’, both 2015, which one the oscar this year for best film. I was surprised by the difference in acting quality. In the former you could noticeable tell peolpe were almost reading from a piece of paper they’d studies. I will hold the director accountable for that, not the actors. I suppose also editing has a large part in this. We need to see initiation, hesitation before response, facial emotions, even when it is based in the 50′s. Especially when it is based in the 50′s. People did not have hearts of ice then, which we get to see so often in films. The stiffness is laughable.  Anyways, the film tells us about a story that the Boston Globe ran around 2002 on the sexual abuse within churches in Boston. They had to swim up-stream a lot on this one, and they get to go head to head with the ‘system’, or the establishment. it’s a very interesting theme in this time of transparency where political motivations are becoming clear through us through the internet. I thought the acting was great, we could definitely feel the motivation and emotional response of the main characters on the event happening. 8/10

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In the mood for Love (2000)

Finally got the chance to watch this work by the director Kar Wai Wong, famous for the films Chungking Express which I’ve seen before. This tragedy follows 2 people very close-by in their struggles. They are neighbours and soon after moving in find out that their wife/husband are seeing each other because they always seem to be away at the same moments. Their partners are cheating on them. First they practice with one another to see what could have instigated this happening, and how would they respond when they would face their life partners with their behaviour. 

The film is a very close-by character study of the two people and how they relate to one another. Culturally this film is very different from a Western movie and we see how delicate and conservative the relationships are compared to here in Europe. There is much more respect for the opinion of the elderly for example (their landlords) and the connection between one another is being treated in a very fragile way. They don’t want to be like ‘them’. Or do they. 

Cinematographically the film is shot with lots of close-ups and almost no big wide establishing shots. This is in the beginning of the film a little confusing, but you almost only see the main 2 characters on the screen. Simple story. The director is famous for his splashed of colour but uses his cinematic language and signature quite sporadically in this piece. I felt that I wanted to see a little more of the evolving love relationship and a little more passion there, but ofcourse the unconsumated relationship is exactly the point. The characters don’t give in to their passion but they do what they think is the right thing. Which might cause a lifelong heart-ache, just because they trust on that whatever happened before the way it did, is the right thing. 

Makes me think of love relationships in our own life and how coincidence and conventions play a part in who we end up with, and it makes us aware that we should try and follow our heart a little more often. 

7.7/10

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Une femme est une femme (dir. by Jean-Luc Godard, 1961)

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Hyenas (1992)

Dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty

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New video from my hand