|
5138e3f
|
Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin. The entertainment for this evening is not new, you've seen this entertainment through and through you have seen your birth, your life, your death....you may recall all the rest. Did you have a good world when you died? -enough to base a movie on??
|
|
life
entertaining
film
|
Jim Morrison |
|
771f7fb
|
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
|
|
dance
art
exaggeration
film
|
Kurt Vonnegut |
|
92b919d
|
Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, 'No, I'm not interested.' I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: 'the book is so much better than the film.
|
|
films-based-on-novels
novels
film
readers
|
Paulo Coelho |
|
a6e47b5
|
people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.
|
|
theatre
academy-awards
film
movies
theater
|
Charles Bukowski |
|
a48299a
|
"Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?"
|
|
writing
film
|
David Mamet |
|
44c93c3
|
My whole life I though I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along.
|
|
romance
life
comedy
romance-movie
star
film
movie
movies
|
John Green |
|
536e825
|
"Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery & then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing & blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her & says, "I ran all the way". That's what I want."
|
|
celebrity
hollywood
film
movies
power
|
Martha Grimes |
|
c30f435
|
"I broke up with this girl, and they put me with a psychiatrist who said, 'Why did you get so depressed, and do all those things you did?' I said, 'I wanted this girl and she left me.' And he said,'Well, we have to look into that.' And I said, 'There's nothing to look into! I wanted her and she left me.' And he said, 'Well, why are you feeling so intense?' And I said, 'Cause I want the girl!' And he said, 'What's underneath it?' And I said, 'Nothing!' He said, 'I'll have to give you medication.' I said, 'I don't want medication! I want the girl!'
|
|
funny
humor
film
|
Woody Allen |
|
eaaead8
|
Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
|
|
criticism
reviewers
film
movie
|
Joan Didion |
|
d116095
|
photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself...
|
|
photography
grief
loss
romance
joy
meaning
past
love
fujifilm
nikon
kodak
kodachrome
super-8
canon
photo
capture
film
knowledge
nostalgia
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
4440d30
|
"Yeah, you're right about having entire rooms full of film and photos... in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage... I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides... I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that's happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs," Alecto responded. "People say that a time machine can't be invented, but they've already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world's first time machines... The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I've been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to."
|
|
memories
industrial
polaroid
steel-mill
kodak
coal-mine
darkroom
kodachrome
cape-breton
super-8
nova-scotia
photograph
smog
photo
digital
coal
pollution
train
capture
film
nostalgia
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
97e3315
|
"I guess if there's one thing I can say about the 21st century, it's that the 21st century is all flash and no substance... everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones... it's sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? ...What's most annoying is that nobody cares, they've just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it... none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, "you're all a bunch of sheep!" and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen... they're all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they've got these days... it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again."
|
|
photography
future
books
bleak
cell-phones
celluloid
depressingly-honest
super-8
camera
digital
paper
doom
apocalypse
book
film
scary
poison
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
0d2ece0
|
Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne's thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or 'Eurocentric'; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the 'radical'; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly 'committed'. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies'--tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote . My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann's point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo'. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.
|
|
enlightenment
progress
irony
lies
socialism
literature
humanism
politics
faith
religion
science
truth
apoliticism
berlin
bought-priesthood
cape-coloureds
eurocentricism
george-hw-bush
german-people
groupthink
left-wing-politics
margaret-thatcher
munich
personality-politics
polytheism
potus
radical-politics
tribalism
xhosa-people
zulu-people
ronald-reagan
sectarianism
monotheism
solipsism
argument
critical-thinking
self-pity
self-love
south-africa
totalitarianism
journalism
right-wing-politics
george-orwell
soviet-union
united-states
conviction
orthodoxy
los-angeles
film
individualism
atheism
hedonism
thomas-mann
populism
russia
communism
postmodernism
cold-war
germany
literary-criticism
euphemism
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
efd305b
|
Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on... places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills... a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.
|
|
photography
earth
television
future
past
love
cook-stove
glow
laundry
traditional
nikon
kodak
kodachrome
cell-phone
farm
pie
massachusetts
grim
country
digital
missing
nostalgic
small-town
film
peace
texting
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
8016d31
|
Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It's so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn't dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They'd all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn't even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend -- movies can't show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.
