Happy new year, everyone!
Sorry for the lack of posts last month. To make up for it, here are five posts so you can catch up to my 2013 and to get you going this 2014.
For the past week or so, I got into my Tabu movie journey and while watching Hawa, there was a particular shot that just struck me like a lightning bolt (pun!) and reminded me of Joan Crawford.
It’s a strong eyebrow thing (I have going on). Plus, Tabu’s got a nose with character (and the character to back it up). With her acting chops, she could totally pull off- let’s just skip The Women, coz I can’t picture a catty Indian version of that and just go straight into Crawford’s 40s- A Woman’s Face (or its En Kvinnas Ansikte version), Mildred Pierce (of course, I would love that), Humoresque, Possessed (1947), Daisy Kenyon, Flamingo Road, and The Damned Don’t Cry. Tabu is also at the perfect age.
The only thing about her that’s off is that… she doesn’t have the hunger for fame and power that I sense from Crawford.
Possessed and Mildred Pierce in contemporary Indian are topping my list.
I really can’t remember exactly when I started out the Top Flicks About Chicks list on MUBI, but it must have been around the same time I wrote how Chick Flicks was a doomed genre in regards of critics. So it might be almost 4 years… and I’ve finally reached 300 titles in the list!!!
A Chick Flick should center on little girls, girls, young women and women… as students, as neighbors, as friends, as daughters, as granddaughters, as sisters, as mothers, as lovers. They are simply women. With that alone, we can tell all sort of other stories that have little to do with romantic comedies.
The purpose of the list, of course, was to encompass an array of female character — not only in the binary sense, since the list also includes men/boys who identify as women/girls… and viceversa — of various cultural, ethnic, social backgrounds. Not favoring one genre over the other, not valuing dramas over comedies… just simple stories about different women.
Though I’m sure the list could be longer, that’s 300 feature length films out of the 2896 (counting shorts) currently rated on the site- that’s roughly 10% so I suppose the list could expand to up to 500 or maybe 1000 once I reach 5000 or 10000 rated films on the site.
1. Treeless Mountain 2. Welcome to the Dollhouse 3. Juliana 4. Labyrinth 5. Fuckin’ Amal 6. Mirrormask 7. Gun Hill Road 8. Pariah 9. Bend it like Beckham 10. Swing Girls 11. The Land of the Deaf 12. Sunny 13. Whip It 14. Stoker 15. Maria Full of Grace 16. Breaking the Waves 17. My Marlon and Brando 18. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 19. Dil Bole Hadippa! 20. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 21. Kotoko 22. Violeta Went to Heaven 23. Skin 24. Raise the Red Lantern 25. Incendies
I picked 25 of the 300 films to illustrate some of the variety (I hope it’s AS varied as I intend the list to be), though I ran out of picks and couldn’t include any of the ‘older’ female characters. If I could pick 5 more, they’d be: Lemon Tree, Frozen River, Late Bloomers, Mother, For 80 Days.
A while back a GORGEOUS Dior commercial featuring Grace Kelly, Dietrich and Monroe, alongside a slinky Charlize Theron was invading my TV and doing rotations on my YouTube ads. That was one of the only commercials I didn’t mind breaking my viewing.
Alongside with visual effects magicians, they managed to bring back classic on-screen beauties… and now, they’re latest project has been bringing back Audrey Hepburn. From the still up there, it looks PRETTY uncanny. Apparently they found the perfect Hepburn double, and did their magic twitching details to make her look IT. Sadly, we can’t watch the commercial for Galaxy Chocolate, which has only been licensed within the UK and Ireland territories.
I guess Audrey Hepburn’s image is THAT expensive.
You can check the info on Framestore.
— EDIT —
An advanced screening of Yoji Yamada’s Tokyo Kazoku [1] was held prepping for its imminent release on January 19th.
Time flies by. It seems like yesterday when they finally announced they were shooting the movie.
In the movie front… no signs of Vampire on DVD.
Both films featuring Clark Gable, released in 1931, and having a leading lady of rather humble beginnings that manages to rise to the top using her… er, skills. Of course, both Susan Lenox and Possessed have very different results. Though the cinematography in Susan Lenox is quite sublime at times — the whole introduction was marvelous with the shadows — I left rather disappointed by the end of the whole movie.
I’ve come to prefer Joan Crawford on screen~~~ remember, I got into her after I saw her on Grand Hotel, which came in the Garbo bundle. I was just left mesmerized. “Who is this woman, and where has she been all my movie-life???” So I do think Possessed edges Lenox by a pretty long thread. Despite its weak resolution, Possessed still holds itself pretty darn well. But even I must admit, I feel Garbo’s magnetism oozing from this still… even more so than I do with Crawford.
So… to me, Garbo on still. Crawford on screen.
After some flame from their compilation of 135 Shots That Will Restore Your Faith in Cinema [1], Flavorwire is back with a new compilation~~~ this time around focusing on faces, their emotions and their beauty… to relative success. I don’t think I could fault them… I had enough with Wong Kar Wai (included multiple times), multiple Zhang Yimou shots (and a double appearance of Gong Li to boot!), there was Park Chan Wook, Guillermo del Toro, Leslie Cheung’s face.
It was a thing of beauty.
The only face I could possibly suggest would have been Greta Garbo’s last shot on Queen Christina, but I’m content.
I’m on my way to watch Tokyo Monogatari as I type this, and I was surprised by this upload on my YouTube timeline. Opening on January 19 (note on the Yu Aoi event calendar below), Yoji Yamada has finally release a meatier look to his version of Ozu’s critically-lauded film. It’s nothing much (visually), and there’s so much crying… and Yu’s going to cry — it seems — a lot. I wanna watch it. I wonder if I watch the Ozu version, if I would need less subtitles to understand Tokyo Kazoku when it’s out. xD
You gotta think of these things nowadays~
The language seems fairly simple. xD Let’s try. Here you go:
