Se7en

I remember seeing this movie on a dark fall night - the lights were turned off, the room was silent, it was me and the couch I was on, and the large TV that was projecting the film. No one else was in the room, heck I even think I was home alone that night.

I was recommended that film by a cinema blog that listed the best movies of the 90's. Se7en was coincidently seventh on their list, as was Shawshank Redeption and The Usual Suspects among others (all of them were also on the coffee table that was between me and the TV that was showing Se7en). I had a field day at the video rental store earlier that day. In hopes in re-educating myself to be a film connoisseur, I mean one has to watch the best to know what good art is, right?

I watched Se7en and was horrified by Kevin Spacey's character, amazed at Fincher's eye for detail in creating the murderer's apartment - mise-en-scene -  (e.g.: the neon cross directly above the single bed, the dirty bathtub that was developing the pictures of the very detectives who were trying to catch him, and terrified by the various depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins (the Lust killing, though never visually shown, is one that I regrettably imagine every time I think of the film).

The film has everything going for it - heady themes (these people were killing themselves and at times harming others, how come its such a big deal that I'm [the murderer] accelerating their deaths?), great acting, and awesome soundtrack made by NIN.

Fincher sometimes gets lampooned because his movies are just so depressing (e.g.: Zodiac, Fight Club, etc.), but this "depressing" ending is absolutely justified as it sets up one of the greatest cinematic twists of that decade - the 6th Sense has nothing on this grand finale in Se7en. After watching The Social Network last night, it cemented within me the greatness of Fincher's directorial films. Like Se7en, Social Network plays into a theme of a person's want to create art and at the same time disregards all matters of civility and law to the point where that creation consumes the creator.

There Will Be Blood

This 2007 film is one that displays itself to be a masterful display of a man's descent into evil. The title of the film by itself beckons a sort of Draconian-Old Testament God reference that when taken by itself, signals madness and destruction.

The story follows Daniel Plainview, an oil-well producer, as he buys land to extract the oil underneath. In a southern Californian town, in which he's trying to purchase land from its inhabitants, him and his son meet the local pastor and that's where the crux of the conflict will develop from.

As the title is a Old Testament reference, the movie is filled with allusions to the Christian faith (e.g.: baptisms, sacrifice, speaking in tongues, blood of Jesus, etc.) that play into the tension between Plainview and the pastor. With the blood in the title as an integral part of the film, the viewers see the competition between the three types of blood (family, oil, Jesus' blood/Christian faith) - in the end only one of the types of blood can win.

It goes without saying that Daniel Day Lewis' performance is nothing short of amazing - his winning of the Best Actor award at that year's Oscars was absolutely justified. His performance is reminiscent of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane as a man that's possessed by a desire and will stop at nothing to achieve that goal, even if that means to disregard one's own family and sanity.

The Fountain

The Fountain (2006), by Darren Aronofsky, ranks as one of my favorite films ever. Not because of its story structure, execution, special effects, hell, not even for its characters, but because the movie was so ambitious in trying to present three interwoven story lines that dealt with a purely human question - in the presence of death, can love and life transcend time?

Although the movie only received a 51% rating from rottentomatoes.com and a 7.6/10 from imdb.com, the film is a deeply personal one that allowed for me to think about these heady concepts - love, life, death, the afterlife, eternity, etc. - in a visually pleasing way.

The constant use of black and white stills (snow on soil, dalmation-like tiling on the floor, white stars in the night sky) and the image of light at the end of dark tunnels speaks to the metaphor of near-death experiences and the processes/feelings that come out of those experiences.

Darren Aronofsky said that the film is more of an experience than a story. I think he's very correct way in stating that because the movie is presented in a non-linear way as the three story lines contain the same people, but differing time periods (love transcending time).

Go see the film. If not for it's mature take on Mayan, Christian, and Eastern afterlife philosophy, then for its amazing visuals. Remember, this is a movie to experience. Take from it what you can from the first watch and later, watch it a second time to grasp more of its heady concepts.

