Untitled 01.11.11

I need to blacken my heart
Make it stronger
Fill it with concrete and lead
So when you chip away it stays intact

I need to remove the sponge
Make it out of steel
Make it immune to anything real

I need an invisible force field
So stop making it bleed
I need a parameter
That you can't come near

It needs something new
Something like you

It needs nothing
Nothing like you

It needs anything
Anything like you

Azure

I call it love, you call it art

And since my whole been admires you

Only from afar


I wonder no more

What could have been

What should have been


You seem to mix love with inhumanity

Oh what pleasure

The seven deadly sins is no more


Sharp daggers slot into your heart

I shall plant them there with my own two hands

Your sobbing heart


I put my heart under your heels

So you can trample and mock

And twist


A no good

No show

Too much perfection so I said no


My spirit rises like a vapor

Towards you seamlessly

And I will always watch you

For Leilani

Elite you are, in every sense.
The sight of your naked flesh
In this piteous vision is all I care for.
With breasts that defy all odds
Lips as delicate as silk, we both live for sin.

You are just like me but nothing like me
How do I get to be with you? In your knickers one more time.
You're presence is dearly needed
And required in all aspects

You are delicate and intersting
Yet I could never get near you.

Good Bye Lenin (2003) - My Review

It's 1989 and Germany is still a nation divided. After her husband leaves her for a better life in West Germany, Christiane (Katrin Sass) finds herself married to her father land (East Germany).In the days leading up to Germany's unification, Christiane suffers a heart attack after witnessing her son Alex (Daniel Brühl) marching in an anti-communist demonstration. Slipping into a coma, Christiane sleeps through the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the introduction of capitalism.
When she wakes eight months later, Capitalism has triumphed by saturating Germany with a globalised ethos. Even her family has embraced the West: Alex has now got a job installing satellite dishes, and daughter Ariane (Maria Simon) is working for Burger King. During Christiane's big sleep, the drab familiarity of communist DDR had been replaced by garish brandscapes, material folly and new Westernised ideals of progress. Fearing his mother's fragile health will not survive Germany's unification, Alex re-furnishes the family apartment with the bland communist aesthetic of the former DDR. So meticulous is Alex's fabrication that, upon returning home, Christiane happily remarks that nothing has changed.
In Good Bye, Lenin! the world is awakened to new possibilities but Alex forces a social blindness on his mother albeit with the right intentions believing she will survive if her politics can continue unchanged. If Christiane hadn't suffered a heart attack after witnessing Alex's oppositional politics in action, the collapse of the Berlin Wall would have sent her health packing anyway. And so, the fantasy of sleeping through major world-changing events offers numerous tragicomic possibilities. Let’s say for argument sake that the same happened to a World Trade Centre employee, would his family send him to work or tell him of the nightmare?
Initially Alex's charade presents few challenges. He installs a hidden VCR that plays back old news footage and empties new imported foods into jars found in the trash. When mom spies a Coca-Cola billboard from her window, Alex enlists budding filmmaker Denis (Florian Lukas) to produce a farfetched news story -- complete with phony news anchor and video footage -- to explain its emergence. Alex becomes his own propaganda machine, spinning the kinds of lies that he once rallied against. It’s certainly a very interesting premise for a film in my view.
Alex soon discovers that there’s more to history than archival news footage and old pickle jars.The attitudes once forced upon the former DDR are changing fast, making it harder to locate people willing to perpetuate his regressive masquerade. On Christiane's birthday, Alex convinces some of her friends to join him in the lie. Even Alex's new girlfriend Lara (Chulpan Khamatova) plays along for a while. But when he starts inventing idealistic backstories for Lara and his sister's dopey boyfriend Rainer (Alexander Beyer), the lie spirals out of control, alienating him from his family and friends.
Alex's desire to help his mother at all costs makes the premise of Good Bye, Lenin! heartfelt and bittersweet. For me, it celebrates a love often not seen on a cinema screen, that of a boy’s love for his Mother. But the lie can only be sustained through the accumulation of others. After a while, it feels as if the plot exceeds its logical limits, becoming nonsensical despite its best melodramatic intentions. Whilst it may have been reasonably funny, it only served to tie itself up in knots a little bit.
Becker certainly knows how to elicit finely tuned dramatic performances from his cast but when it comes to comedy, the director takes the joke too far, relying on reductive slapstick tricks like fast motion. The most effective comic moments pay tribute to pop culture signs and corporate branding. Recurring Coca-Cola and Burger King trademarks wittily acknowledge how even digs at consumerism must inevitably grant it centre stage.
The scene when Ariane begins her Burger King tenure is staged exactly like a cheesy TV commercial, in effect halting the narrative flow as if cinema intermission has been announced. In The Truman Show, Meryl (Laura Linney) similarly interrupts the diegesis to offer homemaking tips. If that movie satirises our desire to be immersed in the global image stream, then Good Bye, Lenin! demonstrates how an effective critique of globalisation depends on acknowledging its omnipresence, no matter our desire.
Overall, I would recommend this film whole heartedly and think people should see it. It has a lovely premise and as I mention earlier a love often not celebrated in film is presented here so lovingly. It may have one or two flaw but overall it’s an engaging and ultimately rewarding drama. It should strike a chord with a lot of people as I’m sure all of us at some stage have tried to protect someone for some reason or other.

