Ziad Shihab

Showing all posts tagged "Roamed"

Cary Grant: The Sprint and the Pose

April 20th, 2021

[From Luc Moullet’s Politique des acteurs (1993, Cahiers du cinéma). See Table of Contents] Each of the four limbs follows one or two different directions (Indiscreet, 1958) Cary Grant is in the same boat as Cooper or Wayne: his first films, made for the same company—Paramount, as it happens—during the thirties, offer us a rather aseptic, standardized actor. We have the slightly caricatured proof of that in his role in Blonde Venus (Sternberg, 1932), where he plays opposite M...

James Stewart: Man of Hands

April 20th, 2021

[From Luc Moullet’s Politique des acteurs (1993, Cahiers du cinéma). See Table of Contents] Four hands: another contagion effect (No Highway in the Sky, 1950) James Stewart appeared on the firmament of the film world in 1938 with Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You, which won the Oscar for Best Picture. This celebrity comes about awkwardly: first of all, Stewart has only the fourth role in the film, after Lionel Barrymore, Edward Arnold and Jean Arthur. More importantly, even ...

Pebbles (2021)

April 20th, 2021

There is a scene early on in P.S. Vinothraj’s first feature Pebbles that takes place in a town bus. Diverging from the story at hand, the director fixates on a series of objects that accompany the passengers: a marapachi doll, a yellow cloth bag, a new set of brass lamps, a CRT television, plastic water carriers. It’s the sort of sentimental detail, each item conveying a world of stories, that gives the film its lived-in quality. As the bus plods along the narrow road, someone smokes one beed...

Apples (2020)

April 20th, 2021

A burly guitarist stands at the corner of a street trying to master the notes of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". A man passing by listens to him intently and drops a coin in appreciation of the effort. The passer-by knows a thing or two about starting from scratch, for he is one of the thousands in the city to be diagnosed with amnesia, an epidemic that seems to have neither cause nor cure. A lucky few have family members who come to pick them up from the hospital, countless others are simply...

A Pioneer of Naturalism

April 20th, 2021

[From Luc Moullet’s monograph Cecil B. DeMille: The Emperor of Mauve (2012, Capricci). See Table of Contents] Edith Roberts in Saturday Night (1922): naturalism. This is one of the most unsung aspects of our director. Two years into his career, he turned towards a meticulous depiction of everyday reality and its sordid aspects. He certainly wasn’t the only one with such an inclination. There were also Raoul Walsh (Regeneration, 1915) and D.W. Griffith (The Mother and the L...

Fruits Basket 3×03 Review: “I Hope It Snows Soon”

April 20th, 2021

Welcome to Fruits Basket, where everyone is just a little bit screwed up and, with some exceptions, everyone’s parents are terrible. "I Hope It Snows Soon" gives us some insight as to why Machi acts the way she does, and potentially why Yuki feels so drawn to her. "I Hope It Snows Soon" shows that while Soma parents completely suck, they certainly aren’t the only parents who have totally messed up their children. The episode opens with Machi, observing the snow through the window...

Review: Way Beyond - Visions du Réel 2021 – Burning Lights Competition

April 20th, 2021

19/04/2021 - The European Organisation of Nuclear Research has never been so intriguing, thanks to the cold yet alchemical gaze cast by Swiss director Pauline Julier Pauline Julier’s works investigate the complex and fascinating relationship between fiction and reality, pragmatism and dreams. A winner at the prestigious Swiss Art Awards in 2010, the Genevan artist has travelled the world, screening her films in art centres, institutions and international festivals such as Paris’s Centre ...

Do We Need to Almost Die to Know How to Live?

April 19th, 2021

Is Suffering Necessary for Understanding? View this email in your browser Do We Need to Almost Die to Know How to Live?Dear Classical Wisdom Reader,It was exactly six years ago tomorrow that I almost died. It would have been an ancient death, just as it was the end of millions of women before me. My family was asked to fly in to say goodbye, a team of experts gathered around my bedside, anxiously waiting and unable to do much. At one point, I had only hours left... It was at that moment (or p...

