Ten minutes after leaving the cinema tonight, having just watched the film Samson & Delilah, I was truly shaken up and the car I was in came to a halt. This story and its restrained yet poetic telling was a new cinematic experience for me – nothing could have been added or subtracted to enhance its impact or beauty.
The film follows two indigenous adolescences from a remote community as they find comfort in each other while losing a hold on everything else in their lives – family, home, health and lucidity. Their situation is desperate and marked by an assault of tragic events but somehow they always return to the refuge of one another.
Samson and Delilah is incredibly bare of dialogue but when words are spoken they say just enough. The film speaks visually with the meaning of every careful yet raw gesture of its protagonists who awkwardly and innocently negotiate their courtship while fighting for survival. Emotions simmer under layers of restraint and self-preservation until circumstances become unbearable and the only release is oblivion.
This window display was just too good not to put it on the blog. Kasia certainly has a talent when it comes to window displays and I think it's safe to say that this is one of her best.
While she was painting the window, there were 8 year old boys on the other side of the glass staring out in awe, with their faces screwed up in awesome appreciation. Even the staff from the tattoo parlor across the street came over to compliment the new window.
I shouldn't forget to mention that the window is in honour of a new book that was recently released called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Austen and Grahame-Smith. There are all kinds of cool things popping up surrounding this book. Just check out the awesome banner for this bookshop (which I may or may not work for...)
Not to mention one very enthusiastic reader:
But most important of all is the window itself. Please enjoy:
Seth Rogen plays Ronnie, Head of Security at the mall. He takes his job very seriously. He is in love with the girl who works at the cosmetics counter and he thinks she is the most beautiful girl in the mall, maybe even the world. When a streaker comes to the mall and starts harassing shoppers, Ronnie is committed to keeping the public and mall employees safe. Especially if that means he finds the streaker before the police do.
Along the way we get to know a little more about Ronnie. He still lives at home with his alcoholic mother. He and his small security team are very into guns and wish they were allowed to carry them in the mall. And Ronnie isn't the smartest guy; he prefers to settle things physically. But deep down, he seems to have good intentions, even if he fails to execute them.
This film disarms you with its humour, then goes to a darker place. For the first half of the film I found myself laughing, but then the laughter died down as the situations became more real. Ronnie and another security guard have a daylong bender on a variety of drugs and alcohol, during which time they decide to clear out some skateboarding teens. They brutally beat these teenagers with their fists, metal torches and their own skateboards. While the absurdity and shock of this scene initially seems funny, any humour quickly dissipates as you realise the reality of what is going on.
A lot of reviews have been quick to criticise, not to mention forum contributors who have been more forthright with their opinions. A questionable sex scene in particular comes under fire. However, while some of these criticisms may be valid, it is important to consider what the filmmaker (director Jody Hill) is trying to say through this movie. The scenes that offend so many are not just there to offend, but also to fill in the background of these characters.
This film has the potential to be many things. A portrait of a flawed misguided man, of what can happen when ignorant people come into power, as a demonstration of why violence really isn't funny. The film has a definite shift in tone. I don't think audiences should be too hasty to condemn this film. Whether it succeeds in what it sets out to do is up to the individual.
Observe and Report can be summarised by a line of dialogue from one of the police characters, "I thought this was gonna be funny, but it's just kinda sad."
She can hear them outside. They're on the stairs. She slips deeper under the covers. The door is open, they're inside the house. Only her eyes are visible above the sheets. They're in the hall. She closes her eyes. The door is locked, but they force it open. She slides deep under the covers, between the folds and ripples of fabric, and is gone.
This high concept thriller is set in a near future when people rarely die of old age. This is all thanks to thanks to the perfection of artificial organs, or 'artiforgs'. There is nothing that can't be enhanced. Your eyes, liver, kidneys, bladder, tastebuds, and even brain stem can all be replaced or upgraded. They can even build in a radar detector. But it doesn't come cheap. This kind of technology isn't insured by your usual health cover, a union and many other loan companies have been set up to afford people financing on their new organs. The cost is high and the interest is higher, and not everyone can afford to make their repayments.
Enter the repossession men, or Bio-Repo for short. This is a group of men whose job it is to track down people whose artiforg payments have lapsed significantly. When they find the client, and they will find you, they 'repossess' the organ. So if you have an internal organ such as a heart, liver or stomach, that’s it for you.
Now one of the best Bio-Repo men is on the run from the Union he used to collect for. He’s holed up in the burnt out remains of a hotel, frantically bashing out his story on an old typewriter. He knows it only a matter of time before they find him, but he also knows exactly how they work, after all, he used to be one of them.
This book read like a film for me. The language was visual and the story moved along at an exciting pace. Having said that, I found the book lacklustre in parts. I didn't really care enough for the main character. However, I think he is purposely constructed with an inbuilt moral ambiguity that is intended to throw people off balance. Garcia wrote the screenplay for The Repossession Mambo before the book had even been published and I think the film may succeed in some of these areas in ways the book didn't.
