flow

Just as books, I think I have found my favorite film of the year at the first week of the the first month. Flow is wonderful and everyone needs to see it. I had seen the trailer a long time ago and I knew it was going to be a great watch. But at the time it felt like the release date was still so long. So when the film won the Golden Globe for the best animation feature, I was a little sad because I was hoping The Wild Robot would win. And then I watched Flow and immediately hoped it wins all the awards out there. (Not that awards matter.)

I saw The Wild Robot in theatre and I thought it was great. I watched a lot of behind the scenes footage and I always have a huge respect for filmmakers doing their craft passionately. But then I think Flow is even more admirable. It started from the idea of this young guy from a small country. It didn't come from big studios with big budget. No Hollywood stars whatsoever. The film doesn't have any human, no human voices, all animals with their natural animal sounds (except for the capybara). Also the animation doesn't look perfectly polished and I love that. The plot is also great. Cat's adventure, birds' quest to enlightenment, interspecies camaraderie. Ten out of ten no notes. 

The only thing I regret is that I didn't catch it in theatre. I think every animation film deserved to be seen on the big screen. I watched the Spiderverse movies in theatre and it didn't feel the same as when I watch them streaming on smaller screen. A lot of the details whether it's the visual or sound were many times better in theatre, enabling the audience to appreciate even more all the hard work behind the films. 

I am now looking for a way to purchase Flow. It's the first time ever since the era of streaming I have thought about purchasing a film. But I want to be a part of the numbers that support this film, to let the filmmakers know they're much appreciated, to let studios know people out there like this kind of films. And also because, now that I knew how the film ends after all that stress, I know I'm going to watch it again and again. 

loneliness will follow

Do you want to go out with us? 

    Not right now. I'm at the bottom of the sea. 

You're under the sea? Then you should stay there a while. Generally humans tend to float. 

    You mean dead bodies float? 

Dead or alive they float, you know. When you're calm, you float. But when you panic and struggle, that's when you sink. So stay there as long as you need to, and when you float back up, I'll take you out somewhere.

---

They say we're all humans. It's not true. Actually, we all come from different planets. So really, it's no wonder we can't understand each other. 

    Even families? What about lovers? What about friends? 

It's no use. You know, it doesn't matter. Because we're all from different planets. Don't you think it makes a lot of sense? 

    We're all aliens. But they must exist somewhere. Some people from my planet. Same as me.

---

My mom died. But.. I felt nothing. No sadness, no regret, no loneliness. Honestly I didn't feel a thing. I didn't cry once. I wonder if you had been my mother, what kind of person I could've become? 

---

So are you thinking of going far away? It's okay. You can stop running away now. No matter how fast you run or how far you go, your loneliness will follow. 

---

From Call Me Chihiro, 2023.

perfect days

"Next time is next time. Today is today."


This film says so much by doing and saying so little. Those who get it, get it.

Also the website companion is so beautiful.

universal moral law

I had been avoiding The Zone of Interest because I didn't feel like watching yet another film about the nazi holocaust, especially when there is an ongoing genocide happening right now. There have been so many medias on the nazi holocaust that many people especially in the west have an impression that it is a singular most horrific atrocities ever committed to humankind. It isn't. 

But the director Jonathan Glazer's speech at the Oscar ceremony got me really curious and I found his approach to the film to be very interesting. He shared the perspective of Primo Levi on how the nazi in cinema were often portrayed as "mythologically evil". Levi wrote, "Monster exist. But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." He also drew from philosopher Gillian Rose who envisioned a film "that could make us feel 'unsafe', by showing how we're emotionally and politically closer to the perpetrator culture than we'd like to think" and a film seen through the "dry eyes of grief" that is unsentimental and "forensic".

It is unsettling how eerily close to the present the feeling is when watching the film. Very recently a close friend for almost twenty years said that genocide, mass killing, rape, kidnapping, murder, were just parts of our dark history and were necessary "price to pay" (quoted verbatim) for political stability and power. She also talked about a particular murder of an alleged dissent with such glee like it's just a usual and necessary procedure to do within the military. She believes that she's immune and isn't in the slightest worry that all those atrocities could happen to her because a certain family member was a high rank in the military. 

I have been questioning since what exactly "morality" is when people don't seem to have the same code of standards to uphold. It is disturbing that I can't see the difference between her living in the present day among us with the SS commandant's wife living by the wall of Auschwitz. 

