You Heard It Straight From The Bird's Beak @loganrich-blog - Tumblr Blog

from Three Comrades

"It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life - and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems." - Remarque

sfmoma

Love letter to John Gutmann’s Promenade Deck, M.S. Brimanger, Pacific Ocean 1933 How did I find you? Why did I choose you? You are so small and colorless. But you are filled with light and space. I guess that means I should beware of shadows. You show me an edge. A place to bang into… possible conflict. A place to jump off of… Is it a beginning or ending? Moving forward toward a horizon, traversing sea and sky. But you remind me there is always the chance of colliding with the black hole of a broken heart.

The Grey (film review)

Director: Joe Carnahan

6/10

Liam Neeson begins the narration of The Grey with a description of his co-workers. He describes them as "unfit for society" and "assholes." He lets you know early on in the film that you probably won't connect with many of the characters in this film. He's mostly right.

What keeps The Grey from becoming disposable is a great ending. The third act is a meditation of life and survival, and the final scene is arguably the best scene in the film. Thankfully, the plot is more reminiscent of Jack London than your typical action film.

However, The Grey still has its weaknesses. Much of the emotional impact relies on Neeson's flashbacks of a past marriage. However, we return to the same shot and are not given much information. More time spent in the beginning scenes could have helped as well. We don't get to explore much of his depression before the plane crashes. Once it crashes, he is fighting for survival and the scenes having to do with his suicide attempt suddenly don't mean much.

Once again, The Grey is a better-than-average action film that has a great third act. If your expectations are low, I think you'll be entertained by this fight against wolves and arctic temperatures. Fuck going to Alaska.

#TheGrey

Shame (film review)

Director: Steve McQueen Jr. 10/10 The fact that Shame has picked up so many awards, mostly in Europe, but is completely ignored at the Oscars says a lot about how the Academy views NC-17 films. I think if Shame was rated R, it would have received a nomination for Best Picture, and Michael Fassbender would have received a nomination for Best Actor. I think the motion picture industry is afraid that time spent promoting this film would be a waste because they think people will avoid it because of the stigma attached to an NC-17 rating. It doesn't take a genius to realize that the films that get the most financial backing are kid-friendly films. Many of the R-rated films are marketed towards teenagers. Some recent examples that come to mind are: Underworld, The Sitter, and Contraband. I don't blame the industry for producing films that have a high return. I blame American adults for not supporting quality films and spending their money on childish garbage instead. Fassbender plays this role perfectly. We feel sorry for him, yet he is a predator in his environment. We like him, yet we are repulsed by him. Sex addiction is a very interesting topic. When does the desire for sex become unhealthy? Most teenage males will go through a phase when they simply cannot get enough. In one of the opening scenes, he preys on a married woman. In a later scene, his computer gets taken away from him at work because of the pornography the company has found. While both of these things are taboo, I think the definitive line is crossed when he tries to have a legitimate relationship with a co-worker, and he cannot perform because the filth isn't there. He needs the vile aspects of sex. He craves the self-debasement. One of the most moving scenes in the film consists of a series of facial expressions from Fassbender. We empathize with his pain. We want to help him, but we can't. He has gone too far, and he can't return. I think that in this moment, he has proved his talent and should be considered one of best actors in the film industry.

#shame #oscarfail

3wings

Monet sitting next to the waterlily pond in his garden at Giverny in France Hulton Archive

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (film review)

3/10

Director: Stephen Daldry

When the nominations for Best Picture were announced, I was surprised to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close on the list. I've recently read that it is one of the most poorly reviewed films to ever receive a Best Picture nomination. This alone sparked my interest. What about this film did the Academy see that the general public did not?

After viewing the film, I'm reminded why I don't like to mix my media. I often hear people say moronic things like, "I'm going to try to read the book before I see the movie." I can't help but notice the huge sections of Barnes and Noble that are dedicated to books that have been adapted to the movies currently in theaters. This is always a bad idea.

I hated the first half of this film. I felt like it was dumbed down to reach a wider audience. Many of the surprises of the second half of the book were given away in the first fifteen minutes of the film. It was like the studio told Stephen Daldry that audiences would not follow this boy on his adventures if we didn't already know almost everything about the quest before it began.

However, once Max Von Sydow entered the film, I found myself connected. I started to feel something. Deep within his face lies the young artist that defined quality acting in films like The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring. Together with Ingmar Bergman, he was part of a crew that established film as a challenging and engaging art form. He still has it. At least Daldry was smart enough to never have Sydow and Sandra Bullock share screen time.

I care about endings. I gave War Horse an extra two points just because it had a spectacular ending. The ending to the book is great. However, the ending to this film is repulsive. All the momentum and vigor from the Sydow scenes gets drained into a pool of Lifetime television quality screenwriting delivered by the soccer mom from The Blindside.

