Category: Cinema
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Babar
Netflix movies were mailed out Monday and arrived Tuesday. Which is amazing to me considering our mail service isn’t the most reliable in the world. We watched the ones for H.o.p. first and thankfully no scratches. I had gotten the animation “Babar, King of the Elephants” which, yeah, is kind of young for an 8-year-old…
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Blogging Godard’s "My Life to Live" (Vivre Sa Vie)
VIVRE SA VIE (MY LIFE TO LIVE) Profile of Nana’s face (Anna Karina). A brief few bars of gently melancholic music (Michael LeGrand), which stops. Silence. Then switch to frontal close-up and the music again. Which again stops after a few bars. Hold on the close-up. Now Nana’s right profile, barest outline of her nose…
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Blogging McCabe and Mrs. Miller
The film opens with credits running over trees bent with wind and rain, McCabe (Warren Beatty) covered in a heavy, head to toe bear fur coat, riding into the mountain mining wilderness town of Presbyterian Church. To the music of Leonard Cohen, “Stranger Song”, the first building encountered is a lone church with a tall…
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Some thoughts on "A Woman Is A Woman"
Communicating feelings with book titles I put on “Une Femme est une Femme” last night and watched it through, thinking I’d blog it and then decided no, it’s an impossible film to blog. It’s a wonderful film, a stunning film. I know I didn’t begin to get it when I saw it the first time,…
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Blogging Jean Luc Godard’s "Band of Outsiders"
Gardez vos yeux d’enfant[clear] Blogging Jean Luc Godard’s 1964 “Band of Outsiders”! Here we go. I’ve got a cup of hot coffee, and we’re deep into September. Perfect time of year for this particular Godard flick. A Janus Film. Believe it or not they used to show Janus films like at 11 or midnight way…
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Blogging "California Split"
Immediate Altman wall of sound. A poker club with a blazer-uniformed man at a huge blackboard, chalking letters, apart from the sedentary commotion below. Every scene in this film steeped in 70s attire and environment, which is painful, which is revisiting the fake wall paneling America of easy up, easy down, nothing aimed at permanence,…
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A website all about Kurosawa
For all things Kurosawa, visit the Akira Kurosawa News and Information website maintained by Vili Maunula. I have been wandering through looking at some of the paintings Kurosawa did for “Ran”, “Kagemusha” and “Dreams”.
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Blogging a disastrously translated "Record of a Living Being"
That I was able to sit through “Record of a Living Being”, which was terribly translated, abysmally translated, is a testament to Kurosawa’s remarkable powers as a story teller just via his cinematography. Below is a blog of the film, but first some background. The film was made in 1955, coming between the “Seven Samurai”…
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"Spirited Away"
Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” was one of this week’s choices from Netflix and it was great. Netflix gives it a rating for kids over 10 because of some scary moments. I sat to watch it with H.o.p., waited for the supposedly scary moments but there weren’t any that weren’t well-cushioned and were worked seamlessly into…
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"The Producers" (the 1968 film)
Speaking of the 50’s blacklist. Night before last we watched “The Producers” again, which stars Zero Mostel who was blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee back in 1955. I’d only seen “The Producers” once before, many years ago, and was glad when Marty picked it up earlier in the…
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Rocketship X-M (yes, I blogged it)
You’ll rain stones on me like the Martian stonepeople in “Rocketship X-M”, but having watched the movie I’m not convinced it’s intended to be misogynistic so much as it does a confused job of showcasing misogynism as an anti-nuke vehicle. Anyway, I blogged the movie because I know I’ll likely never watch it again and…