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Searching for Beauty...directors and the movies...
First - a book suggestion/promotion:
My friend Susan, who helped edit Jana Reiss' popular What Would Buffy Do, has published a book, due out in Feb, but available on pre-order from Amazon.com. It's a Wedding Book - or a Wedding Book with Zen Buddhist underpinings. It's called Wedding Zen.
Here's the link to the review:
http://www.chroniclebooks.com/Chronicle/servlet/FStart
******************************
Tonight, feeling the need to relax - I discovered a classic Italian film I'd never seen before on Channel 25 (one of the public access art channels which has no commericals)- it's the 1971 cinemographic masterpiece: Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti based on the Thomas Mann novel of the same name, starring Dirk Bogard.
Peter Travers introduced the movie with the following quote:
"When I asked Jacklyn Kennedy Onassis what her favorite movie was, she answered, 'not sure about favorite, but the most beautiful was Death in Venice.' It is," states Travers, " a movie where the director works on your senses - with visuals and music to make you feel - while ironically about a composer who cannot feel and whose art has been criticized as being bereft of feeling."
The film takes place in the late 1800s/early 1900s during the Italian cholera epidemic. A middle-aged composer comes to Venice for his health. While in Venice he becomes intrigued and slowly obsessed with the beauty of a youth. No, not in a sexual way. It's more as if he is intrigued by this young man's beauty, enraptured by it. The youth is adrognyous and resembles in facial features a young Gweynthe Paltrow or Vincent Karthesier. He's played by Bjorn Anderson. He follows the youth through the city but can never quite get up the urge to approach him. As his stay lengthens, he realizes the city has been infested with a plague and instead of leaving, he remains and catches it. Through flashbacks we find out why he has remained, why he is bewitched by this youth and why his compositions lack feeling.
The film reminds me a great deal of Lost in Translation yet far more beautiful and graceful both in sound and visuals. Also unlike Lost, it appears to have more to say both about the human condition and art in general. At times it feels as if I were watching a silent film with sporadic dialogue. There is no dubbing or subtitles and it is in English and Italian. Through visuals and music the director conveys the feelings of his characters and the desire to grasp beauty to find it and hold it close to one's heart, protected. Realizing at the same time that beauty like true art remains elusive and slips through your fingers like sea foam. One of the characters in the film informs the composer that by shutting off his emotions, he becomes incapable of creating art, of finding beauty within his art, that art or beauty can only be created or realized through emotion - you can not cut off your senses and make it all cereberal to achieve great art- it is the sensational not the intellectual process, it is about emotion. By shutting off emotion and making it purely spiritual or intellectual, it becomes reduced to mainstream. "And what lies underneath mainstream? Mediocrity." (I love that line - someone actually equates the word "mainstream" with mediocrity...beautiful.)
Ah the wonders of Cable, I had so many wonderful choices and no HBO/Showtime or Premium Channels. Tonight I got to choose from A Death in Venice, The Great Escape, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Spellbound, and Pulp Fiction. I chose the one I hadn't seen. Also saw a five part miniseries "Five Days to Midnight" on Sci-Fi network. The Sci-Fi network is starting to get interesting again. Not fantastic - used the time warp gimmick to ill effect in my opinion. But a nice mystery with some interesting performances by Randy Quaid and Timmothy Hutton. Angus McFadden as the villianous boyfriend of Hutton's lady friend, is a bit over the top, but everyone else performs beautifully. The real find may be Hutton's daughter, Gage Golightly, who looks and acts a lot like a very young Drew Barrymore from ET. It held my attention, but seemed heavy handed at times in direction and writing. Was certainly more interesting than The Jury, see![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ponygirl2000 for a review. I agree with her take. Dull. Jarring. Not worth my time.
Also finally saw the newest Harry Potter with cjl on Friday.
