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my movie experiences at Edinburgh’s Film House have made it hard for me to truly enjoy going to the movies here in the US. the good selection of international films takes what seems like forever to arrive in the mid-west… and the foreign film fest never seems to have the big Hollywood-esque propaganda nor lasts long enough. but i shall stop complaining… for there’re two films i am looking forward to catching this holiday season, if they will arrive by the holidays!
one of my favourite female actresses, Kristin Scott Thomas, stars in the French film: “I’ve Loved You So Long” [Il y a longtemps que je t'aime]. some of you might recall her seductive performance in the late Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient”. various sad themes run in parallel throughout the film “I’ve Loved You So Long” but there seems to be a lot of character study in the good French film tradition, which brings out the layers of humanity. it portrays the struggles of Juliette (played by Scott Thomas) in rebuilding her life after being released from prison for a pretty heinous crime, and i am curious to find out what really led her to it. 
unlike Nicolas Philibert’s film: “Être et avoir”, which documented a school year in the French country, Laurent Cantet’s “The Class” covers the school year in a French classroom that resides in a difficult suburban community. i am eager to experience what critics and reviews have claimed to be worthy of the prestigious Palme d’Or in this year’s Cannes. “The Class” appears to be reminiscent of “The History Boys“, which was hilariously charming, although i suspect the French version of a film about education might be a little more grounded in reality.
gosh! can’t these films come to the twin-cities any quicker??
i never really owned any barbie dolls (okay, just one but it was after all the pre-teen fad died down and the minute it was paid for and removed from its packaging, i came to appreciate why mum despised it), but i grew up playing LEGO with my brothers. while my brothers constructed spiffy LEGO-machines and fighter planes, i was happy creating my boxy dream cottages… until of course we were all fighting for the same piece for our muse.
nonetheless, i’ve always been fascinated with robots. i remember the remote controlled toy cars my brothers got at one time… or the LEGO technic my brother upgraded himself to. then there was STAR WARS that my uncle taped when they aired it on telly and i was fascinated by R2-D2 and C3-PO but only because to a 3 year old, Yoda was scary looking and spoke strangely… well, i still think R2-D2 is the best, what with the gadgets and intelligence with which it was programmed? who wouldn’t want it as a companion?!! =) think of all the things you could do with a R2-D2; explore unchartered territories, get into unauthorized places, find unclassified info. … hide a light saber… use it as a personal mobil ?!?! the possibilities are nearly endless.
so it was with little coaxing that i needed to go watch the new animation movie of a Waste Allocation Load Lifter– Earth-class (WALL-E), a new release from Pixar. 
there is some resemblance of WALL-E in its appearance to ET; the very large tear-shaped eye-lobes encasing the round binoculars. the difference of course is that WALL-E is a little robot; it compacts trash and piles them into compacted trash structures sky-scraper high with its preprogrammed role to “clean up Earth one trash-cube at a time”. it has been doing this for 700 years since humans fled their trash infested earth to travel in the AXIOM to live in space, where they might enjoy the ultimate luxury of their lives… until their earth is cleaned up…
story writers ANDREW STANTON and PETE DOCTER have created a cast of wiz-bots with personality that evolved as glitches during their prolonged activity… and the plot they’ve woven is one that exalts the wonderful human creations, the beauty of the natural world, as well as the awe and fascination in curious inquiry, while abasing the waste, redundancy, the unquestioning short-sightedness that is germane to the problems of ecological sustainability today. it is amusing to find that each little bot has a concrete ‘directive’ or purpose built into their ‘being’ while humans’ purpose in life is portrayed as ominously lured by the said promises of consumerism, an abstract construct. you meet a beautiful and sophisticated earth probe named EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), an obsessive-compulsive M-O (Microbe Obliterator), and their apparently ‘flawed in-design’ friends as you follow WALL-E’s adventures into space and back. while it does not offer concrete answers, but perhaps a glimpse of what future machines might be like. this is an animation movie that would very likely appeal to those who ponder about ‘will-power’, ‘cognition’, or about artificial-intelligence’s ability to evolve and learn, whether they are capable of emotions and store associations and memories like we do. it will also offer those who have fought with their own compy-quirks, battled with dying mother-boards, random-access and/or hard-disk memory, etc. some good laughs. as for me, i loved every pixel and sound-lolling-byte it offered! do go watch the movie before you head to wikipedia’s spoiler… it’s one movie that will probably become a classic!