C.S. Lewis on his book 'Mere Christianity' defended the existence of God because there is a universal moral law, we know what is good and what is bad. But is there really? 

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the poor doesn't want to sit with the rich either

Some days ago there's one popular tweet asking where your school bully is today. Funny because I had just finished watching The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence and layer after layer of wikipedia pages led me somehow to this particular guy that was my high school bully. My answer to the tweet was that he is now a Komisaris Utama (the chief commissioner holding position higher than the board of directors) of a nationally owned company. A company belongs to his father, of course, one of the powerful oligarchs of this country.

I wasn't bullied physically or verbally assaulted, I was looked down upon by the popular kids because I didn't come from rich family. My parents sent me to expensive private christian junior high and high school with a homogeneous demographic without actually having the ability to pay for it. I was sent to the principal's office every month because my tuition hadn't been paid. One time during physics class I was sent to the principal's office to then got sent back to class to pack up and head home immediately and was told not come back until my tuition and entrance fee were paid off. I skipped school for about a week or so. Apart from these, I didn't look like rich kids, like everyone else. I didn't wear fancy shoes. I didn't have the nicest bag or stationery, like everyone else. I still remember the name of a girl who sneered at me and called me derogatory version of the word "poor" because I didn't own a scientific calculator. I had close friends but it never really was bff kind of thing because I didn't belong to the same class of wealth as they were. I couldn't tell them the causes of my stress was because my parents were poor. I remember one friend being so elated that I finally had my own mobile phone, way after everyone else. Some years later, one of my closest friends from high school ended up threaten to sue me on court by law because of some paranoia that could only exist when your family is so rich.

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team deakins and the bear

During the pandemic in early 2021 I discovered the Team Deakins podcast. At first I thought it's probably run by people who admire Roger Deakins' works or maybe by his teams. I was surprised that it was he himself and his wife James who were (and still are) taking times to do a podcast. It was understandable of course because it was during the period of lockdown, some people might want to spend their time doing rather productive things. But it was a huge deal in my opinion that someone as accomplished and well respected as Roger Deakins would still have the curiosity to learn from his peers in the industry, a lot if not most of them are way younger than him, and from his colleagues working on other fields that is not cinematography. We are talking about someone that is widely regarded as the best cinematographer working today. 

I probably shouldn't be as surprised as I was but I work in the field of architecture where most architects I know are creatures of arrogance. A lot of them act like they have known everything that is to be known, even when it's not actually their field of competence. Even someone like Kaoru Mende who is a very respected lighting designer when asked by an interviewer about what's it like working with architects who won Pritzker Prize (a prestigious award for architects), he emphasised how important it is to respect each other. That other consultants, lighting designer or landscape designer etc, are not below architects to command but are equal collaborators. 

Another thing I admire from the podcast is that in the episodes Roger mentioned about how he still get nervous entering new projects. I think the question was asked by his fellow cinematographer who was also often nervous whether or not they can do the job. I found this very reassuring as I almost always think that I am still not good enough yet. I often get nervous about some things I don't really understand. It really says to me that we are allowed to be nervous. And that it is impossible to know everything even when you are already very good at what you do. 

...

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empire of light

Empire of Light has my favorite opening sequence of a film.

Director: Sam Mendes; cinematography: Roger Deakins; production design: Mark Tildesley; music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.  

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the genius behind the banshees of inisherin

I knew almost nothing about The Banshees of Inisherin when I watched a roundtable featuring among others its director Martin McDonagh. I also failed to recognized that he wrote and directed Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which I loved. I found him somehow uninspiring. His answers were short and didn't really give more insight to how his mind works. At some point I even thought to myself, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is dating this man? I was confused. Glimpsing at the trailer and the premise, I wasn't really interested assuming it will be a slow paced period movie, with minimal setting, full of long dialogues. But then I heard so many good reviews and I was intrigued. So even though I had a lot of things I want and need to watch, I watched The Banshees of Inisherin. And within a month, I've already watched it twice.

