stories.

Some of you must be familiar with the work of the young swedish photographer Arvida, but I'm not sure if you've already seen the videos she's been making and displaying on the blog entitled Stories, which is runned "by Arvida Byström and you", in the artist's own words. I have followed these stories from the beggining, and every single episode makes me look forward to the next one.

Vive le burlesque!

So slick your hair and wear your buckle shoes....

Oskar.

Anthony, bullied at school
Get your own back now you are cool
Or are you scared bunking off though you're a toff?
It's all gone wrong again, you've got Double Maths.

But the teacher's got no control
The boys all run riot
"You will stay quiet or you will die."

Tony, at the back of the gym
Smoke another one, your chances are slim,
'Cause here they come again
And they got you on the ground.
Tasting blood again;
At least it's your own.

"It was to be two and a half weeks of travelling before the Dauphine was officially handed over to France. Marie Antoinette would in effect cross the whole of central Europe in her passage from Vienna to Versailles. She spent a great deal of this time cooped up in her velvet-and-gold carriage; sometimes the day's journey would last over nine hours. Essentially she was a royal package, sealed with the double-headed eagle of the Habsburgs and the fleur-de-lys of the Bourbons." (Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette)

Mélanie Laurent is a basterd.

When we first see her, she's a teenage girl hiding like a rat, trying not to breath while listening to a nervous conversation. She then escapes leaving her murdered family behind, face and body covered by mud and tears. Four years later she has a new name and owns a movie theater, pretty much dressed as a boy, but so effortlessly sexy, she goes on with her life. One single night she leaves the newsboy cap for a birdcage hat, only the cigarette remains, inseparable, as the memories she carried within herself during these years, waiting for one day, for the perfect moment, waiting for vengeance.

Brad Pitt is a basterd.

My name is Lt. Aldo Raine and I'm putting together a special team, and I need me eight soldiers. Eight Jewish-American soldiers. Now, y'all might've heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we'll be leaving a little earlier. We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin' guerrilla army, we're gonna be doin' one thing and one thing only... killin' Nazis. Now, I don't know about y'all, but I sure as hell didn't come down from the goddamn Smoky Mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half of Sicily and jump out of a fuckin' air-o-plane to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity. Nazi ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin', mass murderin' maniac and they need to be dee-stroyed. That's why any and every every son of a bitch we find wearin' a Nazi uniform, they're gonna die. Now, I'm the direct descendant of the mountain man Jim Bridger. That means I got a little Injun in me. And our battle plan will be that of an Apache resistance. We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. And they will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the German won't not be able to help themselves but to imagine the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the German will be sickened by us, and the German will talk about us, and the German will fear us. And when the German closes their eyes at night and they're tortured by their subconscious for the evil they have done, it will be with thoughts of us they are tortured with. Sound good?

*I know my favourite film of the year never wins an Oscar, so I won't even hope for it. Not that Tarantino's fantasy version of how WW2 ended needs a golden statuette or anything of the sort to be remembered in many many years to come. Masterpieces are above that.

"If you're going to be Arabella, then I'll be the director, thank you very much."

Stills from Atonement.

Trevi.

in one of my favourite movies.

in its most memorable scene.

Pulp Fiction

-Don't you hate that?
-What?
-Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
-I don't know. That's a good question.
-That's when you know you've found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.

words are not needed...

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland's 1st trailer is more wonderful than I expected it to be. This film is going to be AMAZING!!!

(sorry for the lame twitter esque post, but I'm so excited.)

Taken (2008)

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you."

I'm not an action film lover, hence the difficult I had to ellaborate a list of good action films when my aunt asked me to, I mostly wait to see films of this genre on dvd, and I either love them or completely forget about them by the next week. Taken fits in the first case, and I'm afraid I can blame it on Liam Neeson's character, a cross between Jack Bauer, Captain Nascimento and Jason Bourne - God, what's not to love? He plays a retired agent who won't stop within the next 96 hours, not until he finds his kidnapped daughter (the actress is terrible, but since she's missing during the entire film...) while showing little or no mercy for those who dared to step on his way. The action takes place in Paris, a city for the first time turned into no man's land. So much fun.

Public Enemies (2009)

There's something about the outlaws from the great depression era that has always fascinated me, blame the several Bonnie & Clyde screen portraits. There's something romantic about boldly grabbing a gun and robbing a bank as an option against a mediocre life. Living a life full of danger and excitement, making your own rules, or no rules at all. Living fast, dying young. After all, that was the destiny of all of those infamous figures from the period known as the public enemy era (1931-1935). John Dillinger was one of them. But I confess I had never heard of him before, not until recently, when I heard about the latest film from director Michael Mann (The Last of the Mohicans, Collateral), a film which creates expectations from the moment one sees its trailer, and God, what a cast. And it didn't disappoint me, not even a bit.

I doubt it will make into my top 10 favourites this year, but it will not be forgotten. The characters may lack a background life story, but who needs it, when you have an action movie that never bores you within its 143 minutes? Johnny Depp (oh, so charming, so charismatic) plays Dillinger, beautiful Marion Cotillard, his lover. The scene when Dillinger convinces her to "be his girl" is one of the sweetest and funniest I've seen in quite a while, maybe because it reminds me of those politically incorrect comedies starred by Carole Lombard in the 1930s. Depp and Cotillard's chemistry delivers the most magnetic scene in the entire film, that you wish it will last forever, and it kills you to know in advance it will happen otherwise, although you can't stop wishing the opposite.

