the last zoetrope

The gorgeous Anika

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:25:26 -0400

The gorgeous Anika

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:24:05 -0400

anikainvada: new new new with thorpy towers twist

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:18:59 -0400

anikainvada:

new new new with thorpy towers twist

vjordana: rooney mara | Tumblr on We Heart It -...

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:37:45 -0500

vjordana:

rooney mara | Tumblr on We Heart It - http://weheartit.com/entry/50024888/via/violeta_jordana

Photo

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:34:56 -0500

cinephilearchive: Roger Deakins on the set of 2005’s...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 08:59:29 -0500

cinephilearchive:

Roger Deakins on the set of 2005’s Jarhead.

Deakins talks with BSC President John de Borman after a screening of The Shawshank Redemption in London’s Apollo cinema.

Bette Davis in ‘In This Our Life’ (1942), directed by John...

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 21:37:43 -0500

Bette Davis in ‘In This Our Life’ (1942), directed by John Huston.

Taissa Farmiga

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:53:58 -0500

Taissa Farmiga

Roger Deakins is always such a class act—the sumptuous and...

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 22:49:38 -0500

Roger Deakins is always such a class act—the sumptuous and sturdy cinematography of Skyfall is deserving of Oscar attention.

Skyfall, 2012, Sam Mendes (Photographed by Roger Deakins)

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 22:26:37 -0500

Skyfall, 2012, Sam Mendes (Photographed by Roger Deakins)

Opening sequence The Master. Recorded it on midnight screening.

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 21:21:10 -0500

Opening sequence The Master. Recorded it on midnight screening.

Gun Crazy, 1950

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 16:46:59 -0500

Gun Crazy, 1950

“I have a tendency to hold off starting a film until I feel myself forced to begin in order to see...

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:28:49 -0500

“I have a tendency to hold off starting a film until I feel myself forced to begin in order to see where I want to go, where I will take myself…I wrote about this in my book Making a Film (Fare un film), about La Strada (1954). At the beginning I had only a confused feeling, a kind of tone that lurked, which made me melancholy and gave me a diffused sense of guilt, like a shadow hanging over me. This feeling suggested two people who stay together, although it will be fatal, and they don’t know why. But once this feeling crystallized, the story came easily, as if it had been there waiting to be found.”

— Federico Fellini

P.T. Anderson @ Astor Theater Q&A

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:41:00 -0500

Paul Thomas Anderson has got to be one of the most likable filmmakers in a very long time, besides his great talent as a filmmaker, his personality is so great, he’s just an egregious fellow who loves making movies and living life with his wife and kids. I was watching the Q&A he did at the Astor Theater, and it’s now one of my favorite film interviews of all time.

I wasn’t aware of Paul’s existence until the year There Will Be Blood came out, I heard a segment on CNN, where Blood was getting comparisons to Citizen Kane, and from that moment I became curious about his work. It wasn’t long before I bought Magnolia at Best Buy, and I remember crying when the movie ended, I was hooked to this guy. Like most of my filmmaker infatuations, I had to see everything he had ever done, and by the time I was done watching his films countless times, I knew this guy was something special.

I must admit The Master felt quite unconventional, and to say that “I got it”, would be an insincere thing to say. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like the movie, it just means that at this point in time, I was unable to fully connect with it. I still love “The Master”, I saw it three times while it played in theaters, it only had a two and a half week run before it was pulled out, but my mindset on the movie didn’t change at all after I saw it all three times. When I think back on The Master, I feel as if Paul broke one of his rules about telling a story with flashbacks, he’s more of a linear guy, and he’s been very rigid about that. It jumbles up my mind when I begin to think about what The Master is…. It’s a character piece for sure, almost like Vertigo where Hitchcock completely disregards the cockamamie plot and paints a portrait of Scottie (James Stewart), that’s the sensation I gathered from it. The Master is more of a painting, it’s not a structured film in a conventional sense, the film has a life of its own, it breathes on its own, and it just takes you away.

My thoughts on The Master are still very abstract, it’s an ambiguous piece of cinema, and that’s all I can say about it.

