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Showing posts with label movie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movie. Show all posts

Friday, 17 June 2011

film: senna

about yesterday 16 june 2011


ontem fomos assistir o otimo documentario ‘senna’ no harbour lights. a producao franco-americana de 2010 mostra a vida e a carreira do melhor piloto de formula um de seu tempo, com cenas ineditas de videos da familia e muito mais. o filme mostra tambem os bastidores da formula um e suas reunioes, varias vezes tensas e que dao uma ideia da pressao que ele recebia nesse mundo que, como senna diz, eh cheio de politica e de dinheiro, diferente do comeco da sua carreira, ainda como o corredor de kart Ayrton Senna, que ele menciona numa entrevista anos aa frente de muito que passou.

varias cenas me fizeram lembrar do nosso senna e de como nos, brasileiros, estavamos inconsolaveis com uma morte tao prematura, absurda e anaceitavel, como se a morte pudesse ser inaceitavel. foi mais uma dessas despedidas dolorosas em que a gente fica querendo ser magico e bem poderoso para traze-lo de volta, mas a vida nao nos da esse poder.

eu fiquei pensando em como, quando ele ta ganhando um mundial de formula um, vencendo, tendo ultrapassado varios pilotos, ele ja se sabe vencedor e diz que foi Deus que lhe deu a vitoria. um homem que alcanca o sucesso mais almejado e grandioso, um titulo mundial, e diz que foi Deus, revela uma humildade que so as almas boas tem, a de nao se sentir Deus. achei muito bacana ele dizer que ainda tinha muito o que aprender como homem, que aos 30 e poucos anos de idade talvez estivesse na metade de sua vida, que a carreira de piloto poderia nao durar mais muito tempo, mas que ele precisava ainda aprender muito mais coisas da vida. nas entrevistas ele revelava o que sentia, nao se ocupava de passar imagem de grande. muito, muito linda a cena quando ele vence em interlagos e desmaia, tem dores insuportaveis nos ombros e mal consegue se mexer. a equipe o ajuda a sair do carro e quando, nos bastidores, ele ve o pai, pede que o pai chegue perto dele e lhe de um abraco suave. esse momento foi magico.

as vitorias, os milhoes e o sucesso nao tiraram o sorriso leve da pessoa integra e profissional que senna era. foi bom ve-lo tambem sabendo se proteger e se colocar, como mostra uma das discussoes das reunioes, e algumas entrevistas. antes e por tras de cada vitoria ha um mundo pra se vencer que a midia nao consegue mostrar; ofoco eh sempre em um aspecto apenas. muito bacana ver a tragetoria da carreira dele e as passagens pela toleman, onde estreou em 1984, depois a lotus, a mclaren e finalmente a williams, com muitas vitorias, de premios em paises diferentes e de mundiais. mas eu senti falta de saber mais sobre a vida diaria de treinos dele e do trabalho com o nuno cobra, seu preparador fisico.

o documentatio traz cenas do brasil muito miseravel daquela epoca, epoca de verdades ainda escondidas na nossa historia. eu fiquei chocada com o contraste e tomei um susto, de verdade. quando a gente nao ve a miseria com frequencia, se esquece que ela existe. nos, brasileiros, nao duvidamos que ela exista, mas o conforto da vida nos distancia dessa realidade perversa e contrastante que existe no brasil. o filme tem a participacao efetiva da irma dele, viviane senna, narrando fatos e acrescentando informacoes. ela aparece em imagens numa cena breve de familia e no final, no velorio. quando vi o caixao meu coracao doeu, parece sempre o susto do indesejado evento. chorei, chorei muito assistindo o filme, que tinha o pouco publico de quase sempre no harbour lights. e agradeco muito ao mike pela mao calorosa segurando a minha o tempo todo.

e a chuva, sua companheira maravilhosa? ah, a chuva!

Friday, 3 June 2011

six plus four

2 - 3 june 2011

. . . and listening to radio 6 and eating creamy prawns with chinese rice, cooked by her, at his place, with strawberries and cream for dessert and drinking orange juice and diet pepsi and going to harbour lights afterwards to watch the very american 'win win', directed by thomas mccarthy and starred by paul giamatti, amy ryan, and bobby cannavale, they celebrated 10 (six plus four or six plus one plus one plus one plus one or five plus five) months together. . .

Saturday, 3 July 2010

film: julie & julia

3 july 2010
Definitely for me the book should come before the movie. The movie is fine, Meryl Streep is phenomenal, but the film, which of course is another, completely different language from the book, presents only bits of the real story. I don’t understand why some film producers and or directors feel the need to change details in recent facts. I’ve read somewhere that important bits about Julie’s life were left out of the film. Oh well, it was good to watch, anyway. The said part to it is that now I don’t feel like reading the book. But I do believe it is important that our knowledge about the story doesn’t limit to the selected information presented in a film. Although I am not a movie expert I dare say the director could have made better use of the rich material available. Oh, I loved to see Shakespeare and Company, the great bookstore in Paris in the film.