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Girls Who Wear Glasses: Jacqueline White

April 19th, 2021

Mystery in Mexico (1948)   Original content copyright 2008-2014 by Mark A Clark No rights are claimed or implied for images shown herein. Individual photos may be reposted without permission. Providing credit and a link to this blog is always appreciated, but not required.

Promising Young Woman review: Carey Mulligan picks at the scabs of female trauma

April 18th, 2021

Dir: Emerald Fennell. Starring: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Connie Britton, Alison Brie, Jennifer Coolidge, Adam Brody, Chris Lowell. 15, 113 mins In the first few minutes of Promising Young Woman, Carey Mulligan’s Cassie walks along the street with blood dripping down her leg. She’s just left the home of a would-be rapist she tricked by pretending to be blind drunk, before snapping to sober attention. We don’t see what she did to him, but it must have been gory. Then the camera pans up....

A grey zone by Anne-Katrin Titze

April 18th, 2021

Elvira Lind on The Letter Room and Bobbi Jene and her children with Oscar Isaac: "It’s different kinds of babies. The human babies and the film babies. They tend to come at the same time somehow." In her Oscar-nominated Live Action Short The Letter Room, starring Oscar Isaac with John Douglas Thompson, Alia Shawkat, Brian Petsos, Tony Gillan, and Eileen Galindo, Elvira Lind explores loneliness in a variety of facets. Oscar Isaac’s poignant performance as corrections officer Richard pul...

Not To Be Taken Away

April 18th, 2021

I hadn’t listened to this Who Are You track in a long, long time. Suddenly it’s the new ear worm; I can’t let it go. And it’s very lyrically dense…an angry, exhausted song about the agony and the ecstasy. [link VIDEO] You’re alone above the street somewhere Wondering how you’ll ever count out there You can walk, you can talk, you can fight But inside you’ve got something to write In your hand you hold your only friend Never spend your guitar or your pen Your guitar o...

Synchronic Ending Makes Sci-Fi Movie a Modern Classic

April 18th, 2021

This article contains Synchronic spoilers. "Time is the school in which we learn / Time is the fire in which we burn," wrote poet Delmore Schwartz decades ago, and if any genre filmmakers take that couplet to heart, it’s Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. The self-contained directing/writing/producing/acting pair have made four feature films to date, each of them dealing in some way with the passage of time, the volatility of memory, and the warping of both. Their fourth feature, last ye...

No Beats, No Bloomsburys: Jonathan Meades Talks Blair, Brutalism & Benny Hill

April 18th, 2021

Photo by Pablosievert. CC BY-SA 4.0 The last time I saw Jonathan Meades was in May 2018, in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. In a flat surrounded with books, paintings, pictures, and postcards he’d made himself, and as we got through several bottles of rosé, he said he wasn’t fit enough to come up to the building’s famously sculptural roof terrace, with its running track, its kindergarten, and its view across the city, the mountains and the Mediterranean. Although he was...

Laurent Binet: ‘In France, I just feel like we are lost in space’ - The Guardian

April 18th, 2021

Laurent Binet is one of the most successful French writers of his generation, author of the bestselling HHhH, which won the Prix Goncourt du premier roman, and The Seventh Function of Language, a murder mystery novel based on the life and writing of Roland Barthes. His latest, Civilisations, which won the Académie Française’s Grand Prix du roman in 2019, is a counterfactual novel, a wild romp of a book that turns history on its head. In Binet’s mirror-world, the Vikings discover America, Chri...

Observing Genghis Khan’s Wrath Through the Eyes of Three Women

April 16th, 2021

There have been more than a few contenders for the title of "World Conqueror," but 800 years after the fact, Genghis Khan’s claim to the title remains unmatched. Over the course of four decades, he and his heirs built a realm that stretched from the Korean Peninsula to the plains of Hungary and from northern Siberia to India. And unlike the conquests of Hitler and Bonaparte, the charismatic authority of Genghis Khan endured long after the initial union fractured into warring khanates. Tack...

7 Intergenerational Novels About Family Lore

April 16th, 2021

When my grandmother was a child, she and her family fled Ukraine to spend the war in a factory town in the Ural Mountains, where her father, an engineer, made tanks for fighting the Nazis. Though she never sat down and told me the story in one go, bits and pieces always floated around my consciousness, from the story of my grandmother and her family hiding under a train during a Nazi bombing to the moment when her own grandmother fell under a train to her death while holding her hand. These s...

