Wednesday Nite cinematheque Kickoff

Come, spirit.
Help us sing
the story of our land.
You are our mother;
We, your field
of corn.
We rise...
from out of the soul
of you.
~prayer in Powhatan

The first screening at the wednesday nite cinematheque was an event enjoyed by all present and it was unanimously decided 2 make it a weekly event.
The first screening "The New World" was in ways just the perfect movie to kickstart this phenomenon ---
While the purpose of wednesday nite cinematheque is to experience new worlds and visions by great minds in the artistic world of cinema (contrary to the corporate world of cinema where cinema is a source of revenue, here the commercial value of cinema has zero importance)...the movie also in a way was about exploring the very concept of exploration....
- while in the beginning the Europeans are surprised to see the new world, towards the end we see the total surprised reaction of the native on reaching England where he has come with a bunch of sticks with instructions from his leader to tie a knot for every white man the native encounters, and more importantly to meet this God that white men talk about so much.
- The New World was about love in its purest form where it knows not of anything other then giving and expressed through Pocahontas it spoke of a culture where these values were intact.
- Through the time of Captain Smith spent with the tribes the film maker observes the striking contrast between the peaceful and happy natives with the ever fighting (lots of infighting and politics) attitude of the settlers...smith reiterates through the rest of the film that the only truth in his life were the time spent in the jungle with Pocahontas (though throughout the movie this name is not uttered) but the film maker is not going to take the easy way by setting the direction for the movie, Captain Smith still slave to his own personality knows he does not deserve her love and abandons her for other missions...
- The movie asks very fundamental questions, in one scene we have Pocahontas asking John Rolfe - "Why does earth have colors?"
- It was a typical Terrence Malick movie...poetic, expecting the audience to surrender to the movie, lots of space which some people would refer as slow...
- A lot of effort went in recreating the history, apart from extensive research a lot of natives out of the 3000 who speak Powhatan today were employed to teach the language to the native actors, the movie was given a seal of approval by the Tribal Heads of Native Americans..more then a million feet of reel was used and more then 2000 females were auditioned for the role of Pocahontas before selecting 14 year old actress Q'Orianka Waira Qoiana Kilcher, her age probably the reson why the intimate scenes have refrained from even a kiss.
- the movie was shot entirely in natural light like all Terrence Malick movies

While the movie garnered only a measly 12 million compared to 75 million by Brokeback Mountain it was by far the most loved movie of the year in the Cult Cinema section.
A interesting review of the movie...

Watch this space for next wednesday movie announcement...

SPUN

You know I take the pussy
seriously. Let me tell you.

You gotta take the pussy seriously.
I mean, there's a priority for a tight ass.

But if it's hairy, I go for the tits.

But if the tits are hairy,
hey, it's right back to the pussy.

But you've gotta speak
to that pussy, son.

You know, really talk to it.
You make a vow to it.

Now, no nation has
ever been so ready...

...to seize the power and the
freedom of the pussy as our own...

...and we must all care for that pussy.

Today, we do more
than just celebrate the pussy.

We re-dedicate ourselves
to the very idea of pussy.

I mean, friends, ask not
what the pussy can do for you...

...but what can you do for the pussy.

The Postman

Trivia about the italian classic Il Postino and its hero Troisi ->

Troisi literally gave his life to make Il Postino. He was aware of his heart condition and was told that he needed treatment, but he believed that the making of this film was more important. He died 12 hours after the camera stopped rolling...

This trivia helped me put my own feeling aroused by the movie in the right context.

Bought and Sold (from 'Too Black, Too Strong')

Smart big awards and prize money
Is killing off black poetry
It’s not censors or dictators that are cutting up our art.
The lure of meeting royalty
And touching high society
Is damping creativity and eating at our heart.

The ancestors would turn in graves
Those poor black folk that once were slaves would wonder
How our souls were sold
And check our strategies,
The empire strikes back and waves
Tamed warriors bow on parades
When they have done what they’ve been told
They get their OBE's.
~ benjamin zephaniah

What is OBE? out of body experience does not seem 2 fit well.

Only arrogance and zero Art

Hollywood seems to be capable of making only the most ridiculous movies coz the only thing they care about is themselves and according to them the rest of the world is barbaric and stupid. i doubt Mel Gibson has the slightest idea about nething he is making coz his only purpose is to make a thriller and find situations to put in some nicely shot violence scenes..the only thing that changes from one movie to another is the type of weapons.
I have never seen a more stupid movie, instead of accepting that he is incapable of understanding nething about this evolved culture because he is an idiot he has ended up making a big budget movie for other idiots to feel very nice that they are living in this system and any other system that existed before them was corrupt and violent.
Mel Gibson has shown his own insanity through the movie, and the movie has nothing to do with Mayan Culture which he is also very aware of but sadly i know many people are going to be seeing this movie to form an opinion that all ancient cultures were barbaric and we have made so much progress...overlooking the fact that in fact we are the most barbaric people who ever lived on this planet.