have been really STRESSED. thesis and all. too complicated and vexing to explain. but it’s largely to do with 2 supervisors, time-constraints, different perspectives. i am trapped in the middle…
thank goodness, i got a wee stress-relief… Ratatouille!
it’s gastronomically fun! do go… and watch the rat spice up a wee bit of your life… and fall in love with food…
quel est amour? et, quelle est votre interprétation de l’amour? indeed that was just what 18 directors and sets of actresses and actors tried to define in their version of “Paris, je t’aime“… a lovely (albeit a few quirky and strange ones within the) potpourri of SHORTS about love, and in particular, the essence or flavour of love that one might discover in the different arrondissements of Paris…
no doubt the cast and crew will impress you… but it is what i would describe as the “RAW” everyday emotional expressions and the provocative-yet-almost-incidental-observational-style of looking at a few snippets of others’ lives… which may or may not reflect some of our own experiences that makes this film a wonderful quilt about definitions of love. and love in all its various ironic, frustrating, indulging, addictive, and simplistic forms… love across cultures, beyond mortality, and indeed, in any language…
hope you will come across it at a cinema near you… je pense que vous pourriez l’aimer aussi !
whatever the controversies… i’d say the da vinci code movie is worth the watch even if it may not appeal to you, or that it might be just for the locational settings… rosslyn chapel is spectacular without the scaffolding that is currently shielding it from further weathering damage… and of course, it was a heart-breaking reminder of the good times i had wandering alone on my bike (which i brought over from germany) to find it in the glen… and how much i miss europe…and at least the effigy features of Sir Isaac Newton’s Monument were duplicated…
i can’t seem to work or focus today… do you guys feel like that sometimes?!
i blame it on the stupid talk i had to give that made me lose my sleep fretting over it… it was the longest talk i ever gave in my wee life… i don’t know how they let me do that… anyone in their right minds would have said… ENOUGH! perhaps the wacky things i talked about (colliding into things, gannets, pigeons, monkeys, humans… bats?! intercepting objects… ) might have strange effects… perhaps they just needed an excuse not to get back to their work…
needless to say i was delirious after 2 hours… extremely famished… and it was pouring like it sometimes does in edinburgh… so i headed home from the uni instead of going back to the lab… ate some left-over curry and crashed into bed… woke up some 4 hours later… bright-eyed and bored but didn’t want to do anything related to work… so i watched a DVD called “the Dish” about the satellite dish in Parkes, in australia, and how it captured the moon-walk of Neil Armstrong in 1969 despite random ghastly winds of over 60kmph that could have swept the whole dish away… and the funny cultural clash between the americans and australians…
… if you believe… they put a man on the moon…. man on the moon!!
c’mon tiggie… programme that script!!! ………………. eeeks!
i was mopey yesterday with the remnants of a flu-like bug i was still fighting… and i decided i had to do better than that today… but my heffalumps-neighbours upstairs were game on setting me up in a moody morning with me trying desperately to steal more sleep but obviously loosing the battle… crap. i resorted to blasting my world-receiver (which my brother kindly retrieved from my bedroom at home) and then after a while got bored with the selection of classical pieces on the classical radio channel and started randomly pressing some buttons i’ve made to store the frequencies of some channels that happen not to have too unpleasant things on air…
frequency-modulated (FM) channel 88.5 suddenly aired the voice of a very british accent… and i thought, how weird… i turned up the volume and much to my amusement… it was BBC world on culture and movies… i got to hear a review of Chronicles of Narnia, Everything Is Illuminated and Ang Lee’s new movie Brokeback Mountain, which sounds like a good one to catch… how delightful… and i thought my attempts in trying to find the BBC channels were futile… i really was quite upset not finding any for weeks… now i know at least one channel in the mornings might be dedicated to BBC world news!
