I've finally gotten over the trauma of reading my old live journal entries and I feel as if I can write in here again.
The past week or so has been kinda weak, I haven't been in the greatest of moods all week and that was lame.
Yesterday, I visited Lee's house in Rye, New York. It was a fun trip that lasted most of the day and Rye turned out to be a rather pleasant town. Riding in a car with her that she was driving was a very odd experience. Something that's so normal back home is just so weird here since I live in the city and walk everywhere.
After getting back last night we rented Brian DePalma's Carrie which was a lot of fun.
I returned Carrie today after shooting a project for Meagan and I rented Robert Bresson's The Diary of a Country Priest.
This was the first film that I've seen by Bresson and I thought it was great. I really love his philosophy when it comes to filmmaking. He believes in stripping it down to only what's necessary. It's all very simple and effective. One cool technical note is that he shot everything with a normal lens because he felt that wide angle lenses and telephoto lenses were contrived and didn't present truthful images. The normal lens on the other hand sees things as the human eye would and therefore is more true.
The film itself was a really sad and effective film about a country priest's inner struggles with his faith in his religion and his relationships with others. It was beautiful is all respects, cinematography, acting, story, writing, editing, pacing. It was just an all around great film. It has me excited about seeing the rest of his work.
That's how I feel about DePalma at the moment too. He's a vastly different filmmaker from Bresson but his stuff is really entertaining. I don't know if I wrote about it and I'm too lazy to check but I saw Femme Fatale last month and really enjoyed that.
I also saw Tim Roth's The War Zone which was very powerful. We had to watch it because he was coming to our class the following Friday. When he showed up I didn't recognize him because of his facial hair. The question and answer with him was enjoyable and enlightening. I especially appreciated his trashing of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. He said he tosses out any scripts that mention them and that he dislikes "boy movies." Go Tim. I had a chance to ask him about working with Werner Herzog on Invincible and he said that Herzog is not as crazy as most people think but that the script he had written for the film was appalling (in terms of proper scripts format). On the other hand, Herzog had his reputation on his side and that's why Roth did the film.
Recently I've done some reading too. I'm about half way through Eisenstein's Film Form and I've finished Jean- Paul Sartre's No Exit and Jean Genet's The Maids. Why am I reading books when I could be watching movies? Blame Lee...
I'm also half way through Sartre's The Respectful Prostitute and will probably finish that tonight before I go to bed.
So I've covered film and literature. Now it's time for music. I've listened to lots of Modest Mouse lately. I feel ashamed for not having appreciated them earlier but I'm starting to become obsessed. I'm also really loving King Gheedorah and Autechere (whose name I finally learned is pronounced "Aww-tech-err"). All very different kinds of music but all very cool as well.
School?
It's going well. I'm going to finish editing my third project tomorrow and Tuesday. It turned out really well. Lots of cool lighting effects involving a hallway and shadows and some cool reverse shots too. I'm excited to see how it turns out. Hopefully, I don't botch in the editing room...
I have a paper comparing La Strada to Sweet and Lowdown due next week. When my Italian cinema professor was talking about Woody Allen he stated that Allen has three personas: One where he's trying to be Fellini, another where he's trying to be Bergman, and then there's good Woody Allen. I laughed.
Oh yeah, I finally got No Retreat, No Surrender on DVD in the mail. It's the director's cut and it's SO different from the version I know and love. The music is different, the pacing is off, and there are lots of scenes gone and added. Still very enjoyable but a little weird. I've copied the original to Mini DV and will be burning that to DVD soon.
I've taken lots of photos with Vadim recently. Over 300 to be exact, probably approaching 400... He has a digital SLR so it's too easy. I've taken some slides and shot some black and white with my lovely FE2 as well. The lens on Vadim's camera is rather slow (f 3.5) which is the only drawback but the instant feedback offered by digital is pretty badass. I will post some photos eventually.
I think that's about it for now, I've rambled on for a really long time and I'll be surprised if anybody's made it this far... That's all for now, goodnight.
Edit: AGH! I completely forgot to mention. I just bought my plane ticket home. I'll be flying into Seattle late Saturday night on May 8th, just in time for mother's day.