It reminds me somehow of the writer Elena Ferrante who is famous for never revealing who she really is. She wrote on her book "La Frantumaglia" that she doesn't want to be involved in the media circus, and that the book, the art, should speak of itself and that alone should be enough. It either reaches the audience or it doesn't, the profile of the author themselves should have nothing to do with it. I had been thinking about this Elena Ferrante thing for a while, whether we should separate the art and the artist. On one hand I'm always intriqued about the people behind the art, the story behind it, the motivation, and all that. Like I'm searching for some kind of relatability with the creator because isn't that what great art is all about, about how one idea can resonate with other people. On the other hand, a creator chooses a certain medium to present their ideas and that medium alone should be enough to tell their stories without them have to explain themselves again in another way. Let the audience interpret what feels right to each of them. 

I remember watching couple of videos of Jennette McCurdy when she's doing press after publishing her memoir "I'm Glad My Mom Died". Everyone commented on how eloquent she is as a person and that she must be so intelligent how she could articulate her mind so beautifully in public. It baffled me. What if someone is quiet and shy, can't really speak in public, does that mean she's not as intelligent? Does it negate how good the book she has written is? We of course live in an era of abundancy of media where marketing is a somewhat a necessary element for something to reach the audience and to stand out. The public persona of the actual artist is somehow put in the same importance of the art itself. I think this is sad.

That said, I love The Banshees of Inisherin. Watching it felt like reading one of those absurd literary fiction books. It's the kind of movie that lingers for a while even after you've finished watching. All the actors performed so well, I found myself rooting for every single one of them. The place, the setting, felt like a part of the characters itself. I ended up watching and rewatching all the other McDonagh's films, Three Billboards, Seven Psychopaths, and In Bruges. In the end I laughed and told myself, well of course Phoebe Waller-Bridge is dating this man. There's a limit, I think, to how a creator should be harassed to explain their creations, however important marketing is. Some genius just couldn't or shouldn't be explained. 

lunana

"The bond between a yak and his herder is so sacred. It's as close as family. When they are alive, the yaks benefits us so much. Whenever the village needed meat, they would gather all the yaks, they would throw a lasso in the air, whichever yak the lasso landed on, that yak would be slaughtered. It was the most heartbreaking moment for the village."

with all the narrative about veganism that has been echoed loudly by the western communities, this one short dialog from lunana: a yak in the classroom speaks louder and hits right on point on how animals should mean to all of us.

è stata la mano di dio

"La vita non mi piace più. Non mi piace più. Ne voglio un'altra, immaginaria, uguale a quella che tenevo prima. La realtà non mi piace più. La realtà è scadente. Ecco perché voglio fare il cinema."

Fabietto: I want to go to Rome to see if I'm cut out for making films.
Capuano: Rome? The great escape...Fucking distractions. In the end you come back to yourself. You come back to failure. Everything's a failure, a pile of shit. No one can escape his own failure, and no one gets out of this city. Rome... What the fuck you gonna do in Rome? Only assholes go to Rome. Do you know how many stories there are in this city?

to me paolo sorrentino's "The Hand of God" explains what films are all about. to tell our stories and to escape reality. it is a film about family affair and the coming of age of a boy but how it was crafted really felt like it's a very personal story. i watched an interview with the director where he explained how it was about his upbringing and how it was shot really on the neighborhoods he grew up in. it feels like an approach i would do if i were a filmmaker. childhood and upbringing played a major role on how we became who we are today and to be able to synthesized it into a work of art must felt really precious.

another thing that struck me was one of the ending scene where the boy is scolded by the big director and the director tried to tell him, as quoted above, that there are countless stories even where you are now, you don't need to escape to be able to tell your stories. this fondness of one's own city (in this case is sorrentino and napoli) is something i've always been envious about whenever i encounter it in literature or films. as someone with nowhere to root in and have nothing but hatred to my own hometown, i can only imagine and hope that maybe someday there will be such place. 

set me free

i came to this film expecting a usual coming of age film about a frustrated teenager trying to find his way. the pace is incredibly slow, i didn't watch it in one sitting to be honest. but somewhere along the way i realized i was seeing myself on the screen. what often happened when i watch a film is probably finding characters i can relate to, or characters i would want to be, but in this one, it's like being able to see myself from the perspective of an outsider, as someone who has finally outgrown the darkest and deepest frustration.

films about struggling individuals usually portray the protagonists with strong moral compass for the audience to sympathize. the main character bombarded by the evil things in life still stands strong being the good person he/she is. in reality, most of the time that's not the case. those evil things in life will suck out so much good of you and planted in you the seed of anger and resentment. this is why this particular film speaks to me so profoundly.

