the chan

• Deserts, never-ending stretch of deserts, and the one or two random saloon towns or adobe hut
• Bullets of sweat, grit, dust, and dirt, which can never be washed off even with an hour of scrubbing
• Guns, cannons, explosives
• Horses and horsebackriding
• Attire of tattered wide-rim hats, ponchos, cowboy boots with spurs, holsters, and the most important of all: a water pouch
• Buckets of money buried somewhere
• Twangy, dramatic soundtrack (an extra star if Ennio Morricone happens to be your soundtrack composer!)
• Fantastic intertitles
• Great character names
• Super close ups to insinuate first-person perspectives
• A pink sun umbrella (an extra star for frills)
• Bandit cowboys, sheriffs, and a very obvious villain
• Cigars and alcohol (you don't need food when you have these!)
• Clint Eastwood, squinting into the sun with his mouth in a perpetual grimace

I'm back to blogspot after a summer and a third of fall's worth of abandonment.  Was originally going to post my 1/4-review-3/4-screencaps-thing onto my livejournal but it got so out of hand with my other updates that I decided that it was time to return to 'joining forces with superman.'  Not that anyone knows this exists lol!

Finally watched Luschino Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratell (1960)--out of guilt that it's been sitting on my hard drive since who knows when and my need for some attractive Alain Delon. Typical Visconti; long, melodramatic, theatrical, and long. Many describe it as neo-realist but the only aspect I find neorealistic in this film is the focus on a poor, migrant farming family from southern Italy, trying to make a living in the cold, aloof northern industrial city of Milan (the cinematography though is stunning--especially the touches of film noir lighting and the barren landscape of working class housing).  Beyond a family's struggle to survive, Visconti takes the audience through a multi-character study of three different individuals' descending path towards the act of 'selling their soul' as a 'sacrifice,' means of surviving, or sheer lust for power and recognition.  The human condition's susceptibility to jealousy and pettiness proves as dramatic approaches to consequential demise and further disintegration of a family.  Perhaps touching another (neorealist) social commentary, the film addresses the change in times, in mentality, especially in regards of traditional spiritually-inspired acts of sainthood versus reality-oriented pragmatism.

It's like a bittersweet frothy milkshake of a bit Rocky, a bit of Italian diaspora, lots of family drama, and yummy bits of Alain Delon... There's nothing more I can say about Delon...the fact I had to wean out so many screencaps of Delon CUs says it all.

Trivia: One of Visconti's lovers was Helmut Berger, who played Ludwig in the really, really long film called Ludwig with Romy Schneider, Delon's ex. Berger was also in De Sica's last film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, in which I recall him being blonde, beautiful, and anemic.

Three months ago, I collaborated with Chinatown Community Development Center in San Francisco to make a video for them--for them to use something fun and interactive and interesting for their fundraising kick-offs or special events.  I screened this on Chinatown CDC's Fundraising Kick-Off on April 28th:

Three years back, three of my girlfriends and I went backpacking through France and Spain.  One of our stops was the little town of Sevilla in southern Spain.  Quaint, wonderfully saturated warm yellows and reds, contrasted against blue skies--it was undeniably a relaxing escape into an early summery, lackadaisical atmosphere.

(Note: I had a bad case of over-exposing my photos back in the day...)

As it is commonly heard among all enthusiast young student travelers, "if I had more money, I would go all over the world."  Luckily endowed with the opportunity to study abroad for the first four months of 2010 and then work abroad the summer of the same year, I was by no means moseying around with pockets full of cash and wealth.  But to the best of my ability and stringent budgeting, I managed to visit several places, cities, and towns that have left a lasting, memorable impression in my life.

It is now 2011 and the only place I've gone to is England to visit my lovely boyfriend, given that I'm still financially recovering from last year's adventures.  So here's a visual return, a nostalgic sigh and toast, to those past visits!

A film of photograph stills, a 60s post-apocalyptic, sci-fi trek through time traveling and mind psycho-wankery, directed by Chris Maker and edited together into a remarkable montage by Jean Ravel--truly an inspiration.

Simply put: I adore Vintage Classics. What is being sold on American bookshelves--I believe and witness--are an older line of production; recent but not the latest, which can be previewed on their website, linked above. But I'm positively in love with the cover designs; here are two themes:

Last night, I watched Le Clan des Siciliens (1969), directed by Henri Verneuil, with Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, and the ever-handsome Alain Delon, and was subsequently going to follow-up with a post about the possibly worst score written by Ennio Morricone, mainly because of repetitive, obnoxious 'boings.'  Legitimate boings.

But instead of whining about something I didn't enjoy, I decide to turn to the BBC production.  I've only read two Austen novels: Pride and Prejudice and Emma, which was the book that pretty much stopped me from reading anymore of her work.  But BBC's Sense and Sensibility has done the almost-impossible: convince me to read more Jane Austen.  Not to mention, I actually like it.  So far.  We'll see what reactions it will yield in the next two parts.

Michelangelo Antonioni is popularly known for his trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse, all which I watched but ended up passing out on (though, I managed to keep the eyelids open for Alain Delon in L'Eclisse).  Why I decided to give Blowup a try, beats me.  Antonioni takes us into the beautiful but lifeless world of mod fashion and art of "Swinging London" and succeeds in truly making a period piece that detaches itself firmly within the 60s.  It captures the views of blossoming preoccupation with post-modernism, existentialism and ideals of that time period very well: self-reference, loss of personal identity, emptiness of glamour, the repetition of the mundane, and the uncertainty and questioning of experience and purpose within life.  Blowup can alos serve as a bigger, more abstract metaphor for Antonioni's perception of filmmaking, the whole concept of dream versus reality and seeking objective truth and if it exists or not and so on. While it was beautifully and aesthetically shot, David Hemmings as a pretentious photographer manho, a tall, young, elegant but spazzy Vanessa Redgrave, and the rest of the cast...just not my type of people at all.

Le Petit Soldat has the famous popular quote: "Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second" but I was more taken with character Forestier's monologue post-torture scene, beginning with:

"Today, everyone hates the French. I'm very proud to be French. But I'm also against nationalism. One defends ideas, not territories. I love France because I love the films of du Bellay...and louis aragon. I love Germany because I love Beethoven. I don't love Barcelona because of Spain but I like Spain because Barcelona exists and America because I like their cars..." - Bruno Forestier

Partly due to seeing the trailer and assuming the whole thing was in Cantonese and mostly due to being lazy, I watched with no subtitles. So while the movie was comprehensible 85% Cantonese, the remaining 15% mostly went through my ears, brain department processed about 20% of that and shooed off the rest. As for the film itself, why would a Chinese director set his story in Shanghai but write most of his characters as speakers of Cantonese and those few who were Mandarin speakers, fluidly engage in conversation with each other?! As anyone who has been in mainland China knows, no one north of Guangzhou understands Cantonese and most of the general Chinese population pretty much perceives it as no more than a dialect.

But I digress, language hi-jinks aside: it was all in good, martial-arty, screaming your guts out fun. I enjoyed how no one in this movie was a particularly sympathetic character and were all flawed to an extent of almost-obnoxiousness.