remko caprio


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The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948)

If you don’t like Bogart playing the archetype 50s good guy, watch him play in Sierra Madre. He creates a very credible role out of a difficult and ambiguous character. Worth while watching for Bogart’s acting especially. These old movies are not without really awful stereotypes: in this movie it’s not the blacks or women, but the Mexican natives (or Indians as they are called), they’re dumb, lazy or naive, but never as clever and complicated as the white roles. Alas.

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The Sacrifice (1986)

Andrei Tarkovsky, The Sacrifice (1986), Sweden

A display of visual theater, absolutely amazing and probably Tarkovsky’s best. The script is of a literary quality that is rare in cinema.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (1986) Tarkovsky on cinema and time.

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The Defiant Ones (1958)

I watched The Defiant Ones movie because Desmond Tutu referred to it as one of the visual influences in his upbringing and the formation of his racial awareness. There are mainly two moving scenes: 1. As the black inmate is pulled out the river by the chained white companion, he thanks the white man, to which the white man replies: ‘Thanks for what? I didn’t pull you out, I prevented you from pulling me in.’ The second scene happens when they are freed from each other, their chains broken, but they have become bound by their soul and fate. As the white inmate falls down in exhaustion, urging the black fellow to move on without him, the black inmate holds out his arm stretched toward him, and says: ‘com’on, get up, you’re holding up the chain.’ The two main actors display an excellent classic performance, and it’s hard to forget their faces at these two scenes, once you’ve seen them. It’s a movie from 1958 and while it attempts the emancipation of race, it also displays a flaw in another way, and documents a shameful stereotype of gender. As the two prisoners reach a single woman’s home, she immediately falls in love with the white prisoner, then becoming hysterical etc. Race before gender, a tough bitter pill to swallow for the ladies, but a classic race movie with two tough guys.

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2046 (2005)

Kar Wai Wong, 2046 (2005), China

Links:
2046 @wikipedia

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Das Schloss (1997)

Michael Haneke, Das Schloss (1997)

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The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Werner Herzog, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Links:
Kaspar Hauser @wikipedia
Werner Herzog @wikipedia
Werner Herzog @imdb

comments (0) | category: movies seen |

The Pillow Book (1996)

Peter Greenaway, The Pillow Book (1996)

Links:
The Pillow Book @wikipedia

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Dead Man (1995)

Jim Jarmusch, Dead Man (1995)

“Expect poison from standing water”
William Blake (1757-1827)

Dead Man is a classic in the genre of Jim Jarmusch movies. This metaphoric biography of the English poet, painter, artist William Blake, one of the true great poets of the English language, has come so close to the Platonic ideal of Blake the man and his life, that it is an eerie description of an interpretation. The guide of Blake is the native American Nobody, who leads Blake from the greenhorn accountant to the feared outlaw, from the neurotic ratio to the intuitive heart. Blake is shot close to the heart right at the beginning of the movie and throughout his fugitive travels through the wilderness of desert and dark forests his bleeding does not stop.

On the surface Dead Man is a parody on the American western, a poetic anti-Western, with comic scenes like cult-hero Iggy Pop in the role of Sally, the transvestite trapper, who cooks beans for Big George (Billy Bob Thornton) and Tench (Jared Harris). But beyond the surface lies an artistic depth that few American movies are able to achieve. It is one of those rare movies, which allows you to discover symbolism with no end, leaving you to think and connect the scenes, words with their methporic meaning for hours or days after having seen it. (more…)

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Buffalo ’66 (1998): The Rise and Fall of Vincent Gallo

Vincent Gallo is not a movie director pur sang, not because he is not a real movie director, but because he is really a lot of other things, an ex-painter too good and too spitefull to paint, a model (but there’s no real merit in that), an unrecognized musician, and actor, among other things. He is also a typical product of American culture, that is, an inferior, deranged, obnoxious attention-seeker with a brilliant eye for appearances. A lack of recognition combined with an endless over-estimation of one’s own superiority is a perfect as imperfect combination for genius. That Gallo has a spark of genius to display is proven in Buffalo ’66 (1998).

