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.

quarta-feira, 15 de junho de 2016

Funny how time slips away



 
Well hello there,
My, it's been a long time
How am I doin'
Well, I guess I'm doin' fine
 
It's been so long now and it seems like
(It was only yesterday)
Ain't it funny how time slips away
 
 


domingo, 8 de maio de 2016

If I ever lose my faith in you


Mixed Feelings

 
 
Não tenho nenhuma lei nem regra
para desordenar um poema escrito
não tenho mais que o desejo de tocar-te...

ó coisa inúmera que entretanto
além de tocar
conto e reconto
continuadamente
fome de dizer como nunca foi
acontecido
fora do seu desejo mesmo tu
ó tão funda tão fundada
substância do mundo:
pleno cheio
serias sobretudo
como um voo ou como um ovo
 
 
HERBERTO HELDER

sábado, 26 de março de 2016

Hello like before

 
 

 I guess it's different
'Cause we know each other now
I guess I've always known
We'd meet again somehow
So that it might as well be now.

segunda-feira, 21 de março de 2016

Air Force One, Havana, 20mar16



 
 
U.S. President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, take their first steps on Cuban soil after arriving at Havana's international airport on Sunday, March 20, for a three-day trip. Obama is only the second U.S. president to visit Cuba while in office--the first was Calvin Coolidge in 1928. And former president Jimmy Carter visited in 2011.


sábado, 5 de março de 2016

quarta-feira, 17 de fevereiro de 2016

segunda-feira, 15 de fevereiro de 2016

Cine Me

 
 
Room
 
 
 
 
 
 
The spare yet emotionally sumptuous drama, based on Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue's award-winning 2010 novel that was inspired by similar real-life crimes, is not just a simple tale of terror or a suspenseful saga of survival, although it has elements of each scenario. Instead. “Room" is a soul-searing celebration of the impenetrable bond that endures even under the most unbearable of circumstances between a parent and a child.
 
 
Be warned, Room is a wrenching watch. It’s a story so abhorrent and seemingly hopeless that there may be times you don’t want it to go on, but within its tight confines Lenny Abrahamson, with a script by Emma Donoghue, finds warmth and hope. It is, against all odds, uplifting.
 
The brilliance of Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation of Donoghue’s Booker Prize-nominated novel is in making us see these two worlds as one, Jack’s magic and Ma’s horror, like oil and water, emulsifying into a twisted truth that helps both keep a grip on sanity. 
 
 
One of the best things about “Room” is how such an intimate film manages to raise some big questions. What defines us as a person? What do we really need to live? Why are kids so astonishingly resilient when under duress? What happens when all your troubles disappear yet contentment persists in being an illusion? And what does a parent do when their child begins to outgrow their need for them?
In the end, we are rightfully left once more with mother and child. Together, they are able to close the door on the past and look to the future that is just dawning.

Nine year-old Tremblay gives one of the best child performances ever put on screen, utterly convincing as his world is cracked open. A lot of the credit for that has to go to Abrahamson. Very young child actors are only ever as good as their director.
 
Tough, but resilience is amply rewarded. If last year’s larky Frank suggested Abrahamson was a director to watch, this makes him a director to be cherished.


  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

domingo, 14 de fevereiro de 2016

And I found my heart beating, oh, so fast

 
 

                                                   For that old feeling, is still in my heart.


What is love



What love is depends on where you are in relation to it. Secure in it, it can feel as mundane and necessary as air – you exist within it, almost unnoticing. Deprived of it, it can feel like an obsession; all-consuming, a physical pain. Love is the driver for all great stories: not just romantic love, but the love of parent for child, for family, for country. It is the point before consummation of it that fascinates: what separates you from love, the obstacles that stand in its way. It is usually at those points that love is everything.
 
Jojo Moyes
 
 
 
Sameness is easy. It’s difference that’s the real challenge. Romance is captivating, but the monotony of busy lives can be deadening. Harmony is mesmerising, but discord and conflict can feel destructive. Many think that love is about always being on the same page with our partner, feeling romantic and living in harmony. Threats to these experiences can feel like obstacles that get in the way of love. But love is as much about the obstacles as it is about the bliss. Love is accepting difference, recovering from conflict and tolerating discord. Fundamentally, love is allowing your partner to be entirely who they are, even when their very being needles you to the core. It is a profound acceptance of the personhood of your lover, while dropping your need for them to be anything different. Yes, it’s a tall order. But who said it was going to be easy?
 
