courageisaverb-blog-blog

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Paul Newman and company in Cool Hand Luke (1967).

Cinematography by Conrad Hall.

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

From season 3, episode 1.

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Sam Waterston, Bruce Dern, and Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby (1974).

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche in The Lovers on the Bridge (1991).

I'm surprised by how much I liked this one.

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Mad Men season 5 got on Netflix streaming just last week.

God, I missed this show.

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

I just had to share this. What a great cover and remix, by Jessie Ware and these two Japanese teenagers calling themselves BenZel.

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Apinya Sakuljaroensuk in Ploy (2007).

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

"Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it."

Michel Montaigne

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Tadanobu Asano in Invisible Waves (2006).

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Charlize Theron (and Patton Oswalt) in Young Adult. 

Who knew she could be so funny?

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Silver Linings Playbook.

If you've seen a David O. Russell movie (I Heart Huckabees, Flirting with Disaster, The Fighter), you'll recognize parts of this movie. You'll recognize the jumbled but fluid storytelling, you'll recognize the large cast of characters, you'll recognize the heart and the humor. In the hands of a "Hollywood" director, this movie would be so much your typical Saturday night date movie, and yet, the characters have so many quirks, scruples, sides to them, that it also could have fallen into the easy traps of the "indie" subgenre. Silver Linings Playbook is able to thread the line between, and the result is more alive and real. The acting is superb from top to bottom. This is Bradley Cooper's best performance. This is Robert De Niro's best role in years. Jacki Weaver is great in the mother part. But to me, the surprise of this film is Jennifer Lawrence - she's stunning to look at, of course, but in this movie she gives these dark, forlorn, and crazy looks... she reminds me very much of Amy Adams and Naomi Watts before her, a screwball heroine updated in David O. Russell's universe.

When I really enjoy a movie, I'm always saying that I'll see it again in the theater (yet I never do). This movie replays in my mind over and over again... there are moments in it, not star-making, quotable moments, but smaller ones, fleeting emotional raindrops in life's loud ocean of chaos. Silver Linings Playbook seems to ask the question: Do these best moments happen in spite of the chaos, or because of it? As I scatter off to another crowded Thanksgiving family meal, I'll be thinking of seeing this movie again.

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Holy shit. What am I getting myself into.

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Greta Gerwig in Damsels in Distress, a bizarrely comic film by Whit Stillman. I think she could play Chloe Sevigny's sister.

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Saw this movie last week - found it to be at times remarkable, exhilarating, and yet also an unwieldy mess. I was very glad to see the attempt. The music was mostly effective. I liked the theme, but like many other things in the movie, it could be a bit overdone.

Prelude: The Atlas March — Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, Tom Tykwer

Cloud Atlas (Andy Wachowski/Lana Wachowski/Tom Tykwer, 2012)

After multiple viewings, I still think Cloud Atlas is one of the interesting cinematic failures in recent memory. There may be as much to admire about the film (its technical razzle-dazzle, its naked sentiment) as there is to lament (its hamfisted message, its problematic “post-racial” posturing) — but let us turn the page to the musical score, a deft juxtaposition of multiple narrative threads with a gorgeous progression of Western music tropes. For what it’s worth, this former middle school orchestra geek loved it.

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Hell yes. I've been looking to change up my music for a while now, and here's a start. "Numb", by Gary Clark Jr.

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

Marcel Proust

[courageisaverb-blog-blog]

For Tony Scott. Thank you for this one, and many more.