Cuarvon(sp?), who directed it, certainly did a wonderful job of picking cinematographers. The play on dark and light not to mention the use of visual metaphor to convey changes in seasons - such as the snowy owl flying into snow, the fall of a leaf, the womping willow's flip of its branchs - subtle and quick. Could have used less fade-to-blacks though, Cuarvon utilized one too many scenes fade to black - to the extent that at one point I wondered if we were watching a TV show making room for commerical breaks. Other than that, the direction seemed flawless and for the first time the CJI effects blended effortlessly with the rest of the film stock - in prior films they had a tendency to make my eyes hurt from the attempt to focus and refocus on the digital differences. All in all beautifully directed, enhancing rather than diminishing the performances - which Columbus had a tendency to do in the earlier films. And we get some wonderfully layered performances here from people such as Emma Thompson, David Thewlis, Gary Oldman, Timothy Spall and Alan Rickman. Thewlis as Professor Remus Lupin probably owned the film. The director did a nice job of highlighting Thewlis performance and heightening tension, while simultaneously conveying the magic and tricky metaphors of Rowling's universe through the use of small touches such as a fluttering of branches, a flock of birds, lighting, and the swinging of a pendlum emphazing the theme of time prevalent throughout.
The script, however, made some leaps in logic - if you hadn't read the novel, I think you might have been a tad lost in places, which I'm not so sure is excusable regardless of how popular the novels are. For instance it was never made clear that Harry's father's symbol was a "stag" or that his father had the ability to turn into an animal - so as a result, I'm certain a portion of the audience may have been scratching their heads over a certain scene in the movie. Nor were the names on Harry's map ever clarified. While it was implied who the map belonged to, it wasn't clear. Making the story a bit murky in places. I think, rather than repeating Harry's fear of the dementors over and over again - some time might have been spent on who Sirus, Remus, James, and Peter were to each other, why each turned into animals and why the map had been created in the first place. On the other hand - kudos to the writing and directing team fror cutting out some of the less necessary bits (such as the animosity between Snape and Remus, which the film alluded to instead of overly focusing on, the competiton amongst the houses, Headless Nick, and all the classes they had) and focusing on the guts of the tale, something the previous director wasn't quite as adept at - often cluttering the works by filling each frame with everything imaginable. Cuarvon amazed me. His visuals remind me a little of Visconti and that is a high compliment. He also reminded me of something I'd forgotten, when seeing a movie - the most important player is the director, not the writer, not the actors - the director. No one can save a poorly directed film. In film - the director rules the show.
My friend Susan, who helped edit Jana Reiss' popular What Would Buffy Do, has published a book, due out in Feb, but available on pre-order from Amazon.com. It's a Wedding Book - or a Wedding Book with Zen Buddhist underpinings. It's called Wedding Zen.
Here's the link to the review:
http://www.chroniclebooks.com/Chronicle/servlet/FStart
******************************
Tonight, feeling the need to relax - I discovered a classic Italian film I'd never seen before on Channel 25 (one of the public access art channels which has no commericals)- it's the 1971 cinemographic masterpiece: Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti based on the Thomas Mann novel of the same name, starring Dirk Bogard.
Peter Travers introduced the movie with the following quote:
"When I asked Jacklyn Kennedy Onassis what her favorite movie was, she answered, 'not sure about favorite, but the most beautiful was Death in Venice.' It is," states Travers, " a movie where the director works on your senses - with visuals and music to make you feel - while ironically about a composer who cannot feel and whose art has been criticized as being bereft of feeling."
The film takes place in the late 1800s/early 1900s during the Italian cholera epidemic. A middle-aged composer comes to Venice for his health. While in Venice he becomes intrigued and slowly obsessed with the beauty of a youth. No, not in a sexual way. It's more as if he is intrigued by this young man's beauty, enraptured by it. The youth is adrognyous and resembles in facial features a young Gweynthe Paltrow or Vincent Karthesier. He's played by Bjorn Anderson. He follows the youth through the city but can never quite get up the urge to approach him. As his stay lengthens, he realizes the city has been infested with a plague and instead of leaving, he remains and catches it. Through flashbacks we find out why he has remained, why he is bewitched by this youth and why his compositions lack feeling.
