Do You Find Me Sadistic?

La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) (1968)
Directed By: François Truffaut
IMDB
My Rate: 4/5

I was surprised to learn that this film is the archetype of Kill Bill's plot. How intelligent Tarantino is.! Kill Bill is just another intelligent hybrid movie! As you may guess, the story is like this:

In the wedding day, when the bride and the groom come out of church with the guests around them, out of nowhere the groom is shot and the despondent bride pledges a revenge the other day in the same church. She finds the the killers' names and addresses and makes her "DEATH LIST FIVE" and crosses out the names one by one. But of course there's no sign of Tarantino violence or martial action in this film. The bride is a woman and uses the women's tricks to seduce her victims and commit her cold blooded revenge.

This is the second time that I see the original model of a quite new film that is based "totally" upon the older one. Fortunately both new films worked great and were more interesting for today's taste. The other one was Abre Los Ojos by Alejandro Amenabar which is remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky. Certainly Abre Los Ojos is a genuine film but it has some small flaws in the ending scene when the main character, César, is going up and down the building to figure out that the building is not real. In Vanilla Sky these kind of small flaws were patched, and of course some unique sense of sadness is imbued in the film with great selection of music used in it. About Kill Bill no further explanation is needed that it quenches the today's audience need to watch bloodshed, suspension and thrill.

Acoustic Simple Pleasures

1. JOJO /kho-kho/, that's how Spaniards represent evil laughter. I'm happy that I can pronounce that /kh/ sound. Regarding to this page at least 309 million English speaking people in the world can't pronounce it!

2. Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta wore a mask in the whole movie, he made a revolution with his sonorous voice in the movie, and made me remember his conversation with Neo, in The Matrix, forever:

...In one life, you're Thomas A. Anderson... program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number. You pay your taxes. And you help your landlady carry out her garbage...

3. The first CD I burned for myself, was a collection of Eloy albums. The German rock band who took his mystic name from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, one of my favorite books to read over and over as a teenager, where human beings in some future time are divided into two castes and the delicate, rich, healthy, lucky and aristocrat caste is called Eloi. Eloy is categorized as a space rock band. The heavy organ and bass fills that each play a major role in the songs, always make me high. I call it the natural high feeling. A sense of Floating, which is the name of one of their albums.

Cauldron of Hate

Death and The Maiden (1994)
Directed By: Roman Polanski
IMDB
My Rate: 5/5

In some Latin American country a brutal fascist regime has been subverted. Paulina Lorca (Sigourney Weaver), a former political activist who has been tortured by that regime now lives in some coastal suburb with her husband Gerardo Escobar who has also been an activist but now is a lawyer and tries to litigate the dogs of the previous tyrant. Paulina still suffers from the trauma of the tortures but has never thoroughly disclosed the traits of the torments she had been through. One rainy night incidentally she recognizes her torturer accompanying her husband to home. Time to get revenge. Time to get things even. Time to have a straight-up talk with Gerardo.

Considering myself in a situation like that, I thought what would be the best thing to do? As an observer you may say, yes, that's the best time to get revenge. Take an eye for an eye. Rape him if you have been raped! There he has sat, his hands are tight, he has no power, you can adjudicate, you can torture him and get his confession, and finaly you can execute him. Better slaughter and butcher him. But how many people really can do that? Can I kill somebody who have done the worst things to me? Am I capable of applying justice even if I'm totally in the right? I'm afraid I am not. I think I am not.

The Magic Lantern

We, Persians, are famous of unique demeanors and grooves, some are righteous, some are culpable. One of the latter ones is our inclination to necrolatry not in its literal meaning but in the way that we tend to praise long eulogies for the mortified ones and exaggerate about their virtuous traits when just before they die, we completely ignore them or in the case they present or support some contrary or unique idea, we destroy them as much as we can.

I felt the same when I wanted to write about the news I read today in the papers: "Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman Passes Away In The Age of 89".

