Moving Pictures
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” Opening Titles
The opening titles of David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This awesome sequence was created by motion designer/director Onur Senturk. The song is a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” with vocals by Karen O and music by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross.
Film Review: The Reflecting Skin
1990′s The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley, is a weird movie and rather obscure. It’s very interesting, and quiet, bizarre, grotesque, over-the-top, and terribly beautiful, all at once. Visually, it’s amazing. The cinematography is gorgeous, very unforgettable. It has such atmosphere… Eerie, chilling, ominous, cryptic, ascetic yet lush. Admittedly some of the acting is just god-awful (especially the child actors!), but the movie overall is kind of brilliant. Destined to be thought terrible and intolerable by many, I loved it. It is quite possibly the movie that most embodies an “American Gothic” quality/aesthetic, a haunting sense of desolation and hopelessness, mirrored by the land, and a hypocritical, unforgiving puritanism.
Taking place in rural America in the 1950s (whose landscape of yellow wheat fields and desolate, isolated, gray wood frame houses standing in the midst of them is shot very impressively and gorgeously), The Reflecting Skin is, sort of, about child abuse, innocence, imagination, death, mortality, and love. The main character is a young boy named Seth Dove who creates an elaborate fantasy around a mysterious, otherworldly-seeming English widow who lives nearby, believing her to be a vampire who is preying on his loved ones. I suppose it’s partly about the unimaginable innocence of youth… Instead of registering and owning a sense of evil in the world, Seth displaces it onto this mysterious figure, a source of external, supernatural evil, thus allowing him not to understand these strange, horrific, traumatic events around him.
The “vampire,” pale, regal, and obsessive, is such a strange, lovely, macabre, spectral, enigmatic character, with the most absolutely haunting speeches, remote yet intense, vehement, and unnerving meditations on aging and love. Icily menacing yet alluring, preternaturally quiet with sudden outbursts of piercing, violent, grotesque, deeply primal, forlorn emotion, mercurial as a madwoman, she was played pretty much to perfection by Lindsay Duncan. She should be an iconic figure, in my opinion.
This movie is fascinating, and even if you end up not liking it, you should definitely see it. The cinematography alone is worth it.
The entirety of the film (from the Japanese DVD) is up on YouTube.
Tags: 1950s, abuse, bizarre, children, cryptic, dark, film reviews, fragility, hauntingly beautiful, innocence, innocence/menace, macabre, metaphors, puritanical, religion, sexuality, strange beauty, surreal, surreal horror, trailers, vampires, visceral, witchy
Film Review: Sleeping Beauty
I saw this a few weeks ago, so this is kind of late, but here goes anyway. There’s “spoilers,” just FYI.
Sleeping Beauty (2011) is an Australian movie directed by Julia Leigh, starring Emily Browning and Rachael Blake. It’s about a young college student named Lucy who joins a high-end erotic waitressing service that caters to the wealthy, in order to make ends meet, and further agrees to be one of the “sleeping beauties,” so to speak, who form a more specialized subset of the girls. For each engagement she is driven to the madam/Clara’s house, where she takes a powerful sedative in a cup of tea that induces a very heavy, undisturbable, deathlike sleep for a short period, and while she’s out like the eponymous Sleeping Beauty, some client who has paid for the privilege, usually an older man, gets into bed with her and can do whatever they like with her unconscious body, short of actual penetration, for the duration of an hour. She is promised that when she wakes up, she will not remember a single thing, and for her it will be as if it never happened.
Tags: cryptic, death and the maiden, femininity, film reviews, hauntingly beautiful, minimalist, modern fairy tales, sexuality, trailers
“Clump” by iamamiwhoami
A mysterious, beautiful, frenetic, and vaguely sad music video from iamamiwhoami.Tags: electronic music, experimental music, hauntingly beautiful, iamamiwhoami, jonna lee, meadow, music videos, mystical, nature, surreal
Alternate Trailer for “Melancholia”
Following the first trailer I posted earlier, this is a second trailer for Lars von Trier’s upcoming movie Melancholia. I am so excited for this! It promises to be so, so big, and visually stunning.
Melancholia will be released in New York and LA on Nov. 11, and in other cities across the US starting Nov. 18, but it will be available On Demand on Oct. 7, so you can watch it at home a month before its theatrical release. I feel like this is something that should be seen in the theater, but I will probably be too tempted to resist; and of course it’s great for those who don’t live in one of the cities where it will be playing.
