I'm Drowning...

Brothers - (2009) Directed by Jim Sheridan

Starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman

Today I saw Jim Sheridan's new film, Brothers. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire as brothers, with Natalie Portman as the latter's wife. Tobey's performance was pretty good, Jake and Natalie Portman were okay but nothing special. The soundtrack was corny and besides the climax when Tobey is scaring the hell out of you, there isn't much more in this film to take home. Katherine Bigelow's The Hurt Locker did far more for the topic of a soldier's psychosis and her play on tension, far more stimulating.

I understood Sheridan's split between Tobey and Jake's characters in the beginning after Tobey's character Sam is presumed dead. This division, was also one of mood, where it seemed one was actually watching two movies. On one hand you have a commercial, romantic drama about an army widow who manages to piece her life together and eventually find love with her husband's brother. Its sappy and all the more cringing to watch because of the music thats played along to these scenes. On the other hand, you have a commercial, action, contemporary war thriller about a hostage soldier and his survival and psychological breakdown. The only reason I absorbed the romantic drama was to feel the awkward mending of these two worlds when they finally converge. Such a payoff went short changed.

I do hope Maguire continues to deliver performances of note, like he has in Brothers. I might not be the only one who'll confess I'll be alright if he's not in Spider-Man 4.

You Have No Idea How This Works, Do You?

Persona - (1966) Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann

Just as when I watched my first Godard, then my first Fellini, with Bergman its going to be a while before I can respond to what I saw.

Michael Clayton - (2007) Directed by Tony Gilroy

Starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Michael O'Keefe

Sydney Pollack, Tilda Swinton

I should've saw this in theatres. Love the pace and the art direction. Next time I watch the DVD I'm going to see it in black and white, even though the color looks really nice.

First Scene Dissolve

Anonymous Love Letters to Athena

I'm so tired. My legs barely stand me and there is a hunger inside that echoes tumultuously, with tempest of most concrete vigor do I move about. Hatred is my propeller; my engine, a glowing heart erupting with magma and fumes of shame. The few times I saw you today (I try to see less and less), it was as if, my hatred were offered a compromise. As if noted by my palely apparent countenance, one of deprived honor and starved dignity, a pathetic hand was extended forward with a cupcake.

My sweet tooth and all its fallen graces!

Its an insult! One perfectly visible and recognized, yet how I long to reach for you; such a waist to not have.

I took a break and on a street, under a canopy, I stood. The rain was cold but the air warmer. I had space and my lungs went to work on the early night's dew. You walked out with a colleague, speaking. I wanted some water, it was raining all around me; I was the thirsty, drowning man. It took every bit of each lung to punch my chest forward; every wattage of street lights, to keep my eyes from parking on you.

You are all they have to offer me, and it is true that you are indeed a great offer; but I can't--it wears me out. My fake plastic love, do you understand? It wears me out. I need this hatred and these lungs to roar, snatch, claw, and tear at the winds that so eagerly wish to pass me by. I need my tension, my open eyes that sleep and cry very little but do only absorb, greedily, everything in its path.

Its with love that I must leave you, its with further hate that the action springs awake into motion.

Universally yours,

Une Ammiratore

Weekend's Playlist

Mutliplex Identities.

The Prize - (1963) Directed by Mark Robson

Starring Paul Newman, Edward G. Robinson, Elke Sommer

Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson. It was a fun movie and Paul Newman really seemed to be enjoying himself but I wanted to see more of Edward G.

From Here to Eternity - (1953) Directed by Fred Zimmerman

Starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr,

Donna Reed

Not what I expected at all. I guess because of the famous beach kiss scene, I was under the impression that the entire story was to be lead by Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. I was expected far more romance, in epic scales, and overly dramatic departures; I was expecting An Affair to Remember mixed with Casablanca. What I got in the stead of my imagined plot was a really good drama about identity, responsibility, and capability.

I couldn't get over that the film wasn't an epic love story until the bombing of pearl harbor. Being aware of the film's setting one would think I'd be obviously expecting the bombing of Pearl Harbor but it caught me off guard just as much as it did the soldiers in the film. Some really good action scenes.

The Wilby Conspiracy - (1975) Directed by Ralph Nelson

Starring Sidney Portier, Michael Caine, and Nicol Williamson

I had my doubts at the beginning but as the film progressed, it became better to watch. Its so interesting how violence in films changed in the seventies, it definitely became more about realism and pushing the boundaries of dismantled censorships. And, what is a 70s film without some sort of car chase scene? In this case a jeep chase.

The ending has its pay-off and so does Rutger Hauer's appearance, it almost makes up for the bad driving scene that takes place with a fake background in the first quarter of the film.

All of Me - (1984) Directed by Carl Reiner

Starring Steve Martin, Lili Tomlin, Victoria Tennant

Yes! This movie is awesome...Of course, I removed the color from my TV set. Lily Tomlin is so darling.

December Heart Beats for Kylie Minogue

Let Me Know What You're Like

Anonymous Love Letters to Athena

Look there, among scatters of voices and roused audience, that by their volume and pace orbit like violent debris; a gauntlet for the cosmonaut's atmospheric departure, among this spinning tetris my queen in black speaks.

Like a death, you announce with vivid detail, words from which I am absent. I make from one end to another; beats of hearts like bullets firing through a spark, an angry, tiny spark that shoots a long way. Your body, like a continent, I the foreigner. From borders I climb and hide in the tresses of your most abandoned attentions, where no thought inhabits such barren lands. Like a thief I make for these edges and consult my stubborn friend, Humility, its with the softest caresses that she convinces me to stay while opening my back with her blade.

What do I wait for? Is it Opportunity and its grifter tricks that send parlors a-roar? Is it Amnesia, that darling little fairy of repair, who patches the wound in a band-aid, too much matching the complexion that one forgets to remove it, mistaking it later for skin.

She's a Deftones song, something like Moana, something especially like Moana. A last song, an empire desired invitation to. She so carves my heart, and the stage with all its actors and rustled anxieties, glows like trembling jellyfish in fields of gossamer bedding. The sparks of nerves, the same bullets but now firing information, sensational execution!

And Moana as she exits this stage in her creme colored winter coat, an indigo scarf noosed about her pretty neck, on an escalator my eyes say goodbye to the back of her head. Yet another day that has introduced me as, "coward".

Universally yours,

Une Ammiratore

From Above: A View

For Displaying the Unknown:

if its neutral it can work. if you don't stand and say this is evidence that proves such and such. if you can present what you've seen and let the audience make their mind up on their own, without your influence. if the blank canvas can be the painting and each viewer, a participant who adds on it what they will. your job should thus be to open a window and say, "look! look, I saw this; please take a moment to look for yourself as I did." you won't demand a discussion or praise for your discovery (if it could even be considered a discovery). your only hope is to share that sense of the unexplained, even if only temporarily unexplained. to remember that still, there are much ordinary mysteries hidden in plain view where no one ever bothers to look anymore. at most a neutral agreement, an accordance that we, together as well as separate can certainly say, we're not one hundred percent sure of what's going on here.