The story line of Buffalo ’66 in the beginning is completly absurd and unrealistic, but realistic enough to keep you doubtful about Gallo’s intentions. He weaves the red threat of the movie between symbolic and realistic images, where the action mainly represents the emotional state of the semi-autobiographical antagonist. This movie is in essence a coming of age thriller, about Gallo’s emotional complexities, complexities that he probably will never solve, if there’s a desire to solve them to start with. The American heartland is full of desolate youth without a way to release their anger and fulfill their sense of forsakenness. No matter how rich and diverse American culture is, there is a certain incompletion of the American psyche, which is beautifully expressed in Buffalo ’66. (more…)

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Das Leben der Anderen (2006)

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Das Leben der Anderen (2006)

Links:
Das Leben der Anderen @imdb
The Lives of Others @wikipedia
The Lives of Others @Sony Pictures

comments (0) | category: movies seen |
 
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The Death of Literature
Death in literature is an elementary metaphor, as the fear of death is one of our Id’s primal impulses, together with the sexual urge to reproduce and overcome it. The resurrection of our mind is the symbol for the cycle of life, the seasons, birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, destruction and creation, night and day, there’s probably nothing more universal, nothing more primal than death and life. The article in the Guardian In theory: the death of literature is a great short essay that analyzes the perspective of the Romantics on death in literature as an elementary original perspective that lays at the root of the birth of the modern novel. It’s a very original view with lots of references in high overview, which makes it easy to make any argument, but it’s convincing until midway when the argument becomes an old man’s lamentation on modern times. Here is where the author Andrew Gallix the other essence of the Romantics in my opinion, namely the overcoming of the fear of death in favor of a naive and blind will for creation, this resurrection of the conscious mind is what represents the true power of the Romantic era. In the face of death we are not afraid to throw ourselves in the abyss and love.

Der Zauberberg (1982)
An international production of Thomas Mann’s 20th century classic about the first world war, Der Zauberberg (1982).

Divine Mathematics: George Cantor and Infinity
In Dangerous Knowledge – BBC, Georg Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis and Georg Cantor‘s life is described. Cantor was obsessed with the problem of infinity. Cantor reminds me Pythagoras, who founded a religious school of Pythagoreans who searched the divine truth by revealing the mathematical formulas that described nature. Boltzmann defined a breakthrough in the field of probability, which is crucial for the theory of entropy and chaos.

Solve Puzzles for Science - Fold.it
Solve puzzles for science with Fold.it. Crowd-sourcing scientific problems.

The Master and Margarita - Russia TV
The Master and Margarita – Russia TV Russia’s first television production of The Master and Margarita, the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Vladimir Bortko is the director and screenwriter of the new adaptation. The mini-series of ten 52-minute episodes was first screened on the state television channel “Россия” (“Russia”) on December, 2005. The Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven about the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.

Hunting the Hidden Dimension
Hunting the Hidden Dimension Pt. 1 This film is about looking at the world around us in a completely different way. If you pay attention, you can see that fractals appear throughout nature. But until Benoit Mandelbrot came along, no one really understood what was there all along. more...

Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of Eternity, Coined the Term 'Fractal'
Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85 Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.

Comparative Democracy
Originally, I was playing with the idea that representatives should have to pass an exam to become eligable to run for political office. While listening to C-SPAN broadcasts of Congress committees, or members of Congress giving interviews to NPR, where on some shows they are allowed more speaking time than the 20 or 30 seconds, I am too often shocked by the lack of depth and the absence of fact in their statements. more...

The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. The project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. Another project that visualizes the phylogeny of life for the plants phylum is Deep Green by the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group of Berkeley University.

Litarary Word Comparison
Introduction This is one of the small research projects that I am currently conducting. I am not pretending to offer or accomplish any scientific added value to the research community in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) but humbly submit my efforts to gain further personal learning. While the research remains unfinished and until I publish it formally, I will keep this post as a mini-post. As a Universal Man, a Humanist, a Renaissance Man each individual man has an obligation to question and further his or her knowledge and understanding, as it lies within our capacities. Learning is a tool to humble our heart, and most of all we should mistrust brave hearts. Matt Ridley in his book Nature via Nurture says (says Richard Dawkins in his The Ancestor’s Tale in The Mouse Tale chapter) that “the list of words in David Copperfield is almost the same as the list of words in The Catcher in the Rye.” Springing from this saying, I concluded that it would be an interesting project to create a plotter diagram in which the major works in literature (written, translated or edited into modern English for reasons of ease of comparison) are set out as number of total words versus the number of different words used and another network graph that displays the relative closeness of literary works by words used. The first diagram is the easiest to create of course, so I will start with this first, then moving on to the next network diagram. more...