Could they have made him any more sinister?
Absolutely terrifying when Cesare opens his eyes.
Just this screenshot gives me the chills.
Showing posts with label Films. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Films. Show all posts
Sunday, October 5, 2008
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Saw this for the first time yesterday. Almost 90 years since its original release, this film is still scarry - and there is no bells and whistles like there is today; no blood and gore. Do movies get any creepier?
Could they have made him any more sinister?
Absolutely terrifying when Cesare opens his eyes.
Just this screenshot gives me the chills.
Could they have made him any more sinister?
Absolutely terrifying when Cesare opens his eyes.
Just this screenshot gives me the chills.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
In A Lonely Place
"I wouldn't want anyone but you."
I love Bogart. I think I fell in love with him when I was 14 or 15, when I saw Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon in close succession. Not necessarily Bogart himself - I don't know anything about him really, and I don't think I want to. It's the characters he plays...these mysterious guys... Rick Blaine, Sam Spade...I love them. Dixon in this movie...he's those same characters, but different. Sheila over at Sheila Variations describes it the following way, and she's spot on: "What is interesting about this part, in comparison to other roles - like in Casablanca or Maltese Falcon and others - is that ... the typical Bogart thing that we all recognize: the tough-guy act, the way he is with women, the straight-talking, the intensity - all of that is there, but because of the material, it is no longer idealized. It is seen through another filter - and suddenly it seems like this man is a tremendously damaged individual, that nothing will heal him. He is HARD." I'm not in love with Dixon. He's actually terrifying.
But the scene pictured above -they're in the lounge, Hadda Brooks is singing, "I Hadn't Anyone Till You" and Bogart asks if there is anything he can do to make Laurel happy. She puts her mouth up to his neck...and whispers "I wouldn't want anyone but you." WOW. Honestly, I can't really think of a sexier scene in a movie. In that moment, when Dixon isn't being, you know, violent - totally hot.
Last week, I saw Casablanca for the first time on the big screen. Though I've seen it at least 5 times, it absolutely blew me away. The aching inherent in Rick's drunken, "You played it for her, you can play it for me...if she can stand it, I can." "Here's looking at you, kid" gets me every time. I know that most lists (life AFI) but Citizen Kane at the top of the list, but I really think that Casablanca is the best, most perfect movie ever made.
I also recently watched Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum. I love all the shadows, the cigarette smoke...and Mitchum. I never before really found Mitchum attractive, but this movie solidified his hotness. Jeff Bailey...essentially the same character as Bogart's Sam and Rick. They brood, they're sarcastic, they're smart, they're kind of jerks...and women can't resist.
Why did men stop wearing real hats?
That's what I'm talking about.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
If This Is A Man - Primo Levi
“Architects calmly design the gates meant to be passed through only once. Meanwhile, Burger, a German worker, Stern, a Jewish student in Amsterdam, Schmulski, a merchant in Krakow, and Annette, a schoolgirl in Bordeaux, go about their daily lives, not knowing a place is being prepared for them hundreds of miles away. One day their quarters are ready. All that’s missing is them.” – Night and Fog
Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man was released in the U.S. as Survival at Auschwitz, but If This Is A Man fits the theme of the book much better. The question, “if this is a man,…” can be asked in two ways: If the prisoner of the camps is a man, why is s/he treated in this manner? and If the officers, the Kapos, the soldiers are men, how do they find it within themselves to treat other human beings in such a manner? “The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offence received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the political, the criminal, the prominent, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge, all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternize in a uniform internal desolation.”
Levi, an Italian Jew was brought to Auschwitz III (Monowitz, the labor camp) in early 1944. By a stroke of fortune, he was sent to the Ka-Be (the infirmary) because of scarlet fever just before the forced march out of Auschwitz in January 1945 (Eli Wiesel’s Night tells the story of the march). He and a few others left behind in the sickbay forage for food, batteries, and a furnace…(“like the story of Robinson Crusoe in hell” – Phillip Roth)…enough to keep themselves and the others alive until the camp is liberated by the Russians a few days later. Over the course of the book, Levi and the other prisoners lose their humanity, and are able to gain it back. Humanity, according to Levi’s narrative, is gratitude, kindness, generosity, and unselfishness: “When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski…proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed. Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: ‘eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor,’ and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.”
Levi also describes what he terms the “Drowned” and the “Saved.” The saved “develop ways of surviving” in the camp, mostly through connections and official and unofficial positions within the hierarchy of prisoners. The Drowned, also called musselman are the weak, those who are unable to adapt and survive. “One knows that they are only here on a visit, that in a few weeks, nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some near-by field and crossed out number on a register…they suffer and drag themselves along in an opaque intimate solitude, and in solitude they die and disappear, without leaving a trace in anyone’s memory.” The stories that have come out of the Holocaust are the stories of the saved. The drowned will forever remain in that unnamed solitude. Levi sums up life in the camps in the following, stark way: “here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone.”
Levi stated in an interview with Phillip Roth that his model for the style of If This Is A Man was the “weekly report” used in industry. This comes across clear, as his prose is distant, simple, and objective. I did not find Levi’s narrative as moving as Wiesel’s Night, though I read that in ninth grade so my remembrance of it might be skewed by my age at the time of my reading as well as the passage of time since then. But Levi’s prose style is effective, and gives the reader a contrast, in that what is described is horrific, but it is told in the manner of an everyday, “everything as usual” manner.
