From the weekend(s) couch:

So this morning I find out that Ebert gave "Shame" and "Cloud Atlas" 4 stars, "Melancholia", 3 and a half, and didn't care much for either "Detachment" or "The Tall Man" (the latter did leave a bad taste in my mouth and the former is second to next of my movies to watch, after "360".)

From the weekend couch:

Wong Kar Wai, 2000

David Fincher, 2011

Darren Aronofsky, 2006

From the weekend couch:

Richard Attenborough, 1992

From the weekend couch:

Yann Samuell, 2003

From the weekend couch:

Thelma and Louise

Ridley Scott, 1991

Norwegian Wood

Tran Anh Hung, 2010

from the weekend couch:

"The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow."

Terrence Malick, 2011

"Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it, too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.
The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end."


Roger Ebert reviews.

from the weekend couch:

"I have three children, six grandchildren. They're busy. They're too busy to talk to me. I gotta make an appointment. They got lost some place. They don't need anybody. People changed, life is changed. Today, you shake hands with somebody, you gotta count your fingers to make sure you got five fingers back."

from the weekend couch:

"But whatever I do with this cage, I cannot get at you, and it is your soul that I want."

from the weekend couch:

Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999

from the weekend couch:

from the weekend couch:

Roman Polanski, 2010

"Oh yes, the wall of ego. We all have one, our equivalent of the dentist's fish tank."

from the weekend couch:

Revisited

Sophia Coppola, 1999

From this book:

Jeffrey Eugenides, 1993

"From five, they had become four, and they were all the living and the dead, becoming shadows..."

from the weekend couch:

Mark Romanek, 2010

The artist's mind is a terrible, beautiful thing. This line germinated and went floating in my thoughts for approximately an hour and a half after watching this film, and only sleep made it go away.

I'd been waiting to watch the film after reading the book three and a half years ago, can still remember that it was twilight when I finished it and that the twilight I finished it in was an orange one and that I was sitting outside, hunched on a chair and fighting back tears. It's funny how certain memories stay with us with such vividness. And this film, like the book, will certainly stay with me: its images, snippets of its lines, Carey Mulligan's brilliant acting, how everything is so understated and quiet and yet so heartbreaking and conveys so much despair. I'd say that Mark Romanek's direction and Alex Garland's screenplay did complete justice to Ishiguro's dystopia.

So depressing and yet so beautiful! Makes me want to finish my half-read A Pale View of Hills.

from the weekend couch:

Todd Field, 2006

from the weekend couch:

Tony and Maria, for the nth time, and I still love this film to bits. I remember getting irked when, years ago, I heard someone say how it's so ridiculous that the Jets and the Sharks dance more than fight when they fight. I mean, this is Broadway, duh. Can't we have some culture around here?

from the weekend couch:

Invictus


Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. 


-William Ernest Henley

from the weekend couch:

from the weekend couch:

from the weekend couch: