10 posts tagged “movies”

If you could watch any movie on the big screen right at this moment, what would it be?

Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance

Powaqqatsi - Life in Transformation

Naqoyqatsi

I first saw this video at the 90 Park Ave office in NYC.  I cried like someone who just lost a puppy.  Turns out that "Viðrar vel til loftárása" is Icelandic for "good weather for airstrikes".  I didn't know that Sigur Rós sang in anything other than Hopelandic.  Turns out, the video was directed by Arni & Kinski, the masterminds behind Sigur Rós's more popular music video, Glósóli.  That one won awards, but this one is sad.

If it really bums you out, watch it again.  If you're still bummed, we can cuddle aftar.

This is the best fight scene I've seen in a while.

I had a fantastically groovy weekend.  Played a little Zelda WindWaker, indulged in a 6-mile hike to Bass Lake in Pt. Reyes, Nicole moved to SF, spent some time with Lydia, got a manicure, and now I'm checking out 0.03 release of Data::ObjectDriver.  Life's good.  Here are some beats from Four Tet to celebrate groovy weekends:

In honor of the pending new Cornelius release, I bring you Eyes:

Dropped my car off at the shop this morning for its 7500-mile inspection - just a thousand miles late.  Took the bus through the Tenderloin (always an adventure) and stopped off at the Apple store to ogle the new Macbooks before walking into work at the SoMA office.  All the while I was in the mood for jazz...

I would've liked to share a video with you, but YouTube's API seems to be funky.  It's not finding the video I'm after, so I can't add it to my Vox collection.  But if you're in the mood for some morning jazz, check out Sculpture by Skalpel.

Update: Searching again, later, I was able to find the video for Sculpture - don't know if anything was changed or if YouTube has some caching that needed updating or what.  Anyway, it's here, so I'm adding it to the top of this post.  Cheers.

Rock Werchter is apparently a music festival in Belgium, and apparently YouTube is a great place to find videos of live performances.  This Tortoise performance includes the following tracks:

1. Stretch
2. Ten Day Interval
3. Swung from the Gutters
4. The Lithium Shifts
5. Crest
6. Seneca

And features some nice xylophone action and their rock-tastic dual-drumming.  Enjoy.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

I used to watch The Pink Panther and listen to Goon Show episodes with my father, so I've just about always considered myself a Peter Sellers fan.  As such, I've avoided The Life and Death of Peter Sellers as I was afraid that the reality of his life would take something away from my view of him as an actor.  Kind of like how Chevy Chase wasn't quite so funny after I found out he was a complete jackass.

Last night I was at the video store and I couldn't bring myself to rent the new Pink Panther flick with Steve Martin and Jean Reno.  It might have had something to do with my absolute loathing of Beyonce.  Instead I finally broke down and picked up The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.

At first I was really disappointed by the writing and direction.  Geoffrey Rush's performance was also particularly irksome at first.  I just didn't see a Peter Sellers in him.  The stand out actors were Emily Watson (yeah, that blind chick from Red Dragon) and the children.  As the movie went on, Rush fell more into character - or I got tired and stopped noticing how bad it was.  The plot device of interjecting Rush in the guise of those people most important to him to deliver monologues to the audience also seemed particularly insipid but got better over time.

The movie was not without bits of charm sprinkled here and there.  ("Do you still love us, Daddy?"  "Of course I do, just not as much as I love Sophia Loren.", etc).  I wish more time was spent exploring the relationship between Sellers and Blake Edwards.  I hadn't quite realized how rocky their relationship was.  Also left undeveloped in the movie was Sellers' relationship with his children.  Instead the writer/director seemed to want to focus on Sellers' relationships with women, yet only two of his four wives appeared in the film.  One of those was dreadfully played by Charlize Theron.

Being There

Sadly, the Sellers I thought I knew through his characters is now forever lost.  The innocence of his gags is now tainted by knowledge that he was, in his own special way, a jackass.  The only good I can say about the film is that it made me want to read Being There.

(or, Missing NY on a hot, muggy kin-yoobi)

It's been a while since I've perused my old journal, but I had cause to today and came across this.  I haven't been to NYC since I left it in 2003 and today I'm pining for one of those breezy autumn days in the city.

Naked - Criterion Collection

I've been feeling very conflicted about a lot of things lately, almost to the point of nihilism.  Contributing to that in no small way has been my purchase of the Criterion Collection version of Mike Leigh's Naked.  It had been a few years since I'd last seen it, but it really stuck with me.  The liner notes had a couple of really good critical essays on the work.  One by Amy Taudin shed some light on the inclusion of the Jeremy character - who until then I thought was extraneous.  She sees him as a way to contrast Johnny's playful abuse with Jeremy's actual deviance.  It makes sense, but doesn't make it any easier to watch.

If you dislike hostility, hatred, emotional and physical abuse, and characters with a penchant for mindfucking each other in long dialogues - skip this one.