Fourth Brandenburg Concerto

“Johann Sebastian Bach,” he heard her saying. “The music that’s closest to silence, closest, in spite of its being so highly organized, to pure, hundred percent proof Spirit.” The whirring gave place to musical sounds. Another bubble of recognition came shooting up; he was listening to the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto. It was the same, of

Douglas Fowley

24 Frames: Ringmaster

… e eu? Quem sou eu nessa história? O carrossel? O autor? O apresentador? Um transeunte? Eu sou você. De fato, qualquer um como você. Eu sou a personificação do seu desejo, em desejar saber tudo. As pessoas sempre sabem apenas um lado da realidade e por quê? Porque conseguem enxergar apenas um lado das

Gil Scott-Heron (1949 – 2011)

Agora, esse cara era foda. Em todos sentidos possíveis. Related articles Sunday Diary: RIP – Gil Scott Heron

Centenário de Vincent Price

Top-dúzia bem difícil, não só pela carreira extensa, mas pelos inúmeros filmes que estão mais ou menos no mesmo patamar qualitativo (The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Leave Her to Heaven, House of Wax, His Kind of Woman, The Whales Of August, House on Haunted Hill, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The Fly, Tales of

Ballade pour violoncelle et chambre noire – Baquet & Doisneau

Towel Day

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

3x Mamma Mia

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: “No more fucking ABBA!” Nota: É sempre bom lembrar que O Casamento de Muriel conta a história da protagonista através das músicas do ABBA, concepção esta anterior à criada pelo espetáculo da Broadway de fim dos anos 90 e que deu origem ao filme homônimo. Já

Dorothy Lee

Bill Hunter (1940 – 2011)

As long as the director told me where to stand and what to say, I was happy. Anyone who says there’s any more to it than that is full of bullshit. Esse cara foi um ícone da minha adolescência, namorado da Bernie, casado com a moça do ping-pong, pai da Muriel e nêmesis da dança

Gente foda usa tapa-olho: Indiana Jones

É lógico que isso aconteceria em algum momento. *As Aventuras do Jovem Indiana Jones (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, 1992/93)* Nota: A estréia de George Hall no cinema foi em 1944 com A Canterbury Tale, presumo que ele foi um dos diversos soldados escalados para participarem do filme, aos menos esta é explicação mais plausível

The Crows of Pearblossom – Aldous Huxley

Pais que zelam pelo futuro dos filhos deveriam servir Huxley na mamadeira. I cannot fly – I have no wings; I cannot run – I have no legs; But I can creep where the black bird sings And eat her speckled eggs, ha, ha, And eat her speckled eggs. Eu não posso voar – não

24 Frames: The Pastoral Symphony (Fantasia, Hamilton Luske / Jim Handley / Ford Beebe, 1940)

“Perhaps Bach and Beethoven are strange bedfellows for Mickey Mouse,” he wrote, “but it’s all been a lot of fun, and I want to thank Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor, and all my coworkers for holding my head up when the water got too deep.” The cultural waters were deepest in the short film animated to

Otto Preminger. Gatos. Veneza.

Lisboa às moscas e Veneza aos gatos… (os pombos da bondade só conspurcam a praça de S. Marcos) …ao gato perna alta que não vem quando o chamas, ao contrário da patrícia mosca que não era para aqui chamada, mas logo te soprou os últimos zunzuns mal chegaste a Lisboa O gato de Veneza não

Maureen O’Sullivan

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Down by The River (John-Paul Davidson, 2011)

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Huxley, Lawrence, Jung, Gross

Aldous Huxley’s evolution as a novelist may be described as the succession of three distinct phases. First, one finds the group of the early novels. They are bright and amusing, but also sharply satirical at times, and they express that growing dissatisfaction with our civilized world which comes to a climax at the end of

Roger Daltrey versus Paul Nicholas

Tommy versus Primo Kevin Franz Liszt versus Richard Wagner Qualquer semelhança não é mera coincidência. Related articles So, you don’t like Wagner?

24 Frames: A Época da Inocência (The Age of Innocence, 1993)

Scorsese is sometimes accused of misogyny, but just as his use of violence reflects the shadow process of his characters (rather than a morbid fascination with barbarity on the director’s behalf), so his female characters and the attitude toward them mirror the anima process, the emotional state of his male characters, which is often unhealthy and infantile. Just like the antagonist often represents the materialized shadow, so Scorsese’s female characters frequently represent the materialized anima, and Scorsese’s women are generally more intelligent, sympathetic and independent than his men.
In the final analysis “the projection can only be dissolved,” Jung says, “when a son sees that in the realm of his psyche there is an image not only of the mother but of the daughter, the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess.” Newland in The Age of Innocence chooses the immature May over Ellen, the independent adult who is his equal. Paul Hackett is chased through Lower Manhattan by a whole pack of unruly women in After Hours. The philandering of Howard Hughes in The Aviator reaches epic proportions. The central character of Shutter Island sacrifices his sanity, indeed his very identity, rather than face the true nature of his wife and their relationship. Only in Bringing Out the Dead and Gangs of New York is harmony achieved at the end between the wounded male ego and the inner feminine power of the unconscious as well as the outer feminine aspect of a real woman.
…
Wharton’s novel is, in fact, a perfectly logical choice for Scorsese, and there are innumerable reasons it would appeal to him. Underneath the polished surface, the central themes of the book are similar to the recurring concerns in Scorsese’s films, and like so many of these, it states explicitly and repeatedly that it deals with “the inner devils.” Scorsese was fascinated by Wharton’s use of language, much of which is preserved in the film, spoken by a slightly ironic, omniscient voice-over narrator (Joanne Woodward). According to Jay Cocks, Scorsese was so intent on keeping Wharton’s wit and “sculpted perfection” that he “timed camera moves to the narration with hairsbreadth accuracy,” thus making language and voice-over narration exquisitely filmic narration, and attributing to to Wharton’s cadences the same all-important rhythmic function that he has always attributed to music.
Resonating with Scorsese’s metaphorical use of architectural elements, Edith Wharton once described the mind of a woman as a “great house full of rooms.” There are the rooms, Wharton says, where family and other people come and go on a daily basis, “But beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes. The fact that Scorsese and screenwriter Jay Cocks chose to quote this intensely sad passage at the beginning of their book on the making of The Age of Innocence indicates that they, too, see it as an important connection between the works of Edith Wharton and those of Martin Scorsese. I cannot think of a fictional character who better fits Wharton’s description of the lonely inner space that nobody ever visits than the Countess Olenska, and she is indeed one of the central links between this and Scorsese’s other films.
Preposterous though it may sound, The Age of Innocence is closely connected with Mean Streets, GoodFellas, Casino and especially Cape Fear. Like Scorsese’s films on organized crime, The Age of Innocence concerns a “tribe” that lives by its own rules and rituals, an extended unit that calls itself a family. Through obscure conventions, unwritten rules and “arbitrary signs,” this family controls and terrorizes entire neighborhoods of New York, and like a live organism, it expels or kills off any foreign body: When collectively everyone decides to snub the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), it is referred to by the narrator as an “eradication.” “The savagery of this ritual,” says Thelma Schoonmaker, is “perhaps more savage than the ritual [Scorsese] grew up in.” Scorsese himself has said that over the years he has created a lot of violent and brutal characters, but that those in The Age of Innocence are the most brutal of them all.