jgr6860’s blog

This is a film by the legendary Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike. He directed the extremely gory Ichi the Killer. There is a scene in that movie where an entire room is swallowed up to capacity with blood and guts. There is also sexual violence like the kind that can be viewed in Audition. Miike pushes the borders of violent storytelling, if he was not a good storyteller his films would be spoiled, but because he is a good one, we get violent films that lead us to places we never thought we would go. His output of movies is staggering as he releases multiple films in one years time.

The setting stays the same while the time jumps occasionally in this western parody piece to show the history of the red and the white clans. For the most part the time and place of the film are set.
This is a Japanese Spaghetti Western. The original is Yojimbo, The Bodyguard, 1961 by film auteur Akira Kurosawa. In Yojimbo it is silk merchants versus saki merchants. This film has two opposing groups fighting over treasure. And a lone stranger appears, nameless, to set the balance of power. The two groups are the Genjis and the Heikes, the whites versus the reds.
Kiyomori changes his name to Henry as homage to the Shakespearean play that includes the War of the Roses, which is referenced in the prologue of the film.

This film is very weird. The first time I saw it I was blown away by the decision for a film to use actual puppetering in a major role. The film is about puppetering in more than one way. The main character played by a very long-haired trying to look as unattractive as possible John Cusack, is a puppeteer. And weirdly we have this whole movie where people are puppeteering Mr. Malkovich. I enjoyed watching Malkovich in this film he was a perfectly suited for the role. I remember when I went to see my first Rated R movie, my grandmother, Doris, brought me to see IN The Line Of Fire. John Malkovich was the assassin in the movie, trying to kill the president and to spoil it he does not kill the president instead he is killed by Mr. Clint Eastwood. I love that name Eastwood sounds like a cowboy rockstar type name. Anyways, Back to Malkovich, the film is crazy weird, it gets weirder everytime I see it. I was telling Dr. Guertin that I like the part where Cameron Diaz takes the elevator and gets off at the Mezzanine level and its an actual realistic Mezzanine level complete with a ceiling that causes everyone to dunk for the remainder of their visit on that level. They almost have to crawl and then all of sudden they do start to crawl through some secret caver that turns into a whole that goes all the way into the crazy imagination of Charlie Kaufman a man of many colors and personalities. Overall, the movie is one of my friend JP’s favorite films. The deep movie in the end is not really about anything in particular at all. Also, it is interesting that it shows the addiction and the different types of addictions like the society of people trying to stay young and be John Malkovich. The society is the interesting thing, their addictions to being someone else is interesting to watch as their lives unravel. The part at the end where we see from inside a child’s eyes is vintage Kaufman and as weird as it gets.
The guy who steals Malkovich’s body for the first time cannot control his skills and director Spike Jonze, a true child at heart, is showing us a film that Is not about the body its about the mind of someone that really matters. Our thoughts matter and the person moving our body is a secondary performer even if they are doing the movie. The mind rules the world, and Malkovich shouts back get out of my mind.
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I have seen this film too many times and now I find myself watching it in bits and pieces, coming in and out and watching my favorite parts and discovering new parts. Watching it online is not as good as watching it on a big screen. I still think the intro is a bit much and the color changes seem a bit phony to me, that’s just me though, for the time I am sure they were dazzling. I do like this film, it has my Mom’s favorite actor Jimmy Stewart playing the character of John “Scottie” Ferguson, who is an acrophobic man who used to be a police detective.
Madeline is the woman who triggers his acrophobia by leading him on a crazy chase that ends in an infamous bell tower that was the scene of a previous crime. One of Jimmy Stewart (Scottie’s) old friends from way back in the day now builds ships and he this retired San Fransisco police detective to search out and find out what his wife “Madeline” is up to. He thinks she is up to no good and wants to find out if it is true. The beautiful Madeline is the embodiment of two women, which makes things really confusing for the viewer even upon numerous screenings I still have trouble deciding which way my mind leads me when it comes to distinguishing who is who in every little scene.
Madeline is kind of losing her mind and is thinking about taking her own life. Why? Well, she believes she has become I guess possessed is the most appropriate word. She believes her body is being taken over by an old dead person from the past that could be one of her ancestors. Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie does not believe her at first, but he later is a bit blinded by Madeline’s beauty and begins to believe her and begins seeing “spirals” in everything including Madeline’s hair that is in some kind of twirly bob thing that represents for him yet another spiral, like the spiral staircase he sees in his dreams.
Overall, the film is a nice pastiche of an acrophobic man trying to get a grip on his life while chasing a woman he loves.