Aaron Balick
 
 
Biologically, love is a powerful neurological condition like hunger or thirst, only more permanent. We talk about love being blind or unconditional, in the sense that we have no control over it. But then, that is not so surprising, since love is basically chemistry. While lust is a temporary passionate sexual desire involving the increased release of chemicals such as testosterone and oestrogen, in true love, or attachment and bonding, the brain can release a whole set of chemicals: pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin and vasopressin. However, from an evolutionary perspective, love can be viewed as a survival tool – a mechanism we have evolved to promote long-term relationships, mutual defence and parental support of children, and to promote feelings of safety and security.
 
Jim Al-Khalili
 
 
 
 


Cine Me

 
 
Spotlight
 
 
 
 
 
There's no higher compliment to pay this steadily riveting, quietly devastating take on investigative journalism than to say Spotlight gets it right. So did the Spotlight team on The Boston Globe when, in 2002, it published nearly 600 articles on child sex-abuse allegations against Catholic priests and the church cover-ups that followed. The team won a Pulitzer for its scalding exposé. And right now the film is the predictive favorite to win the Best Picture Oscar. But awards are merely icing on a cake whose candles glow in tribute to long-form print journalism, now fading in the digital fog of budget cuts, reduced resources and click-bait news cycles.
 
It's 'Boston Globe' vs. Catholic Church in the best film about reporting since 'All the President's Men.'

Bravo to director Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, Win Win, The Visitor), who wrote the richly detailed script with Josh Singer (The Fifth Estate). There's not an ounce of Hollywood bullshit in it. Our eyes and ears are the Spotlight team, played by exceptional actors who could not be better or more fully committed.


This is a very important movie (and very well done too). The scenes where victims talk about their confusion especially when the encounters were just beginning were gripping (and enraging).

There’s no tidy moral to take away here, which is, I think, entirely right: a story like this shouldn’t end in comfort. Instead, it leaves your skin prickling – both at the despicable business of secret-keeping, and the courage and resourcefulness that rivetingly overturns it.

Walk on by

 
 
A hundred hearts would be too few
To carry all my love for you
 
 
 

segunda-feira, 8 de fevereiro de 2016

Cine Me

 
 
Carol
 
 
 
 
 
Todd Haynes has turned Patricia Highsmith's novel of lesbian love in Fifties New York into an exceptionally beautiful film, with a career-best performance from Cate Blanchett.
 
Carol is gorgeous, gently groundbreaking, and might be the saddest thing you’ll ever see. More than hugely accomplished cinema, it’s an exquisite work of American art, rippling with a very specific mid-century melancholy, understanding love as the riskiest but most necessary gamble in anyone’s experience.
 
Everything in this long-gestating adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel feels weighted to perfection. The film’s a smorgasbord of edible Fifties design which finds meaning in the smallest details.
 
Many of the most stunning sequences here are inside cars - it’s halfway to a road movie, as Carol and Therese escape on a trip West to consummate their affair away from prying, disapproving eyes. Lachman works utter magic when they drive through a tunnel to get off Manhattan, getting in up close as they flirt, finding a symphony of reflections and hues bouncing off the windscreen, thrilling to their potential together.
 
It’s jazz and poetry and just wonderful. To quote a colleague and thwarted male suitor of Therese’s, Dannie (John Magaro), their energy as lovers is “like physics - pinballs, bouncing off each other”. Carter Burwell’s score, meltingly high and hopeful for this sequence, elsewhere stakes out a striking homage to Philip Glass, which works perfectly for the period and the whole mood. The low ostinatos seem to threaten the couple with heartbreak before they’ve even met.
 
Haynes makes unhappiness beautiful. It makes sense that he’s a fan of Edward Hopper, whose paintings inform this film profoundly. In fact, it’s an Edward Hopper picture as surely as Far From Heaven was a Douglas Sirk picture: think of the diners, the angular rooftops, those forlorn people sitting on the edges of beds.
 
If we got a better look at the pensive, glamorous woman lurking to one side in Hopper’s 1939 painting New York Movie, it could easily be Blanchett, 13 years before Carol meets Therese; and before she’s forced to choose, thanks to the moral taboo of homosexuality and the sexism of this era, between custody of her child and the person she wants to be with.
Blanchett resists every temptation to vamp up the role’s melodrama - you couldn’t quite say that of her Oscar-winning Blue Jasmine work - and the emotional place she reaches is wilted, drained to the dregs, and just extraordinary.
She has a scene trying to reason with Chandler’s Harge in front of their lawyers, which lays bare the dismay of their lives so honestly and exhaustedly it wipes you out. Once we’ve come full circle to the tea scene, and hear Carol’s next act of pleading, it’s cut off after the three most powerful words in the English language, delivered by an actress who couldn’t possibly say them more powerfully.
The scene, like the whole film, is a solar-plexus knockout.

'Cate Blanchett will slay you'


quarta-feira, 3 de fevereiro de 2016

Cine Me

 
 
The Revenant
 
 
 
 
 
Extreme cold; horrific bear attacks; eating raw liver. If this raw revenge western doesn't win Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar, nothing will.
 
 
What a preposterously enjoyable film DiCaprio and his director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, have cooked up – a glistening, gut-wrenching wilderness concerto grosso, drunk on blockbuster quantities of self-importance and with the coppery tang of machismo pricking on its palate. The Revenant is the embellished true story of a 19th-century fur trapper, Hugh Glass, who endures a savage bear attack and the death of his son at the hands of a fellow frontiersman – then claws his way across thousands of miles of frozen rock in order to settle the score.
 
By “he”, “him” and “his”, I mean DiCaprio’s character – but to an extent I also mean DiCaprio, because part of the fun of watching The Revenant is knowing its cast and crew went through hell to make it. If you’ve read any coverage of the film, you’ll be familiar with the on-set horror stories: the perishing cold, the miserable cross-country tramps to remote locations, Iñárritu’s temper-fraying, schedule-destroying insistence on shooting only with the available natural light.
 
Great film has the power to convey the unimaginable. We sit in the comfort of a darkened theater or our living room and watch protagonists suffer through physical and emotional pain that most of us can’t really comprehend. Too often, these endurance tests feel manipulative or, even worse, false. We’re smart enough to “see the strings” being pulled, and the actor and set never fades away into the character and condition. What’s remarkable about Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s “The Revenant” is how effectively it transports us to another time and place, while always maintaining its worth as a piece of visual art. You don’t just watch “The Revenant,” you experience it. You walk out of it exhausted, impressed with the overall quality of the filmmaking and a little more grateful for the creature comforts of your life.
 
“Pain is temporary, but a film is forever,” Iñárritu said when collecting a Golden Globe for Best Director last week. He’s absolutely right, but forever isn’t a concept The Revenant has any time for. It’s two and a half hours of beautiful, visceral present – a film that’s chasing transcendence and wants it now, now, now.

Balanced on desire

 
I am just a woman
Tipping on the wire
Tight rope walking fool, balanced on desire
I can not control these ever changing ways
So how can I be sure the feeling will remain?

quarta-feira, 27 de janeiro de 2016

I can’t handle it


 
And what if I never
feel the touch of your sweet embrace
How would I ever go on
(Without you there's no place to go)




P.S - Well someday love is gonna lead you back to me

Cine Me

 
 
Joy
 
 
 
 
 
Here’s a story that Hollywood has been waiting for: the rags-to-riches saga of Joy Mangano, the entrepreneur and inventor who gave the world… (fanfare of 80s-style synthesiser trumpets) the self-wringing Miracle Mop. Whether the best director to tell that story is the erratic David O Russell is another matter. His last film, retro-styled crime caper American Hustle, was so exuberantly cynical that you can’t quite believe he’s playing with a straight deck in telling the tale of a hard-working woman realising her destiny on the QVC shopping channel.
 
Executed with much the same quasi-Scorsese whiz-bang as Hustle, though the material rarely seems to call for it, Joy works most convincingly as a vehicle for the no-nonsense warrior-woman persona of Jennifer Lawrence, who comes across personably if a touch coldly. Joy revisits the dysfunctional family milieu of Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, the parallels underlined by the casting: Bradley Cooper is a TV exec, Robert De Niro returns as a cantankerous patriarch. But visually, and narratively, the film feels cluttered – too many people hover with too little to do, notably Virginia Madsen as Joy’s TV-addicted mother.
 
