Books Read & Films Watched During March
Tuesday, April 1st, 2003 19:11![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeBooks Read
The Best of Saki - Saki
The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
The Quincunx - Charles Palliser
I'll just link to my reviews from 50bookchallenge, rather than rewriting them here: Saki & Ray Bradbury and The Quincunx.
Cinema Trips
Dogma
The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan)
Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop)
Equilibrium
Adaptation
Dogma
The sinister buzzing of flies whenever the demonic street-hockey gang appear reminded me of the Sartre play "The Lord of the Flies" which I studied for my A-Level French course.
Update 02/04/2003: I actually meant "The Flies"/"Les Mouches". Zeus appears in "The Flies", in the guise of the Lord of the Flies/God of Death, which is why I got mixed up.
The Virgin Spring
A very powerful Bergman film set in mediaeval Sweden, which apparently caused a big stir when it came out due to the * scene which was more explicit than was usual in those days. I hadn't seen it before and although it was interesting, it's not one of my favourites out of the Bergman films that I've seen.
Cries and Whispers
Red briefly stands for life, in the kitchen where there is a vase of red flowers and a dish of red fruit, and the maid, Anna sits at the table eating an apple. But I suppose that kitchens are always life-affirming places, even in a house of sickness (unless Typhoid Mary is working as your cook!). But in the rest of the film, red stands for pain, red stands for death, red stands for passion.
I saw this film a long time ago (probably when I was a teenager) and it made a big impression on me. I remembered the woman dying of cancer with her sisters looking after her and the erotic atmosphere, and I thought it was probably a Bergman film, but had totally forgotten its name. I suspected that it might be "The Silence" from the description (as it also concerns sisters, one of whom is dying), but once I'd seen that film I knew it was not the one I remembered. So a while back I looked up descriptions of all Bergman's films on the Internet and decided that "Cries and Whispers" seemed the most likely candidate for the film that I remembered. So I was excited when I saw that it was going to be shown as part of this month's Bergman season at Broadway. It was even better than I remembered, very erotic and with supernatural elements towards the end, which I hadn't remembered at all from the first time I saw it.
Equilibrium
I must say that I enjoyed "Equilibrium". It is set in a near-future world, where in an attempt to banish war and other examples of man's inhumanity to man, it is illegal to have emotions. Everyone must inject themselves with drugs to suppress their emotions and anything such as works of art that may stir up feelings are also banned.
The gun kata (a martial art practised by the Clerics) was frankly unbelievable. Even if it were possible, in any real world situation, the soldiers would surely have been taught counter-moves to the gun kata, just in case they encountered a rogue cleric. Although, I suppose that in that case there would be more chance of the underground learning the gun kata techniques, which is something that the authorities would try to avoid at all costs.
I found it interesting how even the Clerics (the elite force charged with catching emotion illegals) had trouble answering their superior's questions about what they thought about certain things - how can you describe what it is like to have your wife dragged off and executed without using any 'feeling' words, even if in truth, you don't feel anything. I liked the familial twist at the end - I didn't see that coming. The cast was mostly British, and Christian Bale continues to impress. He just gets better and better.
And finally, Sean Bean's character quotes the very phrase from Yeats that I am have on my![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kittiwakedreams bio. "But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
Adaptation
Very interesting about the problems of adapting a non-fiction book for the screen, when its characters do not undergo any change. Experienced screenwriter Charlie Kauffmann wants to make a film about the wonder of flowers, but is finding it hard-going, while his twin brother Donald has just done a screenwriting course and is enthusiastically writing a serial killer movie, where the killer, the detective and the victim are all different aspects of a man with multiple personalities.
I loved the way that Charlie and Donald followed Susan Orlean down to Florida in the hope that she had left something important out of the book and had in fact been changed by her meetings with the orchid hunter John Laroche. I wonder what the real Susan Orlean thought of the dramatic ending. A quirky and very funny film, this is a worthy follow-up to "Being John Malkovich".
