La película más aclamada de Derek Jarman es un intoxicante retrato de amor.
Jarman mismo describió "La Conversación Angelical" como: "mi más sobrio trabajo, pero también el más cercanos a mi corazón, a un mundo ideal, a un mundo mágico y de rituales, y con todo eso, imágenes de coches ardiendo y sistemas de radar, que te hacen recordar que hay un precio que pagar para ganarse ese sueño frente a un mundo de violencia."
Intenso, ensoñador y poético, "La Conversación ANgelical" es una de las películas más artística de Derek Jarman y es su cuarta obra. Es casi más un objeto estético que una película. Con su ojo de pintor, Jarman invocó, en una hermosa paleta de luz, color y textura, una visualización evocadora y radical de los poemas del amor de Shakespeare.
El director basó la inspiración pasando imágenes stop-printed Super-8 al formato de 35 mm resaltando asi el grado de aspereza exagerada de dos jovenes hermosos que suben rocas, arrastran cargas y nadan, haciéndolos casi abstractos los 154 sonetos escritos por Shakespeare.
La Mayoría de estos sonetos fueron escritas a un hombre joven innomado, referido comúnmente como la juventud justa.
El ajuste de Jarman para los catorce sonetos de Shakespeare no es ninguna narrativa como tal, y el único diálogo que hay es la de la emotiva lectura de los sonetos por Judi Dench al son de las etéreas secuencias de los jovenes en las costas, por las olas y en los jardines coloridos que nos hiptonizan hermosamente.
La interrupción de estas escenas mágicas con imágenes de panoramas estériles y amenazantes hace eco perfectamente la celebración y el tormento del amor explorados en los sonetos. Sus cuadros de cuevas, rocas, agua y figuras texturizadas en un paisaje extraño y terrible devuelve esas similitudes pictóricas: La menor pesadilla religiosa de un Bosch o Brueghel. Indiscutiblemente una romántica y bien pulida obra del retrato del amor de Derek Jarman que no podemos dejar de deleitar.
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"Tom is young, attractive and open about his sexuality and Jochen finds himself confused by his intense attraction to Tom . ."
In "An Unusual Affair' (Eine Aussergewöhnliche Affäre)" Jochen Wenzel (Hans Werner Meyer), is a young teacher, married to Ina (Tatjana Blacher) also a teacher and they have two children. The couple have known each other since childhood and their marriage is one of comfortable companionship but lacks a spark of passion. Jochen and Ina work in the same school.
One day the Wenzel's host a summer lawn party and among the guest that Ina invited is a new biology teacher at their school Tom Leuthner (Matthias Walter). Tom is young, attractive and open about his sexuality. The moment that the two men shake hands there is an instant bolt of chemistry and attraction between them. At first Jochen finds himself confused by his intense attraction to Tom. Jochen had a brief gay relationship before his marriage and had put that part of himself aside and never discussed it with anyone including his wife.
Working together it is inevitable that the two men find themselves in close proximity and they become mates on the school soccer team. This proximity is ripe ground for the attraction between them to grow. On an out of town school trip the men take the opportunity to be alone and consummate their attraction for each other and begin an affair. Jochen finally finds that he has fallen in love with his young colleague and as they both seriously fall for each other their affair intensifies.
Ina is unaware of her husband's past (in which Jochen had had the homosexual experience) but notices the changes in Jochen's behavior. While she worries about Jochen's distanced behaviour she does not have a clue of her husband's affair.
Soon Jochen finds himself torn between his family life and his love for Tom and when one of Jochen's pupils witnesses the two men kissing. The affair suddenly explodes into the life of his family, his professional life and the public domain.
Jochen is faced with not only publicly acknowledging his love for Tom but with making a decision crucial to his family, himself and his love for Tom. That decision will determine the path that the rest of his life will take . . .
The script refreshingly and simply presents with objectivity and sensitivity a beautiful love between two human beings and that portrayal is presented without judgment or social commentary that the love is between two men. The performances by Hans Werner-Meyer as Jochen, Tatjana Blacher as his wife and Matthias Walter as Tom Leuthner are outstanding. . FILM INFORMATION: 'An Unusual Affair'
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Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X'
" The elegant Auntie of Tokyo, cashes in 'her' club and opens a retirement home on the sea for gay gentlemen . . and that is just the beginning of the story . ."
