#1. Watch at least a minimum of 3 films starting today (2Jan2012) and 7 films on weekends (or on work off days..)

- to fulfill my inner (and outer) desires for more film views…

#2. A Jog a Day Never Killed Anybody

- except for those suffering from leg-impaired diseases, which you currently (and thankfully) do not have. Not only do you get a better body, you also risk yourself from getting diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. Plus, you helped release carbon dioxide into the earth which helps in processing photosynthesis for a healthier and yummier environment.

#3. Never Forget to Say Thank You

- because you’ll never know who’s life you might make feel better by appreciating their effort.

#4. Get Back to School Promo

- because the greatest gift a person can get for themselves is Education.

#5. Attend more Filipino Film Festivals

- apparently, your country is the ONLY one who doesn’t appreciate their own breed of talented filmmakers. Why not start attending these films as well and who knows, you just might affect that person sitting next to you in the office in watching.

So far I’m yet to add more to this list in the next few days. Thanks for dropping by!

Whoever you are, you must be one of the unlucky ones who happened to stumble by this post through spam websites and searched for the terms Naked Women or Guns and Notebooks or movies. Yes, you unlucky reader. Or if your a bit like me, you must’ve found me through the wordpress Recently Posted blogposts attempting to copy a post while suffering on a great deal of writers block. But I doubt it that your just like me. Because nobody’s exactly alike. Even twins. With the exception of fraternal twins of course, and yes I pity the siamese/conjoined twins because I don’t know how I can exclude this from this rule.

I just believe they are excluded. Because nobody are alike. Even best friends. Most especially soulmates.

This reminds me of that Paolo Coelho novel, Brida. Its one of my favorites. If you happen to have browsed through my posts, you’ll find that I fancy films. But I also like books so I’ll try and bring them up in this post.

If you’re the kind who likes to read long posts, then you’re in the right place.

So anyway, about Brida. This book had left me a good and bad feeling about finding soulmates, meeting soulmates, loving them until you understand that you’re in the right place to have them. Or to have found them. Or the fact that you will soon understand that you might be in the wrong time and place to have met the One.
A friend of mine who likes boys (and often times girls) whom I shared this thought about what I felt about the book responded to me by saying “so I am right then in trying my best to find my soulmate in everyone?”
I just stared at her when she said this and I shrugged. This friend of mine is pretty, and she knows it. She also knows that boys (and oftentimes girls, too) like her. It doesn’t bother me much that she’s like this. What bothers me is when she gets hurt by doing the things she does.

I couldn’t agree with her either because I don’t think that’s what the whole point means. Its difficult to walk into a room with people having their eyes towards you. And not in the Elephant in the Room kind-of-way.
It’s difficult to just spend time with any kind of person. Especially if your impressions about them are different once you get to really know them.

Well anyway, I’m not looking forward to making this a long post. I hope that whoever reads this has had a bad day. Or a good day, I wish.

This 1967 french film by Robert Bresson which is based on Georges Bernanos’ novel entitled Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette (1937). This film that I saw along with my twin on a Sunday morning in exchange of listening to 60′s music or attending Sunday mass. Before I had to go out and watch some films at the Italian Film Festival (which I shall blog on later..).

Starring Nadine Nortier as Mouchette,this film tells us the story of a young girl living in a French rural village whose life gets harder and harder as she enters adolescence. Her father and brother who’s always drunk, and her mother dying from cancer, Mouchette struggles to keep herself standing in these unfortunate situations.

Mouchette (which apparently means little fly), is weird and awkward. But her sad life and face, which makes it even more believable whenever she cries silently, sort of represents us as a whole. As Ruthless Reviews puts it:

Her plight, then, becomes the plight of us all; a parable for the world entire, filled as it is with injustice, boorishness, and incivility. As Joan of Arc before her, she is martyr incarnate, and the assault on innocence and decency makes fools and cowards of us all.

This is my first chance encounter with a Bresson film. Set in black and white, I am expecting a sort of a Vittorio De Sica setting of injustice. But Bresson’s Mouchette has proved that his is quite far original. He puts us kindhearted folks into a long, and straining “awwwwwwwww” moment before the end of the film wherein, every suffering that our little heroine has endured finally ends in a splash.

