A brief film review: Antonioni's La Notte

I'm finding Antonioni's films excessively tedious of late.  La Notte is by far his worst, apart from the beautiful geometric precision of Antonioni and cinematographer Gianni De Venanzo's compositions. Antonioni consistently overplays the themes of modern malaise. Pauline Kael called La Notte, Last Year at Marienbad and La Dolce Vita "The Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties," and as far as La Notte is concerned she has a point.

Paul Newman

I was introduced to Paul Newman in the film The Sting, but my first time I saw the young radient Paul Newman was in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  While my male and very straight film buddy gushed about how stunning he is in that film, I remained unfazed.  Then came along Cool Hand Luke, and suddenly I saw the light: Paul Newman is an absolute God.

Paul Newman wasn't only an Oscar winning actor, he was a philanthropist, pro race car driver, husband of 50 years to actress to Joanne Woodward, father & grandfather. With a legacy of unforgettable roles such as Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy behind him, Newman also earned $250 million for countless world charities. Paul Newman is an inspiration - his life was one that was truly well lived.

Revisiting Brideshead again

1. Et in Arcadia Ego

Here, at the age of 39, I began to be old. As I lay in that dark hour I was aghast to realise that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died.

The chill bonds of law and duty, and custom.

( Shot – in show, pan across, every one scrubs themselves vigorously while he just stands there underneath the water letting it poor over his face. )

I could bring to my job nothing more than acquiescence.

Disappointment changed to resignation.

Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. When the chestnut was in flower, and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, she exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush that gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously over the intervening clamour.

We ate the strawberries and drank the wine. As Sebastian promised, they were delicious together. The fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.

Just the spot to bury a crock of gold. I should like to bury something precious… in every place that I’ve ever been happy. So when I’m old and ugly and miserable I could come back and dig it up. And remember.

I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable, for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seems to know no bounds. My first sight of him was in the door of Germar’s and on that occasion I was struck less by his looks that by his carrying a large teddy bear.

Now when we met were the circumstances propitious...

{ From the beginning of the BBC series }

2010 Film Diary

January
     2  La Grande Illusion a.k.a  { Jean Renoir } 
     2  Bad Day at Black Rock  { John Sturges }
     4  Cat On A Hot Tin Roof  { Richard Brooks }
     5  City of God { Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund }
     5  Changling  { Clint Eastwood }
     6  El laberinto del fauno a.k.a Pan's Layrinth
         { Guillermo del Toro }
     7  Silence of the Lambs  { Jonathan Demme } *
     9  A Woman Under The Influence  { John Cassavettes }
     10  The Maltese Falcon  { John Huston }
     18  There Will Be Blood  { Paul Thomas Anderson }
     21  (500) Days of Summer  { Marc Webb }
     24  The Graduate  { Mike Nichols }
     25  Once Upon a Time in the West  { Sergio Leone }
     26  The Man Who Planted Trees  { Frédéric Back }
     27  Rocky  { John G. Avildsen }
     31  Patton  { Franklin J. Schaffner }

February
     5  Casino  { Martin Scorsesse }
     7  The Good, The Bad and the Ugly  { Sergio Leone } *
     8  Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
         { Lee Daniels }
     9  Avatar  { James Cameron }
     10  Harold and Maude  { Hal Ashby }
     11  Blade Runner  { Ridley Scott }
     13  Lawrence of Arabia  { David Lean }
     14  Metropolis  { Fritz Lang }
     14  Heat  { Michael Mann }
     14  The French Connection  { William Friedkin }
     15  Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story  { Todd Haynes }
     16  Superbad  { Greg Mottola }
     21  A Prophet { Jacques Audiard }
     24  School of Rock  { Richard Linklater }

March
     4  The Big Chill  { Lawrence Kasdan }
     6  The Blind Side  { John Lee Hancock }
     12  Rebel Without a Cause  { Nicholas Ray } *
     16  Fast Times at Ridgemont High  { Amy Hekerling } *