In the film, Min Tanaka plays Himiko, a terminally ill gay man, and the founder of the titular gay seniors home Maison de Himiko. According to producer Osamu Kubota - quoted here - "the inspiration for the film's story came from his having read an Asahi newspaper article on the Home for Golden Gays, a gay seniors home founded in Manila by Justo C. Justo."
Maison de Himiko takes a highly novel point-of-view on the issue of a burgeoning aging Japanese population by centering its story around a retirement home for elderly gay gentlemen. Directed by Isshin Inudo (Josee, the Tiger and the Fish), who is one of those quality directors deeply respected in Japan but all but unknown in these parts, it manages the increasingly rare feat of being a mainstream tragicomedy that refuses to resort to quick and easy sentimentality. Saori (Shibasaki) is a young woman who seems to have given up on self-esteem. She is permanently short of cash, screws around with the boss at her part-time job, and spends her lunch breaks leafing through recruitment ads for phone sex workers. One day, handsome Haruhiko (Odagiri) shows up at her workplace, with a peculiar job offer: to come work part time as a maid at the retirement home where her estranged father (Tanaka) is spending his final days. The old man is dying and mostly bedridden. The pay offered is exceptionally good for a part-time position but the prospect puts her off; Saori has never forgiven her father for running out on her mother. That he has been openly gay, going under the name of Himiko while running one of the most popular gay establishments of his time and the fact that this dashing young man of her own age is her father's lover only adds insult to injury.
The themes of Maison de Himiko run, as themes tend to do, deeper than the subject of homosexuality alone. The titular retirement home is in many ways an enclave, a safe haven within society at large, where people are allowed to be themselves without fear of judgment or exclusion. Here, the need for tatemae, the public face, has disappeared. Despite her resistance, Saori is to all intents and purposes right at home there, since she too refuses to hide her disillusionment and anger from the real world. Her obstinate behavior and her refusal to look cute and act proper set her apart from her colleagues at her day job. But where she allows her grudges to isolate her, the inhabitants of the maison refuse to be hemmed in. The film derives much of its power from this investigation into human facades and their purpose. Saori hates her father for abandoning her mother, but fails to take his feelings into account. However, she comes to realize that the bond between her parents was more complex and tighter than she thought, even after their separation, and that it showed an ability to accept and forgive that she never even imagined possible.
Concurrently, Maison de Himiko also views its characters and their choices in life with acceptance and tolerance. It is not free of gay stereotypes, with two of the most enduring putting in appearances, that of the screaming queens and the romanticized pretty boys that are so dear to shojo manga readers. Most of the peripheral characters adhere squarely to the former sort, while Odagiri's is an exponent of the latter tradition. The film nevertheless manages to overcome such stereotyping because it cares for the people it depicts. The screenplay gives minor personages a trait or a back story that allows these men to gain an extra, usually tragic, dimension. A solid effort was made to present more than a cardboard cut-out. The actors latch on to these vestiges of humanity, while at the same time relishing the opportunity to run around in pastel frocks. The result, it must be said, is quite infectious.
On the other end of the scale, this motley bunch is balanced out nicely by a pair of grave, dignified performances courtesy of Joe Odagiri and Min Tanaka, who lend an unerringly dark heart to what could otherwise easily have turned into farce. In a role that most young actors with a following of teenage girls would turn down flat, Odagiri transforms his character into another of those enigmatic, troubled souls that are quickly becoming the ubiquitous young thespian's trademark. Tanaka meanwhile, is perhaps the most impressive presence in the film, even though he does little but sit at the sidelines of most scenes and observe. A dancer in real life, Tanaka cuts an imposing figure, giving Himiko a thoroughly unexpected air of unmistakably masculine cool, despite being dressed pretty much exclusively in silken night gowns and a head wrap ala Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.
A thoroughly de-glamorized Kou Shibasaki, finally, falls neatly in between these two extremes. For much of the film, she slouches around with a scowl, making no effort to hide her disdain and disgust for this community of queers, but at the same time she gets along with them phenomenally when it comes to boogying down on the dance floor or mimicking characters from TV Anime.
Maison de Himiko dances into camp with some over the top dance routines. A subplot follows the plot twist of the coming out process of a harassing underage neighborhood bully who spearheaded the anti-gay graffiti painted across the front wall of the Maison. Himiko's house is a pleasant place to while away an hour or two, no matter what your personal inclination may be. ~ . FILM INFORMATION: ' The House of Himiko'
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"An inspiring biopic chronicling the profound struggles, pains, challenges, disappointments, successes and joys in the life and career of Greg Louganis, one of the greatest divers and Olympic athletes of all time."