Black Swan Film Review

Before I sat down to watch this I had a range of superlatives swimming around my head such as 'amazing' 'perfect' and 'the best film I've seen' etc. Despite this, these words soon evaporated as I was totally lost in the world presented on screen. However, it's been 4 days since I saw this and those early remarks seem fully justified despite my earlier trepidation.

The only other Aronofsky film I've seen was Requiem for a Dream and that was fantastic so I was hoping for more of the same and my I got more than I bargained for.

I do own the Wrestler but I haven't got around to watching it just yet. I'd like to also see some of his earlier works such as Pi. My point being that going into this I wasn't really sure what to expect. I went into it with high hopes as both this film and The Wrestler in particular were highly revered. It didn't come as a shock to me to find this film as interesting and exciting as it was as I've always had a soft spot for the darker side to films. It certainly took me through a range of emotions.

I think the film itself is hard to place, it wasn't a horror film but at the same time it was very squeamish and parts of it felt terrifying and on this level it can easily be compared to some of the best horror. I’d liken it to The Exorcist oddly enough in that it documents a persons complete transformation from good to evil, from light to dark. It just wasn't expected from a film which was billed as a 'film about ballet'. It was a film of surprises and more often than not it had the capability to throw you around as though you were locked in a never ending bouncy castle.

Whether it was the oft-repeated device of the mother (Barbara Hershey) cutting the fingernails of Nina (Natalie Portman), with tense music, quick editing and edgey close-ups, or the sight of the latest grotesque ballet injury, Black Swan had me wincing more than I care to recall.

It clearly owes much to The Red Shoes, with some shots directly borrowed, such as the first person view as Nina spins around in rehersal. It also has some similar themes, such as the obsessive and destructive relationship between Nina and her director (Vincent Cassel). Furthermore, it is also essentially an adaptation of Swan Lake – the ballet Portman’s character is set to perform within the film, but with which her own life (or psyche) becomes linked, in a frenetic psychological assualt as dreams and hallucinations are confused with reality. Here Black Swan blurs the line between dream and reality effortlessly.

Near the film’s start, Cassel’s Thomas tells his dancers they are to stage Swan Lake: “it’s been done to death, I know, but not like this. We’re going to strip it down and make it visceral and real”, and this is basically Aronofsky’s brief for Black Swan as a movie.

Emphasis is placed on Portman’s foot muscles as she stands on her toes [forgive my gross lack of ballet knowledge!] and on the bloody breaking of her toenails as she pushes her body to its limit in search of perfection. It uses the star persona to enrich the story whilst also reflecting on certain issues such as fear of aging and of being less than you once were.

I thought Winona Ryder was under used here but she has still as magnetism on screen and I would have liked to have seen more of her. She played the former ballet queen and she played the role perfectly; an excellent piece of casting. Portman is the upstart here, perhaps the new Winona Ryder? On a side note, I recently watched Girl, Interrupted and I forgot just how great she is in that. I do hope that we see more of Ryder in future releases, a very under rated actress in my view.

But it is Natalie Portman really shines here. “It’s a hard fucking job to do both”, Thomas says of the challenge involved in playing both the white and black swan in his ballet. But it is a challenge Portman rises to in her portrayal of Nina. Her Oscar nomination is no surprise to me at all and is fully justified especially her shear physical commitment to the role as well as her fragile beauty concealing hidden grit and her inner darkness. She completely nails it. It is by far one of the best individual performances I have seen in recent years and I’d challenge anyone to tell me otherwise.

The aforementioned Cassel, is funny, charismatic and sleezy in his role, convincing as an unorthodox artistc genius. Then there is Mila Kunis’ ambitious, seductive (and possibly dangerous) Lilly, and with her the psycho-sexual aspect of the film’s exploration of the id. Black Swan has explicit scenes and it contains unabashed expressions of raw sexuality through it but it is never once vulgar or exploitative and for this it should be applauded because it could have easily done the reverse.

I’ve yet to mention the technical aspect to the film and this could be a whole new review itself. The virtuosity of the camera work puts you in the dances which I’ve not seen done before and it’s use of colour is at first subtle then more obvious as the character seems to change right before our eyes. You can see this from the clothes they wear down to the very eye makeup they display. All this adds up to serve the drama perfectly and it is emotionally intense. Visually and narratively it is a complete film experience always driving to provoke mood and feeling. It is as cinema should be, at its most alive and in other hands it could be seen as pretentious but it never was. There are no silly sub-plots and everything is where it should be ending at the precise moment.

Overall, Black Swan is a towering achievement both cinematically and purely for an emotional ride which I won’t forget in a hurry, I get a fuzzy feeling at the back of my head when recalling it, even now nearly five days later. And how often can you say that?