The film reminds me a great deal of Lost in Translation yet far more beautiful and graceful both in sound and visuals. Also unlike Lost, it appears to have more to say both about the human condition and art in general. At times it feels as if I were watching a silent film with sporadic dialogue. There is no dubbing or subtitles and it is in English and Italian. Through visuals and music the director conveys the feelings of his characters and the desire to grasp beauty to find it and hold it close to one's heart, protected. Realizing at the same time that beauty like true art remains elusive and slips through your fingers like sea foam. One of the characters in the film informs the composer that by shutting off his emotions, he becomes incapable of creating art, of finding beauty within his art, that art or beauty can only be created or realized through emotion - you can not cut off your senses and make it all cereberal to achieve great art- it is the sensational not the intellectual process, it is about emotion. By shutting off emotion and making it purely spiritual or intellectual, it becomes reduced to mainstream. "And what lies underneath mainstream? Mediocrity." (I love that line - someone actually equates the word "mainstream" with mediocrity...beautiful.)
Ah the wonders of Cable, I had so many wonderful choices and no HBO/Showtime or Premium Channels. Tonight I got to choose from A Death in Venice, The Great Escape, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Spellbound, and Pulp Fiction. I chose the one I hadn't seen. Also saw a five part miniseries "Five Days to Midnight" on Sci-Fi network. The Sci-Fi network is starting to get interesting again. Not fantastic - used the time warp gimmick to ill effect in my opinion. But a nice mystery with some interesting performances by Randy Quaid and Timmothy Hutton. Angus McFadden as the villianous boyfriend of Hutton's lady friend, is a bit over the top, but everyone else performs beautifully. The real find may be Hutton's daughter, Gage Golightly, who looks and acts a lot like a very young Drew Barrymore from ET. It held my attention, but seemed heavy handed at times in direction and writing. Was certainly more interesting than The Jury, see
ponygirl2000 for a review. I agree with her take. Dull. Jarring. Not worth my time.Also finally saw the newest Harry Potter with cjl on Friday.
Cuarvon(sp?), who directed it, certainly did a wonderful job of picking cinematographers. The play on dark and light not to mention the use of visual metaphor to convey changes in seasons - such as the snowy owl flying into snow, the fall of a leaf, the womping willow's flip of its branchs - subtle and quick. Could have used less fade-to-blacks though, Cuarvon utilized one too many scenes fade to black - to the extent that at one point I wondered if we were watching a TV show making room for commerical breaks. Other than that, the direction seemed flawless and for the first time the CJI effects blended effortlessly with the rest of the film stock - in prior films they had a tendency to make my eyes hurt from the attempt to focus and refocus on the digital differences. All in all beautifully directed, enhancing rather than diminishing the performances - which Columbus had a tendency to do in the earlier films. And we get some wonderfully layered performances here from people such as Emma Thompson, David Thewlis, Gary Oldman, Timothy Spall and Alan Rickman. Thewlis as Professor Remus Lupin probably owned the film. The director did a nice job of highlighting Thewlis performance and heightening tension, while simultaneously conveying the magic and tricky metaphors of Rowling's universe through the use of small touches such as a fluttering of branches, a flock of birds, lighting, and the swinging of a pendlum emphazing the theme of time prevalent throughout.
The script, however, made some leaps in logic - if you hadn't read the novel, I think you might have been a tad lost in places, which I'm not so sure is excusable regardless of how popular the novels are. For instance it was never made clear that Harry's father's symbol was a "stag" or that his father had the ability to turn into an animal - so as a result, I'm certain a portion of the audience may have been scratching their heads over a certain scene in the movie. Nor were the names on Harry's map ever clarified. While it was implied who the map belonged to, it wasn't clear. Making the story a bit murky in places. I think, rather than repeating Harry's fear of the dementors over and over again - some time might have been spent on who Sirus, Remus, James, and Peter were to each other, why each turned into animals and why the map had been created in the first place. On the other hand - kudos to the writing and directing team fror cutting out some of the less necessary bits (such as the animosity between Snape and Remus, which the film alluded to instead of overly focusing on, the competiton amongst the houses, Headless Nick, and all the classes they had) and focusing on the guts of the tale, something the previous director wasn't quite as adept at - often cluttering the works by filling each frame with everything imaginable. Cuarvon amazed me. His visuals remind me a little of Visconti and that is a high compliment. He also reminded me of something I'd forgotten, when seeing a movie - the most important player is the director, not the writer, not the actors - the director. No one can save a poorly directed film. In film - the director rules the show.