Greg Louganis says most people remember him from the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, when he struck his head on the diving board during competition. There are few who can't recall the image, one of the most replayed in the history of sports.
"It was as if that moment defined my life," says Louganis, who won four Olympic gold medals and one silver in his career. "But it didn't."
Indeed not and that is made so clear in his candid and inspirational 1995 autobiography recounting the self-doubt and lack of confidence that curtailed his personal life and professional career until he came out as an HIV-positive gay man a few months prior to the 1988 Olympiad. One must marvel at Louganis' ability to overcome racism, dyslexia, an abusive father, a manipulative manager, nagging self-doubts rooted in his own homosexuality, and finally the prospect of living with AIDS.
"You belong on the cover of that Wheaties box, not Mary Lou Retton. But you just don't fit the Wheaties image. You come across as too gay."
That's one of the minor problems faced by Olympic legend Greg Louganis in the film biopic 'Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story'.
Using genuine Olympic footage provided by ABC and NBC Sports, the film opens with the horribly miscalculated high-dive that caused Louganis to crack the top of his skull against the edge of the board before sinking into the pool. Underwater, the semi-conscious athlete becomes actor Mario López, who flashes back to the troubled boyhood and turbulent teen years during which Louganis was searching for some direction in life.
His half-Samoan parentage gave him a darker complexion that proved problematic once he reached school age, and his insecurities were further compounded by adoptive parents who, as portrayed in the film, were an over protective mother and a distant, often abusive father.
An interest in dance and acrobatics made for a smooth transition to swimming, particularly diving, and Louganis was taken under the wing of former Olympian Dr. Sammy Lee, who thought young Greg had "the most God-given talent" he'd ever seen. Dr. Lee provided the extensive training that earned the 16-year-old Louganis a Silver Medal in the 1976 Olympics. By this time, Louganis knew he was gay, but his sudden worldwide popularity compelled him to lead a double life, frequently resorting to alcohol as a means of easing the social pain. A full athletic scholarship to the University of Miami brought him to the attention of Olympic diving coach Ron O'Brien (Bruce Weitz), along with the prospects of entering the 1980 Games. In college, Greg moved in with his first gay roommate, but their sub rosa relationship resulted only in more stress, as did Louganis's discovery that he was dyslexic.
When the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1980, President Jimmy Carter barred the United States Olympic Team from competing in the Moscow Olympiad, dashing everyone's hopes for another four years. During this time, Louganis met and moved in with crafty and deceitful Tom Barrett (Jeffrey Meek), who took control of the athlete's career by becoming his manager and assuming power of attorney over his finances, image, and sports endorsements. The relationship quickly degenerated into a series of abusive power plays, with Barrett at one point brutally raping Louganis.
This being the mid-1980s, AIDS quickly entered the picture with both men becoming infected. Louganis advised the sympathetic Coach O'Brien of his sexual preference and HIV-positive status, but was deemed healthy enough to continue training and to compete in the 1988 Olympics. In the '88 Games, Louganis won two gold medals for the platform and springboard events. Tom Barrett's early death was quickly followed by that of Louganis's father, but not before Greg and his dad tearfully reconciled their past differences. That reconciliation and the process of burying his father became a defining milestone in Greg's life. .
FILM INFORMATION:'Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story'
Clip del Film:Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story'
. Download y Archivos de Extracto del Film : 'Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story' .
Método 1. Extracción automática de archivo. (PC) Descargar los archivos en una misma carpeta, luego clickear en el archivo (nombrefilm).part01.rar.exe) (MAC) Extraer los archivos con el Stuffit expander clickeando en el mismo archivo (nombrefilm).part01.rar.exe)
Método 2.Unir los archivos. (PC) Descargar y unir los archivos con un programa como HJ Split (MAC) puede unir los archivos usando el MacHacha o Split & Concat.
"2:37 is not a soft picture but the manner in which Mr Thalluri handles it's subject matter with a profound dignity and it's no holds barred approach acts as credit to it's message. It is a brilliantly crafted portrait of innocence lost. And a master stroke for a yet untaped talent."
Directors Comment:
"A close friend committed suicide in late 2003, and left me a video suicide note. It was something that affected me immensely to the point where, over months, coupled with my own personal problems, I was driven into deep depression and ultimately to an attempt to take my own life. But for everything that happens in one's life there is a positive with every negative. You just have to be able to find it. The day after my failed suicide attempt I began writing 2:37, and finished the first draft in 36 hours flat. If you're busy there's no room for depression."