Tags: hauntingly beautiful, lars von trier, sci-fi, surreal, trailers
Short Film/Mindblowing Animation: “Loom” by Polynoid
Tags: alien beauty, animations, avant-garde, bugs, experimental, gloomy color schemes, hyperreal, moths, short films, spiders, trippy, violence, visceral
“Bathtub” by M.A.Y.O.
I’m not sure what this short film is about, but I quite like it. Therefore, I’m posting it. I also love the 1960s French song (France Gall’s “Ne dis pas aux copains”) featured in it.
“Bathtub” Short Film from M.A.Y.O. on Vimeo
via Juxtapoz on Facebook
Tags: bathtubs, dollflesh, experimental, red and white, retro, short films, surreal
Una Burke’s META.MORPH
Úna Burke’s beautiful A/W 2011 collection of armor/medical-inspired sculptural fashion, META.MORPH, is complemented by stunning wet-plate collodion photography from Andreas Waldschütz and Stefan Sappert. Witness below:
Further delight yourself by viewing this video, inspired by “the cinepoems of Man Ray and jarring aspects of psychological horror”:
via Haute Macabre
Tags: alien beauty, architectural fashion, avant-garde, black and white, conceptual fashion, corsets, fashion films, fashion photography, fashiontech, haute couture, high fashion, man ray, medical braces, medical-themed, military/warrior chic, prosthetic, psychological horror, short films, trauma, una burke, vintage, wet-plate photography
MadinSpain Opening Titles
MadinSpain is an annual design and creativity convention in Madrid. This amazing little video is Toch Studio‘s opening titles for this year’s conference, which took place on June 3-4. Sound design by Cypher Audio and typography design by Pablo Abad.
Tags: alien beauty, biological/organic/alien, bizarre, creature, monsteresque, short films, tendrils, typography
4 Most Highly Anticipated Movies
+ Melancholia
{I love Lars von Trier’s work, he’s one of my favorite contemporary directors, and his last film Antichrist (from 2009) was amazing. This movie looks to be potentially amazing as well. Starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, with a role by Charlotte Rampling also, Melancholia can be described as a surreal psychological sci-fi film; the word “Melancholia” being both the name of the planet that’s imminently colliding with the Earth, and an apt term for the feeling and atmosphere of the movie. It promises to be intense, provocative, over-the-top emotional as Von Trier is known for; with a theatrical, sometimes even overly sentimental soundtrack. I love the surreal, beautiful image of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) floating down the river in her wedding gown holding her bouquet. It doesn’t currently have a U.S. release date, but I hope to see it sometime in 2011.}
+ The Tree of Life
{This Terrence Malick-directed movie, starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain, will be released on May 27. It’s one of the most beautiful movie trailers I’ve ever, ever seen. Vague and mystical, it doesn’t show us much of the story, but it’s incredible and moving. It splices together stunning images of outer space, nature on Earth, man-made structures like the ceiling of a church, and scenes from the childhood of the protagonist, Jack (from really interesting camera perspectives, too), in a kind of visual poetry. It seems to be about a man who’s grown up to be an astronaut (Sean Penn) and who’s reflecting on his upbringing and the lessons he learned from his parents, one of whom (the mother) represents the way of love and mercy, and the other of whom represents pragmatism and the way of the world. There’s a line whispered by the young Jack which expresses this tension, “Father…Mother…always you wrestle inside me. Always you will”; and his mother at the end saying, “If you don’t love, your life will flash by.”}
+ Sleeping Beauty
{This movie is written and directed by Julia Leigh and stars Emily Browning, whom I loved in Sucker Punch. It’s a surreal, visually elegant, and classy piece with an oblique fairy tale reference, described as a “haunting portrait of Lucy, a young university student drawn into a mysterious world of hidden desires.” It reminds me of both Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour from 1967 and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. I like its air of mystery, anticipation, and stillness, and its almost-retro sense of elegance and preciseness. It looks like a rare gem. It’s released in Australia on June 23, but doesn’t yet have a U.S. release date.}
+ Martha Marcy May Marlene
{Described as “a thriller that shifts nearly imperceptibly between dream, memory, and reality,” with a bravura performance by Elizabeth Olsen (yes, the younger sister of the Olsen twins), this movie looks really interesting and like one of those near-perfect movies that come along once in a while. It’s about a young woman, Martha, who’s “haunted by painful memories and increasing paranoia” after escaping from a cult. It gets a wide release on July 10.}
Tags: emotive, experimental, hauntingly beautiful, lars von trier, madness, nature, sci-fi, surreal, trailers