here's the thing. as we get older, i think we often see the problems of teenagers as somewhat less significant, as small things, a phase which will eventually pass, especially compared to adults' problems. but this film reminds me how much more significant a frustration in a teenage life actually is. when you're a kid, the safety net to your problems is your family. by default you have a shelter that shield you from the cruel outside world. but when the cruelest of all is actually your own family, with what are you going to shield yourself with? when the people that brought you to existence, that supposed to provide for you turns out to be the people that rob you, that demand so much from you, how are you going to cope? you're lost. at such early age you're lost.

as you grow older, you finally found your own strength, your own independence. free. completely? maybe not, maybe never. for a long time you'd think many things are wrong with yourself. the world convinced you that you're damaged. all these frustration and anger and desperation become the fuel that shaped your character, become the basis on how you navigate through life. it might seems to be okay finally but you'll carry the resentment with you always, like an incurable cancer.

another thing i should note is that this film shows what my therapist told me once, people who went through same circumstances could cope with different mechanism and came out to be totally different type of persons. also, i love how the director chose to close the film in the end. i found myself telling the protagonist, "you're gonna be okay".

paintings and cinematography

i have been watching a lot of videos on cinematography on youtube. on one that i recently watched, the panels are discussing on how they light night scenes: backlights, lamp posts, shop windows, gas light, wet down, and all those interesting things. and then one of the panel mentioned paintings by Atkison Grimshaw as his inspiration, on how it doesn't have to be monochromatic when it comes to lighting a period piece, how Grimshaw uses gas lighted windows and wet down (splashes of water on the ground) making his night scenes very much vibrant and not monochromatic. reversely i say, we can see right away a cinematic feeling out of his paintings. he uses of vibrant light but still depicts a somewhat sad landscape of the industrial towns.

i always feel somehow cinematography doesn't received the credit it deserved in general when it comes to movies. the public put too much recognition and celebration on actors and how much efforts they make for the success of a movie and too little appreciation on the more technical things behind the scenes. yes actors are the forefront of a movie but cinematography is literally what makes a movie. it dictates how a movie would look like. it would be ridiculous to put too much credit to a model in a photograph without much appreciation to the photographer.

orbit ever after

"i want more than just safety. i spend my whole life in here just going round and round and nothing ever happens, nothing ever changes. and nobody seems to mind."
 

short films are underrated. it's not every day you get a luxurious two hours of free time to enjoy a good story in a cinematic experience. i love this one particularly for how they put much attention to details on the production design and light. one of the opening scenes reminds me somewhat of the little prince. also, aren't we all constantly craving for that something to keep feeling alive?

let if enfold you

either peace or happiness, let it enfold you

when I was a young man, i felt these things were dumb, unsophisticated. 
i had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing.

i was hard as granite, i leered at the sun.
i trusted no man and especially no woman.

i was living a hell in small rooms,
I broke things, smashed things, walked through glass, cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being evicted, jailed, in and out of fights,
in and out of my mind.

women were something to screw and rail at,
I had no male friends,
I changed jobs and cities,
I hated holidays, babies, history, newspapers, museums, grandmothers, marriage, movies, spiders, garbagemen, english accents, spain, france, italy, walnuts and the color orange. 
algebra angered me, opera sickened me,
charlie chaplin was a fake and flowers were for pansies.

peace and happiness to me were signs of inferiority,
tenants of the weak and addled mind.

but as i went on with my alley fights,
my suicidal years,
my passage through any number of women-
it gradually began to occur to me
that i wasn't different from the others,
i was the same,
they were all fulsome with hatred,
glossed over with petty grievances,
the men i fought in alleys had hearts of stone.

everybody was nudging, inching, cheating for some insignificant advantage,
the lie was the weapon and the plot was empty,
darkness was the dictator.

cautiously, i allowed myself to feel good at times.
i found moments of peace in cheap rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser 
or listening to the rain in the dark.
the less I needed the better I felt.

maybe the other life had worn me down.
i no longer found glamour in topping somebody in conversation.
or in mounting the body of some poor drunken female whose life had slipped away into sorrow.

i could never accept life as it was,
i could never gobble down all its poisons
but there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking.
i re formulated i don't know when, date, time, all that but the change occurred. 