India's contribution to English

Encountered this word on Southpark and it not even beeped like all other abuses...

choad

/chohd/ n. Synonym for `penis' used in alt.tasteless and popularized by the denizens thereof. They say: "We think maybe it's from Middle English but we're all too damned lazy to check the OED." [I'm not. It isn't. --ESR] This term is alleged to have been inherited through 1960s underground comics, and to have been recently sighted in the Beavis and Butthead cartoons. Speakers of the Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati languages have confirmed that `choad' is in fact an Indian vernacular word equivalent to `fuck'; it is therefore likely to have entered English slang via the British Raj.

u guys know of any great indian words now part of english? its high time the exchange went the other way...i can think of chutney, curry....

Sex, Lies and Videotape

Graham - I remember reading somewhere that men learn to love the person that they're attracted to and that women become more and more attracted to the person that they love.
Ann - God. That's beautiful.That's really beautiful.I like that.
Graham - I'm just quoting.

Quotes withing quotes within quotes...but then all have 1 source (which is tending to zero) so plagiarism, orignality, uniquness, intellectual property is all bollocks...thoughts and ideas can never be owned, can never belong...only dead things can belong, can be owned...
- this is my bike, fine.
- this is my idea, fuck u.

A review on Kubrick's "The Shining"

Kubrick did a marvelous job in giving one of the most spine thrilling horror flicks, as usual his forte being extremely strong and at the same time subliminal images, and ofcourse Jack Nicholson. Interestingly the movie holds the record for most takes for a scene in a film...125 times...

While it would have been great as a horror flick i ended up finding this very interesting interpretation of his work on this website.

Excerpts

And in a final stroke of brilliance, Kubrick physically
melds the movie audience leaving his film with the ghostly
revelers in the photograph. As the credits roll, the soundtrack
ends, and we hear the 1920s audience applaud, and then the gabble
of that audience talking among themselves - the same sound the
crowd of moviegoers itself is probably making as it leaves the
theater. It is the sound of people moving out of one stage of
consciousness into another. The moviegoers are largely unaware of
this soundtrack, and this reflects their unawareness that they’ve
just seen a movie about themselves, about what people like them
have done to the American Indian and to others. Thus to its very
last foot, this film is trying to break through the complacency of
its audience, to tell it, "You were, are, the people at the
Overlook Ball." The opening music, over the traveling aerial shots
of a tiny yellow Volkswagon penetrating the magnificent American
wilderness, is the "Dies Irae" ("Day of Wrath"), part of the major
funeral mass of the European Roman Catholic Church. This movie is
a funeral, among other things. And it was Hitler’s Germany,
another genocidal culture, that first produced the Volkswagen. At
the end of the movie, in the climactic chase in the Overlook Maze,
the moral maze of America and of all mankind in which we are
chased by the sins of our fathers ("Danny, I’m coming. You can’t
get away. I’m right behind you"), the little boy Danny escapes by
retracing his own steps (an old Indian trick) and letting his
father blunder past.

A 13 minute docu on Kubrick as an artist

Interesting Quotes by Stanley Kubrick

Quote 1

I believe that drugs are basically of more use to the audience than to the artist. I think that the illusion of oneness with the universe, and absorption with the significance of every object in your environment, and the pervasive aura of peace and contentment is not the ideal state for an artist. It tranquilizes the creative personality, which thrives on conflict and on the clash and ferment of ideas. The artist’s transcendence must be within his own work; he should not impose any artificial barriers between himself and the mainspring of his subconscious. One of the things that’s turned me against LSD is that all the people I know who use it have a peculiar inability to distinguish between things that are really interesting and stimulating and things that appear to be so in the state of universal bliss that the drug induces on a "good" trip. They seem to completely lose their critical faculties and disengage themselves from some of the most stimulating areas of life. Perhaps when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful.

An interesting snippet from Anton Chekhov’s - "The Lady with the toy dog"

Sitting side by side with a young woman, who in the dawn seemed so beautiful, Gomov, appeased and enchanted by the sight of the fairy scene, the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky, thought how at bottom, if it were thoroughly explored, everything on earth was beautiful, everything, except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.

Is Gomov on LSD or just horny i dunno

Quote 2

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

In the current scenario we could choose to see

- America as a gangster, financing tyrants like Saddam world over and then jumping in to perform its own genocide like a mega advertising campaign for its weapons.

- India as a prostitute...if you are an indian and have not figured out that you belong to a whore nation, then i dont want to break your illusion...

On a brighter (actually black and white) note here is a 9 minute flick by kubrick before he made any of his feature films.