This is a tense, exciting thriller that poses larger questions about what it is to be human, even when most of your body parts are artificial. Eric Garcia is also the author of Matchstick Men, which was turned into a film starring Nicholas Cage & Sam Rockwell.
Climb to the top of a tree and take a picture of the view.
"This photo was taken from a reassuringly low-lying lilac tree in my parents' back garden in Co. Dublin, at 5:17pm on Thursday the 30th April 2009." Alex Dublin, IRELAND
Art is something that has been an important part of my life since I was about five years old, when my parents would routinely drag me to the QueenslandArtGallery on a weekend. I think I complained for at least three years about these excursions because I was so bored and could not understand why anyone would stand in front of a painting for more than a minute - what were they staring at for so long, what extra information were they absorbing?
So now as an adult I find myself staring at ordinary things that are supposedly undeserving of as much attention as a painting, like the shiny white car outside the very still dark brick house around the corner from my place, the intense orange of the marigolds in my garden, people's feet on public transport, the aqua blue reflections of light on the bottom of Musgrave Park Pool when I go swimming - really the list of the random things that hold my attention could go on forever.
These everyday fascinations I experience are very much in debt to my agonising childhood trips to the gallery - my parents and all the art around me showed me how much I could see if I really looked and noticed the details. Art in the gallery helped me find it outside in all the ordinary things we do - and of course these are the very things that stimulate artists. Now when I visit an art gallery or gaze over the pages of a favourite or much desired art book it always boosts my awareness of all the little things and ‘secret’ art embedded in daily life. Strange as it sounds - art is almost like a reality dose for me; it points out all the stuff (internal and external) I’ve been missing.
Sometimes artists can beautifully capture the serendipity of finding art in unusual places, making the connection between art and everyday life very tangible. Double Game (1994 -1999) was a collaboration and book by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle and American author Paul Auster that vividly intertwined art and everyday life. One part of this project involved Calle following a set of instructions devised by Auster on how to improve life in New York City. This resulted in many people stumbling upon Calle sitting on a chair (often knitting) next to a public telephone booth in TriBeCa, Manhattan that she had cleaned and furnished into a home with flowers, food and drinks for people to enjoy while they made a call. Her intervention accentuated the sites and moments of intimacy routinely experienced in public spaces – like a phone booth.
Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher are artists that ask the public to make art out of their life experiences. They created, Learning to Love You More, a website that posts assignments for the public to complete as reports which are then displayed online and have already been compiled into a book (of the same name and published in 2007). Some assignments have been, “make a list of things you at first disliked but later learned to love”, “photograph a scar and write about it”, “take a flash photo under your bed” and “spend time with a dying person.” The reports simultaneously reveal the curious similarities and differences of how people respond to these tasks, culminating in an often funny but ultimately touching survey of everyday life.
Brisbane artist Sandra Selig draws our attention to the most ephemeral and easily ignored (or accidentally walked into) aspects of suburban reality. Her delicate series of spider web paintings (2007) involved the artist carefully detaching webs from around her home and yard, dipping them in enamel paint and then fixing them to black paper. Brightly coloured and fragile these works highlight the intricate complexity of these formations - the spider webs almost seem unreal even though they are something we can find everywhere.
Although I love my monthly trip to GOMA to check out the latest exhibition – the best thing about it is that after I experience all the art inside, I find art everywhere I go.
Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa. Just don't ask me how to say it.
Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) lives with his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and his daughter Olive. They have an unhappy marriage and Caden constantly thinks he might be dying. Adele is an artist who paints miniature canvases.. really miniature. So small that when viewing them in a gallery, the audience needs to wear magnifying glasses. When she goes to Berlin for one of her exhibitions, taking Olive with her, she never comes back.
Meanwhile, Caden has been given a generous "genius" grant for his theatre productions. He decides to stage a massive performance, based around his own life. He outfits a warehouse with a scale reproduction of New York, hires actors to play himself and other people in his life. If this isn't strange enough, the rehearsals take about 40 years!
The film becomes layered and almost self-referential as the actors start to incorporate things into the play that have just happened in Caden's life. Nothing is safe. Despite the complex sounding nature of this film, the narrative itself is actually pretty straight forward. Deriving meaning from the film seems ilusive, but not entirely out of grasp. Synecdoche, New York is clever, subtle and very funny in parts. Charlie Kaufman has crafted a superb film that will require more than one viewing. The film held my attention all the way through, and it was refreshing to be presented with an experience that made me think, rather than be just a passive observer. I recommend taking a friend so you can talk about it afterwards.
Check out the trailer below or see what Margaret and David thoughthere.
this blog is a collective notebook of our creative ideas, thoughts and opinions on art, literature, music and film - all the stuff we like! it features original artwork, creative writing and critical reviews. we decided to start this blog as a way of reinvigorating our creative practices while looking closer at all of our other interests and how they inform us. feel free to leave comments, suggestions and ideas, we'd love to know what you think!
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