JAPAN
After seven years of meaning to visit Japan, I'm finally doing it!
I've dilly dallied so long I now randomly have two friends who live out there who I can stay with. To make things better, I'm leaving the same day and arriving at the same airport as a bay area friend of mine, and we will spend the first eleven days traveling together. He's half Japanese and will probably prove invaluable as a translator and inside man.
In a way I'm glad it took me so long. If I had gone when I was twenty one like I wanted to, I probably would have spent my time shopping and partying and scuttling around big cities. But now that I'm old and worn down, instead I want to spend most of my time touring the countryside, doing watercolors, taking infrared medium format photos of landscapes, and carefully studying the wooden joinery and civil engineering traditional practices. (I've been super geeking out on how amazing ancient Japan was in these respects from this book: Just Enough, Lessons in living green from traditional Japan)
I'll be in japan six weeks! Long enough to pay homage to 21 year old Ali's consumer whore geekyness, and jaded old man Ali's meditative pretensions.
I probably won't be posting much while there, but I return at the end of April. So be prepared for a deluge of drawings, paintings and photos when I get back!
No Talking Tuesday # 233
March 13th 2012
This Tuesday found me back in the screening room at work for another movie night. This time we watched The Mill and the Cross, and Chimes at Midnight.
The first is a Polish/Sweedish film by Director Lech Majewski. The film brings to life Pieter Bruegel's painting: The Way to Calvary, and imagines the relationships, politics, and spirituality encoded in the many figures and compositional elements of the painting. Most notably for me however was the beautiful Flemish painting inspired Lighting of the interior scenes which were draw droopingly gorgeous.
The second is a little known Orson Welles film shot near the end of his career.
A well shot adaptation of Shakespeare with everything you would expect from an Orson Welles film.
While I'm always blown away by the magnificent direction in his films, I generally find his characters to lack humanity and rarely share real genuine moments with one another. To be sure they share moments with the camera, and the story, but I never get much of an impression of characters relating to each other with any real authenticity. And as this film was more about character's and their relationships with each other, and because it wasn't as innovative and daring from a photography standpoint as his other films, it honestly left me a bit flat.
But far be it for me to speak critically of Welles, I only mean to imply that compared to his other masterpieces, this one doesn't play to his strengths as effectively.
The List:
Ali Jamalzadeh
No Talking Tuesday # 232
March 6th 2012
No list. Nothing special to report.
No Talking Tuesday # 231
February 28th 2012
No list. Nothing special to report.
No Talking Tuesday # 230
February 21st 2012
This Tuesday found me back in the screening room at work watching Alan Parker's Midnight Express. The cautionary real life story of what happened to one helpless American tourist who tried to smuggle hashish out of Turkey and was caught by the local authorities. Let me just say this, the movie made it perfectly clear to me that I don't ever want to go to jail in a middle eastern country. Never ever ever ever ever.
The script is Oliver Stone's first writing credit and is amazingly sharp. The performances are emotionally exhausting to watch (in a good way) and the whole film from beginning to end is so psychologically penetrating and unnerving in such a focused well tuned way that I was very impressed. I have to say the snitch beat up scene is one of the most visceral scenes of violence I've ever seen filmed.
No list.
No Talking Tuesday # 229
February 14th 2012
No list. Nothing special to report.
No Talking Tuesday # 228
February 7th 2012
No list. Nothing special to report.
No Talking Tuesday # 227
January 31st 2012
This Tuesday found me back in the screening room at work watching the Criterion blu-ray of White Material.
I'm a sucker for beautifully shot natural light photography, and as such this film got a free pass to enthrall me. It's also interesting for the strange abstractly emotional note it's able to hit and sustain throughout the entire film. The film imparts a confused, smothered panicking, anonymously brutal, poetic beauty to the viewer, which probably says more with respects to the authenticity of the politics it's reporting on, than any straight forward surface level plot could have.
No list.
No Talking Tuesday # 226
January 24th 2012
This Tuesday found me back in the screening room at work watching the blue-ray edition of John Carpenter's The Thing.
I vaguely remember seing it as a child and have always been fascinated by certain moments that I think really resonate on some deep level with our psychology. Specifically the scene with testing the blood samples, and the spider head freak out.
The movie definitely strikes me as more wince inducingly eighties and cheesy than I remembered it, but it also was successful for much of the same reasons most horror films were of that time, namely that they understood pacing and saved the horrific explicit scenes after you had already had time to acclimate, believe the setting and characters, something horror films the last fifteen years haven't figured out.
No list.
No Talking Tuesday # 225
January 17th 2012
This Tuesday found me back in the screening room at work watching the blue-ray edition of Jacky Brown.
I enjoyed the movie well enough. I like how De Niro plays this shlumpy so-what character, and I liked the overall pacing and snappy dialogue typical of Quentin Tarantino's films. His films always feel like a pastiche of whatever genre he's working in, and while well plotted, filmed and acted, never really draws me into the reality, and it seems would prefer me keep the films half ironically at arms length so I can better admire what clever movies they are.
No list.