Sunday, 30 May 2010

film: 'kitaj'

30 may 2010

Kitaj

Last night I watched a documentary about the life of R. B. Kitaj . He was a Jewish painter who lived in the US and in Europe for many years. The documentary is mainly based on his own account of his life. It was very interesting to hear him telling about his ideas of turning a story from the thing he saw or stories people told him into a painting. He was an influential painter, born in 1932 in Cleveland, Ohio. He died in Los Angeles 2007. Kitaj pointed out that a painting should be used for both intellectual and sensual communication. lots of nudity in his paintings.

I watched it at home, by myself. It felt nice to be under the sheets in the cold night. It felt like being somewhere on a lazy holiday. Thanks a lot for lending me the film, Diana. I loved it.

Tuesday, 18 May 2010

film: 'a single man'

18 may 2010

A Single Man

Production year: 2009
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 99 mins
Director: Tom Ford
Cast: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode, Nicholas Hoult
 
i just got back home with mathilde. we went to watch 'a single man' at the susu on the highfield campus. price of the ticket: £2. the filme, set in 1962, tells of a day in the life of George (Colin Firth), an English professor who is filled with sadness because his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode) has suddenly died in a car accident. jim's family prohibits george of attending jim's  funeral. george is then lef to lead a lonely, sad, and empty life, despite the work as a teacher and a nice friendship with charley (Julianne Moore). george plans to go about his routine for the day in Los Angeles and to put an end to his life later on.
 
i loved the film, slow at times, beautiful photography and superb interpretations, specially Firth's and Moore's interpretations. i love old movies or movies set back in time, where there is not much of technology, only humans struggling with their lives and make ups. Julianne Moore is fantastic as a recently divorced alcooholic. i do recommend it. i love the in which charley is putting on make up to get beautiful for the night with her friend george. the scene shows she nearly finished with one eye, now with a heavy load of make up that makes her look ver different and upbeat, in contrast to the other side of hers. she looks at the mirror and says, as if her voice were coming from an outsider: 'very beautiful'. i might be wrong about the precise words she pronounces, but i think i am right, and this is the idea, anyway. she is half astonishingly beautiful and half the original, raw, charley.

when we left the cinema we met with yuki (my japanese friend) and hamish (my english brazilian friend), who by the way were together :-)
i chatted with hamish for a while and mathilde with a german friend of hers.  hamish is planning to move back to brazil as soon as he is finished with his phd here. he has dual nationality because he is born to a brazilian mother and a scottish father. he is cute and funny. it's always a good chat whenever we meet up.

they invited us to go to the stag's head, this pub right there on campus, but we said no because we are very (ir)responsible people who keep working. we talking standing outside susu, facing the pub, but still resisted temptation. am i growing up? i doubt it, but there is hope. mathilde, isabella (german girl), and i were then headed to the interchange to get the bus home. at the interchange i met with najima and we discussed our problems with our research. . . readings. . . first year presentation. these conversations are important.

for some reason everyone is on the same boat of being a little too slow, not so happy about production, and worried about deadlines. this defines me at present.

Saturday, 17 April 2010

alice in wonderland

17 apr 2010


Today Diana, Mathilde and I went to the Odeon cinema to watch Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in 3D. In the movie Alice is 19 and decides to follow the white rabbit exactly as she is proposed by the ungracious son of a friend of her father’s. From this point she starts her fantastic adventures, as she used to dream of them as a child. Mia Wasikowska plays Alice, Helena Bonham Carter is the Red Queen, Johnny Depp is the fabulous Mad Hatter, Anne Hathaway is the White Queen. They are all fantastic. By the way, I love all the characters, although I found the smiley blue cat a little spooky, but that’s me. Alice can only prove she is Alice when she defeats the monster. I loved Burton’s film, and the 3D was a super plus. It is great entertainment and offers loads of representations of the self and the human relations to be interpreted. I love the fact that she has different sizes as she encounters different people. Mia Wasikowska did an awesome job. As I was watching the film I thought I had seen her somewhere. Yes, she played Sophie, one of Paul’s patients in the American series In treatment. We three did not like that she comes back to her real life and sort of gives people advice. After all, life is a dance which can be felt by each one of us individually, I’m afraid. I am not certain we learn from what others have experienced.


