Since I've been loving you boy

And the drives, and drives.
Oh, oh, and drives.

Cine Me

Big Eyes

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1126590/

http://bigeyesfilm.com/

Tim Burton's 'Big Eyes' paints a beautiful picture.

As is appropriate considering the story of what amounts to fraud in the artistic community, Big Eyes paints a deceptively simple picture that masks some genuine profundities. The story concerns the strange tale of Margaret Keane (Amy Adams) who (and this is basically first-act spoiler territory) painted a series of best-selling paintings but only after her husband (Christoph Waltz) insisted that he take credit for the work. That’s basically the story in a nutshell, but it’s a surprisingly compelling one that wrings its seemingly low-stakes drama for maximum emotional impact. Thanks to a superb star turn by Amy Adams and a strong character performance by Christoph Waltz (who, aside from his Tarantino adventures, has never been better) that reveals utter cruelty disguised as over-the-top comedy, Big Eyes is a relentlessly engaging motion picture.

"Big Eyes" is a strangely conventional entry in Tim Burton's filmography. The story itself is fascinating, though, which helps, and Amy Adams' quiet meticulous performance as Margaret Keane is a beautiful and emotional piece of work.

"Big Eyes" is full of fascinating questions about the meaning of art, the concept of popularity, and what it means to develop a huge audience. Back to Warhol: whether or not something is seen as "good" by an expert is irrelevant if so many people like it. The cultural gatekeepers will always be apoplectic in such a situation. "Big Eyes" is not a major film from Tim Burton, and it has some tonal issues, but one can see why he was drawn to such material. In a way, it's a very personal film.

Waltz hams it up in high style, though a little more restraint would have made Margaret seem less a dupe for falling for a man whose only artistry is the con. It's Adams who restores our rooting interest by showing us the steel even in Margaret's reserve. It's a performance of haunting transparency.
It's clear that Burton sympathizes, minus irony, with Margaret's fervent belief in what one critic calls "the big, stale jellybeans" she puts on canvas. A recent showing of Burton's artwork at New York's Museum of Modern Art attracted long lines and critical brickbats. Maybe that's why Big Eyes, for all its tonal shifts and erratic pacing, seems like Burton's most personal and heartfelt film in years, a tribute to the yearning that drives even the most marginalized artist to self expression no matter what the hell anyone thinks.

 Walter died in 2000, with no creative output. 

Margaret, 87, still paints every day.


 Burton gives her the sweetest reward in Big Eyes: the last laugh.

Oscars 2015

“So many people with this disease feel isolated and marginalized,” she explained, adding that movies make people feel seen and not alone. “And people with Alzheimer’s deserve to be seen so we can find a cure.”


Julianne Moore

When we run off for the weekend

I love the weightless feeling that accompanies us.

Earned It

You make it look like it’s magic

Cause I see nobody, nobody but you, you, you

I'm never confused

Hey, hey

I'm so used to being used

So I love when you call unexpected

Cause I hate when the moment's expected

So I'ma care for you, you, you

I'ma care for you, you, you, you, yeah

Cause girl you're perfect

You're always worth it

And you deserve it

The way you work it

Cause girl you earned it

Girl you earned it

You know our love would be tragic

So you don't pay it, don't pay it no mind

We live with no lies

Hey, hey

You're my favorite kind of night

Source: http://www.directlyrics.com/the-weeknd-earned-it-lyrics.html

Cine Me

A Most Violent Year

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2937898/

http://amostviolentyear.com/

There's a kind of 1970s American movie that's catnip to directors who grew up in the '80s and '90s while watching that sort of movie on cable TV and home video. It's visually and thematically dark, and very male. It has Rembrandt lighting and a palette dominated by paper-bag brown, burnt yellow, leprous emerald, and dirty cream. There's talk of honor and integrity and tradition, of old ways passing and a meaner, pettier, more chaotic, new way taking its place. It is an organized crime film, or a family drama, or a big city nightmare, or all three things at once. Nobody in it is conventionally likable. The hero, despite a certain reticence about selling what's left of his soul, soon figures out that to get ahead in this world, you have to be cold and calculating, and divest yourself of illusions. "A Most Violent Year," a 1981 New York period piece written and directed by J.C. Chandor ("All is Lost," "Margin Call"), is that kind of movie. Oh, boy, is it that kind of movie. It's quite good, for what it is. But it's that "for what it is" part that proves slightly exasperating.

The film's title refers to an actual, statistical designation: 1981 was the most violent year in New York City history up till that point, with 1,841 homicides (the number climbed through 1991 before starting to level off). Coupled with the retro look and rhythm and subject matter—the film is a dirty business movie, a crime film, a crusading New York DA story, and a visual homage to cinematographer Gordon Willis ("The Godfather," "The Conversation"), and a lot of other '70s-film signifiers as well—it all feels like a romanticization of a past which, through a twenty-teens, American middle-class filmmaker's eyes, looks like a Brigadoon of urban ethnic machismo. The movie is so funereal that at times it plays like a memorial service, not just for a particular kind of American drama, but for the male heroes who populated them: a snapshot of one of the last cultural moments when American men could be Men, in that old fashioned, two-fisted, furrowed-brow-and-whispered-threats sort of way. 

The movie is devoted to the scrappy side of fortune-building at the end of the industrial age.

The glory of “A Most Violent Year” lies in Chandor’s sense of how a certain corner of the world (and, by implication, a much larger portion of it) works, for ill or for good.