In telling the story of the woman who invented the Miracle Mop, director-writer David O. Russell, who co-wrote the story with Annie Mumolo, gets off to a wobbly start, builds to a wonderfully satirical middle and ends with a whimper. So, should you see Joy? I'd give it a shot. The invigorating talent of the man behind The FighterSilver Linings Playbook and American Hustle still shines, even in this uneven muddle.
And did I mention that Jennifer Lawrence is the star? The 25-year-old supernova again proves she can do anything, moving from comic to tragic without missing a beat.



 'Jennifer Lawrence's brilliant fairy tale'
 
 
 
 
 

Cine Me

 
 
In the Heart of the Sea
 
 
 
 
 
A recounting of a New England whaling ship's sinking by a giant whale in 1820, an experience that later inspired the great novel Moby-Dick.
 
 
 
What is "In the Heart of the Sea" about? There are so many ways to answer that question. You could say that Ron Howard's latest feature, adapted from Nathaniel Philbrick's acclaimed nonfiction book "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex," is about the real incident that partly inspired Herman Mellville's novel "Moby-Dick"—the 1820 destruction of a whaling vessel by a murderously angry sperm whale. You could say that it's about the relationship between nonfiction and fiction, though here things get dicey: the film's story is told in a characteristically clunky framing device to the young Melville (Ben Whishaw), even though in reality Melville wrote his novel without ever visiting Nantucket. (Howard told Charlie Rose that Melville interviewed the last survivor of the wreck, though, so there may be a tether of fact here.) You could say the film is about humankind's collective, slowly dawning realization that whales are not big fish but intelligent mammals, and that the whaling industry was (and still is) engaged in interspecies genocide—a notion teased out in shots of the vengeful whale and other members of its pod floating peacefully with their calves underwater, then surfacing to stare accusingly at the humans. You could say it's a survival story, about a group of shipwreck survivors (led by an unqualified rich-boy captain, played by Benjamin Walker, and Chris Hemsworth's macho and resentful first mate) dying of hunger and thirst in lifeboats. Lastly, you could describe "The Heart of the Sea" as a story of corporate ethics: the final section shows the whaling company urging survivors to lie about what happened, for fear that insurance carriers won't cover them if they hear that a whale is capable of destroying a huge ship.
 

Cine Me

 
 
 
The Danish Girl
 
 
 
 
Tom Hooper’s beautiful, humane and moving biopic of the transgender artist Lili Elbe, who worked during the early part of the 20th century and was one of the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery, may not be the most obvious next step for the director of The King’s Speech and Les Misérables. Those are elegant, gilded, crowd-pleasing films of a type often called "easy watches" – and on the surface, there’s nothing easy about Lili’s plight.
 
Long before Hooper arrived on the scene, this film was to be directed by one of two Swedish filmmakers, Tomas Alfredson and Lasse Hallström, either of whom might have made the kind of wincing, austere, fingernail-picking drama the film’s subject matter suggests. (Nicole Kidman was also attached to play Lili.) But Hooper’s involvement makes it a far more daring proposition – because he has no interest in making a daring film. His clear-eyed, tasteful storytelling makes Lili’s struggle as easy to grasp as if she were a loveable prince played by Colin Firth. That doesn’t just make The Danish Girl watchable. It makes it revolutionary.

But there’s depth to be had if you’re looking for it, and tellingly unfaithful reflections – of people, landscapes, intentions – are everywhere. Even out in the Scandinavian wilds, where the film begins, a wind-whipped lake twists trees into new and beautiful shapes – while in Copenhagen and Paris, Einar catches muddy glimpses of himself in foxed-glass mirrors and smudged windows.
 
The film’s secret weapon is Vikander, who’s been blessed with a role that has no truck whatsoever with the usual supportive wife banalities – at points she’s effectively its lead character. The Swedish actress glides into the film after a ludicrously busy 2015, in which she bounced between lead roles in Ex Machina and Testament of Youth, did fine supporting work in The Man From UNCLE, and even made a dignified cameo in the otherwise dignity-phobic chef drama Burnt. But here she’s better than ever – hungry, energised, up on the balls of her feet, and an equally convincing awards prospect. (Like Redmayne, she’s already been nominated for a Golden Globe, with surely more nominations to follow.)
 
 

quarta-feira, 6 de janeiro de 2016

Sir Tom Jones

 
 
has sold over 100 million records and just released his autobiography and a new album, Long Lost Suitcase. At 75, he sounds better than ever .

Moonless

 
 
Não mais amarei
aquele que se não demora...

nas voltas dos meus fios de luar.
 
LÍLIA TAVARES