I digress, the Q&A that took place in the Astor Theater gave me more of a perspective on Paul, and one thing that I learned is that the great filmmakers cannot express “the process” of how their work comes to life. I think true genius comes from a mysterious place, and only presents itself as an idea, and this creative spark which ignites it is something that can’t be defined. Most of the questions asked in this Q&A couldn’t be answered, but Paul’s humor is what really made the whole thing a riot to experience.

If I learned anything from this video is that, any semblance of the old Paul Thomas Anderson we knew in his Magnolia days, is all but gone. The biggest inspiration for Paul’s movies is life and age….I think wisdom is the greatest power a great filmmaker can possess…granted, wisdom comes in many forms, you don’t have to be Confucius — Paul’s wisdom comes from progress in life.

After I saw this interview, I began to think about ‘The Master’ yet again, and it’s true to life, because when we sit down and think about what our lives mean we just end up with a big headache…and life just goes on, until it doesn’t.

Here’s the amazing Q&A below:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/watch-1-hour-q-a-with-paul-thomas-anderson-about-the-master-at-the-astor-theater-in-melbourne-australia-20121122

"There's more to talking than just words."

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 19:50:00 -0500

As I observed Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”, it became evident that the embodiment of Lewis’ performance as Abraham Lincoln, was nothing short of poetic. I believe a great performance sheds light into the soul of a person, and the connection an audience makes to that person becomes a mirror of something they see in themselves, or perhaps something that they see in others they know.

If there’s any magic in the movies, I believe that the magic mainly comes from the actor, who in their performance creates life, a life not entirely their own, but fabricated from whatever magical entity that possesses them. Of course not every actor or “movie star” possess such fathomable, God-given talent as Daniel Day, for he is a rare breed indeed. However, in a film like “Lincoln”, I experienced what I feel is a monumental acting performance unlike anything I have ever seen and felt. The reason for that feeling is yet to be known to me, but I think that emotions are stronger than words, it’s the meaning they hold as they are spoken, which is important.

There’s a very special line of dialogue in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “The Barefoot Contessa”, the film is about the destructive nature of a beautiful woman, which is all too familiar in the annals of Hollywood’s existence, most noticeably Marilyn Monroe. In the scene Humphrey Bogart is trying to convince Ava Gardner to show up for a screen test, somewhere along the line he says “There’s more to talking than just words.”, and when I remembered that I knew that speech is like music, it is the music we emit from the core of our hearts. And meaningful talk, like music, must be sincere or else it doesn’t mean anything. Hence, “There’s more to talking than just words.” Great talk in the movies is nothing short of poetry.

When Daniel Day-Lewis speaks through his characters, he is not simply saying the words, he is releasing the emotions of his heart, and they come out of him as poetry. I believe this very talent, is what makes Daniel Day such an important actor, the many masks he wears are the very colors of our existence. In “Lincoln” we see a man bleed for the sake of humanity, and every bit of emotion he carries like Atlas, holding the celestial sphere over his shoulders. It is his righteousness to mend a country on the brink of destruction that leads to his death; the scene when Lincoln walks out the door for the last time, I felt like we were watching him slip into the arms of eternity.

The Walking Dead: Is there Hope?

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 15:30:00 -0400

I’ve been terribly obsessed with The Walking Dead lately, I saw the entire season 2 program in one whole night, and then watched the last two season 3 episodes online. The zombie pandemic in The Walking Dead is a complete and utter mystery to its survivors - the pandemic commenced sometime before the show’s protagonist, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), awakened from a coma, after being critically wounded in a police chase.

Tracing the origins of the zombie genre, one must not only look at Romero’s Living Dead films, but all the way back when Victor Halperin made “White Zombie” with Bela Lugosi. Zombies were corpses controlled by a Haitian spell, and were more like minions who worked in sugar plantations, picking up cotton for Lugosi.

George A. Romero changed cinema after he directed Night of the Living Dead with a micro-budget, he used local acting talent and crew, and financed his picture by directing tv commercials, and doing work at the news station where he learned his trade. Romero proved to the world that you don’t have to be a Hollywood person to make a movie, you just need a movie camera and the right idea. Romero found his inspiration after he saw a Powell & Pressburger movie called ‘The Tales of Hoffman’, he felt the effects were somewhat obvious and soon found himself assembling a production team for his feature film. The look of Night of the Living Dead was also inspired by Orson Welle’s 1952 film production of ‘Othello’. Unlike any other filmmaker, George was a rare breed, his liberal views on film and politics prompted him to cast an African American male as the film’s star, named Duane Jones. This was most likely inspired by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film ‘No Way Out’, which introduced Sidney Poitier to the world of cinema.