|
|
stereotypes
reality
films
film
movies
gender-stereotypes
|
Chuck Klosterman |
|
2a70ae1
|
I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in power. This snuff-movie opens with a plenary session of the Ba'ath Party central committee: perhaps a hundred men. Suddenly the doors are locked and Saddam, in the chair, announces a special session. Into the room is dragged an obviously broken man, who begins to emit a robotic confession of treason and subversion, that he sobs has been instigated by Syrian and other agents. As the (literally) extorted confession unfolds, names begin to be named. Once a fellow-conspirator is identified, guards come to his seat and haul him from the room. The reclining Saddam, meanwhile, lights a large cigar and contentedly scans his dossiers. The sickness of fear in the room is such that men begin to crack up and weep, rising to their feet to shout hysterical praise, even love, for the leader. Inexorably, though, the cull continues, and faces and bodies go slack as their owners are pinioned and led away. When it is over, about half the committee members are left, moaning with relief and heaving with ardent love for the boss. (In an accompanying sequel, which I have not seen, they were apparently required to go into the yard outside and shoot the other half, thus sealing the pact with Saddam. I am not sure that even Beria or Himmler would have had the nerve and ingenuity and cruelty to come up with that.)
|
|
ba-athism
beria
cull
himmler
ba-athist-iraq
conspiracy
saddam-hussein
dictatorship
execution
film
syria
torture
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
cd15dac
|
Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.
|
|
photography
history
magic
nature
human
future
compassion
cellulod
hd
kodak
instant
robot
camera
photo
digital
art
film
nostalgia
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
181fc05
|
"We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not "we might have to eat the dog" poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald's was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and collecting nickels and dimes from the washing machine because she never got allowance, that kind of poor... poor enough to be nostalgic about poverty. So, when my mom and dad took me here for my tenth birthday, it was a really big deal. They'd saved up for two months to take me to the photography store and they bought me a Kodak Instamatic film camera... I really miss those days, because we were still a real family back then... this mall doesn't even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it's depressing..."
|
|
poverty
future
past
cardboard
coins
washing-machine
instamatic
kodak
cape-breton
nova-scotia
mcdonald-s
camera
digital
birthday
mall
canada
nostalgic
shopping
film
poor
insurance
wishes
dog
nostalgia
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
f10b249
|
"You should find something better to do with your time," Mandy told him. "I spend my time shooting people, and then I take them to darkrooms and blow them up." "...Come again?" Alecto questioned with a tone of alarm in his voice. "I take photographs and develop them myself, I've got my own darkroom... it was a joke," Mandy laughed. "I love photography and I'm gonna be a photojournalist someday." "Really?" Alecto asked. For the first time since she'd met him, he sounded slightly enthusiastic. "...I take photographs and I film my own home movies, I have a darkroom as well... but I can't be a photojournalist like you... I can't be anything... still, at least I can take photographs, it's fun."
|
|
photography
murder
friends
funny
humor
april-fool-s
blow-up
chemical
dark-room
demented
instamatic
nikon
photography-humor
home-movies
kodak
darkroom
super-8
disturbing
develop
camera
enthusiasm
shoot
weird
film
strange
hilarious
joke
crazy
insane
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
7bfefd1
|
Out of the ugliness of the ironworks lepers will eat, children will be born, their parents will grow old.
|
|
hayao-miyazaki
japan
film
|
Helen McCarthy |
|
3aecd6d
|
"I just got another kitten, you know. Found another trademark. It's quite embarrassing I missed it." " They can send you to prison for that." He pushed his glasses back on his nose. "I'm calling him Murad, after the cigarettes." "Never heard of them." "They're an obsolete Turkish brand, popular in the 1910s and '20s. means 'desire' in Arabic. The brand that ever appears in a Cordova film is . There's not one Marlboro, Camel, or Virginia Slim. It goes further. the Murad cigarette is by the camera in any Cordova film. The very person who appears on-screen has been devastatingly . In other words, the gods will have drawn a great big across his shoulder blades and taped an invisible sign there that reads FUCKED. His life will henceforth never be the same."
|
|
crazy-old-man
conspiracy-theories
film
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
0402c5e
|
A lot of film people are like that- especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them. It's not about art or ideas. It's about working at something and making it come out right.
