shoes with wings

In memoriam : Farley Granger (1925-2011)

News on Bond 23 : shooting starts on November 2011

After trade press reports claimed Ralph Fiennes was linked to a role in the 23rd James Bond film and his filming was scheduled for December this year. Today, Dame Judi Dench has revealed that shooting is planned to start even earlier.

Dame Judi revealed the start date for filming during a visit last week to Hever Castle in Kent, to plant a rose bred for its gardens - reports the Daily Express.

She said: “I am going to do the next Bond in November. I don’t know the location yet but hopefully it will be somewhere nice. I can’t tell you much more but I do enjoy playing M as she is such a strong character. I like being bossy and my grandson thinks its cool that I’m in Bond.”

Wile E. Coyote 127 Hours

A Brief History of Title Diesign

WE ARE SO LITTLE part 6 : Myanmar heartquake

Crisis (1950)

Crisis is a 1950 drama film about an American couple who become embroiled in a revolution. It was based on the short story "The Doubters" by George Tabori.

Dr. Eugene Ferguson (Cary Grant), a renowned American brain surgeon, and his wife Helen (Paula Raymond) are vacationing in Latin America when a revolution breaks out. They are taken against their will to the country's dictator, Raoul Farrago (José Ferrer), who urgently needs a life-saving operation. Over the next few days, while Ferguson trains assistants for the operation, he witnesses various acts of brutality by the regime, especially by Colonel Adragon (Ramón Novarro), but his Hippocratic Oath compels him to do his best.

Roland Gonzales (Gilbert Roland), the rebel leader, kidnaps Helen to pressure her husband into making a fatal surgical "mistake", but his message to Ferguson is intercepted by Isabel Farrago (Signe Hasso), the patient's wife, and the operation is a success. Fortunately for the doctor, Helen is released unharmed when Farrago dies soon afterwards and his government is overthrown.

This is an interesting and thought-provoking story. Even though it was made in 1950, many of the statements and circumstances are timely to the world today. Dictators still rule and are also overthrown. But are their replacements any better than they were? And what about the medical oath that doctors take? Are they bound to save the life of even the worst tyrant?

Cary Grant is a likeable Dr. Ferguson. He goes about his daily life with a sense of calmness and understanding. Even though he is troubled by the situation, he remains calm, cool, and collected. Jose Ferrer as Farrago shows here once again his greatest acting capability.

McLuxury

In memoriam : Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011)

Home (IT) Italiano

Mariel Clayton dolls

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The Origin of the World

Stockholm, Berns Hotel

Marrakech, Jamaa El Fna

beyond glass

Milano, Colonne di San Lorenzo

Never let me go (2010)

Never Let Me Go is a 2010 British dystopian drama film based on Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel of the same name. The film was directed by Mark Romanek from a screenplay written by Alex Garland. It stars Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield, with Sally Hawkins and Charlotte Rampling in supporting roles.

Never Let Me Go centers on Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, played respectively by Mulligan, Knightley, and Garfield, who become entangled in a love triangle and are scientific specimens, created in a laboratory and raised in order to provide their organs to severely ill patients.

Prior to the book's publication, Garland had approached the film's producers, Andrew Macdonald and Andrew Reich, about a possible film, and wrote the film a ninety-six page script. While initially having trouble finding an actress to play Kathy, Mulligan was cast in the role after Peter Rice, who is the head of the company financing the film, recommended her by text message while watching her performance in An Education. A fan of the book, Mulligan ecstatically accepted the role, having hoped to play that specific character if a film adaptation were to ever be made of the book, years before. The film's message and themes were the factors that attracted Andrew Garfield to become a part of the film.

Garfield said the story of Never Let Me Go is about humans and projecting "what it is to have a soul, and how you prove what a soul is"; he says he enjoys the way the film is a "call to arms" about the positives of life. He further adds that its message could hopefully remind people that they have a choice to arise in the morning and wonder what their preference and their activities for the day should be instead of questioning what they should or are obligated to do. Keira Knightley feels that the film's story is alarming, but has said that the film is "more about humanity's ability to look the other way". "You know in fact that if your morals can go out the window if you think you can survive in a certain way, whatever your morals may be," she explains.

Director Mark Romanek has said that, as in the film, everyone has to uncover what our relations to our own mortality is; we have two choices: either go against it, or try to figure out a way around it like the character Tommy does. When questioned about what he'd hoped that audience would get from Never Let Me Go, Romanek said it was to remind people of what is important, like love, behavior and friendships. He recalled an email a person had written to him that said: “I saw your film and it made me cry and I haven’t reacted to a film emotionally like that in years. And I called my father, cause I realized I hadn’t spoken to him in 3 weeks and I told him how much I love him and how much I appreciated what a good father he’s been.”

