Film

Exactly! All those things.

The best book I ever read on Japan was Shogun by ames Clavell. He apparently developed a taste for Japanese cruelty as a prisoner of war.

I don't tend to relate the book to the movie spinoff which I have no intention of watching. The book is a rather systematic disclosure of the aesthetics of domination, indifference to suffering and absolute ambition, which frames the story of the English colonial captain in a larger frame of will to power, which keeps quite ruthlessly disclosing until the very last page.

It is magnificent how much human types and qualities Clavell manages to rank in the process of unfolding his 'story of the archetypical egoist'.

Pezer wrote:

To the medieval japanese, at least, simplicity and delicacy was the most important and the most heavy. Deepness was seen as unhealthy, fit for buhddist monks of the ancient era (this under the influence of zen).

But even there deepness was of taste and quality of discipline, not of conceptual structuring, let alone psychological (libidinal) self-reflection.

Quote :

I think modern manga seeks some of this. But since there is no violence in their daily lives, it has to show its relevance in the same frame.

I tend to see the term violence in a broad light when speaking of Japan. The pressure the society puts them is hacking into them harder than any ghetto can; outside of big Japanese towns there are forests for people who have a setback in their career to walk into with a piece of rope to do what they must.

Violence is completely integrated in the Japanese soul. Also therefore the necessity to stay superficial; the same reason Buddhism was invented; as a perspective to take on in the face of great suffering.

The art of keeping the consciousness on the surface as things stir and burn in the deep - this is regarded as dignity, and is essential to honor. Which compels the man to stir and burn in other peoples depths.

The films appear as a reflection of these stirrings; as the means whereby the Japanese soul cries out its agony.

What's beautiful is that even the crying out has to be done with absolute discipline and taste.

Btw, I haven't seen My Best Friend's birthday, but I'm pretty sure Tarantino's bit in Four Rooms has a lot of going back to basics.

I only saw a clip that Zizek used where they mock Top Gun in that amazing Tarantino it-doesn't-matter-what-the-conclusion-or-discussion-is-what-matters-is-the-art+of-discussion-and-conclusion fashion: "you can ride my tail any time!"

I think the original phrase is "you can be my wingman any time," but the point stands.

That's the one scene Ive watched from that film too.
The Japanese are one and all sword; their deathculture is the same as their aesthetics. There is literally no difference. It is entirely ruthless, and therefore it has over tim evolved in the subtlest of subtle cultures, and surely the one producing the greatest transformation of world aesthetics.



The Japanese also introverted the world by refining and exploding technology to become responsive on the level of subpuberescent world-architecture.

This is fantastic.

The first half of this is pure gold



this is what I want to see in a making of, the simple registration of what was going on around certain shots.

Then it shifts to an interview with the decorators. Apparently Elvis Presley used to cut cars in half to dine in them, and in James Caan's first movie Redline 7000 they had toy racecartracks which was also integrated in the lavish Jack Rabbit Slims set which slurped up a good portion of the budget.


Redline 7000

Terminator 2 struck my attention chords in a way no film had done before or would ever do afterwards... it was this small, busted up tv set and a rented vcr that was hard to tune, and I was lying on my stomach quite close to the screen. Imagine seeing Terminator 2 for the first time at that age in that way. I was with my sister and mum, I think, those things didn't matter then. Good old! Total bliss. No film was ever so perfectly appropriate to what I desired at the moment. I watched it again the next morning as if the film was my new found girlfriend, and it remained that status until its disposal was overdue, when some other movies had struck me... but honestly I could not imagine a movie better made than T2. The form is flawless and the force is a puerile idea of the superman and the eternal recurrence. It is rock solid, and the hero says in the end: "I can not self-terminate. You must lower me into the steel"; Very masculine, all. Job very well done, potent, ah, real filmmaking I call that. Still if I talk about it it's better than Lebowski and all that. Sarah Connor pressed against the cold hard linoleum, the boot of that fat swollen face of a guy, that was all visceral, hard to endure rape, except she broke out of that system and ripped it apart, which is what the core of that film is. Antipsychiatry. The Apocalypse is real, you motherless fucks.