I should have watched The Help.

from Leviathan

"Books are born out of ignorance, and if they continue to go on living after they are written, it's only to the degree that they cannot be understood." - Paul Auster

mythologyofblue

Anselm Kiefer, from the exhibition, Heaven and Earth

“The title Heaven and Earth is a paradox because heaven and earth don’t exist anymore. The earth is round. The cosmos has no up and down. It is moving constantly. We can no longer fix the stars to create an ideal place. This is our dilemma.”

-Anselm Kiefer

See also my previous Kiefer posts:

+ + + + + +

Residence

Before moving to Little Rock, I had no idea that people put so much thought and pride into their neighborhoods. After living here about four months, I realized that where you live says a lot about you. Living in The Heights meant that you were rich but urban, living in Hillcrest meant that you were cosmopolitan and cultured, and living in Capital View meant that what you value most is the abillity to walk home from a night at Whitewater Tavern. Apparently, living in West Little Rock means that I am scared of minorities, opposed to small businesses that aren't chains, and probably Republican. The first few times that I brought up where I live in conversation with people I had just met, I was surprised to see the instant scorn that I would receive. I didn't really understand it. Having previously lived in Dardanelle, there was no huge distinction between neighborhoods. If you lived on Skyline in Russellville, you were probably rich, but living in Dardanelle or Russellville at all meant that you met the West Little Rock qualifiers. The initial reasons I chose my apartment complex were pretty simple. It was close to 430, and I could get to work quickly. It had a dishwasher and a place for a washer and dryer. It was close to Market St Cinema. This last benefit was one of the most appealing, and it has since proved fruitful. After living there for over a year, some of the other benefits are: I'm really close to Rave Cinemas (I underestimated how often I would go there), I'm really close to all those chain restaurants everyone hates (I go to Firehouse, Moe's, Chick-Fil-A, and Jason's Deli), and it is very safe. Also, I'm a short drive from all the places that people who live in cool neighborhoods get to go. I'm not necessarily scared of miniorites as people of downtown Little Rock would claim. However, I am scared of people that would mug me. Some of these people would probably be white. Since I've lived at The Landings, I have had absolutely no problems, and I haven't heard of any of my neighbors having problems. I never feel intimidated. Many of my friends and acquaintances of downtown Little Rock do often feel intimidated, and some of them own guns. I think the moment that I decide to own a gun in the name of safety is the moment that I need to find somewhere else to live. My lease is almost up. I can move if I so choose to. Hillcrest is the most appealing neighborhood. However, I would like to find an apartment that has a dishwasher and a place for my washer and dryer. That may not happen. If it doesn't, oh well. I'm not opposed to continuing my stay in Republicanland.

Carnage (film review)

Director: Roman Polanski

8/10

Ever since I first saw him in Inglorious Basterds, I knew that Christoph Waltz was going to be one of my new favorite actors. He chooses to play very interesting characters while radiating a different kind of cool. I'm still waiting for him to take the kind of showcasing role I've imagined him to play, but in the meantime, we get a sample of his immense abilities in the Polanski's new film, Carnage.

The most impressive thing about Carnage is that the entire film is in one setting and is basically one long scene. Despite these boundaries, it is very entertaining and displays some great performances. The basic plot is that one set of parents is visiting another set of parents because their sons got in a fight. One by one, each of the parents loses his or her cool despite the polite arrangement of their meeting.

Waltz plays the coldest of the parents. He admits early in the film that he was not interested in the meeting, and that he is there against his will. He refers to his son as a "maniac." He pays more attention to his phone than the people in the apartment. However, when the characters start to reveal their true selves, he delivers the best lines in the script and shows that his pessimistic demeanor may have been the most honest of the group.

from Bright Lights Big City

“You considered violence and you considered reconciliation. But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.”- Jay McInerney

#McInerney

leslieavonmiller

Gunter Ludwig

“Portugal” Acrylic, asphalt, charcoal on canvas 48” x 60” 2009

War Horse (film review)

Director: Steven Spielberg

5/10

War Horse is a beautiful film. Many of the scenes look like famous paintings, and there's a specific shot in a wheat field that looks like it is straight out of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. The final scene is so well crafted that it is almost worth waiting the entire duration of the film to see. If War Horse wins the Oscar for Best Cinematography, it will deserve it.

However, the visual aspects of the film may be the only redeemable qualities. This is disappointing because Richard Curtis, who wrote Love Actually, wrote the script. The storyboard of this film is one long campy cliche, the characters are terribly one dimensional, and every plot point is painfully predictable. The first forty-five minutes are spent dealing with the crisis of, "How are we going to train this horse to plow the field?" I'm not joking. Fortunately, the inevitable war comes to claim its victims, and the plot zooms out to more interesting conflicts.