“Even a peaceful landscape…even a meadow in harvest, Even a peaceful landscape...even a meadow in harvest, with crows circling overhead and grass fires...even a road where cars and peasants and couples pass...even a resort village with a steeple and country fair can lead to a concentration camp.” – Night and Fog
The French film Night and Fog (see my previous post) is also about Auschwitz, and I timed my Netflix delivery of the documentary to coincide with my finishing If This Is A Man. It is an extremely moving piece of film, in which there is no dialog, just images of Auschwitz in color, with birds and grass, and black and white footage of the camps, probably of both Allied and German origin. It’s not a film about Hitler (in fact, there is only one shot of him); it’s not a film about Nazis. It is just images with a voice-over. But the images: train tracks leading to the camp, now covered with grass. Decapitated bodies. People with stars of David on their jackets, waiting with their luggage beside the train. A bulldozer pushing bodies into a pit. The fingernail scrapings on the inside of the gas chambers. It is all horrendous. The film brought horrible reality to Levi’s slightly distant prose. The images of the prisoners’ shoes was especially poignant after reading Levi’s account of the problems they caused. Two lessons are taken away from the film: Who is responsible? and will we let this type of tragedy happen again by our complacency…by our belief that this horror happened at time and place that is now passed? This is a film everyone should see.
“Today, I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.” – Primo Levi
Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man was released in the U.S. as Survival at Auschwitz, but If This Is A Man fits the theme of the book much better. The question, “if this is a man,…” can be asked in two ways: If the prisoner of the camps is a man, why is s/he treated in this manner? and If the officers, the Kapos, the soldiers are men, how do they find it within themselves to treat other human beings in such a manner? “The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offence received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the political, the criminal, the prominent, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge, all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternize in a uniform internal desolation.”
Levi, an Italian Jew was brought to Auschwitz III (Monowitz, the labor camp) in early 1944. By a stroke of fortune, he was sent to the Ka-Be (the infirmary) because of scarlet fever just before the forced march out of Auschwitz in January 1945 (Eli Wiesel’s Night tells the story of the march). He and a few others left behind in the sickbay forage for food, batteries, and a furnace…(“like the story of Robinson Crusoe in hell” – Phillip Roth)…enough to keep themselves and the others alive until the camp is liberated by the Russians a few days later. Over the course of the book, Levi and the other prisoners lose their humanity, and are able to gain it back. Humanity, according to Levi’s narrative, is gratitude, kindness, generosity, and unselfishness: “When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski…proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed. Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: ‘eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor,’ and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.”
Levi also describes what he terms the “Drowned” and the “Saved.” The saved “develop ways of surviving” in the camp, mostly through connections and official and unofficial positions within the hierarchy of prisoners. The Drowned, also called musselman are the weak, those who are unable to adapt and survive. “One knows that they are only here on a visit, that in a few weeks, nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some near-by field and crossed out number on a register…they suffer and drag themselves along in an opaque intimate solitude, and in solitude they die and disappear, without leaving a trace in anyone’s memory.” The stories that have come out of the Holocaust are the stories of the saved. The drowned will forever remain in that unnamed solitude. Levi sums up life in the camps in the following, stark way: “here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone.”
Levi stated in an interview with Phillip Roth that his model for the style of If This Is A Man was the “weekly report” used in industry. This comes across clear, as his prose is distant, simple, and objective. I did not find Levi’s narrative as moving as Wiesel’s Night, though I read that in ninth grade so my remembrance of it might be skewed by my age at the time of my reading as well as the passage of time since then. But Levi’s prose style is effective, and gives the reader a contrast, in that what is described is horrific, but it is told in the manner of an everyday, “everything as usual” manner.
“Even a peaceful landscape…even a meadow in harvest, Even a peaceful landscape...even a meadow in harvest, with crows circling overhead and grass fires...even a road where cars and peasants and couples pass...even a resort village with a steeple and country fair can lead to a concentration camp.” – Night and Fog
The French film Night and Fog (see my previous post) is also about Auschwitz, and I timed my Netflix delivery of the documentary to coincide with my finishing If This Is A Man. It is an extremely moving piece of film, in which there is no dialog, just images of Auschwitz in color, with birds and grass, and black and white footage of the camps, probably of both Allied and German origin. It’s not a film about Hitler (in fact, there is only one shot of him); it’s not a film about Nazis. It is just images with a voice-over. But the images: train tracks leading to the camp, now covered with grass. Decapitated bodies. People with stars of David on their jackets, waiting with their luggage beside the train. A bulldozer pushing bodies into a pit. The fingernail scrapings on the inside of the gas chambers. It is all horrendous. The film brought horrible reality to Levi’s slightly distant prose. The images of the prisoners’ shoes was especially poignant after reading Levi’s account of the problems they caused. Two lessons are taken away from the film: Who is responsible? and will we let this type of tragedy happen again by our complacency…by our belief that this horror happened at time and place that is now passed? This is a film everyone should see.
“Today, I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.” – Primo Levi
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Night and Fog
"Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own? We pretend to take up hope again asthe image recedes into the past, as if we were cured once and for all of the scourge of the camps. We pretend it all happened only once, at a given time and place. We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us and a deaf ear to humanity's never-ending cry."
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Farmers. Grimaldi, Pixley... Gessner!
Seeds drifting through space for years...took root in a farmer's field. From the seeds came pods...which had the power to reproduce themselves...in the exact likenessof any form of life. So that's how it began...out of the sky.
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