>>Chrystal Chan<<

Esao Andrews combines a colorful palette with a Gothic sensibility. Some of his paintings are twists on traditional portraits from earlier epochs akin to the work of Nicola Samorì. Wildly dilapidated and foreboding houses are a recurring motif, and, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson‘s psychological horror stories, depict the inner, psychical falling apart, decay, distortion, and warping. Fairy tales and folklore, including Pinocchio and Thumbelina, loom in the forefront with menacing or perverted appeal. In some works, his vibrant style illustrates the bizarre, the obscene, and aberrations, contrasting atrocious or monstrous things such as a giant, bloated black spider with a symbol of sweetness, purity, and elevation such as a child or an angel. Some of his illustrations are cartoonish, charmingly retro, with a dark, whimsical sense of humor, while others are realistically rendered and Dali-esque, while yet others are macabre and lovelorn, bloody tale-telling depictions.

>>ジュウニコ/Juuniko<<

If anybody knows more about this artist, or if they have any alternate Websites, I would love to find out.

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.

I liked this movie, and I’d been looking forward to it for a long time, ever since I saw the amazing trailer. I will have to watch it again sometime to see how I feel about it after a second viewing. But I suspect that it’ll only grow on me. I love Emily Browning. She’s so gorgeous, and there’s a sadness about her, a “vulnerability,” though I don’t know if that’s the right word; her character seems strong and indomitable, but also appears fragile, with her delicate, pale, doe-eyed, diminutive beauty.

Lucy has a perfect, easy grace; she is armored and dainty, utterly unapologetic, independent, very capable…she seems to be a rebel and individualist and vaguely insolent, while always remaining perfectly gracious. And a bit “mysterious,” I suppose…many of her actions are unexplained, though they don’t necessarily perplex me as things that need to be “figured out” or made sense of. She’s opaque without being an enigma. There’s something youthful and alive, and slightly fierce or feral, about her, an understated intelligence and sensuality, without an excess of explanation. I don’t feel that the movie really tries to explain away Lucy’s actions and characteristics too much (just as the rest of the movie is very much veiled), or to victimize her.

One of my favorite moments is near the beginning, a brief scene where she shares a line of cocaine in the bathroom with some Asian woman she’s just found in the bar/club, which I find kind of powerful, and I think it has more of a low-simmer sensuousness somehow than the more overt displays of sexuality in other scenes. My other favorite moments are the moments when she shows raw emotion, in which she’s more naked, and shows her vulnerability, her tenderness, and gives vent to her sadness, grief, fear, terror, frustration, ragged anger, confusion, etc. One of these is the scene where she’s lying with her friend after he’s OD’d, and she starts to cry in his arms. Another, and the most obvious, one, is at the end, when she wakes up from her enchanted sleep to discover what’s happened during that deathlike slumber.

This movie is very quiet and restrained. At no point is it overwhelming or over-demonstrative. It’s like a series of vignettes, each revealing just a little, which is rather obscure and doesn’t readily reveal its “meaning,” and the whole movie has a certain opaque quality. Visually, it’s quite beautiful. It has an austerity but also a gorgeousness…a rare visual elegance that parallels the somber classiness of Clara and her world. The style is extremely precise, crisp, tightly controlled, flawless; just very different from most movies. I feel like there wasn’t a single shot that wasn’t necessary, that could be considered “excessive,” and each shot is perfectly framed and controlled. Its leanness stands in contrast to the trend in modern movies for more highly-wrought, chaotic qualities. It’s evocative of vintage cinematic styles, and gives the film its intangible retro vibe. It also has a – I don’t know what to call it, a…slightly…frightening?, haunting quality, a sense of foreboding, a hint of something sinister, chilling. The sense that something bad is going to happen – that expectancy is always there, just around the corner, beneath the surface. I’m not sure how it achieves this, but for me it definitely has an undertone of still, sterile, white eeriness, though very low-key. This comes through in the trailer, I think.

{My interpretation of the ending}
I see the ending as a kind of total inversion of the traditional story of Sleeping Beauty, where the prince wakes her with the kiss of true love. A repeat client (the first one Lucy had, in fact: a dolorous, cryptic old man who just gently touched and admired her sleep-heavy, milk-pale body, and then lay side by side with her in a semblance of sleep) has requested that he be allowed to die in bed with drugged Lucy. (Presumably the body would be taken away before she comes to, with her being none the wiser.) So at the start of the session Clara doles out for him a lethal dose of the same drug that gives such a total, beautiful sleep to Lucy. Afterwards, Clara is sitting at the foot of the bed, having checked the old man’s dead body, and observing that Lucy is still deathly-still and doesn’t respond to her touch, she panics, in sudden and uncontrollable fear, thinking that she may have died…and she tries very hard to wake her up…shaking her by the shoulders violently, and even trying to give her mouth-to-mouth respiration (the “kiss”). When Lucy suddenly awakens, disoriented and shocked, coughing and sputtering, she looks around, only to see the old man lying dead in the bed next to her. It’s not her prince, but this sick old man who’s used her to fulfill his strange macabre-erotic death wish. It’s not the prince’s kiss, but Clara’s breath of blind panic and terror. At this point she breaks down, screaming, sobbing, and pounding her hands against the headboard, in a long, unbroken torrent of pure, vented, naked, piercing emotion.

{Ash}

>>Marcela Bolívar<<

See the rest of the series below.

>>Brooke Shaden<<

Martine Johanna does gorgeous, highly detailed, melancholy, sometimes eerie, vividly surreal drawings and paintings. See lots, lots more below.