Kazuo Ishiguro's hauntingly enigmatic novel "Never Let Me Go" is a challenging artistic work that requires its readers to decipher a mysterious story arc that is never fully unveiled in the text. It's complicated to describe, but the brilliance of the work is what it doesn't say--and this ambiguity, when all the pieces finally fall into place, reveal a unique and disturbing alternate reality. It's a difficult piece to conceptualize and adapt to a visual medium. Those hoping for a literal translation might, indeed, be disappointed in the film incarnation of "Never Let Me Go" which can't replicate the novel's precise and measured revelations. However, this lovely and thoughtful film does succeed in its own right as a heartbreaking examination on the nature of humanity.

"Never Let Me Go" does honor Ishiguro's novel in tone, pacing, and mood. Gentle and idyllic, but austere and bleak when necessary, this is a subtle film that requires and rewards patience. The film establishes, from the first frame, that we're embarking on a parallel timeline in which medical science is greatly advanced from our current world. In the British countryside, we meet three youths--Kathy (the film's narrator), Tommy and Ruth--at a tony boarding school named Hailsham. Hailsham students serve a special purpose and their entire existence is lived within the walls of the academy. The three friends form a love triangle of sorts with Kathy and Tommy seeming to be soul mates and Ruth becoming the romantic foil. A treatise on unrequited love, the film follows the kids to young adulthood as they leave the confines of Hailsham at eighteen before fulfilling their final destiny.

Home@last! - sunny morning

Laughing Penguin

Burrowing owls

family....1967 circa

In memoriam : Michael Gough (1917-2011)

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150° today

The Amazing Spider Man!

The Wind (1928)

The Wind is a 1928 American dramatic silent film directed by Victor Sjöström. The movie was adapted by Frances Marion from the novel The Wind written by Dorothy Scarborough.

It features Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson, Montagu Love, Dorothy Cumming, and others.

It was one of the last silent films released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Letty, a girl from Virginia, trainbound for her cousin's ranch in the western prairies, meets Roddy, who hints at a marriage proposal. At the ranch, Cora's children and husband become too fond of Letty, and she is forced to leave. With nowhere to go, she decides to accept Roddy's implied invitation to become his wife. When she discovers him already married, she hastily marries Lige, a roughhewn son of the soil at whom she had previously scoffed. While Lige is away for a round-up of wild horses during a particularly fierce windstorm, Roddy forces his way into Lige's home and stays the night with Letty, urging her to go with him in the morning. She refuses, shoots him when he becomes insistent, laboriously drags his body outside, and buries it in the shifting sand. Letty spends a day of terror that approaches madness; but Lige returns, and Letty decides that she no longer wishes to return to Virginia--they will face the wind together.

The Wind is the last surviving silent picture by Seastrom, the great Swedish director who worked in Hollywood in the 1920s. It is also the last silent film of Lillian Gish, the mute art's greatest actress. In The Wind, natural forces destroy a delicate young woman, played by Gish, who is isolated in a desert cabin struck by sandstorms. Through both cinematography and Gish's performance, wind represents all the cosmic forces that have ever borne down on a vulnerable humanity. When faced with a brutal male attacker, Gish's seemingly fragile and innocent character summons a ferocious strength and resilience.

What makes The Wind such an eloquent coda to its dying medium is Seastrom's and Gish's distillation of their art forms to the simplest, most elemental form: there are no frills. Seastrom was always at his best as a visual poet of natural forces impinging on human drama; in his films, natural forces convey drama and control human destiny. Gish, superficially fragile and innocent, could plumb the depths of her steely soul and find the will to prevail. The genius of both Seastrom and Gish comes to a climactic confluence in The Wind. Gish is Everywoman, subject to the most basic male brutality and yet freshly open to the possibility of romance. As a result, the film offers a quintessential cinematic moment of the rarest and most transcendentally pure art.

WE ARE SO LITTLE part 5

Liza and Friends: A Tribute to Sammy Davis Jr. (1992)

WE ARE SO LITTLE - part 4

Today earthquake in Japan shifted the earth’s rotation axis by 10 cm.

As a result of the earthquake in Japan on March 11, the Earth’s rotation axis has shifted by almost 10 centimeters(4 inches) It’s the preliminary result of studies carried out by INGV, National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

Chile earthquake in March 2010 was already so powerful that it shifted as well an Earth axis and shortened the length of a day, NASA announced few days later.