Maurice Ravel's "Daphne et Chloe"

Ravel's composition, "Daphne et Chloe," is one of the most beautiful pieces that I've ever heard.
It's construction is a three scened ballet fit within one act. Although originally it was suppose to be a ballet with a musical score, the music has long outlived the ballet as the piece is usually performed solely as an orchestral score.

The piece's reference to nature, "sunrise," brings a new perspective the sounds of nature that people like Messiaen and Stravinsky did.

check http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrOJcEHXYWM for a video of one of the pieces.

Watchmen: Alan Moore and David Gibbons

I have never read any comics until I picked up "Watchmen."

After hearing all the hype - about that graphic was the most important comic of all time, about how the ideas in that book espouse truths and insights in modern western society that before then have not been spoken of - I just had to give it a shot.

Aesthetically, the Watchmen novel is a book within a book, within another book (Watchmen --> Under The Hood --> Tales of the Black Freighter). All this combines into an interweaving story that illustrates the vigilantes of old and new with the Black Freighter serving as an allegory to the bigger Watchmen universe.

A lot can be talked of how Gibbons' artistic renderings of Moore's plot is just as important as the story itself. Gibbons' use of color and shadow to depict the destruction of New York, his imagination that led him to create Dr. Manhattan's creation on the moon show the true marriage of pictures and text. But as time as an issue, I will focus more on the literal themes of Watchmen that Moore espouses.

The story starts off with the death of a once powerful superhero which signals the end of the hero era. This theme is reminiscent of Nietzsche's "Jesus on the Cross" in which the moment of crucifixion starts the rise of post-modernity/nihilism. The death of the superhero in the Watchmen starts off a wave of an anti-superhero sentiment that spreads across America - the rise of post-modernity, the rise of the ego/individual that negates the powers of the almighty, or in the case of the Watchmen, rejects the eyes of the watchers.

Moore's take on the concept of peace is one that can only be brought through a mutual enemy. The novel is set in the Cold War period in which the world is at a stand-off between two nuclear powers that are prepared to play a zero-sum game. To deter those two countries from destroying one another and in result annihilate the world, another superhero creates an enemy that's out of this world in hopes that the two opposing Cold War states would bind together to destroy the alien enemy.

Read the book before you watch the movie. For a genre that's always placated as one that's for kids and teenagers, Watchmen is definitely a graphic novel for adults with its heady themes and gruesome images.

Kryszztof Penderecki

After watching The Exorcist this weekend again, it reminded me of the first time I listened to the compositions of Penderecki. After all, it's only fitting that a man of such terror driven (musical) ambitions would create certain segments of the aural world for that truly horrifying film.

His piece, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, was a piece that is one of the most memorable compositions I've ever heard. The 52 stringed instrument arrangement is not played as a normal arrangement where the start and finish are defined, but at times, the orchestra were asked to play at random places of the song and also to play on unusual parts of their instrument (e.g.: for the violinists, they were asked to play on the opposite side of the bridge). All of this created an aural world that wreaked of novelty, but at the same time, resulted in a primordial composition that sounded like the cries and screams of the victims of Hiroshima. 


Many artists have since then taken cues from that piece such as Radiohead's Climbing Up the Walls from OK Computer and Jonny Greenwood's soundtrack for There Will be Blood. 


go to this link for a sample of this piece: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfBVYhyXU8o

Stanley Donwood

I first heard about this post-modernist painter when I was listening to Radiohead's seminal album, Kid A.
It turns that he's been a long-time collaborator with Thom Yorke (the frontman for Radiohead) for quite some time now. Full evidence of this collaboration came with Donwood doing the cover art for Yorke's solo album, The Eraser. 

The woodcut pieces (linocut technique) that Donwood did for Yorke's solo album was truly impressive in that the originals for the visuals were cut from wood and then pasted onto a 2d medium (e.g. paper). The separation between the black and whites is then more visibly seen as the more protruding and shortened crevices create more depth.

For more information and his pieces, go to: www.slowlydownward.com