The first time I went to go see Fight Club I went to Dallas to a little Theatre to the midnight screening. After watching the film I felt inspired to paint, so I painted a huge bar of soap surrounded by a dark background. Not very original. After that I designed a shirt with Green and Red lettering. The film made me feel like so many more things were possible. For a reference point I was very young when I first saw the film, so I latched on to the idea of anarchy over modern day culture in America. I looked out my window and saw a suburb, I looked out my parent’s car window and I saw huge advertisement signs for cars, food and luxury. Then when I stepped out of the car I saw buildings that were as imposing as the white collared bosses who sat behind the desks at the top of these skyscrapers. Downtown Dallas became a beast in my mind, but the beast could be fought according to this film.

I went and got the book and read it. The movie captured a moment in my life that I held on to a belief that new things I had never thought of before were now possible. Both characters spoke to my moment in life. They told me that life could be different and it could be full of danger and change through resistance.
This film is full of so many ideas and the digital effects for 1999, or today, are very creative, new and add to the film. This multi-textured film is not about fighting, it’s not about fighting the system, it is about changing the way you look at the world on a daily basis. Taking it all in I viewed the film as beyond any life metaphors, but instead a look inside the way man views life from his own perspective and the things he does in life to feel alive and to feel like a man with purpose. To what purpose is this man. Is man made to earn money and then buy his needs and his excesses in order to express his mode of life? The movie says no, man was made for something more.

To create purpose in life the men in the movie band together to form a tight knit group of guys performing operations of extreme magnitude. With humble beginnings (in small forms of guerilla terrorism, practical jokes and starting fights with complete strangers in order to lose) the group rises to the higher levels of terrorism including: burning two windows in a skyscraper and then marking the side-face of the building with bright green paint in order to create the face and destroying different forms of public property. Then the project mayhem (group of tight knit men) working as a collaborative moving corporation set huge bomb charges to all the credit card buildings in the city, possibly all of America, in order to create a new form of chaos beyond any small bits of chaos they created in society with their aberrant behavior.

One of my favorite parts of the film is when Schreck mid conversation with one of the cast members, grabs a bat out of the air and starts sucking the blood our of it without any explanation. The look on the face of the witness to this act is worth the price of admission. Also, the way the film is shot so dark sets the mood perfectly. And near the final scene we have a mirroring of the final scene in Nosferatu as the vampire leans over the virgin lying asleep on the bed. Unknowingly the vampire has stayed too long and daylight is approaching. In the Shadow version we can hear the camera running and the light is making a sound of its own as it creeps over the Willem Dafoe character ultimately causing the demise of the vampire. The final scene with the light is simply amazing and I really enjoyed watching the film.

Shadow of the Vampire is a movie about the making of the 1922 film Nosferatu. Both films feature a very ugly, pale antagonist, who plays the vampire.
In this version cast members keep disappearing. The director tells the actor playing Nosferatu to stop making people dissappear. The actor playing Schreck is Willem Dafoe. Schreck played the role in the old version, so now Dafoe is playing a part about an actor playing a part. Only things begin to get all to real on the set. The film focuses on the not so easy relationship between the director, Murnau and the actor Schreck. Murnau wants to create the most realistic vampire movie and he will do it at any cost.
I almost forgot to mention John Malkovich, one of my favorite actors of all time (he was great in In the Line of Fire), plays the part of Murnau perfectly. The way he gleams at Schreck with disdain, but still rationalizes the losses of life for his perfect film.
It is thought that the original actor of Nosferatu was an actual vampire according to the legend of the 1922 film. But according to imdb.com he was a stage actor before the shoot and went on to make plenty of non-vampire film. Still, you gotta wonder because he looks so real.