The film is dedicated to the directors 22 year old friend who took their own life. The film earned a place in the Cannes Film Festival's "Un Certain Regard" section.
A contemporary, ensemble drama telling the complex tale of six high school students whose lives are interwoven with situations that so many of today's youth are faced with. The story takes place during a normal school day. At precisely 2:37 a tragedy will occur, affecting the lives of a group of students and their teachers. As the story unfolds, the individual stories of the six teenagers are revealed, each with its own explosive significance. An unwanted pregnancy unravels a terrible, dark secret; all is not as it appears for the seemingly confident school football hero; an outcast with physical disabilites must deal with everyday taunts from his peers; a beautiful young girl battles an eating disorder; a stellar student constantly struggles to win his parents' approval; while another gay student uses drugs to escape from his own isolation. . FILM INFORMATION: '2:37'
Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X'
Gus Van Sant's rock epiphany is the final film in his informal "Death Trilogy" which includes the films "Gerry" & "Elephant".
"It's a long lonely journey from death to birth." ~ Blake
Not everyone will love "Last Days." Nonetheless it concludes a minimalist trilogy that continued to build Gus Van Sant's credo as a serious and original filmmaker and did so better than anything since "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho". And in its way it's every bit as good as its predecessors, "Gerry" and "Elephant", and like them is HBO-sponsored and exquisitely filmed in a boxlike and claustrophobic small format. The irony is that this career-making role for the young Michael Pitt is that his role in "Last Days" contains little discernible dialogue and he only mumbles but he embodies, lives and becomes his role as few actors you will see have done. He goes to a dangerous and disturbing place. River Phoenix might have taken the part, but maybe it's a good thing for him he never did.
Pitt channels the dying spirit of Kurt Cobain as he was, isolated in a big house, avoided by people there and avoiding them and almost everyone who came looking or called. Once he picks up the phone when his producer is calling and he listens, but never speaks. Blake (Pitt's character's name) is a shaky, peripatetic Howard Hughes, who goes native in the first sequence, wandering in a daze, walking into the woods, bathing in a river, spending the night by a bonfire of sticks. The mumbling is eerie, it's eavesdropping without insight for us. As he returns to the house, stumbles about, prepares makeshift meals in the kitchen, puts on a dress and brandishes a shotgun, the lack of human interaction brings home as no dialogue-written scenes ever could how isolated and mad he has become.
Since "Last Days" is largely a mood piece -- a splendidly original, dreamlike one -- setting is crucial and the old stone house with its crumbling, paint-peeling walls and mess and sound equipment and instruments and paintings, is a major player, so well represented in the elegant, original cinematography of Harris Sayides that it resembles no place else you've ever been. There are three or four other people in the house -- the action's so chaotic and haphazard you may not quite know who or how many. One's clearly "Asia," Asia Argento, and she's sleeping with "Scott," Scott Green, and there's "Luke," Lucas Haas, tall and gangly in Coke-bottle glasses. Blake sneaks up on Asia and Scott with a shotgun when they're in bed together sleeping. Typically, nothing happens. He doesn't shoot, and they don't notice him. They and other people go out to and return from nightly revels. Blake is… just there.
As in "Elephant" Van Sant's approach is neutral. He does not analyze or explain or judge, and the actors are free to improvise and be themselves. Blake's respected because it's his house, but he's also a kook. Random visitors who're let inside are grotesque and comic: first it's dorky but cute twin Mormon "Elders," then a large well-spoken black man selling a renewal of a Yellow Pages ad from the year before. "How's your day been so far?" he asks as an opener. "Uh….it's another day…." mumbles Blake. He's cooperative in a rote sort of way but there's little indication he knows what he's talking about. There's a detective and a young man who once knew Blake, who escapes them and other people by running outside to the woods again. These two are neither sinister nor funny: they just are. They're just interlopers, like everybody else, into Blake's lost world.
The method that this trilogy has in common is that it requires quiet acceptance of the proceedings; that if you give yourself up to its sometimes real time sequences (especially in "Gerry," where Van Sant says they're influenced by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr), they're hypnotic and special, and if you don't, they're just irritating and boring. The experience requires a lot from the viewer. It's hard to describe a movie in which little happens. Nothing turns out to be quite a lot and you might remember that James Joyce wrote a long detailed novel about the events in the life of a little man in a single day in Dublin. It's certainly important that Pitt is deeply in character. If his acting were mannered or theatrical or unfelt, nothing would work. When he finally sings one song, a plangent cry of despair with the refrain, "It's a long lonely journey from death to birth," it's very Cobain, but Pitt's own song and passionate, exciting performance.