By speeding up Earth's rotation, the magnitude 8.8 earthquake—the fifth strongest ever recorded, according to the USGS—should have shortened an Earth day by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to new computer-model calculations by geophysicist Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

WE ARE SO LITTLE - part 3 : tsunami in Japan 11/mar/2011

Castaway on the moon (2009)

Yesterday, Mr. Kim was just another statistic of the global recession, leaping off a bridge to a watery grave in the Han River. But when he washes up on a tiny strip of land in the middle of the river with Seoul’s skyscrapers glittering obliviously in the near distance, he realizes that his exile from the rat race may be the best thing that's ever happened to him. Unable to swim, he might as well be a millions miles away from civilization. And so, nesting in a paddleboat shaped like a giant duck, farming with bird poop, Kim goes native, embracing his new existence as the CASTAWAY ON THE MOON.

Back on dry land, Ms. Kim is a traumatized agoraphobe, a right-clicking blog bandit who electronically appropriates other people's lives to fill her own emptiness. Sleeping in a bubble-wrapped closet, texting her parents instead of opening the door, she's only able to bear the outside world during civil defense drills, when life freezes in place, and the silence of the moon falls over the Earth. But everything changes when she gazes across the river, and Kim meets Kim, beginning the strangest, coolest courtship in cinema history.

Castaway on the Moon delivers good old-fashioned storytelling from an unusual vantage point. Because of the distance between the main characters, the pair never have the opportunity to meet and so they manage to find other ways to communicate. – Mr. Kim by writing large messages on the sandy beach for Ms Kim to see via her telescope, and Mrs. Kim by communicating through messages in a bottle thrown over the bridge, onto the island.

The pen pal-style relationship allows the film’s director Lee to integrate several charming vignettes depicting both Mr. Kim’s plight as a castaway and Ms. Kim’s plight as another type of castaway. Mr. Kim may be stranded on the island, but Mrs. Kim lives her whole life in the confines of her darkened bedroom, completely isolated from the rest of society. She works through her computer and seemingly lives her life online. Like Mr. Kim, she is seemingly caught in the middle of a bustling urban society but easily goes unnoticed. The reluctance to interact is so strong that she chooses to communicate with her mother via text messages rather then simply speaking directly to her.

Lee wisely directs the actors into contrasting performances, with Jung Jae-Young leaning towards overacting and Jeong Ryeo-Won delivering a more introverted performance.

Lee also takes his time slowly leading the audience into the core of his story through odd but touching moments, such as the running joke where a bowl of black bean noodles becomes Mr. Kim’s motivation for existence. These moments make Castaway a brave, surprisingly absorbing film that takes considerable risks but ultimately succeeds.

Even more interesting is how the two become isolated from society in very different means.

Mr. Kim is faced with forced separation from society while Ms Kim who is in the midst of society chooses to hide away. The virtual distance of Ms Kim is therefore quite similar to Mr. Kim’s physical distance and his separation from the surrounding city.

Its hard to deny the film’s valid and poignant critique of urban society and contemporary modes, given an ironic twist at the end, wherein the city of Seoul is hit with a rare emergency drill, shutting down the city and possibly allowing for a fateful meeting.

real UP!

National Geographic Channel have created a real-life version of the animated film Up — launching a house thousands of metres into the air using balloons.

A team of scientists, engineers, and two world-class balloon pilots successfully launched a 16' X 16' house 18' tall with 8' coloured weather balloons from a private airfield east of Los Angeles, and set a new world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted.

equal

THE FIRST AVENGER: CAPTAIN AMERICA

Reinventing the past - part 1 : 007art.free.fr

Western Airlines commercial 1985

Alma

The Boston strangler (1968)

The Boston Strangler is a 1968 film based on the true story of the Boston Strangler and the book by Gerold Frank. It was directed by Richard Fleischer, and stars Tony Curtis as Albert DeSalvo, the strangler, and Henry Fonda as John S. Bottomly, the chief detective now famed for obtaining DeSalvo's confession.

The cast also includes George Kennedy, Sally Kellerman, Murray Hamilton, Jeff Corey and James Brolin.

The first part of the film shows the police investigation, with some examples of the seedier side of Boston life, including promiscuity in the adult quarters of the city. The second part shows the apprehension of DeSalvo. The intention of Officer Bottomly and the law is to answer the question presented in the film's famous print ad:

Why did 13 women open their doors to the Boston Strangler?

When several middle-aged women are found strangled and sexually assaulted in the Back Bay area of Boston, the police round up numerous suspects but fail to uncover any leads. As the stranglings continue, Massachusetts Atty. Gen. Edward W. Brooke, Jr., persuades Asst. Atty. Gen. John S. Bottomly to set up a bureau to coordinate information concerning the slayings.