Sometimes you find the great ideas and people so late. A couple of months ago I watched my second film of him, Winter Light, my first film of him was Wild Strawberries. I was astound with what he does with lights in his films and how simply, with no action or much effort he presents the most complicated cognition of human-beings and God relativity in Winter Light. It was very impressive. So I bought his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, and collected around 20 of his films with the help of a friend. I was about to define an "Ingmar Bergman Project" for myself, but I postponed it, to deal with "some more important stuff"*, anyway. Now that he's dead, I should be Persian.

* ...and who knows which is which and who is who...

Infinite Creativity

The Five Obstructions (2003)
Directed by: Lars Von Trier & Joergen Leth
IMDB
My Rate: 5/5

Some call it an aristocrat fancy game of two intellectual directors. I don't see anything wrong about it even if we consider it so.

Actually it's a meta film. Von Trier challenges his favorite director Joergen Leth on remaking one of his earliest films called The Perfect Human, which is a unique short film about how the director sees human being as a series of motions, habits, manners, actions and reactions. Over these shots of a single actor and actress, Leth asks questions like "What does the perfect human think about?" and so.

To do so, Von Trier sets very random and spontaneous obstructions for Leth, on his way to remake the short film. Like that when they speak about smoking a Havana cigar, Von Trier comes with the idea that his first episode should be filmed in Cuba! You can read about the obstructions here.

What made me so fond of this film is what it left me in the end. Just like Von Trier's masterwork, Dogville, you are imbued with some feeling of vague awareness that is hard to express in words and questions like who is who, how things are done, how a spark of an idea leads to some splendid consequent that no one has ever thought about it. How infinite the human being's creativity can be? Does it make the human perfect? I don't know.

Signals And Systems

Finally you find somewhere quiet, you sit down and close your eyes for a moment, you take a deep breath, play your media player to listen to your favorite songs, you inhale deeper and deeper, you ventilate your lungs more and more, you feel your heart beating slow down, you stretch your hands and feet, and enjoy the blood rushing through them, this is heaven... but suddenly your phone rings! RING .... RING ... RING ..., and you sell your heaven to a phone call that 99% of the times is not a matter of life and death. It seems inevitable, it's like we're conditioned to such things like a phone call. When it rings you give up everything to answer it! Who has set it as a rule? How has it penetrated in our minds? How many times has it happened to you?

Phone calls are not the only example of this situation. We do things in certain ways that we have used to them. But just think about doing them in some other style. Maxwell Maltz suggests: one morning when you go to work, as you fasten your shoelaces, and you always put the right lace on the left one, this time do it vice versa, and see how the world changes within you.

Next time it rings, just smile to it, and tell I won't answer you, and see how some strong feeling of joy spreads in your veins. Of course there's a caller ID function and you can call him or her back a couple of minutes later, but feel that you have the choice, you are not a slave of a human made signal, you are free, just don't let it ruin your moment of glory.

P.S. To friends: hey don't test it on me, I am the one who suggests it to you so exempt me from your experience, thank you. ;)

Different Worlds, Same Idea

As I told somewhere before, I sometimes check my old mp3s and make selections of them. This time I was investigating Chris de Burgh's songs. In his first album (1975 - Far Beyond These Castle Walls), there's a very mellow, romantic and oneiric song called Satin Green Shutters. He depicts his hopes and dreams of having "the most beautiful house in the world" and having his love of life forever and having "the most lovely children in the world". I know that at least his last wish came true a few years ago, when his daughter, Rosanna won the miss world title. Many people were fascinated here because Chris de Burgh has many fans in Iran.

Later, in the same day, I was running with my friend in the park as our regular sports schedule. He talked about a poor worker of a freight company who had rented their house many years ago. He said although he had a poor family but he always talked like he had enough money for everything. He always had bigger dreams than his pocket. They moved out and they had no contact with my friend's. But yesterday, oddly enough, the door bell rang and yes it was that worker with his wife riding a precious brand new BMW to come over my friend's family. He now owns a freight business himself and has sent his son and daughter to university. He is wealthy and happy with his family as he always thought so.