A tense freeway shootout and car/foot/rail chase sequence aside (the latter plays like a sombre variation on a theme from The French Connection), A Most Violent Year keeps its action tinder largely dry, the fireworks generated instead by tense conversations between husbands and wives, lawyers and district attorneys, police and putative thieves. Chastain is terrific as the Lady Macbeth power behind the throne, chiding the authorities for being “very disrespectful” while cooking the company books with fingernail-saving disdain. Isaac is a portrait of manicured, camel-coated anxiety, a man struggling to maintain his moral-code cool amid overstretched mortgages and 30-day payment deadlines. Top marks, too, to David Oyelowo as the DA whose crime-busting clampdown masks naked political ambition and Albert Brooks as the world-weary, dyspeptic lawyer walking the thin blue line between his client and the authorities.

When “New York, New York” lyricist Fred Ebb wrote that immortal line, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” it’s doubtful he imagined the life-or-death stakes such sentiments take on in “A Most Violent Year,” an ’80s-era NYC crime drama in which just making it from one day to the next seems like a major accomplishment. In his third turn behind the camera, writer-director J.C. Chandor has delivered a tough, gritty, richly atmospheric thriller that lacks some of the formal razzle-dazzle of his solo seafaring epic, “All Is Lost,” but makes up for it with an impressively sustained low-boil tension and the skillful navigating of a complex plot (at least up until a wholly unnecessary last-minute twist). Like last fall’s “Out of the Furnace,” this solid, grown-up movie-movie is almost certainly too dark and moody to connect with a broad mainstream public or make major awards-season waves, but it does much to confirm Chandor as a formidable filmmaking talent, and star Oscar Isaac as one of the essential American actors of the moment. 

The movie is also a triumph of subtle period craftsmanship on almost every level, especially the work of production designer John P. Goldsmith, who has a field day with long-bodied Cadillac coupes and diesel Mercedes, metallic desks and filing cabinets; costume designer Kasia Walicka Mamone, applying bounteous earth tones (with Chastain outfitted by Giorgio Armani); and the great cinematographer Bradford Young (“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”), whose widescreen images are retro without ever verging on kitsch, with ungentrified Gotham locations bathed in a crisp winter’s light and swirls of indoor cigarette smoke.

Cine Me

Fifty Shades of Grey


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2322441/

http://www.fiftyshadesofgreymovie-intl.com/ww/

At the end of a recent New York sneak preview of “Fifty Shades of Grey” — in the blackout between the final lines of dialogue (“Anastasia!” “Christian!”) and the first breathy notes of the last Beyoncé song — a lot of the audience burst out laughing. The source of that laughter continues to puzzle and intrigue me, perhaps more than the actual movie did. Was it delight? Derision? Embarrassment? Surprise? All of the above?

The last answer seems the most likely, since Sam Taylor-Johnson’s screen adaptation of E. L. James’s best seller is, like the book itself, a wildly confused treatment of a perennial confusing subject. Sex is a knotty business, perhaps all the more so when actual knots are involved, as they tend to be in the world of Christian Grey, the kinky billionaire bachelor who lends his name and his impressive collection of neckties to this Seattle-set tale of seduction, submission and commodity fetishism.

Reviewers have complained about Ms. James’s pedestrian prose, but the bad writing serves an important purpose. “Fifty Shades” not only destigmatizes kink, bringing bondage and spanking to airport bookstores and reading groups across the land. But it also, so to speak, de-sophisticates certain sexual practices, taking them out of the chateau and the boudoir and other fancy French places and planting them in the soil of Anglo-American banality. If E. L. James were a better writer, her books would be more — to use one of Anastasia’s favorite words — intimidating. And much less useful.

W.H. Auden once wrote that “the proof that pornography has no literary value is that, if one attempts to read it in any other way than as a sexual stimulus, to read it, say, as a psychological case-history of the author’s sexual fantasies, one is bored to tears.” In defiance of this irrefutable good sense, the “Fifty Shades” phenomenon has spawned innumerable kink-themed think pieces, though the analysis has dwelt less on Ms. James’s psyche than on the fantasies of the tens of millions of women who have bought her books. The writers transform their boredom into mockery and judgment as they circle around a tantalizing, perhaps frustrating question. Why do so many women read these novels, even though they have no literary value?

I’m no expert, but I can venture a guess: for fun. They seem to be the kind of books you can simultaneously have fun with, make fun of, trash and cherish and adapt to the pursuit of your own pleasures. Which brings me back to the laughter at the end of the sneak preview. 

The movie is neither one of those things. It dabbles in romantic comedy and splashes around in melodrama, but the one thing it can’t be — the thing the novel so trashily and triumphantly is — is pornography. Ms. Taylor-Johnson’s sex scenes are not that much different from other R-rated sex scenes, though there are more of them and more hardware is involved. You know the routine: an arched neck, some curled toes, a buttock here, a breast there, a wisp of pubic hair, a muffled moan, another Beyoncé song. Maybe a riding crop for variety.

Mr. Dornan has the bland affect of a model, by which I mean a figure made of balsa wood or Lego. What vitality “Fifty Shades of Grey” possesses belongs to Ms. Johnson, who is a champion lip-biter and no slouch at blushing, eye-rolling and trembling on the verge of tears. She’s a good actress, in other words, and Ms. Taylor-Johnson matches the colors and the visual texture — the chilly blues and pulsing reds, the drab daylight and the velvety dusk — to Anastasia’s moods and desires.

“Fifty Shades of Grey” might not be a good movie — O.K., it’s a terrible movie — but it might nonetheless be a movie that feels good to see, whether you squirm or giggle or roll your eyes or just sit still and take your punishment.