Jonathan Auerbach’s “Chasing Film Narrative: Repetition, Recursion, and the Body in Early Cinema” deals with early cinema and the philosophy of the beginning years. On the first page near the bottom there is a section regarding continuity and “how time and space are organized,” a brief look at Relativity of what is seen not what is not seen. Thomas Elsaesser in his “Early Cinema: From Linear History to Mass Media Archaeology” renders the thought that “spatio-temporal and causal relations coherently and consistently” show the visibility of logic. The “diegetic unity” constructs a synthetic representative that exists within the imagination, that is to say it is not perceptible because what you are seeing on screen is different from the true reality of any event that is being filmed. Lumiere starting out in 1895 began his fatherhood of cinema and Griffith followed in 1908. The shift of formal narratives to spatial coherence which in general, this concept of coherence could be related to the predictability, or stabilized phase.

I would like to use my tumblr acct for my blog
by giving everyone a link url that is posted here:

TUMBLR ROCKS –
We should all stumble upon it and use it.
It’s awesome…

RIP!: A remix manifesto TRAILER

Last night our class viewed the film RIP!: A remix manifesto. We got a chance to see a film about copyright laws. Brett Gaylor’s film featured the Mash Up artist Girl Talk, who is a one man sampling machine who takes other people’s music and creates his own work through his regeneration. His music is a re-imagining of others music which he steals a makes his own. “Great artists don’t plagiarize they steal” to make their own new art product. Girl Talk is a young man who we see working a normal nine to five job by day and putting on DJ concerts by night. Gaylor explores Girl Talk’s media Mash Up artwork and uses his story to support his issues regarding copyright laws. He feels that the current state of copyright laws is unfair and does not promote fair trade or equal use.
The film also prominently features culture critic writer Cory Doctorow and later in the film we meet Lawrence Lessig, Brazils Minister of Culture. Lessig is an interesting man who plays music and is also a politician. After viewing the film we are told you can view raw footage of the media experiments at opensourcecinema.org.,
and remix it yourself. I tried to register to make a remix on the website, but I got notice that read
“Registration and comments on Open Source Cinema are now closed. Thanks for remixing!” Sadly, I did not get to create a remix, but I was able to view other user’s remixes.
The film itself is a Mash Up with quick jump cuts and fast camera movements. The film lists the manifesto and stays on task to support his manifesto of how culture builds on the past and our cultural freedoms are in jeopardy. Gaylor considers himself a man on a battlefield fighting for artist rights and everyone’s rights to share music and media.

The ManifestoRIP!: A remix manifesto TRAILER

“At last we have the movie every would-be cinematic visionary has been trying to make since 1927.” – AO Scott, NYT

Fritz Lang’s film was a wonder to me the first time I saw it. The images used in the film helped me to get lost in the dynamic world Lang created. The film has many layers and it includes three different settings. The first is the Babel Tower symbolizing paradise, then the world of the machines that is inhabited by the workers and lastly the catacombs beneath the city made up of ancient ruins. This last setting is the place that the workers go to meet and hear their spiritual guide and prophet Mariam.

There is a rhythm in the motion of the factory workers on the factory floor. They move in unison and in sync with there fellow workers. Their synchronicity is symbolized in their motions, ebbing and flowing like the current of an ocean, they appear to be one body accomplishing one great task.

In the film, the hero, Joh Frederson (Freder) is the rich playboy who is the son of the master and architect of the city. The workers do all the work and people like Freder live off the spoils of their labor. The children of the factory workers accompanied by Maria come to visit Babylon to see the world of their creator. Upon seeing them, Freder empathizes with them and makes it his mission to go and visit the world of the factory workers and understand their life.