something in me relaxed, smoothed out.
i no longer had to prove that i was a man,
i didn't have to prove anything.

i began to see things: coffee cups lined up behind a counter in a cafe.
or a dog walking along a sidewalk.
or the way the mouse on my dresser top stopped there with its body, its ears, its nose,
it was fixed, a bit of life caught within itself and its eyes looked at me and they were beautiful.
then- it was gone.

i began to feel good,
i began to feel good in the worst situations and there were plenty of those.

like say, the boss behind his desk, he is going to have to fire me. i've missed too many days.
he is dressed in a suit, necktie, glasses,
he says, 'i am going to have to let you go'
'it's all right' i tell him.
he must do what he must do,
he has a wife, a house, children, expenses, most probably a girlfriend.
i am sorry for him he is caught.

i walk onto the blazing sunshine.
the whole day is mine temporarily, anyhow.

(the whole world is at the throat of the world, everybody feels angry, short-changed, cheated, everybody is despondent, disillusioned)

i welcomed shots of peace, tattered shards of happiness.
i embraced that stuff like the hottest number,
like high heels, breasts, singing, the works.

(don't get me wrong, there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism that overlooks all basic problems just for the sake of itself- this is a shield and a sickness.)

the knife got near my throat again,
i almost turned on the gas again
but when the good moments arrived again i didn't fight them off like an alley adversary.
i let them take me, i luxuriated in them, i made them welcome home.

i even looked into the mirror once having thought myself to be ugly,
i now liked what i saw, almost handsome,
yes, a bit ripped and ragged, scares, lumps, odd turns, but all in all, not too bad, almost handsome, better at least than some of those movie star faces like the cheeks of a baby's butt.

and finally i discovered real feelings of others, unheralded,
like lately, like this morning, as i was leaving, for the track, i saw my wife in bed,
just the shape of her head there
covers pulled high, just the shape of her head there

(not forgetting centuries of the living and the dead and the dying, the pyramids, mozart dead but his music still there in the room, weeds growing, the earth turning, the tote board waiting for me)

i saw the shape of my wife's head, she so still, i ached for her life, just being there under the covers.
i kissed her in the forehead, got down the stairway, got outside, got into my marvelous car, fixed the seatbelt, backed out the drive. feeling warm to the fingertips, down to my foot on the gas pedal, i entered the world once more, drove down the hill past the houses full and empty of people, i saw the mailman, honked, he waved back at me.

poem by charles bukowski, as narrated by timothée chalamet at the end credit of beautiful boy
 

a feast to the eye

"isn’t he scared of dying? he said, 'i, in no way, feel obligated to maximize lifetime.'" 


as a documentary, free solo is a rather special case cause i read so many good reviews about it on lots of media, a little unusual for a documentary. and of course it's not aired in any theatre here in this country, meh. i waited so long to be able to view it online, so i decided to watch the previous documentary made by the same filmmaker, meru, also about climbing, released back in 2015. i had a colleague who was crazy about climbing mountains and i got to listen to her talked a lot about it. but i never really had any interest on it, cause to me, on several occasions where i was forced to do such activities, i found them to be such horrendous experience. i mean i understood the whole concept of the activity and what you'd gain from it, but it just never was appealing to me. watching meru, i finally got the whole appeal of mountaineering and it seriously makes me wish i were a much more physical person with such greater goal as climbing the highest peak on earth. i mean, in the end i think it's way better to have your passion with the nature than to have it with a computer. technology is of course amazing, but as a basic human being, being with the nature gives you a greater reward in the end.

meru was initially not intended to be purposely made for a documentary. but free solo is on a completely different level. alex honnold is definitely the man and undoubtedly a superhuman, but the cinematography here deserved all praises. they were all professional climbers who shot the scenes while also climbing. and the shots of alex climbing el capitan are just mesmerizing. the contrast of the tiny little dot of the red shirt he wore in the vast greenery and rock scenes were such feast to the eye. as much as people say this movie is about courage, about reaching the impossible, i see it more like a celebration of the relationship between human being and the great nature we inhabit in. also, i finally get it why people risk their lives doing such life threatening activities like mountaineering or free soloing. and the staggering amount of people died seems understandable now. like alex said, people could die doing anything anytime, so why worry. and of course he also said, "i, in no way, feel obligated to maximize lifetime."

