My babe don't care for me

 

 

I wonder what's wrong with baby.

 

 

 

Love is

 

 

a smoke made with the fume of sights.

 

William Shakespeare

 

 

Cine Me

 

 

Room

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3170832/

 

 

http://www.roomthemovie.com/?redirect=off

 

 

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.



  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1895587/

 

 

http://spotlightthefilm.com/

 

 

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

 

 

 

Cine Me

 

 

Carol

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2402927/?ref_=ttmd_md_nm

 

 

http://carolfilm.com/

 

 

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'



Cine Me

 

 

The Revenant

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1663202/

 

http://www.foxmovies.com/movies/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?