on here at Gurewitz's request
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Cries and Whispers 1972
fully illustrated version at my blog here:
cinemasparagus.blogspot.com/2023/02/whispers-and-cry-aka-cries-and-whispers.html
THE PASSION OF AGNES
"...the greatest of those who create such spectacles do not resort to lies but instead get the public to accept their truth, all without breaking the law that the spectacle must represent the rising movement. Both their truth and their madness are accepted, for we must never forget that an artist imposes his madness on an audience less mad, or at least unaware of its madness.
"It might…
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Yumeji 1991
fully illustrated version here:
cinemasparagus.blogspot.com/2023/04/yumeji.html
NO. 2 DREAM
This is the tale of a man, an artist, named Yumeji Takehisa (Kenji Sawada). The film (1991) starts off not with wedding bells but lanterns resembling beach balls aflight. A young woman stands in a tree. Yumeji fights through the crowd to approach her, this vision/miracle/Madonn'.
He's heading to Kanazawa to elope to a 22-year-old named Hikono Kasai (Masumi Miyazaki). She tells Yumeji her ex drowned in the lake. The clothes he's…
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Eyes Wide Shut 1999
A contender for the greatest film ever made. Watched again last night. One note for here: the infamous pool-table sequence: in which the furniture and the chairs seem to stare back at Bill and the viewer, depopulated but haunted by a gaze-"off", which is the dialectic between Kubrick's own POV/world-view/gaze and that of the viewer: a mise-en-abyme of the very Void, or, to quote Morrissey quoting someone else: "I entered nothing / And nothing entered me."
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Goodbye to Language 2014
Despite or because of the 3D almost all the action of the story : (1) is backstory; (2) takes place off-screen.
Nothing much to say here, except seeing it at Cannes '14 at the world premiere screening was the ultimate theatrical experience of my life.
The film can be watched in 2D (it's the only way I recently saw it, though I've seen it in 3D three times) but it's not merely only a "reproduction" (as the lunatic celluloid purists…