April
     5  Hotel Rwanda  { Terry George }
     16  Star Trek  { J.J. Abrams }
     18  Ordinary People  { Robert Redford }
     25  Rebecca  { Alfred Hitchcock }

May
     11  Goodfellas  { Martin Scorsesse }
     14  Broken Flowers  { Jim Jarmusch }
     24  M  { Fritz Lang }
     25  Before Sunset  { Richard Linklater }
     25  Punch-Drunk Love  { Paul Thomas Anderson }
     26  Rashomon  { Kurosawa, Akira }
     28  Cool Hand Luke  { Stuart Rosenberg }
     31  Dog Day Afternoon  { Sidney Lumet }
     31  Kids  { Larry Clark }

June
     1  The Secrets in Their Eyes  { Juan José Campanella }
     1  Saving Private Ryan  { Steven Spielberg }

* re-view

Beauty?

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

-- Sir Francis Bacon

You should be dancing

Stop press.  Joy.  Oh joy.  Oh joy.  10th of July, 2010: The Red Shoes is going to be released by the Criterion Collection on blue ray.  Oh joy joy joy joy.  Seriously, it used to be completely impossible to find a clear still image of this film, let alone a clear copy of it.

What Avedon did

My top pics.

1. MARLON BRANDO

2. JUDY GARLAND

3. BOB DYLAN

4. THE BEATLES

5. PAUL SIMON

6. TWIGGY

Holiday in the sun

Our escape to my parents place in the tropics - Townsville and Magnetic Island - over the Easter Break.

The Talented Mr Ripley

I'm going through a two-fold obsession with The Talented Mr Ripley - the fashion, and the premise.

Tom Ripley, like many of Highsmith's characters, is a very credible sociopath, coldly capable of disposing of anybody who gets too close to his secrets. It is easy for him to kill, and the fact that he does so while living the haut-bourgeois life in an elegant French house adds to the fascination we have for him.

Of course we know that it all started with the murder of Dickie Greenleaf, and as we see his life unfold over the series of novels, we may cherish hopes that sooner or later Ripley's criminal past will catch up with him. But it does not, and after several novels I suspect that many readers are actually unwilling for that to happen. Why? Because we are fond of Ripley? That is hardly likely -- Tom Ripley may be charming and urbane, but he is not really very likeable.

Perhaps we merely want his story to continue because we are enjoying it so much. If Ripley had been arrested, or disposed of by somebody he had crossed, then that would have been the end of the series, and that would have been a disappointment. As it happened, Ripley survived his creator, and is still presumably living in Belle Ombre, his house in France, awaiting some author to approach the Highsmith estate with a request to continue to record his dubious doings.

-- from The Wall Street Journal

Bertrand is my homeboy

Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness.  Praise where praise is due.  It speaks for itself.

"Truth, profundity, clarity...

...but the greatest of these is clarity."

One of the most important ideas of the philosophical tradition has been the new concepts and values that emerge from the stubborn reflection of one's old ones.  At the beginning of virtually every social and scientific revolution, there stands a philosopher who not only questioned some idea or practice of her age, but was able to suggest something better.

Nick Cave?

{ Nick Cave at London Fashion Week }

The look

Chorale for the Death of Icarus

But he has wings, and is pursued with light.
    Golden he lies,
and he has brushed the sun's fire in his flight.
        We saw him rise
    from the east sea, a wound upon our sight;
dawn was across his wings, and midday in his eyes.

Golden he wheeled in the height of his morning-mad
    brother the sun.
But is this he, this stone-limbed borken lad,
        and are they one,
    the rock-racked boy and he whom the the young sky had?
Mourn not; if this be not his triumph, he has none.

{ Author unknown unfortunately - found when going through my old poetry folders by Randolph Stow }

Icarus flew too close to the sun, but oh boy was he hella cute.