Each scene in which we expect this little girl to at least shed a little happiness in her eyes is being taken away by yet another sad result. Oh and yes, if you have seen The Dreamers, this one’s the last clip shown before that film ends with an unsuccessful suicide attempt from Isabelle (played by Eva Green).

References: http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/937/mouchette/

Directors by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman surely have had to up the ante in the third installment of this home-video-horror. Set 18 years prior to the first two films, wherein we trace back where the “activities” begun, I expected this to be a bore.

But alas, I was proved wrong.

True to its form of providing us that raw experience of horror, the film starts like how every horror ride begins. Katie and her younger sister Kristi reunite during Kristi’s pregnancy. Katie delivers a box of home videos to her which ends up being mysteriously burglarized a year later in Kristi and her husband David’s home.

We’re then switched to go backwards to 1988, a young Katie and Kristi live with their mother Julie and her boyfriend Dennis, who makes a living out of video coverages of weddings, parties, and the like. Dennis notices a strange noise one evening and then plans to videotape the entire evening on both his and Julie’s room and the kids’. He then finds a footage of Kristi waking up in the middle of the night talking to an invisible entity.

Like the previous Activities, Dennis videotapes the next few evenings and a couple more strange occurrences are caught on tape including a creepy take on the Bloody Mary game. From strange demons lurking in the closet to the most scariest add-ons to a horror flick: creepy single women cult, Paranormal Activity 3 is scarier than the first, much more sensible than the second.

When a beautiful woman from the city goes into a small town and rents a cabin to finish her latest novel, she realises she may have caught the attraction of a couple of locals.

 In a perverted, sardonic, and sick way.

 Adapted from the 1978 film titled Day of the Woman, I spit On Your Grave is a raw, straight-on horror-thriller-sadonistic shocker that’s not a spite of the ordinary film. Absolutely not for the fainted hearted, once Jessica Hills asks help from one of the locals to fix the water pippings, a little peck on the plumber, a stuttering young man named Matthew (played by Chad Lindberg) takes this peck seriously and forgets to get the payment for his services. Along with some sick friends of his who spotted Jennifer earlier at the gas station, they plan to visit her at her home later that night. This unexpected visit from locals she felt she had embarassed earlier at the service station brings an instant nightmare of degradation, rape and violence.

 Left almost dead, Jennifer stands up in a complete mess, naked but never facing her male attackers. She walks almost out of the woods and into a bridge while her attackers slowly follows her from behind. A last glance at them and she jumps off the bridge, miraculously staying deep into the river and never to show up again in more than a month.

The lowlife locals, alarmed that her carcass might soon turn up at the end of the ravine. continue to search for her by the river, burning all of her possessions that may be claimed as evidence. A couple of months after, signs of that day haunt them one-by-one until Jennifer finally returns back to seek vegeance. Sarah Butler performs frighteningly fit for the role of Jennifer as she inflicts acts of physical torture to each of her attackers until the torment has completely surpassed her. Both the actor and the character succeeds in providing us mad solution to the story’s main problem. Here we find a woman who never agrees to be overpowered by her male attackers.

Reminds of Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Who Wore Black, except that the heroine is also the victim of the story, and I guess the physical torture performed by Jennifer is much more grotesque while that of The Bride is a bit more eloquent.

Andrew Howard's Sheriff Storch gets a taste of his own medicine

Cast include Sarah Butler as Jennifer Hills who plays the role perfectly. Jeff Branson as the egotistic Johnny, Rodney Eastman as Andy, Daniel Franzese as the perverted aspiring freak filmmaker Stanley, Chad Lindberg as the insane nervous wreck Matthew, and Andrew Howard (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) as the perverted Sheriff Storch.

Frightening, freaky, perverted, pitiful, disturbing, and sickening. The rape scene, although not as long as the one in Irreversible, is the most unsettling and emotionally eerie performances I’ve ever seen. Granted to give you the chills whether you’re a man or a woman.