Pursuing to capture the outlaws, it's Christian Bale as the taciturn and enigmatic FBI man Melvin Purvis, who never loses his temper and is overall "the good cop", unlike one of his partners who phisically abuses women in order to obtain valuable information. Purvis has pretty much the same facial expression through the entire picture, but I believe it's Bale trying to be as subtitle and economic as his character's words. The best scenes are those which require almost no spoken vocabulary, only a camera willing to follow every single bit of the action, running fast or slowly. Dillinger's escape from prison to liberty is one of those, but it's actually an intermediate scene and the final scene that breaths cinema, especially the final one, a communion between reality and fiction embracing nostalgia.

Marla Singer

Last night I rewatched Fight Club, after nearly 10 years, and it only reminded me why it figures in those best of the 90's top 10 lists, and how much I love Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer.

"I got this dress at a thrift store for one dollar. It's a bridesmaid's dress. Someone loved it intensely for one day, then tossed it. Like a Christmas tree - so special, then, bam - it's abandoned on the side of the road, tinsel still clinging to it... Like sex crime victims, underwear inside-out, bound with electrical tape."

movies I'm looking forward to see

1. Bright Star (directed by Jane Campion), 2. Los abrazos rotos (directed by Almodóvar), 3. Coco avant Chanel (do I need to say why?). The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Heath Ledger one last time).

Guess the picture - part 3

Different films, same actress. If you love her screen presence as much as I do, this is a piece of cake. Tip: These are Marilyn Monroe's legs.

Answers:

The Misfits (1961) and Some Like It Hot (1959).

Antichrist

First of all, forget all about this nonsense the press in Cannes has created around Lars von Trier's newest film. "Love it or hate it"? Not really. I neither loved it nor hated it, I'm more in between, and I humbly say I haven't truly understood this film, not deep within. But since the director himself has said he doesn't comprehend some of the images he created, I suppose it's not a problem... Charlotte Gainsbourg plays a woman, Willem Dafoe, a man. They're married and now grieve the death of their little boy, although they react differently to the tragedy. The woman can't accept the lost and sinks into depression whereas the man assists her during her suffering, trying to "cure" her through therapy. As she confesses that the woods is the place she fears the most, feeling powerless and exposed there, they move to their cabin Eden located in the woods, a place in the middle of nowhere. Here her treatment will continue, but not exactly in a progressive manner.

In many of his previous films, Lars von Trier presented women as suffering characters, victims of a man's world. Fragile in the surface, nevertheless strong deep within. Somehow it always made me see him as a feminist, but in Antichrist, things aren't quite the same, as he resurrected old religious tabus against the female sex. Perhaps it has nothing to do with the film's purpose, however it's impossible to be indifferent to certain lines. What else could justify the insane behaviour of the female in the film's final moments than a line such as "women have no control over their own bodies"?

The film is neither a thriller nor a horror, and I'd like to believe a certain scene envolving a talking wolf was made as a joke, as I laughed so hard that I almost cried... The images are nevertheless beautifully haunting, especially the ones in the woods, which evoque a dreamlike atmosphere. The forest is so tangible that it becomes a third character, and the gorgeous soundtrack is hypnotic. There are moments of roughess, including a self-mutilation, but I just had to close my eyes for a second. I suppose only moralists would feel disturbed by anything else, and honestly, I don't know what's all the fuzz surrounding Antichrist.

Photos found here.

Meeting Anna Karina

This month the danish film institute celebrates the french new wave, showing a great number of classics directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, among others. Two of these films were introduced by the lovely Anna Karina, danish herself, but living in Paris since the age of 18. She introduced Godard's Une femme est une femme, Rivette's La religieuse, both starred by her, and the recent Victoria, which she directed and acted.

Anna Karina is as sweet and funny in person as in some of her most famous roles, not to mention her beauty. She's soon 69, nevertheless, still a very beautiful lady, who speaks danish with a charming accent, forgetting one word or two sometimes, after all, she hasn't used her mother language in so many years. She spoke about meeting Coco Chanel, who gave the idea of the name Anna Karina (her birth name is Hanne Karen), about working as a photo model in her beggining in Paris, while saving money to take french lessons. She told that Godard didn't want to give her the role in Une femme est une femme at first ("I can't imagine you saying those lines"), about the controversy surrounding La religieuse ("It was a subject no one talked about, not even in private", in reference to the suggestive homosexualism in the film), about Brigitte Bardot ("a very beautiful woman at her time, but I don't share her political view"), about drinking red wine and smoking cigarettes in her youth ("You can tell by my voice", she laughs, in reference to the cigarettes).

She gave a lot of attention to us, admirers or fans, signing autographs and posing for pictures. I never got nervous during the few times I approached famous people, but this time, my hands were nearly shaking. I don't know, it's just that meeting a true movie legend in person meant so much to me, especially considering the passion I have for films. Truly exciting. When she saw the picture I was holding, she instantly recognized it as a film still from Godard's Bande à part. Later, she said how happy she was, for the fact people and even young people still appreciate the films they made so long time ago (in reference to those involved in the french new wave). Of course we do, they're classics, and they're unique.

In Une femme est une femme, Anna Karina plays Angela, a stripper who shares a small apartment with her boyfriend Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy) . She wants to have a baby, but he doesn't agree with the idea, throwing Angela in the arms of Émile's friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who claims to be in love with her. A delicious up-side-down romantic comedy playing constantly with film language, Une femme est une femme is a first class entertainment filled with colour and imagination, as reality and fantasy becomes one.


One of my favourite scenes!