I've already written about the amazing amount of luck my generation has had in this blog. This film supports that thesis in many ways. Most of the characters that die on screen are young. Everyone is affected by the war in one miserable way or another. Like every other species on Earth, the human race has had to go through periods of suffering. This film focuses on a horse that didn't take sides but has to endure the suffering alongside the humans nonetheless.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (film review)

Director: David Fincher

7/10

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a widely successful novel by a Swedish author that was made into a Swedish film. I viewed this film sometime last fall and thought it was pretty good. It had the feel of a usual murder mystery, but the hook was that it would push boundaries with the degree of gore and sexual content. When I heard that David Fincher would take on an American version of this project, I was disappointed. I hate remakes. I especially hate remakes of recent works. I thought Fincher was too good for this.

After viewing the film, I get it. About half way through the film it started to make sense. Fincher has developed a running theme with The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He is focusing on characters that are socially distant but are able to understand social networks better than everyone else. Mark Zuckerberg had no idea how to keep a girlfriend or how to keep from alienating his closest relationships. However, he would invent a social medium that advances relationships for almost everyone around the globe. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, we meet a girl that can access information faster and easier than everyone else. She is able to manipulate funds from international corporate giants. However, it comes as a shock to her that this superstar journalist (played by Daniel Craig) with a daughter doesn't see a future in a relationship with a girl that looks like an extra in a Nine Inch Nails video.

The book God's Debris by Scott Adams presents an interesting theory. This theory is that The Big Bang was God destroying himself, and that everything that was created during The Big Bang is actually a piece of God. Therefore, communication and advances in communication are actually efforts to bring us closer to God and his true form.

If you consider that theory and look at the characters depicted in these films, you see something more than two youngsters who are good at typing and zooming in on photos. You see people that can register human communication and advancing social networks faster than the average person. This type of person is the bishop, the new medicine man. They understand us from a higher standpoint. They are the new harbingers of the divine.

#girlwiththedragontattoo #god'sdebris #divine

t-ransitions-blog

(by Dan Lansley)

Domestic Violets (Quotes)

from Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman

"He arrived to find that she'd left, discovering then that he was all alone. Even the birds had gone. They'd abandoned their nest on the windowsill, and he was somehow certain that they'd never come back."

"Hell, think of it as a compliment," he continues. "As the old saying goes, the only thing worse than having a wife who lots of guys want to fuck is having a wife who no guys want to fuck."

"For a while we're silent, and I know that she's lying. Not because of how she's acting, or because I don't trust her, or because in a million years I ever thought we'd be having this conversation. I know that she's lying simply because I can't imagine it."

"A woman never wants to be with someone else. Not really. That's the business of men, and for some reason we destroy things because of it. But not them. They're better than us. They only choose someone else when we push them away."

2011

My favorite films of the year:

1. The Tree of Life 2. The Descendants 3. The Skin I Live In 4. Take Shelter 5. Drive 6. Melancholia 7. Beginners 8. Weekend 9. Natural Selection 10. Cedar Rapids

I still need to see: Shame, A Dangerous Method, The Artist, and A Separation

My favorite records of the year:

1: Middle Brother - Middle Brother 2: Banner Pilot - Heart Beats Pacific 3: Deer Tick - Divine Providence 4: Ampere - Like Shadows 5: Black Lips - Arabia Mountain 6: Graveyard - Hisingen Blues 7: Touche Amore - Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me 8: David Bazan - Strange Negotiations 9: Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues 10: Bright Eyes - The People's Key

Best music festival - Fun Fun Fun Fest

Books I read in 2011:

Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga 1Q84- Haruki Murakami Straight Man - Richard Russo The Wrong Blood - Manuel De Lope The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes Cain - Jose Saramago Then We Came to the End - Joshua Farris Tony and Susan - Austin Wright Towing Jehovah - James Morrow Death With Interruptions - Jose Saramago The Afterlife - John Updike The Orchard Keeper - Cormac McCarthy My American Unhappiness - Dean Bakopoulos Phillip Roth - Indignation The Razor's Edge - W Somerset Maugham Ten Storey Love Song - Richard Milward Number 9 Dream - David Mitchell The Devil all the Time - Donald Ray Pollock Mooch - Dan Fante Essays and Aphorisms - Arthur Schopenhauer Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart The Silent Land - Graham Joyce Everything In This Country Must - Colum McCann The Centaur - John Updike The Clockwork Universe - Edward Dolnick Netsuke - Rikki Ducornet Laughter In The Dark - Vladimir Nabokov The Counterlife - Phillip Roth Love Wins - Rob Bell The Pale King - David Foster Wallace The Sound of Waves - Yukio Mishima Last Evenings on Earth - Roberto Bolano Popular Hits of the Showa Era - Ryu Murakami Mr. Peanut - Adam Ross Caribou Island - David Vann Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller Citrus County - John Brandon The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - David Mitchell O Pioneers! - Willa Cather

#2011 #Bestoflists

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

You Heard It Straight From The Bird's Beak