By Mike V, a slightly troubled kid in the middle of Los Angeles.
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The cloud of smoke from the LA wildfires, as seen from my backyard at 3:32 PM. The whole city can’t quite breathe….
Rahm Emanuel tells people to fuck off by showing them the space where his right middle finger used to be.
Class (via vskyeno)
I like to sit on the floor against the wall, mostly because I’m usually late to class and all the good seats are taken.
History of Narrative Film
There is a pretty great profile on Charlie Kaufman in the November issue of Wired:
In Malkovich’s most famous scene, the eponymous actor enters a portal into his own mind. In Adaption, a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman writes himself into his own movie, which becomes Adaptation. And the lead character of Eternal Sunshine witnesses his memories as they are being erased, including the memory of his decision to erase his memories. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning tome Godel, Escher, Bach, refers to such regressions as Strange Loops-circular paradoxes that contain themselves. And Kaufman’s Mobius scripts contain some of the strangest loops ever put to film. “I’ve been told that my stuff is mathematical,” Kaufman says. “There’s like a hidden epiphany in it for me. You think you understand something, and then another version opens up.”
Charlie Kaufman is the writer/director of Synecdoche, New York which is already out on limited release in Los Angeles and New York.
The November 2008 issue of GQ has a great article, The 25 Sexiest Women in Film. Among the list are legends Sienna Miller, Raquel Welch and Sophia Loren.
In reverse order, my personal favorites include:
Wearing what would become the world’s most famous bikini, the lasciviously named, and outrageously shaped, Honey Ryder set the benchmark for the long line of Bond girls to follow: dangerous, primal, and athletically sexual.
Ludivine Sagnier (Swimming Pool)
Sagnier, who was 23 during filming, spends most of the movie in a bikini when she’s not topless. Panning over her tanned legs, full breasts, and sun-bleached hair, director Francois Ozon lovingly takes his time capturing a momnet that will not return.
“There are much prettier girls in Paris than me,” feints Jean Seberg in Breathless. Nobody’s buying it: not Jean-Paul Belmondo’s cocky scam artist who’ll do anything to get into her Capri pants; not director Jean-Luc Godard, who shot the Iowa-born beauty so close you can almost see the drool in the corner of his lens; and apparently not all those “prettier girls in Paris,” who - having just seen the sexiest neck in film history - ran into their hairdressers asking for the la coupe Seberg. Of course, on every other woman, it was just a haircut.
The story behind The Shot is that Sofia Coppola had written Lost in Translation’s opening sequence into the script, but when the time came to film it, the teenage Johansson balked at showing her rounded buttocks to the world. Sofia closed the set, sent the gaffers gaffing, and in a See, its not hard to do! moment, slid the slinky panties over her own ass (Johansson’s character was based on Coppola herself). Convinced, Scarlett did the scene - thirty perfect seconds of title and butt shot.
Oddly, GQ didn’t mention anybody pre-1957, which would have included the very first sex symbol, Clara Bow, America’s ‘It Girl,’ of the 1920’s silent film era. And lets not forget Farrah Fawcett, the quintessential sexy.
In truth, however, I know there are lots of Americans who, whatever their income, believe that the government should get its grubby hands off their money. To them, I’d simply say that if you drive on a highway, walk on a sidewalk, use the postal service, send your kids to public school (or appreciate the fact that public schools keep your neighbors’ kids off the streets), and generally enjoy the fact that 300 million people are able to live in something other than chaos and squalor, you should accept the fact that all this stuff has a price tag.