The Book of Books: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible

April 16th, 2021

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Kristin Swenson’s fascinating and accessible introduction to the Bible In the earliest New Testament writings, the mother of Jesus doesn’t even have a name. Paul says simply that Jesus was born from a woman, and there are very few references to the Virgin Mary in the earliest Gospel. Mark mentions a Mary, and he also mentions the mother of Jesus, but the context is ambiguous: it isn’t clear whether he is even ref...

From Jeff Goldblum to Sharktopus: Six times pop culture embraced interspecies horror

April 16th, 2021

T here’s an old cliché that scientists in films never seem to realise the dangers of their most outrageous experiments. Why was Jurassic Park’s Richard Attenborough so surprised when his island full of genetically modified dinosaur clones became the scene of violent carnage? Did Robin Williams really expect Flubber to be anything other than slimy green evil? But there’s more truth to these fictional stereotypes than one might assume. This week, US scientists sparked an ethics row af...

How Charlie Chaplin tackled fascism with ‘The Great Dictator’ and what we can learn

April 16th, 2021

Charlie Chaplin’s first movie with sound represented an end to silence in more ways than one. The star emerged from muteness by writing, directing, producing, scoring, distributing and starring in The Great Dictator, a film that culminates in a voice-giving sermon that sits comfortably at the top of any given search for ‘the greatest speech ever made’. This double-edged meaning to breaking silence is an example of the movie’s eerie prescience in every which way.  Looking back, it would s...

The 20th-century American novel is stuffed with stuff: baseballs, red wheelbarrows, and other bric-a-brac. What’s the point of it all?

April 16th, 2021

In the prefurnished apartment where I have spent most of the last year, I am surrounded by things that seem to vibrate strangely with something like life. On my desk, there are three interchangeable coffee mugs and another, for unknown reasons, that is special to me. There is a lamp that came with the apartment, whose bulb needs to be fussed over every time I turn it on.There are my beloved books, some of them dragged with me from apartment to apartment since college, gathering grime and dust...

“She Can Only Function in the Dark”: Writer/Director Corinna Faith On Her Female-Led, ’70s-Set Ghost Story, The Power

April 15th, 2021

Set during London’s so-called "Three-Day Week" period — just over two months in 1974 when Conservatives in Britain rationed electricity as part of a dispute with the coal miners whose output supplied most of the country’s energy — Corinna Faith’s The Power is an impressively accomplished debut feature that yokes a classic ghost story to the dynamics of the contemporary #MeToo movement. Val is an apprentice nurse working her first night shift in an aging East London hospital. There are plenty ...

An Interview With Eric Magnussen: The Art of Drag and Photography

April 15th, 2021

RuPaul’s Drag Race is the Emmy-winning global phenomenon taking reality TV by storm. The show is in its 13th season but boasts several spin-offs including All Stars, as well as localized seasons in Canada, UK, Thailand, Holland, Spain, and Australia. Drag race, as it is called by fans, is a reality competition that challenges contestants to find the drag performer who possesses the perfect blend of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. Eric Magnussen Eric Magnussen is th...

Fire Hymn: Keki N. Daruwala

April 15th, 2021

Fire-Hymn is one of the best hymns ever written by Daruwalla who is not only a poet, but a novelist, a short story writer, a travelogue-writer and an anthologist too besides being an IPS officer who has worked in various capacities. One from Lahore, he is a Parsi by faith and upbringing, but an Indian writing in English. After serving  the U.P., mainly the Terai regions and being posted in Delhi, he joined the RAW wing and worked as a Member of the National Minorities  Commission. His first b...

Complexity and Its Relation to Variation

April 15th, 2021

Introduction From time to time it is helpful to take a step back and reflect the foundations of our concepts since they represent a very important type of our tools in linguistics. COMPLEXITY and VARIATION are two such widely employed terms that at first glance do not seem to have much in common. Languages seem amazingly complex, in particular when one tries to learn foreign languages after childhood and youth. In the linguistic literature as well as in layman's understanding, complexit...