Good new films.

Ok guys, been a bit bored lately so have been taking myself off to wonderland. I'll give you an insight into some films i have seen recently and if you have seen any of them, some feedback would be great...

1. "Adaptation" starring Meryl Streep and Nicholas Cage:

Wow, what a ditty. I can't recommend this enough. It was directed by the same guy who did "Being John Malcovich", and is equally as good, if not better. It engages from start to finish and the stuff that happens in between, well, i can't even begin to explain. A real mind-opener, looking forward to comments on this film and further discussion!

2. "Bowling for Columbine":

Interesting stuff. My opinion of Charlton Heston will never be the same.

3. "Far from Heaven", starring Dennis Quaid and Julianne (I can't think of her surname, i think it's 'Moore'). What a load of crap that was, i can't believe it got nominated for so many Golden Globe awards, over "Adaptation". Look, the themes and issues were good, but i was forever waiting for it to 'take off', if you know what i mean. And then it ended in a really weird way... You'd think with all that money they'd be able to make something that faired better. Anyway, as i said, it opened my eyes to certain prejudices, which was good. I'm not saying "don't go and see it", I am just venting on how sometimes high budget Hollywood movies sometimes fall short of the mark.

I can't wait to see "The man from Alysian Fields", im going to see it today.

Have a good day all and tell me what you think, but don't give the story line away!

Also, has anyone seen "Chicago"? I'm very curious about this one, i get the feeling it could be a bit of Hollywood Shmollywood on the go.

Hey there LG 🙂

I loved Gangs of New York, and I'm looking forward to Chicago because I love Hollywood Shmollywood. 😛 And Richard Gere. I can't wait to see that movie with George Clooney, can't remember what it's called, Julia Roberts will be in it, I think it's about an old game show host or something.

On that movie "Bowling For Columbine" I haven't seen it but I know that it was directed by Michael Moore so I know that it's going to be very biased against Charlton Heston.

As for George Clooney, I have lost respect for him after some low class comments that he made about Heston. Sick loser!

wow, what did he say?

Phoenix, at an awards show (I dont remember which one, there's a million of them) Clooney made fun of Heston having Alzheimer's disease. Then after the ceremony a reporter confronted him about and it he replied "Anyone who is the head of the NRA deserves it".

If your anti-NRA thats fine. But to make fun of a person with Alzheimers is just low.

I just saw Catch Me If You Can... not a movie-theatre movie but a really good one nonetheless. It was way more dramatic than I expected but I think Holleywood did a good job of transfering a true story over. It is Steven Speilberg so of course it's good 🙂 I'm a Speilberg fan.

romeclone; I agree, that is crappy stuff, I can't believe my Georgie would say such things 😢

what an ass-ish thing to do

That is an Assy thing to say but when you see the film, you will understand why George Clooney doesn't like Heston. Infact, you will understand why nobody would want to like him after seeing the film.

I will watch this movie whenever I get the chance. Even though I know how biased Michael Moore is.

I just went to see "Frida" (Salma Piak?). Omg, it was unreal. Along with "Adaptation", it has to be my other favourite film of late. It is about an artist, it is a love story, it's just fantastic.

Libragirl,

Where do get all these movies. I dont see them out here yet?

Frida Kahol--her work is incredible!!!

I found this little bit of information you might like.

Lots of people have defined Frida' s mania for self-portaits (about 1/3 of her works) as a sort of therapy to survive, an alienation of suffering and phisical pain from herself, a kind of repression of the ravaging action inflicted by external events on her body (bus accident, abortions, surgery operations and "weird" medical treatments of her age).
The body surely was for Frida the centre of any kind of thought, both about her internal self (as women and artist) and about her external environment (cultural, political and social aspects of her time).
Certainly her body, wounded, pierced, distorted by technology (bus) and by the medical treatments of her age, was the ideal place for eliminating all self/world barriers:
when the external (s)wor(l)d pierces you from the stomach to the pelvis your body becomes a privileged place of understanding, passage and metabolization of any event.
Representing oneself becomes representing the world.
Anyway this representation must not be interpreted as an idolatry of the self. In spite of Frida's fondness of religious Mexican idols, often depicted in her paintings - above all in her diary - and of "retablos", Frida does not idolize her self: she does not depict herself as a divine image, there is no trace of mystical tension in her works, neither as exaltation of her personality nor as vision of an hypothetical ideal self.
Starting from Mario Perniola's definition of the fetish that "is not the symbol, neither the sign nor the figure of something else, but is valid only for itself, in its splendid indipendence and autonomy" we can formulate the hypothesis that Frida was moved to represent (depict) herself and her body by a deeply fetishistic attitude: in this way her body ceases to be an object fixed and identical in the subject's perception - a determined shape - to become a sort of "thing" that acquires an "overflowing" abstract universality.
Through this interpretation it is possible to understand one of Kahlo's paradoxes: even if perforated and tormented by the external world and by the desease, Frida has always held a great energy, a surprising dynamism. Maybe this attitude was possible thanks to the fetishism that "does not adore the world, does not have any illusions about it, nevertheless declares itself without reserve and with the greatest energy in favour of a part, of a detail..."; indeed, Frida made several details of her body become fetishes, through a real disintegration of her self/body scattered in her paintings and drawings.
This fragmentation method was mainly put into practice in Frida's diary. The pages of the diary are full of bodies and parts of bodies, placed in an accidental way, sometimes sketched, simply outlined or created through spots, sometimes inserted in net structures where hands, foot, genitals and faces mix together.
This style has often been interpreted as close to surrealistic writing, according to the technique of "automatism" and words freedom. Frida herself denied this connection - "They thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality" - driving us to a different reading, where the nearly maniacal concentration on herself becomes "turning into a thing", through the elimination of body inside/outside barrier (see "Two Fridas", "The broken column", "My nurse and I"), the fusion with nature sometimes as an animal ("The wounded deer") sometimes as a plant ("Roots"), the depiction of herself as a thing among other things ("Portrait on the borderline between Mexico and The United States" where Frida, dressed in pink, rises as a statue in the middle of the painting between things representing the Mexican tradition on one side and the technological landscape of North-America on the other one).


Through the visual howl of the writing
YO SOI LA DISINTEGRAC

Romeclone,
I am not a huge George Clooney fan...but, I am not a huge Charlton Heston fan either. They both have proven themselves as excellent actors and they have both proven that they can be excellent in being an ass. However, I do think it entirely inappropriate that someone make fun of someone regarding something that is beyond their control (Alzheimer's)...that is quite rude. I do believe it is possible that Charlton has pissed off many over the years as he did on Saturday Night Live in the 70's. He, too, was never shy about voicing his opinion, no matter how controversial.

I, too, voice my opinion, but, I do consider the possibility that someone may be able to sway me with a constructive argument. Heston and Clooney are/were too stubborn for that...that is what I don't admire about them....

Thanks, Libragirl, for all the movie suggestions!

Hey Star, how goes it?