The Best of Saki - Saki
The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
The Quincunx - Charles Palliser
I'll just link to my reviews from 50bookchallenge, rather than rewriting them here: Saki & Ray Bradbury and The Quincunx.
Cinema Trips
Dogma
The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan)
Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop)
Equilibrium
Adaptation
Dogma
The sinister buzzing of flies whenever the demonic street-hockey gang appear reminded me of the Sartre play "The Lord of the Flies" which I studied for my A-Level French course.
Update 02/04/2003: I actually meant "The Flies"/"Les Mouches". Zeus appears in "The Flies", in the guise of the Lord of the Flies/God of Death, which is why I got mixed up.
The Virgin Spring
A very powerful Bergman film set in mediaeval Sweden, which apparently caused a big stir when it came out due to the * scene which was more explicit than was usual in those days. I hadn't seen it before and although it was interesting, it's not one of my favourites out of the Bergman films that I've seen.
Cries and Whispers
Red briefly stands for life, in the kitchen where there is a vase of red flowers and a dish of red fruit, and the maid, Anna sits at the table eating an apple. But I suppose that kitchens are always life-affirming places, even in a house of sickness (unless Typhoid Mary is working as your cook!). But in the rest of the film, red stands for pain, red stands for death, red stands for passion.
I saw this film a long time ago (probably when I was a teenager) and it made a big impression on me. I remembered the woman dying of cancer with her sisters looking after her and the erotic atmosphere, and I thought it was probably a Bergman film, but had totally forgotten its name. I suspected that it might be "The Silence" from the description (as it also concerns sisters, one of whom is dying), but once I'd seen that film I knew it was not the one I remembered. So a while back I looked up descriptions of all Bergman's films on the Internet and decided that "Cries and Whispers" seemed the most likely candidate for the film that I remembered. So I was excited when I saw that it was going to be shown as part of this month's Bergman season at Broadway. It was even better than I remembered, very erotic and with supernatural elements towards the end, which I hadn't remembered at all from the first time I saw it.
Equilibrium
I must say that I enjoyed "Equilibrium". It is set in a near-future world, where in an attempt to banish war and other examples of man's inhumanity to man, it is illegal to have emotions. Everyone must inject themselves with drugs to suppress their emotions and anything such as works of art that may stir up feelings are also banned.
The gun kata (a martial art practised by the Clerics) was frankly unbelievable. Even if it were possible, in any real world situation, the soldiers would surely have been taught counter-moves to the gun kata, just in case they encountered a rogue cleric. Although, I suppose that in that case there would be more chance of the underground learning the gun kata techniques, which is something that the authorities would try to avoid at all costs.
I found it interesting how even the Clerics (the elite force charged with catching emotion illegals) had trouble answering their superior's questions about what they thought about certain things - how can you describe what it is like to have your wife dragged off and executed without using any 'feeling' words, even if in truth, you don't feel anything. I liked the familial twist at the end - I didn't see that coming. The cast was mostly British, and Christian Bale continues to impress. He just gets better and better.
And finally, Sean Bean's character quotes the very phrase from Yeats that I am have on my
kittiwakedreams bio. "But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."Adaptation
Very interesting about the problems of adapting a non-fiction book for the screen, when its characters do not undergo any change. Experienced screenwriter Charlie Kauffmann wants to make a film about the wonder of flowers, but is finding it hard-going, while his twin brother Donald has just done a screenwriting course and is enthusiastically writing a serial killer movie, where the killer, the detective and the victim are all different aspects of a man with multiple personalities.
I loved the way that Charlie and Donald followed Susan Orlean down to Florida in the hope that she had left something important out of the book and had in fact been changed by her meetings with the orchid hunter John Laroche. I wonder what the real Susan Orlean thought of the dramatic ending. A quirky and very funny film, this is a worthy follow-up to "Being John Malkovich".