In 1968, Night of the Living Dead was released in local Pittsburgh cinemas, the film garnered mixed reviews and was dismissed until it was rediscovered one year later in New York and Europe. A world wide fascination of the living dead began and has not wavered away until this very day. The biggest tragedy of it all was that Romero and his production company failed to copyright the film, and it became public domain.

The mythology established in Night of the Living Dead has remained the standard for every single zombie film that came after, the source of this mysterious outbreak is only insinuated in documentary-like TV and news reports. Was it a satellite with a mysterious radiation that infected the water? Is it the world being punished by God for all of our sins? We will never know the truth, and we shouldn’t.

After a decade Romero came back with the legendary Dawn of the Dead, it is a more humane tale of survivors who take refuge in a shopping mall, they clear the whole shopping mall of zombies and make it their home. The beautiful thing about Dawn of the Dead is the way its survivors are stripped down to their very essence. The film is about purpose, what is the purpose of living? Is it in what we have? What we own? The clear answer is ‘no’. “Naked we came into this world and naked we shall return”, is the biblical saying in the book of Job. That is the central meaning of Dawn of the Dead, we put great meaning into the things we own and base our own importance on the things we have, when deep inside we know they will become utterly meaningless in death. In a world where the social and economic structure of the world crumbles and falls, when every man-made thing is destroyed, what is there left to do? In George A. Romero’s world his survivors are constantly searching for the answer, why is the world being consumed by the dead? There is a profound scene in Day of the Dead, when three of the protagonists sit down and have a very profound conversation about human existence; how every history book and every document has now become a relic of something that once was, in a way his protagonists must accept that it’s the end of human existence, and the end of their world, for maybe a new life will replace what was once mankind.

Years after Dawn of the Dead came a slew of Italian horror ripoffs, with lurid zombie gore and outrageous sequences like a zombie fighting a shark, came to be. Lucio Fulci films were more about the supernatural, and they mainly had a very incoherent plot, you never knew what the hell was going on. After Romero made Day of The Dead, zombie films weren’t scary anymore; they just had so much to offer before the public became bored, and Romero was the only one who could get it right. The genre died out until it came back….

Resident Evil brought back what Romero created so long ago, and it was not in the form of film but in a videogame. The fascination for zombies touched a newer generation and the fascination for the dead is stronger than ever. Graphic novels were written, more zombie movies were made and some in the sub-genre like 28 Days Later, Planet Terror, etc.

And from these graphic novels came a Robert Kirkman gem called ‘The Walking Dead’. The beauty about ‘The Walking Dead’ is that it gives you an infinite possibility of being with a protagonist on his journey of survival horror. To understand The Walking Dead series one must look back at the genesis of the genre, because in a way it is the never-ending zombie movie and we don’t have to pay a movie ticket to see it because it’s free, and the writing and storytelling is too damn intriguing to ignore.

The Walking Dead is a sandbox with infinite possibilities, like Apocalypse Now, we never know what horrors lie ahead for its pathetic survivors. Rick Grimes is an atheist or border-line atheist who is angry at God, so much so that he refuses to acknowledge that he exists. Season 2 is heavy with Rick’s religious views, and he is constantly questioning the will to survive and overcome this world-wide pandemic of the undead, and it’s almost like the story of Noah’s Ark, when the flood wiped out mankind, this zombie plague has also wiped out 80-90 percent of the world.

Thematically, it’s almost like watching a very prolonged version of Dawn of the Dead, granted they don’t hide out in a shopping mall, but the reasoning of survival, and the questioning of their very purpose and existence is there. Are they all naive and holding off from the inevitable, or is there hope? The way Noah survived the flood and repopulated the world, and the world became new again, with different structure and laws…perhaps the same fate awaits Rick Grimes and his family, and the family of his son, and the son of his sons. The intrigue of The Walking Dead is profound, because people are stripped down and give core meaning to one another, and love one another like brothers. I think that’s what gives The Walking Dead a beating heart, it is a show unlike any other.