|
|
filmmaking
film
|
Paul Auster |
|
e1d5d9d
|
"Her first really great role, the one that cemented the "Jean Arthur character," was as the wisecracking big-city reporter who eventually melts for country rube Gary Cooper in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). It was the first of three terrific films for Capra: Jean played the down-to-earth daughter of an annoyingly wacky family in Capra's rendition of Kaufman and Hart's You Can't Take It With You (1938), and she was another hard-boiled city gal won over by a starry-eyed yokel in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). "Jean Arthur is my favorite actress," said Capra, who had successfully worked with Stanwyck, Colbert and Hepburn. ". . . push that neurotic girl . . . in front of the camera . . . and that whining mop would magically blossom into a warm, lovely, poised and confident actress." Capra obviously recognized that Jean was often frustrated in her career choice."
|
|
classic-hollywood
frank-capra
jean-arthur
films
hollywood
film
movies
|
Eve Golden |
|
5dc8a7b
|
"Every day it's something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they'll all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples' minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck," Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. "Mearth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone."
|
|
led-lights
microchips
retro
nanotechnology
telephone
digital
obsolete
sinister
minds
film
technology
mental-illness
memory
nostalgia
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
8a0d0c5
|
Super 8 film is the language of silence.
|
|
photography
silence
kodak-moment
kodak
cape-breton
super-8
nova-scotia
obscure
seventies
film
language
nostalgia
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
739c692
|
There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it... this place, she decided, was called Smog City.
|
|
grief
heaven
death
kodak
kodachrome
super-8
concept
smog
steel
canada
forgotten
film
cruel
city
nostalgia
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
16f9b6d
|
"Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!'
|
|
film
movie-theater
movie-theatre
movie
|
Cornell Woolrich |
|
d305861
|
Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...), is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party, and that the war against is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following: And that's just from Orwell's in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.
|
|
farenheit-9-11
michael-moore
pacificism
moral-equivalence
george-orwell
film
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
bfd58d2
|
"Alecto... what do you think would happen if people found out about you? Your abilities, your life, Mearth's super 8 films, those powers of yours... how would they react?" "I don't know," said Alecto, "but ordinary people like a show, especially when it's a disturbing one. They enjoy seeing misery... probably because it allows them to pretend that they themselves are not so miserable, too. Also, they would probably find out about you, how you know about Personifications, how you saw the films... they would put us in cages and throw peanuts at us, I guess." "All joking aside, Alecto...." "Who is joking, Mandy Valems?"
|
|
humor
peanuts
psychokinesis
psychokinetic
pyrokinetic
super-8
super-8-film
super-eight
telekinesis
throw
pyrokinesis
ordinary
show
film
powers
misery
joke
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
7243642
|
...she found it made things easier if she dramatised them. Or melodramatised them. It was easier, for example, to face the fact of Uncle Philip if she saw him as a character in a film, possibly played by Orson Welles.
|
|
orson-welles
film
movies
|
Angela Carter |
|
20fb7a6
|
"Hey Alecto, film this!" she called out. With the slide being as tall as a two-storey house, it felt slightly risky being up there. "On second thought, why don't you come up here? It's a blast being up here." "I don't really like to be in high places," said Alecto as he filmed her, the camera lens reflecting the entire playground, which was partially secluded by tall trees that cast otherworldly shadows dancing across the ground. "If you don't like being in high places, then why'd you take so many drugs in the seventies?" Mandy questioned jokingly. "Do you want me to go up there and push you off the top of that slide?" Alecto threatened coldly. "You'd never do that, we're best friends!" Mandy pointed out. She reached over and picked a bright red maple flower from one of the long branches of the trees, tossing it down to him. "Even in this failing 21st century, where people are cell phone addicts and crude humor and violence is the norm, even when society falls apart and drowns in its own mistakes, we'll still be best friends!" She looked incredibly eccentric, never mind the fact that she was an adult woman wearing a trippy rainbow Pucci dress from the 1970's, standing on top of a slide at a children's playground. Alecto didn't seem to mind, he just continued to film her with his camera like she'd asked him to."
|
|
friends
friendship
cape-breton
psychedelic
super-8
nova-scotia
trippy
70-s
heights
sydney
park
camera
seventies
canada
film
flower
drugs
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
fdc8727
|
All Sam Peckinpah ever did in his movies was show that getting hit on the chin doesn't sound like [makes a small popping noise]. When one grown man hits another grown man in the face, it splatters like an overripe tomato. And it's not fun getting killed. It's bloody and gory and altogether unpleasant. That's all Sam Peckinpah ever did.
|
|
violence
sam-peckinpah
film
movies
|
Harry Crews |