yippeee…
a memoir like fictional Nitta Sayuri’s is one which i wish i could have the talent to pen… it is utterly captivating… lyrical and heartfelt. …little wonder that Arthur Golden has been critically praised for rendering this remarkable voice of the legendary Geisha, a skilled courtesan who entertains the men that frequent the tea-houses of pre-war Gion, in his debut novel. i am most intrigued by the myriad of life-complexities and rivalries hidden behind the glorious facade, the perfect demure smiles, graceful movements and social banter that these artisans carry in the presence of their patrons which Golden delicately exposes to the reader.
training to become a top-grade courtesan can be what seems like an arduous and tormentous journey… one is expected to become skilled in music, dance, social etiquette as well as the art of enticing and yet not jeopardizing your worth… this is particularly challenging if you are sold to a household so devoid of appreciation, encouragement and trust… and if you have in addition a tyrannical Hatsumomo (the top geisha of the Nitta household who is a reincarnation of a devil camouflaged beneath her inconceivably divine beauty) bent on crushing you, life is the epitome of misery…
young Chiyo, nonetheless, emerges to become the legendary Sayuri under the tutelage of the renowed Mameha and the generosity bestowed (unbeknownst to her) by the Chairman… whose kindness to the young girl one afternoon lingered in her memory for years since and inspired her to work towards her dream…
yet, i will probably never be able to fully appreciate the life of a geisha for the world in which a geisha lives seems really quite bizarre to me… or perhaps i should say that the kind of sexual muse and fantasies of (some?) men in japan and many places elsewhere are quite… warped?! and i wonder if Golden had the intention of making a mockery of this aspect of humanity in his novel…
in any case, what rings through in the spell-binding story is that if adversaries (as predominantly portrayed by Hatsumomo and the Nitta household and possibly even the archaic practices) could be overcomed, our dreams (life, love, freedom and perhaps even happiness) may not be totally out of reach… no body ever said that life isn’t a struggle and the reward as you will discover at the end of the memoir is bittersweet.
i am certainly looking forward to the movie, which should be out for x’mas… the trailers are simply mesmerising… what with a cast of shinning stars, such exquisite kimonos… and the promise of beautiful music (by John Williams) and dance (performed by dance-graduates Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh)!
… gosh… i do wish i owned a pair of luminous grey-blue eyes…
if any one knows me well enough they’d know that sometimes i wish things would happen “like NOW!”… f teases me a lot with it… as he did this morning in his self-imposed morning call from across the atlantic. i was still thickly encapsulated in sleep’s cobwebs, dreamy with lizzy and darcy in my own concoctions of Hertfordshire, Netherfield etc. … utterly pleasant. but i have to wait till Wed. before the film’s released in a cinema that i could reasonably get to without whimpering for a ride in someone’s car…
then he continued to torture me with details of an un-warranted extended ending in the US-version that seems not to do justice to the novel in its original form… a kiss… champagne… sunset… how kitschy is that?!… and so the divide between the anglo-saxons and their yankee cousins remains.
ahh… but Matthew MacFadyen, who plays Darcy, is a lot more palatable to the eye than Colin Firth (sorry Mr Firth)… in fact, if i could have had it my way, i’d engage Ralph Fiennes in the role, oh yes! oh, i can’t wait… and while i am re-reading the novel… and enjoying every pomposity of Jane Austen’s verbose use of the language… i am hoping that wednesday will arrive sooner…
like NOW!
i’ve grown to adore Jane Austen’s works since many years ago when we read Pride & Prejudice for literature in school, then we went to visit her home on a school-trip to England, then i found myself in that part of the world living and studying for quite some many years… then again, i am a sucker for period movies and everything quaint and british, medieval and ancient… good scenery, tasteful music and dramatic landscapes easily cause me to melt…
i sure hope this film-adaptation of the wonderful novel will not disappoint!