I don't have a special thing for Jim Belushi. I used to li Danny de Vito. I also used to lie Joe Pesci in Home Alone. (Didn't like Home Alone 2). I liked that other burglar in the movie Danny De Vito did with him called Wise Guys. Fucking silly movie. Wise Guys. Brian De Palma did it in his early days before he became everbody's idol. Martin Scorsese and Coppola and Spielberg they all go on about Brian De Palma how he's the most talented. Of course he is pretty bombastic in his style, but I'd say Spielberg is still the most talented. No, Scorsese. Scorsese gets better with age. Spielberg is from Mars, or from the Galactic Center at least. Oh right he is Jewish. All these other guys are Italian. That's interesting. The Italians all makes these visceral movies with a lot of personality. Spielberg makes very mental movies, abstract ideas and science fictions. It's cool how they still all consider them selves equals. I never thought of this racial thing before either, but yes Spielberg's films can be definitely said to be both political and metaphysical in it's philosophy, which characterizes the Jewish intellect and the birth of the idea that the good can be universal and still have living antitheses. But actually that's Persian. That befits him, Spielberg; A Persian Director. On a magic carpet.

He's the bomb but he also sucks tragically. I hated Saving Private Ryan. Fury is a good antidote to that. Also to the failure of inglourious bastardes to be actually WWII like. It was a travesty with hilarious comedy in it. And admittedly the end was quite good. But nothing was gritty dark and German, there was no urgency and endless remoteness, none of that deep deep pale warwinter romance we grew up on here when I grew up and which I need lie heroin

Films from my home country aren't usually a lot of good since they aren't really typical of the people here. When they are they are dark, weird scandinavian.



Maybe you'll like it. After 30 seconds, I was beginning to lose consciousness.

A famous scene.



Endurable, but hardly earth shattering or emotionally involving. The acting is never very human in dutch films. This is by Paul Verhoeven of Robocop, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers.

The first thing that struck me about the US when I was 16 is that people actually behaved like they do in the movies. Therefore it felt like I was in a movie all the time. It still does to a degree whenever I am anywhere in the country. It's nice to know it first through film and then in real life. It never disappoints. Because to Americans, acting is how you simulate real living, and movies are about very remarkable people and occurrences. In Holland acting is "what you do on stage or on the screen" and movies are about the lives of ordinary people.

Then, it gets worse:



The strive to bad film is so strong that it even manipulates the American actors into performances that are notably worse than those in the work of zany directors as Mel Brooks and Ed Wood.

Is there something wrong with these people?/"Darlings"/"What is wrong with this family?"/"Nothing."/KER_POW/

Is it revenge?/how far will they go to attain their goal?/"I will repay your attempts to irritate us with equal coinage!!"

Darlings../the doubt/the tenderness.../the passion,/The jealousy.
"Dirty bastards!"/The blind rage in / Darlings/Who is the strongest?/"Incredible."/Does the goal justify all means?/Who wins? Who loses?/"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKK!!!!"/How in gods name will this end??

In Darlings//The film by Ruud van Hemert /soon in this theatre

The thing to understand about Inglorious Basterds, it's like Bethoven's 9th. Tarantino gets like angry with himself and demands himself to reach end points, the result is necessarily incomplete. The thing to understand about basterds is that Quentin doesn't go out to make a movie about WWII, he seeks to make a beautiful movie about movies (and against movies) about WWII, demanding that he make use of and transform all of his previous tools, demanding everything from him as a director. It's not terrible, it's quirkyness made deep. In many ways its a movie about his own movies and body of work. The scene in the bar, with the English three and the german three, is the climax and the best of the Tarantino Mexican stand-off. It's so powerful it requires the echo of people getting down there, resevoir dogs-style reconstructing the scene again "the thing to understand is that its a shootout in a basement." In the end, it winds up catcing something of the Nazi idiosincracy and how it synched with the English Imperial one.

Acually, the best standoff is in Django. Basterds is more raw, Django is more accomplished.

That's a good way of looking at it, to judge him on his own terms. The basement standoff was real genius, that's true. I'll have to watch Django again on these terms.

We mustn't forget that a lot of the goodies in Pulp Fiction come out of Roger Avary's pen. The more emotionally visceral stuff maybe - the guy nearly killed his wife? I dunno. In the dark. I haven't even seen Killing Zoe.

In the meantime Snatch is a good alternative postmodern movie about guys having a romp making a movie.

