domingo, 19 de agosto de 2018

Good Morning Love



Há palavras que nos beijam
Como se tivessem boca,
Palavras de amor, de esperança,
De imenso amor, de esperança louca.
Palavras nuas que beijas
Quando a noite perde o rosto,
Palavras que se recusam
Aos muros do teu desgosto.
De repente coloridas
Entre palavras sem cor,
Esperadas, inesperadas
Como a poesia ou o amor.
(O nome de quem se ama
Letra a letra revelado
No mármore distraído,
No papel abandonado)
Palavras que nos transportam
Aonde a noite é mais forte,
Ao silêncio dos amantes


ALEXANDRE O'NEILL, in POESIAS COMPLETAS 1951-1986, (Imprensa Nacional, Lisboa, 1990)




sexta-feira, 26 de agosto de 2016

So, so you think you can tell

 
 
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
 
 
 

segunda-feira, 15 de agosto de 2016

domingo, 14 de agosto de 2016

Cine Me

 
 
Jason Bourne
 
 
 
 
Matt Damon reunites with Paul Greengrass for this fifth instalment of the Bourne series – a head-spinning, post-Snowden cyber-thriller.
 
It’s a bravura sequence, a superbly orchestrated symphony of chaos, swathed in the burning ochre glow of street fires, with water cannons and motorbikes shooting across the screen. Twenty-five minutes in we’re exhausted, but the pace doesn’t let up. In globetrotting fashion, the narrative nips from Langley, Virginia, home to the CIA, to Rome, to Berlin, to London, where Paddington becomes the setting for another vertiginously high-octane showdown. Then it’s on to Las Vegas for a monstrous car chase that rivals the madness of both The French Connection and To Live and Die in LA, with added levels of insane collateral damage.
 
In between the head-spinning action we meet Alicia Vikander’s Heather Lee, a rising star of the CIA whose idealistic demeanour contrasts starkly with the old-school bullying of Tommy Lee Jones’s haggard Agency director Robert Dewey, a man whose face has the texture of hammered granite. Riz Ahmed is excellent as Aaron Kalloor, the Zuckerbergy whizz-kid whose Deep Dream empire is building “a community that is transcending national boundaries” while insisting that “no one will be watching you”, a hollow promise compromised by a murky debt dating back to his startup days.
 
Meanwhile, Assange-style hackers promise to dump huge caches of sensitive information online and sci-fi-inflected scenes, in which the CIA accesses conversations and computers via mobile phones, invoke the all-too-real spectre of the chilling documentary Citizenfour. This is a world of “full spectrum surveillance” and its countervailing counterpart, wherein the lines between protection and terror are blurred. Against this backdrop, Vincent Cassel’s perma-snarl assassin (referred to as the “Asset”) seems reassuringly uncomplicated.
 
 
At times the film’s relentlessly contemporary edge works against its crowd-pleasing power; when news stories are as bleak as they have been recently, how much do we want our escapist entertainment to remind us of horrifying headlines? Yet this is Greengrass’s natural metier, the logical extension of the “induced documentary” style that William Friedkin pioneered in the early 70s (both film-makers have backgrounds in TV and documentaries), and which was in turn rooted in the grit of Costa-Gavras’s 1969 thriller Z.
Amid such visceral spectacle, Damon injects a much needed air of humanity. His speech may be sparse, but his body is expressively talkative, conveying violence, pathos and even tragedy in surprisingly precise fashion. After the joyous monologuing of The Martian, Damon proves that he can keep an audience onside while keeping his lip buttoned. No wonder we keep coming back for more.
 
         

sábado, 13 de agosto de 2016

Blue Summer

 
 
On the blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass:
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.
I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing:
But endless love will mount in my soul;
And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,
Through the countryside - as happy as if I were with a woman.
 
 
Arthur Rimbaud


Cine Me

 
 
Me Before You
 
 
Imagine “The Intouchables” with more romance and less chemistry, crossbred with a far tamer version of “Pretty Woman” so lacking in eroticism that its PG-13 rating seems unduly harsh, and you’re halfway toward picturing Thea Sharrock’s “Me Before You.”
 
That said, considering the popularity of Jojo Moyes’ bestselling source novel (she adapts her own work here), and Hollywood’s bizarre reluctance to make the sort of big-hearted romantic dramas that would seem to be its most reliable date-night draws, the film ought to do solid business, burnishing the rising careers of its stars, Emilia Clarke (“Game of Thrones”) and Sam Claflin (“The Hunger Games” movies).
 
Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin are aces in a romantic melodrama that should put Nicholas Sparks out of business.
 
Directed with rare intimacy by theater veteran Thea Sharrock (she oversaw the recent revival of “Equus,” fronted by Daniel Radcliffe), “Me Before You” bends some of its genre’s most tiresome tropes into a love story that hits with the blunt impact of a broken heart. This is a glossy melodrama fit for the multiplexes (Remi Adefarasin’s sparkling cinematography allows the movie to double as a feature-length ad for Wales), but it hits a nerve because Moyes’ story never betrays its characters or what they want from the world, and because the sweetness of its candied telling doesn’t overwhelm the  truths at its core.
 
It’s the rare romance that becomes more beautiful by virtue of how it recognizes that even true love has its limits.