amazing and wonderful

I've been a Doctor Strange fan since the Strange Tales comics of the 1960s. The artist Steve Ditko's pocket dimensions back then entranced me, suspended my teenage time, made me strange.

This movie is a quality envisioning, a marvelous homage:

amazon.com

True Detective

Evil thinks of itself as badass, but Evil's about to meet Rust Cohle.

Amos Oz & Natalie Portman

I read that Natalie Portman has written a screen adaptation for Amos Oz's book A Tale of Love and Darkness. I read that she's currently directing and starring in the film, shooting on location in Jerusalem.

I wish Ms. Portman much success with this project. I think the project is in capable hands.

Having said that, I'm ambivalent about this 2014 film. I liked Oz's book a whole lot. When I like a book a whole lot, the book lives vividly in my imagination, and I want it to stay there as a book. So that makes me ambivalent -- a preference to keep the narrative inside my head and a curiosity about how it might be brought to cinematographic life. 

When the film is released, I'm sure I'll watch it. And I'll probably appreciate it as a thing existing in its own right.  

amazon.com

For a Few Dollars More

Guy driving, guy in the passenger's seat, two of us hiding in the trunk. Four for the price of two on a Friday night at the drive-in movie theater. To see a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western.

The early autumn's night air has a chill. The early autumn's night air is filled with girls -- in other cars, at the concession counter, or as some kind of vague possibility. We're watching Clint, and we fire up our own cigarillos.

Ennio Morricone's score begins to haunt the blasty, hollow, low-fi speaker.

We realize we have entered a certifiable alternate reality.




We even get to see the peculiar Klaus Kinski as Juan Wild, the Hunchback.

Charlie Kelly versus World Order

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Charlie Day as Charlie Kelly 

First, let's stipulate that everyone is unusual. The spectrum runs from highly functional people with a few quirks to stark raving madmen and madwomen. Then, there's Charlie Kelly. He has completely sidestepped the spectrum.

Objects have meanings bestowed on them owing to consensus of experience. A hammer is for affixing a nail. A window is for staring out of. A pizza is for being round. So on and so forth. But in Charlie's head, all objects are free-floating, a-historical phenomena.

As with objects also with behavioral conventions. Every social construct is, for Charlie, a region of stupefaction and always already beside the point. His impatience with the usual, the agreed-upon-by-society expresses itself as an almost physical spazzification.

Try to imagine Charlie Kelly running for elected office, becoming an entrepreneur, writing depressive poetry. It's not possible. Outsider artists interred in insane asylums would consider Charlie one step beyond. This fracture of normality precludes his participation in ordinary non-verbal codes. Inflections, nuances, winks, and nods don't mean for Charlie what they mean for the rest of us. This is not solipsism on his part. This is about him moving around as best he can inside our collective solipsism.

Charlie is preternaturally tuned in to a frequency of "I wasn't consulted beforehand about being born, therefore...rabbit." This is non sequitur as the manic law frothing beneath all philosophies of Being and Time.

Charlie Kelly is the embodiment of something on the tip of the tongue. He's the living reverse of the Freudian Uncanny -- with Charlie, things have no chance of ever coalescing into the familiar. Charlie is permanently un-housed.

Watching Charlie Kelly on the TV series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is to encounter primal spirit set loose in the world. He's a stray mercurial juggler of semantics performing unlawfully inside our thick categories.

colors from somewhere else

I think I've read that color has to do, scientifically, with light. Something about a prism and the word "spectrum." I really can't be bothered with that kind of thinking. It makes me tense and rebellious. I prefer rummaging around in the fractal cracks and seams of things, where spirit moves and the poetic happens.

I want to talk about Jack Cardiff's use of Technicolor in the 1947 Powell and Pressburger film Black Narcissus. 

I bought the DVD several years ago, owing to Cardiff's color. It's the most beautiful film I've ever seen. The plot and characters are beside the point.

I want to talk about Cardiff's color in this film, but I'm not sure what to say. Even if I knew what to say, I doubt I would know how to say it. Whatever it is I want to talk about is something different than what this article has to say:

Jack Cardiff: Painter's eye view

Cardiff said his filter palette was influenced by master painters. That's one way of looking at it -- his. I want to look at it my way.

I've read about the effects of peyote. I've read that colors from somewhere else are transposed onto or interfused with objects. A chemical transcendence in which vibrancy itself is made manifest as tones of metaphysical color. It's an entry into a dimension unsuspected by everyday consciousness. 

As with peyote so with Cardiff's colorology -- we're getting as close as we're likely to get to thingness-in-itself. An impossible depth of presence somehow also possible.

Jack Cardiff's cinematography in Black Narcissus happens as a convergence of hallucination, substance, and aesthetics. 

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1914 - 2009

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Borishka

I keep thinking about the lad Borishka and his great bronze bell down in Tarkovsky's clay-casting fire pit. His father had died before telling him the secret of bellmaking. So he proceeded according to trial and error, instinct and intuition. An amazing chapter from Andrei Rublev, one of my favorite films.

a book about Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer

I'm drawn to the title of this book and would not fling it aside if it appeared in my hands. 

 

amazon.com

About Italian filmmaker Elio Petri...

...film critic and film historian Jean A. Gili said this:

Through a mixture of expressionism, Brecht, and the bizarre, Petri’s films brought together Marx and Gramsci, but also Freud and Reich. He dove into the world of dreams with Kafkian lunges and into the maze that divides being and schizophrenia.  

Elio Petri (1929 - 1982)

Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life

Branagh's MACBETH

National Theatre

upon the liquid surface of the questionable

Werner Herzog has an acting role in the wonderful film Incident at Loch Ness. The movie is a subtle indictment of the credulous. He's coaxed to board the monster-seeking boat. He does his best to join in the spirit of seriousness about the endeavor. He is uncharacteristically patient with the logic-dubious cryptozoologist. He even gets communally alarmed during an inexplicable episode. 

But...overall, our good man gives off an air of ennui and quiet exasperation about the whole enterprise. This performance -- the presence of the eccentric Herzog -- does extensive implicit damage to clanky forms of belief. His "ecstatic truth" has more to do with imagination-as-artform than with para-delusion.

Onegin -- a film version

This article...

...is my kind of thing, means a lot to me:

"The Fiery Beauty of the World"


It's about the 1973 film The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, by Wojciech Has based on the writings of Bruno Schulz.

KWAIDAN

criterion.com

THE HAUNTING (1963)

The Life of Emile Zola

MASKA -- the Brothers Quay

brief commentary

LEOS JANACEK -- the Brothers Quay

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