Finished the movie we walked to this Italian restaurant on Above Bar Street called Bella Italia. it offers a variety of Italian dishes. There we had pizza and wine and chatted and chatted and chatted. Mathilde, my flatmate here at the uni hall, is Belgium. she is here for a semester only, an Erasmus student. Diana is from Romania, i might have said this already. we're friends from uni. she is doing her PhD in the representations of the Holocaust. her research is super interesting and we have talked a lot about it already. We talked about trips, safety in different countries and many other things. It was indeed a very nice night out.

the pizza was a bit cold, which might imply it was not really fresh, but still good. wine was superb. Above Bar is a street where there are lots of other pubs. it was funny to appreciate the girls 'nearly dressed up' to go to these pubs. no matter how cold it is, they are always very brave to face the night with very little clothes. it was a chilly night and got the bus back home.

Tuesday, 20 October 2009

movie "Sukkar banat" or "Caramel"


this is the view from my window, and my feet resting a bit :-)

19 Oct 2009

i should be at uni now doing more reading and writing my literature review. instead, i decided to stay home and watch this very nice lebanese movie called originally Sukkar banat and Caramel in English, about the life of five lebanese women living in beirut. 

i do love and recommend the movie. it is very interesting that through cinema we have the chance for a flavor of other cultures and their peculiar perspectives on life. 'caramel' tells of the life of these five lebanese women who have different personal needs and possibilities and how they struggle in life. it also points out the common things between them, the beauty parlor being the main stage for this. the beauty parlor - with its sweet 'caramel' - i reckon stands for femininity and the inner search for outside look of ok & acceptable & attractive appearance that gives everyone, we all included, the impression that the situation is pretty much under control. but this is not enough, of course, to guarantee that life is indeed under control for them. that is clearly stated throughout the movie, so beautifully expressed in the song that talks about their search for identity. the song that plays in the end was, according to karen, a lebanese girl who is my flatmate, especially composed for the movie. this musician is married to Nadine Labaki, the movie Director. She plays layale, the main character in the movie. caramel is a must see movie.

the soothing song goes a little little this:
'mirror on the wall
listen to my story
tell me who i am'

another point that has drawn my attention is the language. i had no idea the arabic they speak in lebanon would sound very soft and display an enormous french influence. it actually has some french words incorporated to its daily speaking. 'merci' for this extra piece of precious information about the lebanese culture, nadine.

from the movie:
Sukkar banat or Caramel
- Director: Nadine Labaki
- Writers: Rodney El Haddad (writer)
             Jihad Hojeily (writer)
- Awards:3 wins & 2 nominations more
- Cast (Credited cast)
Nadine Labaki ... Layale
Yasmine Elmasri ... Nisrine (as Yasmine Al Masri)
Joanna Moukarzel ... Rima
Gisèle Aouad ... Jamale
Adel Karam ... Youssef
Sihame Haddad ... Rose (as Siham Haddad)
Aziza Semaan ... Lili
Fatmeh Safa ... Siham
Dimitri Staneofski ... Charles
Fadia Stella ... Christine
Ismaïl Antar ... Bassam

cheers,
Kalina

movie and book: 'Le scaphandre et le papillon'


 Jean-Do dictating his book. .
                                                               photo from wikipedia



I saw this movie a few days ago. It is impressive how Jean Dominique Bauby (Jean-do) managed to write a book by only blinking his left eye after he had a cerebro-vascular accident. At the beginning of the movie he is waking up from a 3-week coma after the accident. we see the room in the hospital from his perspective, from what his eyes manage to see. It is sort of disturbing. Well, the doctors and therapists come by and talk to him about his problem and explain to him he has this 'locked-in syndrome' and thus will need help for anything he might need or want. There is a strong scene when the doctor stictches his right eye. Jean-do is bedridden but his brain works perfectly. From his perspective we see the doctor coming close to him and saying that he is going to stich his eye because it is dry, no longer good. stitch by stitch we see a wondow being closed.

He start different therapies: physical, and speech therapy. we hear his thoughts throughout the film. he says that after the accident he only has his memories and his imagination left to him. when this therapist comes to help him she teaches him to dictate to her what he wants to say, by blinking his left eye. amazing!!! everyone should watch this movie and, i believe, read the book.

i ordered the book and already got it in the mail. i'll read it as soon as i have some free time.

from the movie
Director: Julian Schnabel

- Writers (WGA):Ronald Harwood (screenplay)
                           Jean-Dominique Bauby (book)
- Awards: Nominated for 4 Oscars. Another 40 wins & 33 nominations
- Cast (Cast overview, first billed only)

Mathieu Amalric ... Jean-Do
Emmanuelle Seigner ... Céline
Marie-Josée Croze ... Henriette Roi
Anne Consigny ... Claude
Patrick Chesnais ... Le Docteur Lepage

cheers,
Kalina