Yeah, Guy Ritchie is definetly an answer to Tarantino, and a good one. I would agree that Snatch is his best, pure genious. The guy is like Sergio Leone though: 1 good movie and then a bunch of soulless echoes. Being English, hus soul is older and the movies are more mature, self conscious, and less... Gleefully abundant.

I am glad to say though that he made a movie that truly understands addicts from the inside, that rock-n-rolla. Only a soul that has been through some real experiences in harshness, has rolled through life as we say in Venezuela, could have mader that.

Speaking of harsh, I was looking at this:



Includes an earlier edit of the end. Better, maybe.

Not that anything mattered anymore.
This movie made a similar impact on me as Terminator 2. Another hyper antagonistic self-destructive paradigm.

Less noble and less necessary. The truth was coming and he wasn't coming on horseback.

What I like most about Leone films is the music. But even for very forgettable and forgotten movies Morricone made memorable scores.

Ah! The italian take on theoretical music, sans the romanticism! A romanticism all our own.

Only such mastery could have made a piece like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly stand out in its dryness. It made dryness digestible, and what a movie that turned out to make!

I am reading these days that a presocratic after Thales suggested the wind was the source of all being. This movie almost justifies that notion...

Philosophy born fro the lyrical impulse is the ontology that becomes back into the earth and born of he kakaphony of voices it is the epistemology that becomes power. How to be lyrical and cacaphonical? The quest of the 60's, psychedelic edges to the prehistoric archetypes brought out the fractal, and time; recorded ecstasy. Our music is the agent of time, without it we would collapse into a flat world and politics would become impossible. Like a god must constantly dance if he wants to pertain, politics must ease itself between the thighs of fate as it trembles in the silliness of efficiency. It is a strange task and like all tasks of seduction in order to reproduce a seed or principle, it involves a truth so deep that it justifies quite a number of lies; so much so that the lies themselves become radiant expressions of the truth; in this lalaland lies are truths smiling form; truth is never a message, it's the wind that carries it. What we're 'dealing with here' is the breadth of the wings of the fiction that remembers the truth of the future.

Westerns are the original pulp fiction of cinema. It always had the prerrogative of going just south of morally acceptable, this is what made john wayne huge, and eventually catapulted both westerns as serious movies and just south of morally acceptable a serious trend.

But what made them great in their pulp was the ephimeral feeling you got from the setting, as if they had found a special place of pleasure in no man's land just for you. That your imagination had to make the cheap scenography real gave it huge, light depth. Truly for the child within adults.

Romantic movies tried to achieve the same thing, but it always felt forced and overdone: corny.

Ah... Black and white! I liked the analysis of Coppola, it still has so much more to offer.

Film Noir was the true heir of this moral playground and ephimer. Secluded pleasure was exchanged for asthetic masochism. I suppose manliness was the common thread.

The pinnacle was Touch of Evil, Orson Welles going bananas as usual. But pulp fiction isn't about pinnacles... Chinatown is a pretty good adaptation of that moodyness to modern times. But maybe my favorite is one about an insurance investigator where the hero is involved with a woman he investigates who, contrary to later canon, was not to be trusted. Wished I remembered the name... It's all based on voice over from his tape recorder. Pure pulp.

Ive been starved of films or series or the past days. But Narcos just came online. As shameless exploitation of the financial success of Escobar it promises to be quite well made. I've also considered re-watching Homeland in preparation of its fifth season. I'm not sure. It's a very peculiar show with many riddles about it in my mind.

This spy stuff and my strange mood the past two days reminds me of Snowden, this video I did with Tom about him.



Im going to mention Toms movierelated site as well, http://www.spyculture.com/

I haven't talked to him in a while. But he knows his movies.

trying to analyze Bourne and what I like about them I was looking at some of it's fight scenes on youtube, when this caught my eye.



I watched this movie in a bad time, I can remember quite liking it, but I didn't remember these brutal fight scenes.

Tom Cruise really is very good at his job. It is quite difficult to identify a truly bad movie with him in it, an he's make so many.

This was a bad movie but he was still good in it.

Truth be told, I never watched a lot of westerns. It's because they represent an ideal and I preferred the few images to the many.

But I think this counts as western too.

As an icon of pop culture



As a good natured lunatic,



In the actual nobility of his efforts.