#ben connelly

[beyondmetaphysics]

This teaching is not about denying that external reality exists. It is about understanding what and how we know for the purpose of helping us to cultivate and manifest the intention to alleviate suffering. Vasubandhu says the five senses arise like waves on the water of the root consciousness. A sailor who ignores the waves is going to be in deep trouble. It’s good to attend to the waves and engage in discernment. If you see charcoal clouds massing on the horizon and the wind is starting to whip up from the East, get inside, or get a raincoat. If you see a red flush forming on your colleague’s cheeks and her voice is rising in tone, volume, and pace, attend to what she is saying, how she feels, and your own emotions and thoughts arising. These waves are here in the moment and they are a part of what we are encouraged to attend to mindfully in these verses.

We are also encouraged to attend to the ocean, to the fact that the waves are part of a vast, unfolding interdependence, deeply manifesting our past conditioning by creating our present-­moment way of seeing. If you see a coconut falling out of a tree toward your head, of course, there’s no need or time to direct your attention to the ocean—just get out of the way! However when you feel anxious or threatened at work or at home, it can be very helpful to remember that what you believe to be real, true sensory information about a threat is also a manifestation of your habits of seeing. This awareness—of the screen, the ocean, the storehouse—is here to help us lighten up a little bit, to soften, to have some compassion for ourselves, conditioned beings, to help us see the vast power our conditioning, and find compassion and openness about everything. This is a common thread in Buddhist teaching. Here we are encouraged to see that even at the very most raw and apparently “real” level of our experience—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—what we experience is deeply, karmically conditioned. Ultimately, we do not know what is.

- Ben Connelly, “Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacra : A Practitioner’s Guide”

[aflawedfashion]

Melanie & Bennett | Snowpiercer

[soulofgod]

𝘼𝙡𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝘾𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙈𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙚𝙨

[ultimateanna]

My fantasy is which cast will be well suited for the role of the main characters of The Evil Within.

[dare-g]

Bad Behaviour (2023)

[vvomentalking]

The new teaser poster for Alice Englert’s directorial debut film BAD BEHAVIOUR starring Jennifer Connelly and Ben Whishaw.

[maskofmilves]

BAD BEHAVIOUR trailer is here!!!

[aflawedfashion]

Melanie & Bennett | Snowpiercer 1x06 / 2x01 / 4x02

[cantsayidont]

Some movies of the early '00s, good, bad, and indifferent:

THE SWEETEST THING (2002): Enthusiastically raunchy but extremely dumb romcom starring Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, and Selma Blair as three 20something friends supporting each other through various sexual and romantic misadventures. Not without charm, but too sloppily written to really land except in fits and starts, and the weak plot, which focuses on the Diaz character's disastrous pursuit of a hunky real estate agent (Thomas Jane), sidelines both Applegate and Blair so completely that they might just as well have been condensed into a single character. However, it is occasionally very funny, with the highlight being a hilarious musical number entitled "Your Penis Is…" CONTAINS LESBIANS? Not even as a concept. VERDICT: Your life will be no poorer if you tune out after the musical number, but don't miss that.

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (2003): Slow-moving, moody, downbeat drama about the battle of wills between depressed white divorcée Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly), whose house has been wrongfully seized and auctioned off by the county, and the buyer, exiled Iranian military officer Massoud Behrani (Ben Kingsley), who moves in with his wife (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and teenage son (Jonathan Ahdout) and refuses to sell the house back to the county for less than four times what he paid for it. (With the skyrocketing cost of real estate since the film's release, hearing those amounts may cause physical pain.) Now broke and homeless, Kathy falls into a relationship with a married local sheriff's deputy (Ron Eldard), whose attempts to "help" by bullying and terrorizing Behrani into cooperating lead to tragedy. A strange story that spends a lot of time alternately cultivating and then deliberately puncturing viewer sympathy for the characters, and which seems unusually determined to avoid examining the larger social and structural forces that are actually driving the plot. Connelly and Kingsley are effective; Aghashloo is boxed in by her thankless, rather condescending supporting part as Behrani's timid wife Nadi, who barely speaks English and lives in mortal terror of being sent back to Iran — a far cry from her later role as cunning, sharp-tongued politician Chrisjen Avasarala on THE EXPANSE. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Not at all. VERDICT: Well-made, but very heavy going, and the last half hour (which is a real downer) is troubling on several levels.

BOARDING GATE (2007): Customarily oblique Olivier Assayas crime drama, in some ways reminiscent of a William Gibson story (though it's not based on one), about a sleazy businessman (Michael Madsen) confronting his soon-to-be-former mistress Sandra (Asia Argento), whose sexual favors he has previously exploited to gather intelligence on business partners and rivals, and who now wants to break things off for good. That meeting is just one strand in a more complex web of betrayal and vengeance involving Sandra and her new employers (Carl Ng and Kelly Lin), who each have their own agendas. The terse, gritty, sometimes lurid story can be tricky to follow at points because Assayas deliberately avoids ever pulling back to present a larger picture of what's going on or revealing much about the actual nature of the characters' business, and the jittery, desaturated cinematography seems calculated to keep viewers disoriented. The problem is that the film also holds the characters at arm's length, making it hard to care what happens to them, and the ending succumbs to Gibsonian anticlimax, leaving it unclear what the point was supposed to be. That it works at all is due mostly to Argento, whose smoldering performance is the main thing holding the film together. CONTAINS LESBIANS? By implication only. (Sandra describes a reluctant past encounter with a woman who doesn't actually appear in the story.) VERDICT: The story's self-imposed limitations tend to smother its virtues, although in stretches, the movie feels more like a William Gibson story than most actual William Gibson adaptations.

THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS (2004/2006): Sordid, thoroughly unappetizing drama based on the 2001 short-story collection by "JT LeRoy," adapted by Asia Argento and Alessandro Magania and directed by and starring Argento herself, her second feature directing effort. (The movie debuted at Cannes about two years before "LeRoy" was revealed to be a fiction created by Laura Albert, although that revelation limited the film's eventual theatrical release in 2006.) The film is an episodic chronicle of several nightmarish years in the life of a boy named Jeremiah (played at different points by Jimmy Bennett, Dylan Sprouse, and Cole Sprouse), who after spending his early life in foster care ends up back in the custody of his erratic, self-absorbed, wildly irresponsible mother Sarah (Argento). After Jeremiah is sexually assaulted by one of his mother's awful boyfriends (Jeremy Renner), he's ineffectually counseled by a useless social worker (Wynonna Ryder, appearing unbilled) and placed in the custody of his Jesus-freak grandparents (Peter Fonda and Ornella Muti), who are no less cruel or abusive in their own ways. Sarah later "rescues" Jeremiah, encourages him to cross-dress to pose as her younger sister — leading to his being assaulted by another of Sarah's terrible boyfriends (Marilyn Manson) — and then moves them in a run-down house with a meth lab in the basement. The public interest in this very unpleasant material, which is a veritable anthology of child abuse and frequently difficult to watch, was ostensibly driven by the notion that it was based on real events of "LeRoy's" life. With that pretense revealed as a fraud, what's left is a distasteful appetite for the self-consciously lurid, to which Argento's main contribution is the gusto with which she embraces an especially unsympathetic maternal role. Even that was rendered all the more unpalatable by the subsequent allegations of Jimmy Bennett, who reported in 2018 that when he was 17 (about 10 years after this film was made), Argento sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room. Argento's DARVO response squandered all of her remaining goodwill and permanently consigned this already hard-to-stomach movie to the "Morbid Curiosities" file. CONTAINS LESBIANS? No, and aside from the point. VERDICT: Unpleasant content, fraudulent premise, too many creeps. Very strong CW for CSA and other forms of child abuse.

[itsdarkinsidee25]

Sundance 2023: THR's Portrait Studio 

[ad-j]

WATCHLIST 2022: Only The Brave

[filmhoundsmag]

Bad Behaviour (Film Review)

Continue reading Untitled

[weclassybouquetfun]

Taron and Edward Holcroft hung out again today.

I was hoping that when Holcroft's IMDB profile pic was updated it meant he would be coming out with a project soon. Doesn't appear that way.

He seems firmly in his Ben Barnes era of making music.

I'm not saying Alex Pettyfer is a worse actor than Edward Holcroft, but I am saying that Alex Pettyer's foot and mouth disease ran through him and left people hating him so much that when I AM NUMBER FOUR (in which he played Number Four) came out on DVD, all the ads were focused on Number Six played by Theresa Palmer. Even with this Alex has never stopped working. You may have never seen these projects, you may have never even *heard* of them, but he does work.

And he just wrapped working with Guy Ritchie, so...who is his agent and can they take Edward on?

-One Edward Holcroft coworker who is working is Ben Whishaw whose PASSAGES, a love-triangle drama directed by Ira Sachs, will open Toronto's Inside Out film festival.

Ben and costar Franz Rogowski

On Thursday BAFTA will be holding a livestreamed discussion between Whishaw and Will Sharpe.

Do I have to watch THE WHITE LOTUS, Will?

I get it, Sophia. I do.

Ben will also (eventually) be seen in BAD BEHAVIOUR written and directed by Alice Englert (Starz' DANGEROUS LIASIONS) and starring Englert, Whishaw and Jennifer Connelly.

[some-trace-of-her]

World Cinema Dramatic Competition Bad Behaviour Lucy seeks enlightenment. The former child actress makes a pilgrimage to join her guru, Elon Bello (Ben Whishaw), for a silent retreat at a beautiful mountain resort with a Tesla-crammed parking lot. Before she shuts off her phone to the world, Lucy reaches out to her daughter, Dylan — a stunt person training for a dangerous fight scene — to interrupt her concentration and announce that she will be unavailable and out of range, and that she is very worried about her, and that she might extend her stay. It is codependent, bad behavior. When a young model/DJ/influencer at the retreat is paired up with Lucy to do a mother/daughter role-playing exercise, hellfire stokes Lucy’s bad behavior to an astonishing low. Director Alice Englert’s sophisticated feature debut delivers a surprising, tongue-in-cheek, dark comedic dismemberment of a toxic white woman. Jennifer Connelly is pitch-perfect as Lucy, a woman whose sublimated pain has transformed her into an unavoidable mortal vortex. Bad Behaviour shows that purging anger as a redemption strategy can really get someone hurt.

[screenzealots]

"Bad Behaviour"

A terrible film with few redeeming qualities, this dull, weird movie about an unpleasant woman seeking enlightenment is just as aimless as its characters.

Despite a pedigree steeped in industry nepotism, “Bad Behaviour” is a terrible film with few redeeming qualities. This dull, weird movie about an unpleasant woman seeking enlightenment is just as aimless as its characters. Former child actress Lucy (Jennifer Connelly) is desperate for a little spiritual healing, so she heads off to a mountain retreat led by guru Elon Bello (Ben Whishaw). Before…

[spryfilm]

Blu-ray review: “House of Sand and Fog” (2003)