A movie and a concert
Just saw Nostalgia de la Luz (Nostalgia for the Light). Absolutely beautiful movie. It focused on the confluence of astronomers, archaeologists and traumatized citizens who sift through the dust and stars in the Atacama desert in search of relics from Chile's recent and prehistoric pasts and clues about the origins of humanity and the universe. Moved me to tears, twice. Patient, thought-provoking, emotional in the truest, non-sentimental sense. Bone-chilling at times (e.g. exhumed bodies). Kind. So kind to all of its subjects. And had one of the best, poetic closing lines I can remember.
It reminded me of Terrence Malik's The New World, which I tried to watch recently but could not stand. Malik, from what I've since read, evinces a sense of timelessness, of epic themes, of the world's grandiosity and humankind's simultaneous insignificance and deathless universality, by holding on shots of nature and human bodies over long musical notes. I found them intolerable, and the characters' mumbled philosophical lines laughable. Guzman's (the director of Nostalgia) transitions from sand to galaxies to skin to dust were clunkier, his subjects' musings and connectedness more spelled out, but they worked much more for me.
Maybe that is a fault of mine. Some of the reviews for The New World certainly make it sound like a moral/aesthetic failing, a lack of sophistication, to not appreciate the filmmaking genius that is Malik, his spurning of Hollywood narrative structure and America's dwindling attention span. And I do want to try his forthcoming The Tree of Life. We had no idea what we'd just witnessed when the trailer showed before Black Swan, but (a) it did look intriguing, more so than the New World trailer, and (b) maybe it's a different experience if you know what sort of three-hour molasses-paced nonlinear philosophical experiment you're in for ahead of time. Perhaps afterwards, if I feel the same way about it as I did about The New World, I will not lack the courage of my convictions to say his style is a matter of taste, and that taste is just really not mine. See also: Richard Linklater and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Anyway, if you like transcendent documentaries that give equal attention to cosmology and dictatorship atrocities, do go see Nostalgia.
* * *
My sister visited for a few hours this week, which is about our usual length due to her schedule. Ended up going with her to the Jimmy Gnecco show she was here for, which was excellent as always, except this time while I watched and listened, I was thinking about how Jimmy is one of the people my sister knows who would be super-popular in fandom if fandom knew and cared. I mean, to put his physical appeal in fannish terms, imagine Ryan Robbins' head (on a good day) on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's body -- Jimmy used to be a gymnast -- with Tom Hardy's tattoos and a voice like Bono's if Bono were singing Rufus Wainwright songs. In short, he is a fine nearing-forty specimen who weighs 100 pounds with his boots on, and I may have to draw heavily from this solo acoustic performance if there are tattoo or sensation play squares on my Kink Bingo card.
Or you could just look.
It reminded me of Terrence Malik's The New World, which I tried to watch recently but could not stand. Malik, from what I've since read, evinces a sense of timelessness, of epic themes, of the world's grandiosity and humankind's simultaneous insignificance and deathless universality, by holding on shots of nature and human bodies over long musical notes. I found them intolerable, and the characters' mumbled philosophical lines laughable. Guzman's (the director of Nostalgia) transitions from sand to galaxies to skin to dust were clunkier, his subjects' musings and connectedness more spelled out, but they worked much more for me.
Maybe that is a fault of mine. Some of the reviews for The New World certainly make it sound like a moral/aesthetic failing, a lack of sophistication, to not appreciate the filmmaking genius that is Malik, his spurning of Hollywood narrative structure and America's dwindling attention span. And I do want to try his forthcoming The Tree of Life. We had no idea what we'd just witnessed when the trailer showed before Black Swan, but (a) it did look intriguing, more so than the New World trailer, and (b) maybe it's a different experience if you know what sort of three-hour molasses-paced nonlinear philosophical experiment you're in for ahead of time. Perhaps afterwards, if I feel the same way about it as I did about The New World, I will not lack the courage of my convictions to say his style is a matter of taste, and that taste is just really not mine. See also: Richard Linklater and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Anyway, if you like transcendent documentaries that give equal attention to cosmology and dictatorship atrocities, do go see Nostalgia.
* * *
My sister visited for a few hours this week, which is about our usual length due to her schedule. Ended up going with her to the Jimmy Gnecco show she was here for, which was excellent as always, except this time while I watched and listened, I was thinking about how Jimmy is one of the people my sister knows who would be super-popular in fandom if fandom knew and cared. I mean, to put his physical appeal in fannish terms, imagine Ryan Robbins' head (on a good day) on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's body -- Jimmy used to be a gymnast -- with Tom Hardy's tattoos and a voice like Bono's if Bono were singing Rufus Wainwright songs. In short, he is a fine nearing-forty specimen who weighs 100 pounds with his boots on, and I may have to draw heavily from this solo acoustic performance if there are tattoo or sensation play squares on my Kink Bingo card.
Or you could just look.