While women report possible suspects, an ESP expert, Peter Hurkos, is brought in to conjure up a vision of the murderer.

Elsewhere in the city, plumber Albert DeSalvo stops watching the funeral of President Kennedy on television and tells his wife that he must check on a customer's furnace. Instead, he gains access to a young woman's home and murders her. He continues his attacks but is finally apprehended when he is chased into the street by the husband of an intended victim and struck by a police car. DeSalvo is sent to Boston City Hospital for observation, while Bottomly and Det. Phillip J. DiNatale question a surviving victim who recalls that she bit her attacker on the thumb. Discovering that DeSalvo has a bite mark on his thumb, Bottomly and DiNatale check his place of employment and discover that his absences from work correspond with the dates of the murders.

Aware that DeSalvo may be a schizophrenic incapable of total recall, Bottomly places him in a room with his wife and watches from behind a glass wall as the confrontation triggers DeSalvo's subconscious and compels him to clutch his wife by the throat.

There is insufficient evidence to prove that DeSalvo is the strangler, but Bottomly is certain that he has the right man when DeSalvo later reveals additional details about the murders.

Perhaps the most obvious of all the film’s attributes is the tremendously original shooting style. When The Boston Strangler is on the screen, the screen splits into anywhere from 2-5 screens so the viewer can see the Strangler ringing the doorbell, the stairs he’s going to walk up, the door to the apartment, and the victim in the apartment at the same time. While it seems as though this would be confusing, it is spectacularly done. An haunting scene is when you see a split screen of a roommate dead on the floor in her bedroom (with the door closed) and her roommates having a very casual conversation right outside her door, unaware that their roommate is dead. I would bet that most people would feel a chill up their spine in that scene.

The second attribute that deserves a mention is the controversial issues this film brought up. This film caused quite a stir with the censors as it dealt with the most horrible sexual crimes you could possibly imagine in explicit detail (there is an explicit discussion where it was revealed that one of the victims was raped with a wine bottle).

“The Boston Strangler” can be considered the first modern serial killer procedural.

Hot Millions (1968)

Hot Millions is an 1968 crime comedy film made by MGM. It was directed by Eric Till and produced by Mildred Freed Alberg, from a collaborative screenplay by Ira Wallach and star Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Karl Malden, Bob Newhart, Robert Morley, Cesar Romero. The music score was composed by Laurie Johnson, featuring the single "This Time" from Scottish singer Lulu. The cinematographer was Kenneth Higgins.

Released from prison, Marcus Pendleton, an embezzler whose crime was discovered by a computer, decides to become a computer expert. He then befriends Caesar Smith, one of Britain's foremost computer authorities, and persuades him to leave the country. Equipped with Smith's identity, Pendleton is hired by Ta-Can-Co., an industrial conglomerate headed by Carlton J. Klemper; assisted by a charwoman, he programs the corporation's computer to pay large monthly checks to three nonexistent companies.

Pendleton then makes secret trips to Paris, Rome, and Frankfurt to collect and cash the checks. Meanwhile, he has married his secretary, Patty Terwilliger.

When Pendleton learns that he is going to become a father, he leaves Ta-Can-Co. and flees with Patty to Rio de Janeiro. But Klemper and his computer overseer, Willard C. Gnatpole, discover the fraud and follow the swindlers to Rio.

Fortunately for Pendleton, Patty has invested some of the money and made a fortune in the stock market.

After paying back the stolen money, the couple still have her funds, and Pendleton is free to fulfill his ambition of becoming an orchestra conductor--in whose orchestra Patty plays the flute.

This delightful comedy comes from the pen of Ustinov himself, with writing partner Ira Wallach, and is a joy from start to finish. For this is a movie in which there's both a convincing plot and winning characters, neither of which feel forced. Resisting the temptation to write himself a showy part, Ustinov makes Pendleton/Smith the straight man, with all the best lines going to Smith. And Smith certainly does shine as a comedienne, instantly endearing as the unco-ordinated, seemingly dim Patty, who is unable to keep a job and dreams of becoming a flautist. Newhart also impresses as the slimy exec trying to climb the greasy pole and eliminate the competition.

And, unlike many crime capers, there's an ending that's both plausable and genuinely surprising. And it gets there with the minimum of fuss, never dragging, except for an inexplicable cameo featuring Cesar Romero as a customs officer offended at Malden and Newhart's taste in beverages.

In memoriam : Jane Russell (1921-2011)