Ginger Snaps is a kickass horror movie. :D

 

Horror Director Crush #1 million: Lucky McKee

 

I’m a sucker for a movie with good opening credits.

Case in point:

It is a truth universally acknowledged in cinema that mannequins are creepy.  Especially red-lit ones.

Blood and Black Lace:  A+ for color scheme.  Scary- not so much, but ominous, yes!  And the credits are so wonderful I will forgive the rest of its imperfections.

 

 

 

Let the healing begin.

This is easily one of my favorite scenes ever.

And I would wager one of the best ever.  In the history of everything.

 

Sunday stuff

Your cinematic moment of Zen for the day: 

ALSO:  The indie movie I’m a PA on is getting some good press!

Buzzbuzzbuzz.

io9

Film School Rejects

OTHER THINGS!  Look at the My Milk Toof blog.  Cute Overload posted a link to it the other day, and it is so adorable, I almost can’t take it.  For example: 

Apparently the artist who created this blog lives in Berkeley.  Um, does that mean we can be bff?  😀

 

Jane Campion is so fetch.

I love Jane Campion.  I am currently watching her debut film, Sweetie, which so far is odd and has beautiful beautiful cinematography.  Mostly I am in love with her montages and how strange her characters are.   I especially love the one animated part in the Piano, which goes by so quickly and is so interesting because it never recurs anywhere else in the movie.  It ‘s just this little detail that’s hidden in there when Anna Paquin tells the story of her father’s death.  It also seems like she really likes deep focus, at least in Sweetie.

 

Art house directors are like, so hot right now.

<—-I can’t really back up the title of this post, but it popped into my head and I thought it might be amusing.

ANYWAY.

I took an art house cinema course this past semester and it revived my love for foreign cinema from the masters.  Not that my love was dying or anything, but it definitely needed a kick in the pants to restart it again.

Before this class I had never actually seen an Ingmar Bergman film.  Wait, that’s not true.  I saw about half an hour of Fanny and Alexander.  Whoops.  I think it takes a lot more than just seeing one isolated film though, to “get” Bergman.  I don’t really think it’s always possible to “get” any one the art house greats, since one of the chief characteristics of a lot of art house cinema is that it is incredibly challenging and often confusing.  Take Persona.  I’ve read a bunch of articles on it thanks to that class, heard various interpretations of what it’s supposed to be about, and I think no matter how many times I see it, I’ll still come out of it thinking, wtf was that part with the blood-sucking all about?  That’s okay though.  It’s still a fascinating experience.  Plus, Bergman is a HUGE influence on a lot of directors.  I was watching Woody Allen’s Love and Death the other day, and I have always been aware that he’s referencing a lot of Russian literature in it, but it gave me a special thrill to be able to pick out the specific filmic quotations of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Bergman’s Persona.

Love and Death's take on Persona's most famous of shots

Some of the most influential cinematography EVER

And let’s not forget that death is an actual character in Woody Allen’s Love and Death.  Seventh Seal, anyone?

Death wears white after Labor Day.

But back to Persona- personally, I think Liv Ullman is very interesting looking and it’s obvious that Bergman is obsessed with his two characters’ faces- he even fuses them together at one point.

Look carefully.

Art house cinephilia is definitely an exclusive club, complete with its own snobs and elitists.  I like to think that I’m neither of those, but there is a definite thrill that comes with being able to pick out references of influential, obscure (to some anyway) films from international filmmakers.  I hear that yet another of Allen’s films, titled Another Woman, is an extended take off on the Bergman film Wild Strawberries, an engaging look at a crotchety old man’s daylong roadtrip, during which he takes inventory of his life, mistakes, and relationships.  Amusingly enough, the main character of this film has the initials IB, so Ingmar Bergman basically aligned this crotchety old man character with himself by sharing his initials with him.

That’s all the thoughts I have for you today.  But before I go, here are some cool and very old school movie posters I found along the way in my searching for good photos from Bergman’s films.  There’s a bunch more posters on the BFI website in the same style and they’re all really cool.

God, I love love love Badlands. And it's an extended take-off of Bonnie and Clyde, just fyi.