There's a kind of climax here, but there's nobody (but us) to witness it. Luke and Scott are up in bed with each other. As in 'Elephant', several sequences repeat. Blake seems to be dying repeatedly, as Asia stumbles upon him lying on the floor and he seems to nod out, though you never see him do drugs and maybe it's just the after effect of them from long before. Finally he's gone. We don't see him do that either. His soul quietly climbs naked up out of his supine body, like a Duane Michals photo. Then there's all the police, the ambulance, and the other inhabitants sneak off, as Blake did. It's all a pageant.
It was Grunge Rock and Kurt Cobain, who died in 1994 at the age of 26, to whom the essence of this film is dedicated. If you give yourself to it and take it in its own context it's a wonderful film, a beautiful funny-sad experience of doomed-damned youth and a deeply felt meditation on isolation and death. ~ Chris Knipp . FILM INFORMATION: 'Last Days'
Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X'
"Elephant" is the second film in Gus Van Sant's informal "Death Trilogy". It is a deeply affecting, haunting film with a laser-like focus on the spirit crushing ennui which permeates our culture and a brilliant distillation of the resulting alienation and angst."Gerry" is the first film in this trilogy and "Last Days" is the final film.
'Elephant' is Gus Van Sant's brilliant and mind-blowing distillation of teenage alienation and angst. Set on one of those sterile suburban high school campuses, the film recounts a typical day in the life of a school - typical that is until it ends in a Columbine-type massacre.
Here is a film in which style does indeed become substance, where the 'meaning' lies in the form and shape of the film itself. Rather than tell us a conventional 'story,' Van Sant has chosen to give his film the look and feel of a pseudo-documentary, merely recording the events and conversations that occur that day, a day we are led to believe is not unlike every other at that school. Van Sant's prying camera eye turns us into voyeurs, as we observe the cliquishness, petty humiliations, and sheer overwhelming banality that have defined high school life for so many of us. Van Sant uses space brilliantly.
Despite the fact that this is undoubtedly a school with a large student population, the characters on whom he focuses seem always to be somehow isolated from almost everyone else around them. None of the characters we see really seem to have any connection with one another, and even when they do, it tends to be of only the most superficial kind. They are like people stranded on their own individual islands, enduring their suffering alone and in silence. Van Sant sets the tone with his tracking shots of characters strolling down seemingly endless corridors heading to nowhere in particular, making little or no human contact as they go.
The camera, throughout the film, seems to have a mind of its own, often avoiding what seems to be a major plot point and, instead, zeroing in on something that seems to have little or no real importance. Then through the process of editing, he weaves nothing less than a tapestry of alienation. By concentrating so intently on the seemingly irrelevant minutia of daily life, Van Sant brings to the film a sense of documentary immediacy most fiction films lack. We are made privy to bits and pieces of conversation only to have the talk dribble off as we or the characters turn the corner and move on to the next group of people. It is the deadening 'sameness,' the insignificance of so much of what we see and hear that makes this such a sad and haunting experience.
One thing Van Sant refuses to do is try to 'explain' why the killers act as they do. He's smart enough to know that there is no single explanation for such behavior, that it arises from a variety of sources and that it is primarily the product of a general feeling of alienation in modern society. We see one of the murderers taunted as a fag and suffering humiliation at the hands of two schoolmates, the second killer playing a violent video game and perusing a gun magazine, but these, in and of themselves, cannot be the sole explanations. At best they are symptoms of a much deeper societal sickness, one that Van Sant can only hint at but never fully grasp - for who among us can claim to truly understand it? What 'Elephant' does is to make us focus on and actually see this spirit-crushing ennui which permeates our culture and which defines life for so many of our young.
The director has drawn fine work from his cast of talented unknowns. Their every word, their every gesture rings believable and true. He has also employed Beethoven's 'Fur Elise' to serve as a haunting refrain throughout the film, capturing the poignancy of a world in which beauty, spontaneity and joy seem to have been removed.
There are some who will find 'Elephant' to be slow-moving, empty, arty and pretentious. For those there are plenty of mindlessly upbeat depictions of high school life to watch. But for those who can appreciate a film artist working at the peak of his form, 'Elephant' is a mesmerizing, vision-altering experience that pushes the boundaries of the medium and takes us to a place, emotionally, that we haven't ever been before. ~ Roland E. Zwick FILM INFORMATION:'Elephant'
Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X'
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