]]> http://underthefiretree24.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/i-spit-on-your-grave-2010/feed/ 2 'Nocky Sara Butler vlcsnap-2011-11-05-13h34m32s92 vlcsnap-2011-11-05-14h18m08s145 vlcsnap-2011-11-05-14h51m57s208 Jeff Branson being tortured like a stubborn horse as Johnny Andrew Howard as Sheriff Storch http://underthefiretree24.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/642/ http://underthefiretree24.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/642/#comments Mon, 31 Oct 2011 05:00:42 +0000 Old Soul http://underthefiretree24.wordpress.com/?p=642 ]]> One of the things I like to do on weekends is to take photographs of strangers. And photographs of things in general. I like to jog on weekends too so I take photographs of co-joggers and myself in sweat.

A photograph of myself in sweat is not something I’d like to share to you in particular. It’s not as interesting as the next photographs you would see in this post.

Just like Zooey Deschanel’s character in Yes Man, I too love to take photographs during my jogging trips. While I was warming up, I took a snap shot of this place in Quezon City that I haven’t been able to dwell into. I’ve been here so many times that I haven’t been able to notice this. Like most of us, I guess I’ve been too busy to take in what we see, even in just a little few seconds. And so, I took in a little less than five seconds. A lone tree that was perhaps pushed by the change of weather yet it chose not to die —- instead, it chose to grow it’s leaves even more and adapted to the change of times.

How many of you out there (yes you, whoever you are reading) who’s gotten this dream of dying? Well perhaps a ratio of about 7 out of 10 have dreamed of finding themselves dying (in whatever instance or situation that occurs into) or perhaps 7 out of 10 have NOT dreamed of finding themselves dying (sorry, my bad of insinuating this thought..). Well, I’ve found myself dying in a number of dreams, but the most similar thought is finding myself floating into some realm of surrealism. Much like floating into a painting that looks real (much like the first photograph). A painting that contains several mountains and a few splashing rivers of several different colors. After that dream, I always find myself wondering if that might be true. Yes. After waking up to that dream I always find myself wondering before praying or even while brushing (or not brushing??) my teeth just to start the day. What if that’s how the after life looks like? What if we wake up to a little bright light and find ourselves momentarily drifting off, off to see the ones we love and hate getting stuck on earth, not even caring to wave us off goodbye or laughing at us for just drifting off to some estrange world? And after seeing all this beauty of the earth, we’re drifted off into a world filled with anger and hate, rage and fear, of loathing and jealousy? Fire into fire into fire?

Well I guess you’d either laugh at me now or say ‘whoa’?! I know, it’s too hard to digest. But that’s how I feel whenever I’m looking at something this beautiful. I stand there and wonder how we never get to just stand there and look. And listen to the birds chirping. And feel the dampness of the sunny wind whirling all over us. I guess I just got too busy.

We’ve all gotten too busy.

So the question is, have we really been to busy to even care? Have we been too old enough to tell ourselves that we know the answers to everything.. or have we just been old enough to tell ourselves that we don’t know and that we don’t care? Oh come on, that’s not how we’ve been taught in school, right? Haven’t we all been taught to keep asking?

Some people remember things, some people stick to things, and some people stick to the memory of a person. Or a cat. Or their favorite teacher’s name. Or a book. Or a character from a book.

I remember everything, although I very much would like to forget everything. It comes back to me like a recurring dream. This one would come back to me like a recurring daydream. Like by the time I get home from work, that one hour or forty-five minute drive home (depending if I went home early or I was on overtime) would be like daybreak. Everything you’re not supposed to think about you begin to think about. Like cars crashing into the Commonwealth highway, a car about to collide into our bus from nowhere, a person knocking into my door at ten thirty just to bother my sleep, and then the afternoon sunlight hitting my eyes on that unforgettable afternoon.