In the scene below in the underworld of the factory we see workers enveloped in clouds of smoke. Then there is an accident and an explosion. Workers are injured and then the screen changes and we get a view of the machine (labeled Moloch!) as a great pit of fire that the half naked workers are being horded into to be burnt alive as fodder for the machine. It’s a scary vision and our hero Freder looks on this vision with dismay. Then we return to reality to see workers being carried off from the accident in stretchers.
This apocalyptic vision gets Freder thinking and he later returns to the workers and disguises himself as a worker and he tries as the film goes on to become their saviour.
Fritz Lang’s cityscape scenes are amazing works of art and the imposing architecture serves the ultimate purpose of portraying a world of sinister power. I was impressed with the film and looked on at wonder at the city that Lang created.

Scene 2

This clip shows the children of the factory workers accompanied by Maria visiting Babylon to see the world of their creator. Freder empathizes with them and makes it his mission to go and visit the world of the factory workers and understand their life.

“Israeli Raiders”

Israel and Iran
The gathering storm
Jan 7th 2010 | JERUSALEM AND TEL AVIV
From The Economist print edition

As Israel pushes for sanctions against Iran, it also mulls options for war

Israeli AIr Force

SHORTLY after four in the afternoon on June 7th 1981, the late King Hussein of Jordan looked up from his yacht off the port of Aqaba and saw eight Israeli F-16 jets, laden with weapons and external fuel tanks, streaking eastward. He called his military staff, but could not find out what was going on. An hour or so later, the answer became clear. After a ground-hugging infiltration through Saudi Arabia, the jets climbed up near Baghdad and bombed Saddam Hussein’s Osiraq nuclear reactor.

Zeev Raz, the squadron’s leader (pictured bottom right), still recalls every phase of “Operation Opera”: his constant worries about running out of fuel; the risky move to jettison tanks, while the bombs were still attached to the wings, to reduce drag; and the loss of a key navigational marker. He overshot his target and had to loop back. He later discovered that his deputy, Amos Yadlin (now Israel’s military-intelligence chief), had slipped ahead and, annoyingly, dropped the first bombs. Somehow the Iraqis were surprised. King Hussein’s tip had not been passed on. And even though Iraq was then at war with Iran, there were no air patrols or active surface-to-air missile batteries. The Israelis encountered only brief anti-aircraft fire. In the cockpit video of the last and most exposed plane, Ilan Ramon (top left), who later died in the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, is heard grunting nervously. Their mission completed, the jets flew home brazenly on the direct route over Jordan.

The Osiraq raid, condemned at the time, is often seen these days as the model for “preventive” military action against nuclear threats. It set back Iraq’s nuclear programme and, after America’s two wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Saddam never built nuclear weapons. Such methods were repeated in September 2007, when Israeli jets destroyed a suspected nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. Now that Iran is moving inexorably closer to an atomic bomb, will the Israeli air force be sent to destroy its nuclear sites?

By Israel’s reckoning, Iran will have the know-how to make nuclear weapons within months and, thereafter, could build atomic bombs within a year. Even if Iran does not seek to realise its dreams of wiping out the Jewish state, Israeli officials say a nuclear-armed Iran would lead to “cataclysmic” changes in the Middle East. America would be weakened and Iran become dominant; pro-Western regimes would become embattled, and radical armed groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza would feel emboldened.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others could, in turn, seek their own nuclear arms. In a multi-nuclear Middle East, Israel’s nuclear arms may not ensure a stabilising, cold-war-style deterrent. “If Iran gets nuclear weapons, the Middle East will look like hell,” says one senior Israeli official. “I cannot imagine that we can live with a nuclear Iran.” For Israel, 2010 is the year of decision. Yet its ability to destroy the nuclear sites is questionable, and such a strike may precipitate a regional war, or worse.