la nouvelle vague

"what typifies paris is its endless variety. you can easily slip from one milieu to another. it's a city that's truly open, where you end up learning more about yourself than you learn about the city. i don't intend to stay, of course. but i hope i never lose touch with paris. my stay here will leave its mark on me. that's not surprising, because this just might be the most important period in one's life, when one shakes off past influences and one's true personality is formed."


i'm not really familiar with french nouvelle vague directors. somehow i always failed my attempts to watch any of godard's movies although deep down i've always wanted to. just maybe my reality doesn't really allow me to get in the mood to watch old noir movies and i tend to avoid to go deeper on sad melancholic mood. i mean, sad or serious movies i don't mind, but i tend to choose visually nice ones with more "modern" cinematography, or with actors or actresses or directors i'm familiar with.

now i like to roam around instagram for entertainment and i have a habit to screenshot books or movies i'm interested in to read and watch later. even though the fact is that 90% of the screenshots were buried on the camera roll on my phone or in a folder on my laptop. so there were two french nouvelle vague movies i attempted to watch. the first one was godard's. it seems appealing and i thought it was a lighthearted one until i read about it and it's about some war soldiers torturing a woman to death. needless to say, plan cancelled. the second one was éric rohmer's nadja à paris, which turn out to be a 13 minutes short i could find on youtube and watch in one sitting.

it's about a serbian american girl living in paris in the 60s, which somehow doesn't feel that much different with paris today. as i've written before, paris is the kind of city where each name of the places carries its own familiarity. nadja lived in citè universitaire which is in walking distance from a place i used to live in paris. then there's saint-germain-des-prés, which is of course one of the grand boulevards of the city. then there's belleville, montparnasse, etc etc. places i used to be. and i miss the kind of normal urban interaction a normal city should provide, since i now live in a not normal city where interaction is limited and mostly unpleasing.

anyhow, despite my reminiscence, i think the film is a simple existential narration that people could relate to. about how you perceive yourself, the people around you, and the places where you are. and how certain places or periods of time in life make more memorable marks in life. the narration is somehow the content of what i usually would write on my journal. i also enjoy reading the essay written by nadja 30 years later after filming. there's always something soothing about reading personal nostalgia from different time and different places.

cyberpunk dystopia

"humanity has spread to the stars. we set out like ancient seafarers to explore the limitless ocean of space. but no matter how far we venture into the unknown, the worst monsters are those we bring with us."


altered carbon is so far the only series which i started rewatching the first episode as soon as i finished the last one, while at the same time not giving a shit about the next season. it's a cyberpunk festivities came in the form of tv series. what more do you expect? i'm all about the cyberpunk aesthetic. although it's kinda disappointing seeing all the neon awful bend and wiring.

somehow it made me think how probably one of the reasons why i still continue going on living is that i'm curious enough to see what the distance future might look like with all the technological advance. whether all this fantasy would slightly become the new normal. i also would like to think that my whole life is basically to make me mentally trained (i wish physically too) to live such dystopian future.

one thing that it also made me think of, is that this is probably one of the rare moments when i think the man is more sexually arousing that his counterparts' female figures in sex scenes. i don't even like a too muscly hunky type of men's body. but it proofs my theory how men is attractive, sexually or not, because of his character. while women's just naturally have the aesthetically pleasing body type, it can be arousing if it's beautiful, no matter the character of the person.

loving vincent

"live longer, you'll see. life can even bring down the strong."


when i first noticed this movie, i think i never watched the complete trailer, but i knew it's a movie that's going to be made in the style of paintings. it immediately reminded me of shirley - visions of reality, which i wrote about and enjoyed much. so i thought it's gonna be in a similar way, or at least i thought i'd experience similar kind of excitement. turns out, it exceeds all my expectations. from the beginning to the end, i have never enjoyed each of every scenes of a movie as much as i did with this one. every single frame was hand painted, it's so captivating since the very first scene, i was kinda lost and i had to replay it again from the beginning as soon as i finished. even until the very end, the movie ended in the song "starry starry night" sung by lianne de havas, which closed the movie beautifully.

in fact, i stayed until the whole movie credit was rolled feeling like i appreciated so much all the artists and production crews involved in this art project. i watched several behind the scenes videos, i just couldn't imagine how excited the artists were working on such project while also at the same time feeling the excruciating process of it.