It was a nice coincidence to me. It doesn't matter what you are or how big or small your scale is. How much you are famous or how rich you are. You'll become what you think of yourself.

Here's a couple lines of Chris de Burgh's Satin Green Shutters:

"Where your dreams are, put your hopes, you know they will not fail you,
Where your love is, put your heart, oh what would you do if your dreams came true?"

One Week Father

Vozvrashcheniye (The Return) (2003)
Directed by: Andrei Zvyagintsev
IMDB
My Rate: 5/5

The portrait that is carved in my memory about a Russian movie, is a black and white, long and boring film whose story usuallys happens in a village fully covered by snow with poor muzhiks living there, very few words uttered and so on, everything converges to dejectedness in those films.

After a long time of watching western movies, this one was handed over me. The only thing it has in common with that style is it's minimum words. This, along with astonishing scenery, blur and cold colors makes it a very calm and relaxing film.

It's the story of two youngsters, Ivan and Andrey, who have not seen their father since they were very young. The only memory is a family picture hidden in the attic. But suddenly the father comes back out of nowhere and takes them out to a short trip which lasts longer than expected. He teaches them how to be a man, he says: "Use your hands" in response to feeble boys' complaints facing to physical works for the first time.

It's a tribute to fatherhood I think, in contrast with Pedro Almodovar's Return and it's highly recommended as well.

Cold as Ice

La Tourneuse de Pages (2006)
imbd
Directed by: Denis Dercourt
Gog's Rate: 4/5

My devotion to french cinema is nothing new, I enjoy quite a lot movies coming from our northern neighbours for many reasons: the real/credible stories, whirling plots (which do not frame the spectators), the beautiful scenery and cinematography are common in these films, or at least more common than they are in the cinema which comes from the other side of the Atlantic.

The film 'The Page Turner' is not a typical french movie. At the very beginning, I had the feeling of watching a Merchant-Ivory film, no feelings, no gestures, very few words,... pure seriousness. A very cold movie, with a cold-coloured cinematography.
I don't know if I should tell something about the plot: The daughter of a low class family plays the piano, but it's rejected in the last minute, as the teacher makes her lose her concentration during a exam. Years later they meet again, and the teacher (who doesn't remember the girl at all) wants her to turn the pages on her concerts.

I would strongly recommend this movie for the uneasiness which causes the young belgian actress Déborah François, the rare atmosphere which is breath all over 85 minutes. The ending is (also) great. I would rate it '5', but I saw it yesterday, and I may still be under the influence of such a fine piece of machinery, which lies inside this film.

His Mysterious Ways

Babel (2006)
IMDB
Directed by: Alejandro González Iñárritu
My Rate: 5/5

Impressive, breathtaking and real! They are the first expressions that came to my mind describing it. Babel is composed of 3 stories occurring in Morocco, Mexico and Japan, connected to each other in a curious way and as we may expect from Iñárritu (the director of 21 Grams), with a slight time shift. But that's not the point that makes the film so interesting. The point is that it is so much real like a bitter story of "somebody else" you read in a newspaper everyday. Sort of disastrous stories that we read a lot about these days. The stories you wish that somebody could have done something to prevent them, but that's not possible. Somethings happen with no intension, they just happen. I don't know if we should call them God's will. People here normally call it so.

The main theme of the film is the human's solitude. The lonely human who is nothing apart from his family and his home, who is afraid of strangers and who is nothing if left alone and not supported by the family. We are still as vulnerable as a lonely kid in a desert.

The title of the post comes from the film Constantine. In the last scene John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) says: "He (God) does his works in mysterious ways, some people like it, some don't." Some people may like this film some don't. It depends on how you interpret the world.