Sunday, April 15, 2012
Saturday, April 14, 2012
The Shining remembered
There has been much speculation over the years about the history of the two pieces of “art” Dick Hallorann has hanging above his bed and television in The Shining.
The source for the piece above his television has finally been discovered: It is a photo taken in the early 1970’s that was sold as a poster titled “Supernatural Dream”.
The model is named Azizi Johari, and she has this to say on her Facebook page:
“It’s on the wall in Scatman Crothers room in the movie ‘The Shining’. It’s called ‘Supernatural Dream’. It freaked me out when I saw the shot in the movie! The one over the tv definitely is my poster.”
The Phobos Monolith
The Phobos monolith is a surface feature, a large rock, on the moon Phobos which orbits Mars.
It is a boulder about 85 meters (~280 feet) across.
A monolith is a geological feature consisting of a single massive piece of rock. Monoliths also occur naturally on Earth, but it has been suggested that the Phobos monolith may be a piece of impact ejecta.
The monolith is a bright object near Stickney crater, described as a "building sized" boulder, which casts a prominent shadow.
The monolith is a bright object near Stickney crater, described as a "building sized" boulder, which casts a prominent shadow.
It was discovered by Efrain Palermo, who did large surveys of Martian probe imagery, and later confirmed by Lan Fleming, an imaging sub-contractor at NASA Johnson Space Center.
The general vicinity of the monolith is a proposed landing site for a Canadian Space Agency vehicle, funded by Optech and the Mars Institute, for an unmanned mission to Phobos known as PRIME (Phobos Reconnaissance and International Mars Exploration). The PRIME mission would be composed of an orbiter and lander, and each would carry four instruments designed to study various aspects of Phobos' geology. At present, PRIME has not been funded and does not have a projected launch date.
The object appears in Mars Global Surveyor images SPS252603 and SPS255103, dated 1998. The object is unrelated to another monolith located on the surface of Mars, which NASA noted as an example of a common surface feature in that region.
Friday, April 13, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Monday, April 09, 2012
Possession (1981)
Possession is a 1981 French cult horror film directed by Andrzej Żuławski and starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill.
Possession is not exactly the kind of movie you'd expect to have been inspired by real-life events - and yet that's exactly the case. Żuławski wrote the script after his marriage to Małgorzata Braunek (the Polish star of his first two movies) hit the rocks and it was left to him to take care of their son Xawery (nowadays a celebrated director in his own right). With Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" as an alleged source of additional inspiration, Żuławski and his co-screenwriter Frederic Tuten put together a viscerally acute portrayal of male jealousy and rage, which includes a double set of not-to-be-revealed doppelgängers and is ultimately about the perils of personal freedom taken to its extreme.
Shot on location in divided Berlin, the movie makes a great, conspicuous use of wide-angle deep-focus photography, which renders each interior eerily compressed and all exteriors airy and ominous at the same time. Possession's first image is that of Berlin wall itself, and Mark and Anna's place overlooks one of the wall's outposts, with the communist eastern part of the city looming in the background as a reminder of a violated, enslaved reality that the film's Polish director knew all too well (having been kicked out of his country twice). What's more, many shots of the main couple are organized so that the growing division between them is mirrored by dual composition, with Mark and Anna reigning over separate halves of the frame.
If one would try looking for comparisons that best describe Żuławski's sensibility, it would probably be wisest to position him mid-way between Brian De Palma and Ingmar Bergman. For all his love of cine-hyperbole, which often makes his movies feel like mere strings of 'grand' sequences, Żuławski doesn't share De Palma's slickness - or his heartlessness, for that matter. Instead of reducing his cinema to formal pyrotechnics, Żuławski remains deeply engaged with the secrets of the human soul, which he perceives as being forever torn apart by violent contradictions. In that alone, he's a deeply romantic director: a passionate explorer of what's most self-destructive about us. And yet, one feels him strive for an elation that would prove redemptive enough to help us carry on despite our deeply divisive desires. Even if "Possession" was once described as "a movie about a woman who fucks an octopus", there's no mistaking the fact that deep inside, Żuławski's cinema is all about searching for grace.
Thursday, April 05, 2012
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Monday, April 02, 2012
Sunday, April 01, 2012
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Friday, March 30, 2012
Caterpillar of feathers
Here’s a fantastic optical illusion courtesy of mother nature. What looks like a vibrantly colored caterpillar perched on a tree limb is actually photographer José Luis Rodríguez’s chance encounter with nine extra cozy European Bee-eaters. The photographer named the image Oruga de Plumas, which translates roughly to “Caterpillar of Feathers”.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
The Floating Cinema
This temporary raft structure was built out of recycled materials by architect Ole Scheeren in a lagoon in Yao Noi, Thailand for a new film festival Film on the Rocks Yao Noi.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Monday, March 26, 2012
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Friday, March 23, 2012
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