Mr Raz, for one, thinks Israel cannot repeat the Osiraq feat. Iran’s nuclear sites are farther away; they are dispersed, and many are buried. The disclosure last year of a secret enrichment facility being dug into a mountain near Qom suggests that there are others undiscovered. “The Iranians are clever. They learnt well from Osiraq,” says Mr Raz. “There is no single target that you can bomb with eight aircraft.”

For Mr Raz, Israeli air power could, at most, set the Iranian nuclear programme back by a year or two—not enough to be worth the inevitable Iranian retaliation, which might include rockets fired at Israeli cities by Iran and its allies, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. A more thorough action would require ground troops in Iran, but nobody is contemplating that.

Though he now works for a defence-electronics contractor and lives comfortably in a flat with a commanding view over Israel’s narrow coastal plain, Mr Raz exudes gloom. His four children, all adults, are applying for foreign passports—German ones, of all things. His eldest daughter, a mother of two, “does not think Israel is safe any more”—not just because of the prospect of a nuclear Iran, but because years of suicide-bombings and rockets have sapped belief in peace. Her siblings, he says, were persuaded to apply too.

This is a surprising admission, particularly from a kibbutz-bred former fighter pilot. Most Israelis still believe in the mystique of their air force. And for much of the past year Israel has been unusually calm. Palestinian suicide-bombings are very rare, and the morale-sapping showers of rockets have all but stopped (see chart above).

In Israel’s view this is thanks to the tough security measures it has taken, among them the contentious security barrier in the West Bank, and its willingness to go to war against Hizbullah in 2006 and against Hamas a year ago. “Deterrence is working wonderfully,” says one defence official. But both militias are rearming, partly thanks to help from Iran, with missiles of even greater range that could reach the crowded Tel Aviv region from either Gaza or Lebanon. And the lull has been bought at a serious cost to Israel’s diplomatic standing. An inquiry commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council and headed by a South African judge, Richard Goldstone, found that Israel (and to a lesser extent Hamas) may be guilty of war crimes in Gaza. Europe is regarded as increasingly hostile, a region where Israeli government and military officials travel warily to avoid war-crimes lawsuits.

There are doubts even about Israel’s great ally, America, after a spat over Jewish settlements in the West Bank. President Barack Obama may be clever, Israelis say, but he lacks the empathy with Israel shown by his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George Bush. One minister, Limor Livnat, recently said that Israel had “fallen into the hands of a horrible American administration”.

Israel thus finds itself in a paradoxical state: more secure for now, but acutely anxious about the future; closer than ever to some Arab regimes because of a perceived common threat from Iran and its radical allies, yet more demonised by its Western friends. Israelis see a global campaign of “delegitimisation” akin to efforts to isolate white-ruled South Africa. “I’m sure the Afrikaners felt like we feel now,” says Mr Raz.

For many Israeli strategists, the decision over whether to bomb Iran is the most important in decades—some say since the birth of the Jewish state in 1948. The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu—the son of a staunchly nationalist professor of Jewish history, and the younger brother of Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, who died leading the famed rescue of hostages from Entebbe in 1976—is said to feel the weight of history. His office is adorned with portraits of two of his political idols. One is Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. But the other, Winston Churchill, is unusual in a country that regards Britain as having betrayed the Zionist cause when it ruled Palestine.

Bibi as Winston
Mr Netanyahu draws inspiration from the British wartime leader for reasons both tactical and strategic. Political courage in Israel is often deemed to mean willingness to surrender, after decades of colonisation, the territories captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; to act like Charles de Gaulle, who gave up Algeria. By holding up Churchill, Mr Netanyahu is saying that courage consists of holding tenaciously to one’s beliefs, regardless of popularity.

This model carried special force on the question of Iran. As opposition leader, Mr Netanyahu recalled Churchill’s efforts to awaken the world to the danger of Nazi Germany. “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” he said in 2006. Now that he is in power, pundits ask, might Bibi see himself as the Churchill of the Battle of Britain, fighting alone against Hitler and desperately trying to draw America into the war?