In this mini daydream of mine, which I repeatedly have almost everyday as far as I can remember is on that instance wherein I am found sitting in a dewy grass, it’s in the afternoon and I stare at the trees where the sun creeps and peeks like a kid in hiding. I am waiting for someone, and this someone is someone I keep remembering almost once a week, once a month, once in every quarter of the month. He walks into this serene picture, carrying two bottles of water and looks down on me with that reassuring smile. I haven’t seen him in a while and I’m not planning on seeing him any soon. But the problem with people you try best to forget is that their faces are the last thing that disappear.

And so, as I post this slightly personal post, my only desire is to completely forget. But as I say goodbye to that only beautiful memory of that person, I would like to say ‘thanks’ as well. And formally, goodbye. I hope this message reaches across.

I just hope so.

May 8, 2011

After his son forgets to visit him at the nursing home, ninety year old Jacob Jankowski (played by Hal Holbrook, Into The Wild) decides to go to the circus on the later time of the night. Two circus workers find him standing in front of the circus getting drenched in the rain and invites him to come inside. He then informs one of the co-workers named Charlie played by Paul Schneider (was also in Elizabethtown) his story of what it was like to be part of a one of the greatest shows on earth, the Benzini Brother’s Circus in 1931,who’s also intrigued by the how the famous Circus is also infamous for it’s disaster. The story then goes into a flashback to the Great Depression wherein a young Jacob Jankowski, played by Robert Pattinson (Twilight, How To Be, Little Ashes) a Cornell student back then studies to become a veterinarian and soon after taking his final exams learns that his parents dies in a fatal car crash. Jacob decides to leave school, saddened by the loss of his parents whom also leaves him with a huge debt and no house to live. After walking and walking, leaving his future to whatever awaits for him far away from his old home, he jumps into a moving train where he meets Camel and a group of sweaty men who offers him a job on the train.

The next morning he realizes he’s hitched a ride in the famous Benzini Brothers Circus train, after having breakfast he does unusual jobs like cleaning out horse poop and staring at the workers build the huge Circus tent. Yes, same as us, he too stares out in amazement (instead of helping out..) at how the huge tent is built. Same as any young man or woman who ventures out in a new world, Jacob is amazed at how this alternate universe begins, where everything is possible from flying trapezes and women breathing and blowing fire.

He then meets the show’s star, a white horse and a couple more horses being cared for by the showmaster’s wife Marlene (Witherspoon, who somewhat looks like Marlene Dietrich). He attempts to help her out with his knowledge on animals but she strays away, for fear that her husband might catch them perhaps.

The show’s showmaster August is played by Christoph Waltz (Inglorious Basterds, Green Lantern, and will later show in 2011′s Carnage) who yet again portrays a backstabbing, creepy evil villain who seems nice at first. Yes, I feel like a little girl afraid of a man who might’ve killed my parents in my dreams but seem like a very kind gentleman in real life whenever I see Christoph Waltz play his character. That seems to be the effect. But it’s fine, and it works in this film as well.

My several complains about this film does not include the fact that Robert Pattinson plays the part. For anyone who have not seen his earlier works (Little Ashes, How To Be, well his stint in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Remember Me, and a very funny but weirdly played role in Love and Distrust.), I tell you that he really is potentially good. This film lacks a bit of development between Jacob’s parents and him. We don’t get to see much of a family thing here, except for a few smiles and then kaput, they die from a car crash. I know, I know it’s so that we can get to the point straight away on how Jacob meets the love of his life in a time when everything was still being crafted as a pill for complications.

This Reese-Rob tag team works—- in five minutes. And then we remember they used to play as mother and son in “Vanity Fair”. Although they’re both great actors, you just somehow couldn’t put a finger on it. Even the Christoph-Reese battered couple, thank god they were placed in roles wherein they somehow hate each other. Otherwise, it might’ve been a solution for me to walk out of the theatre.

The interaction though with the animals were great and commendable. The feeling of being in a 1930′s circus is there, with the big close ups and wonderful costumes and stunts. The film is quite a visual to the eye, but I feel like I’d rather read the book.