unlike shirley - visions of reality where they turn painting into movie scene with real actors, loving vincent was animated fully from paintings, although they first shot with real actors before each frames were later translated into paintings. i enjoyed the details of each painting. how they created rain effect with oil paints, for instance. and unlike shirley, where the movie were shot in static frames from the thirteen of edward hopper's paintings, in vincent the cinematography is dynamic and beautiful. the lighting effect plays great importance in each painting to make it not fall flat. my favorite were the night scenes, especially the one by the boat, where the lighting were minimal but so subtle. the flashback scenes painted in black and white were also a great play on light and shadows. and also unlike shirley, the storyline itself was much more simple. it makes the audience questions the whole thing but it's all closed nicely despite whatever conclusion we might had in mind. the fact that the story of his life was made in his style of painting somehow made me empathize more and in a way loving vincent van gogh even more. as written here, loving vincent is a movable feast of a film that illustrates why, after more than a century after his death, we continue on loving vincent. having said all these, loving vincent is definitely definitely on the list of the most beautiful movies i have ever seen.

a 1968 space odyssey

i first watched this movie on my first year of university as a part of some compulsory philosophical class which taught you how to think. all i could remember was the scene of the apes at the beginning of the movie and not much of the rest. then it was mentioned again when i was working in rome two years ago. one of my bosses who taught at a university came back to the office one evening ranted about how students these days were really ignorant. how every single person who wants to be a designer should have watched this movie. fast forward to some weeks ago, i rewatched this movie after i saw picture of a scene in this movie in a book about history of design (industrial design in particular).

i was amazed of how good the quality of the cinematography is since the beginning of the movie. and then every single scenes after the apes, pretty much blew my mind. i just couldn't stop reminding myself that this movie was released in 1968. to me somehow 1968 felt like a renaissance era where people haven't even invented computer. but this movie was so beautifully crafted it kept getting me thinking how did they even think of it or how did they make it back then, almost fifty years ago. every scenes felt like an artwork itself. the production design was so impressive that it's of no wonder the movie is deemed to be aesthetically significant. the whole time watching it i did feel like it's one of the most beautiful movies i've ever seen. and it's a movie from 1968 which i watched in 2017!

however i have to say i kinda lost it right after the character reached jupiter. it was too surreal and to me it's kinda jump too far after all the fascinating technological advance in the spaceship. i'm sure there were lots of theories about it, but i don't really care to find out. to me it's enough to think about how fascinating and thought provoking this movie is, to see how video calls and artificial intelligence were present in the movie, something which have become part of our regular daily basis today. who knows in the near future we might be able to actually be put into a long hibernation with a machine.

to each of our own stories

"When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else." - Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
 
basically i love watching documentaries. with this one, i noticed so many good reviews although to me what it's actually about wasn't really that interesting. so here the director tries to tell the story about her late mother and also how she found out that she wasn't his father's biological daughter.

halfway through the film i kinda expected something big to happen. i kept looking at the remaining time left and wondered what kind of drama or plot twist that would happen next. it didn't happen. and i realized that it actually wasn't about it. it wasn't about the story itself but how the same story was told by different people from different perspective. and who these people are were revealed one by one as the story goes, which makes such a good structure for the film. and then the most exciting part is of course the faux home videos shot in super 8. they're all beautiful and convincing i spent most time wondering which one was the actual real footage from the 80s and which one was shot later with actors for artistic purpose. if i were a filmmaker i think this would be the kind of film i would make. it's simple in its sense but well thought and artistically made. as i've been always saying, the most beautiful art piece for me is always the one which somehow makes me think like oh i could actually makes something like this. like it resonates to me personally instead of just being something i'm fascinated by.

there was one scene where her father was asked about something related to his wife about her death, i don't really remember the exact question, but he began to get teary, with the fact that she passed away almost thirty years ago. it struck me how one person could have such a significant impact on how some other person write their own stories. i've been wondering these days about relationships and how someone that is not myself could have such control over what i feel. and i tried somehow to take over that control as hard as i could. i read about and i have a friend who try hard to live in solitary in order to have such control over themselves. to be content with oneself. but i don't think it's really a solution. at the end of the day as cliché as it sounds, as bob marley said, the truth is, everyone's gonna hurt you, you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.