Iran is central to Mr Netanyahu’s thinking. It helps explain his surprisingly strong partnership with Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labour Party (and a former army chief of staff and prime minister), trusted as the only man able to handle the big security issues. It helps that he served in Sayeret Matkal, the elite commando unit once led by Mr Barak—and by brother Yoni.

Iran affects Mr Netanyahu’s calculations on the Palestinian issue too. He came to office convinced that tackling Iran was a bigger priority than peacemaking with Palestinians. This may have been a convenient argument for a sceptic of the “peace process”. In truth, a peace deal has been difficult ever since the Palestinian movement split violently in 2006 between the Islamists of Hamas who seized Gaza, and the more secular Fatah faction that clings on to bits of the West Bank (with Israeli and American help) under President Mahmoud Abbas. Mr Netanyahu argued that even if a deal were possible, a nuclear-armed Iran would unravel any agreements. But in the view of prominent Palestinians such as Ghassan Khatib, a former planning minister, peacefully resolving the nuclear stand-off would help push Hamas into more moderate positions.

Under pressure from Mr Obama, who argued that progress on the Palestinian issue would help galvanise an Arab coalition to confront Iran, Mr Netanyahu has since adjusted his positions. He belatedly accepted the idea of a Palestinian “state”, albeit a demilitarised one. And having upset the Obama administration by rejecting its demand for a complete halt to settlement-building, he later announced a unilateral, partial, ten-month suspension.

Something is now stirring. During a recent trip to Cairo, Mr Netanyahu seems to have offered enough to win praise from Egypt and start a new flurry of diplomacy that may yet lead to new peace talks. Mr Netanyahu’s aides now speak in Labour-like aphorisms: “We must make progress with Palestinians as if there is no Iran, and confront Iran as if there is no Palestinian issue,” says one. Perhaps there is a bit of de Gaulle in Mr Netanyahu after all. Or perhaps, as one Haaretz columnist, Aluf Benn, noted, the parallel is that Churchill brought America into the war, but lost the empire.

Mr Netanyahu has gone along with the Obama administration’s decision to talk directly to Iran. In contrast with the threats issued by the government of his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, his cabinet has been told to keep quiet about military planning, saying only: “All options are on the table”. As one aide puts it: “Those who know will not speak; and those who speak do not know.”

Clues in the wind
The few public signals seem contradictory. Mr Netanyahu has boosted the defence budget, and the army is planning to distribute gas masks to all citizens next month. Joint missile-defence exercises were held with America in October, and a simulated biological attack is to be rehearsed this month. Despite all this, Mr Barak seemed to recognise the difficulty of curbing Iran’s nuclear programme last month when he told a closed meeting with members of parliament that the Qom site “cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack”.

Two war games run recently by academics add to the despondency. In one, played out at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, America was ready to live with a nuclear Iran through containment and nuclear deterrence, and exerted strong pressure on Israel not to take military action. In another war game, held at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies and designed to explore diplomatic options, Iran continued to build up its stock of enriched uranium—even after a simulated Israeli commando raid on one facility under construction.

All this suggests that Israel is drawing up military options to attack Iran, but none of them is very appealing. This may explain Israel’s enthusiasm for sanctions. The emergence of an Iranian protest movement raises hopes that the regime could be restrained, perhaps even toppled, by stoking internal pressure.

America is rethinking the wisdom of targeting Iran’s most obvious vulnerability: its dependence, because of inefficient refining capacity, on imports of petrol and other fuels. Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, now says America will seek to impose penalties on the increasingly powerful Revolutionary Guard, “without contributing to the suffering of the ordinary [Iranians], who deserve better than what they currently are receiving.”

Mr Netanyahu’s lieutenants seem inclined the other way. They say ordinary Iranians will blame their government, not the outside world, for any sanctions; so the embargo should be as crushing as possible. Domestic instability should be encouraged. Only a direct threat to the survival of the regime, they believe, will make it think again about seeking nuclear weapons. It is a harsh view, but for Israel the alternatives are even worse.

http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15213442