25 September 2011

When I saw the title of this along with all the other DVDs I had in store for this list, I instantly thought of deserts in the sahara in a drama about two star crossed lovers. But eventually, after viewing Annie Hall (again) and Stardust Memories just a couple of days ago, my sister told me “you’ve got to see Purple Rose of Cairo. It’s Woody Allen’s as well. A person from a 1930′s film gets out of a film..” and then everything went blurry afterwards. The cue words were Woody Allen and 1930s.

I had planned this several days ago but only had the time this morning after a long sleep. Woody Allen writes and directs this 1985 American Comedy-drama film starring Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello, Edward Herrman, Jason Wood, and Deborah Rush. Set in the depression era, a clumsy Cecilia who works as a waitress in a local diner loves watching the movies to take her away from her unhappily married life.

One evening she watches a new film called The Purple Rose of Cairo. As she sits through the film we’re shown snipets of the film as well. It appears to be the story of a rich man playwright (Hermann) who goes to an exotic trip to Egypt along with his friends (Wood and Rush). On one of their trips in Egypt’s famous places, they meet an archaelogist Tom Baxter (Daniels) who guides them through to a few more interesting places and facts about Egypt. Tom is then invited along with them to go on a “madcap Manhattan weekend” where he falls in love with a nightclub singer Kitty Haynes (played by Karen Akers).

Cecilia returns back to her normal life the next day feeling enchanted with the film’s setting. She invites her sister to watch the film again. She tries to invite her husband who doesn’t seem to be the least interested in anything but playing dice, drinking, and giving her a “whack” afterwards. She sees the film anyway by herself several times. As the film goes into the scene wherein Tom is invited on the Manhattan suite, as he delivers his lines with a little glance here and there towards Cecilia. Later on he tells her in front of everyone “Boy, you must love this film don’t ya?” she wonders if it’s her he’s talking to. Apparently it is. “You must’ve seen this film five times!” he says and then goes out of the screen and walks up to her like a normal person.

Woody Allen makes our dreams come true in this classic, tragic hit. Tragedies are his cup of coffee and a drag of smoke as he directs Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels perfectly. I loved Mia Farrow in this film. She proved to be very irritatingly clumsy, vulnerable and impeccable. Jeff Daniels cannot be set aside as he portrays both the fictional character Tom Baxter and the real actor Gil Shepard. He kind of repeats his performance as Tom in the film Pleasantville wherein he naively explores a new world outside the fourth wall. Tom Baxter, being the character that was created as a minor character who plays an important part of continuing the story towards the next scene where they have to go to the club where he has to meet the cabaret’s singer, Kitty, whom he’ll end up marrying at the end of the film in this film, felt his breaking out as a feeling of rebellion and freedom.

As he breaks free, he invites Cecilia to come live with him and make love with him and fall in love forever. As tempting as this may sound, Cecilia makes him aware that this cannot happen as he is only fictional. My favorite part is when they kiss on a stuck carousel and Tom thinks that the lights would fade out into a different scene where they would then make love. Jeff Daniels is effective as the naive Tom, even with the way he tries to act like a 1930s tour guide character makes the film a bit sardonically funny.

As the “minor” character ends up missing from the screen, which causes a conundrum at the theater mainly because the even bigger characters need him, the theater manager can’t attempt to shut down the picture, otherwise the Tom Baxter character would disappear forever, meaning loss in sales in all the other theaters that play the film and would cause more and more insanity all over the town. And most importantly, this would make or break the career of the actor who plays the character. And so they contact Gil Shepard to come find the character in the small town, and he ends up meeting Cecilia in a local coffee shop. She confesses that she knows where the Tom Baxter character is hiding.

I liked this film so much that I enjoyed listening to its every dialogue. It enriches a cinema lover’s extreme admiration with the movies and a woman’s final attempt at redeeming her miserable life. Interesting enough, we never get to feel Woody Allen’s presence in the male lead actors, but once again he plays god in terms of making us feel the difficulty of choice. In this case of Cecilia’s, at the end of the film, she chooses as the uncertain heroine of the whole film, whether to come with Tom and live a happily predictable life, or with Gil Shepard who can give her a life she never had with her husband. In the end, she chooses a painful path that leads her going back to the movies all by herself.