had two movies this weekend:
1. the hours (Stephen Daldry) Meryl Streep, Nicolde Kidman, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Toni Collette
my comments: beatiful acting performance by three actress; the movie talks in the kind of language I like; but the screenplay/stories are not my kind, way too dark, not even signs of bright sunny in any kind; little depressed myslef after the movie. "my life has been stolen from me"
rating 3/5
2. Dead Poets Society (1989)
Robin Williams.... John Keating
Robert Sean Leonard .... Neil Perry
my comments: well, not a bad one, I will rate it 3.5/5. I like the shinny young faces with sincere passions, but the director drageed too much the doctrine.
Football Training (from 9th Symphony 4th Movement - "Ode To Joy" by Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Fritz Reiner) (2:34)
DEAD POETS SOCIETY: Music composed and conducted by Maurice Jarre. Orchestrations by Patrick Russ. Recorded and mixed by Joel Moss and Shawn Murphy. Produced by Maurice Jarre. THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY: Music composed and performed by Maurice Jarre. Produced by Maurice Jarre ---------------------------------------
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John Keating: No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. They're not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they're destined for great things, just like many of you, their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because, you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? - - Carpe - - hear it? - - Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.
O Captain, my Captain. Who knows where that comes from? Anybody? Not a clue? It's from a poem by Walt Whitman about Mr. Abraham Lincoln. Now in this class you can either call me Mr. Keating, or if you're slightly more daring, O Captain my Captain.
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse." That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be? Thank you for playing
Mr. Dalton. I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.
Understanding Poetry," by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D. "To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: One, how artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and two, How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness. A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great. As you proceed through the poetry in this book, practice this rating method. As your ability to evaluate poems in this matter grows, so will, so will your enjoyment and understanding of poetry."
John Keating: Excrement. That's what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard
Sucking all the marrow out of life doesn't mean choking on the bone.
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Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-winning The Hours uses Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway as the link that binds its three leading female characters. Far apart in terms of time and space, those three disturbed, unhappy women have in common both the deadness of a life of self-abnegation and the living, breathing reality of death itself. Despite gaps in the narrative, Stephen Daldry’s stabs at melodrama, and one poor central performance, The Hours stands as an intelligent and deeply moving achievement. Most of the credit for the film’s success goes to Meryl Streep, outstanding as a 21st century Mrs. Dalloway; Nicole Kidman, surprisingly good as the suicidal Virginia Woolf; and Philip Glass, whose beautifully haunting score, alive with longing and soulfulness, is perhaps The Hours’s most important character.
David Hare’s screenplay moves back and forth in time and space, jumping from the English countryside of the early 1920s to a Los Angeles suburb in the early 1950s, and to New York City at the dawn of the 21st century. The changes in settings both accompany and propel the development of the three disparate but interconnected storylines. In 1923, as the severely depressed Virginia Woolf (Kidman) creates the characters and the situations found in Mrs. Dalloway, we witness those very characters come to life decades later, in other corners of the world. In 1951, Californian housewife Laura Brown (Moore), is both reading Mrs. Dalloway and experiencing moments from that book in her own life. In 2001, Manhattan book editor Clarissa Vaughan (Streep), like Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, is intent on throwing a party—in Vaughan’s case, for her AIDS-stricken former boyfriend, Richard Brown (Harris), to whom she is utterly devoted.
Each story has its points of interest, though Laura Brown’s tale is the one weak link among the three. Apart from the fact that she coldly abandons her young son, Laura’s predicament is little more than the old cliché about the woman who must find her true self away from the constraints of the home. Julianne Moore’s apathetic performance (a far cry from her sensitive portrayal in Far from Heaven that same year) fails to convey Laura’s inner dilemmas—freedom vs. convention; self-love vs. maternal love. Instead of playing Laura as a woman who has had all her emotions buried deep inside, Moore opted to create a character totally devoid of any feelings. Laura’s face is a permanent blank, and a close look into her eyes merely shows an extension of that blankness. That is hardly the way to create a live human being, let alone a complex one with whom we are supposed to sympathize.
Another character that fails to win our sympathy is Richard Brown, who is little more than your average movie AIDS victim. The highly capable Ed Harris is thus stuck with playing Richard as a three-note character: angry, angrier, angriest. Never do we sense that Richard is having his mental faculties destroyed by the disease. On the other hand, Meryl Streep soars above the limitations of both her character and her director, handling several highly melodramatic scenes without ever resorting to either self-pity or over-the-top histrionics. Her Clarissa may be a controlling type—while neglecting her own life—but Streep makes a potentially unsympathetic character likable by bringing forth Clarissa’s vulnerability and her desperate need to both give and receive love.
In her 25-year career, Meryl Streep has created countless great portrayals of all types of women, so we have come to expect continuous excellence from her. Nicole Kidman, however, is a different matter. True, she displayed a solid comic talent in Gus Van Sant’s quirky To Die For back in 1995, but her film career always seemed more of an offshoot of her marriage to Tom Cruise than a result of her on-screen achievements. Following a much hyped (and quite mannered) performance in Moulin Rouge!, Kidman reveals a quieter, more introspective side of her in The Hours.
As a plus, instead of the plasticky makeup Kidman has used in her other roles (including her destitute heroine in the purportedly gritty Cold Mountain), she has an ugly fake nose plastered on her face for this one. Whether the fake nose possessed magical properties, we don’t know, but Kidman—though no Virginia Woolf replica—has never looked as interesting or acted as movingly. With a glance, she is able to convey in heartbreaking fashion Woolf’s yearnings for freedom from her constraining life, while her lowered tones add gravity to the precarious psychological state of her character. Finally, to her belong the two emotional highlights of the film: the first, when Woolf and her niece, while in the midst of a lush forest, focus on the the body of a dead bird, a symbol of the ever-present reality of death; and the second, at the film’s end, when death itself engulfs her in the waters of the River Ouse. (Woolf actually killed herself in 1941, sixteen years after the publication of Mrs. Dalloway. She was 59 years old.)
While those and other scenes in The Hours overflow with beauty and poetry (with the assistance of Glass’s music and of cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s soft, melancholy hues), neither adapter David Hare nor director Stephen Daldry fully succeeds in patching up several puzzling holes in the narrative. When Richard kills himself, for instance, we have no sympathy for him. That is partly because we know him only as a bitter, sour man, but it is mostly because he decides, with what seems like a totally clear head, to jump out the window right in front of Clarissa—and for no apparent reason. (Except that a shell-shocked poet in Mrs. Dalloway also jumps out a window to his death.)
Clarissa’s relationship with her female lover is another major narrative gap. We are never told what made Clarissa search for the companionship of women, considering that her greatest love had been Richard, and that she had been married to another man and had raised a daughter (Claire Danes, giving the most amateurish performance in the film). True, Mrs. Dalloway was quite probably a lesbian, but this particular connection to the 21st century Clarissa is too tenuous to be convincing. And this reviewer hopes that the film does not imply that Richard “became” a gay man because of his mother’s negligence—or worse, because he witnessed her kissing the mouth of her beloved neighbor, Kitty (Collette). The insinuations are there, though no overt rationalizations are forthcoming.
Although sections of The Hours are unsatisfying, the whole packs a major emotional wallop. Life, The Hours implies, may not be ours to live. Our fate has been sealed long before we were born. Perhaps Virginia Woolf’s own tragic fate had already been written by another author, in some past century, in some far away place. A disturbing—and perhaps silly—notion that in no way detracts from the real drama, the magnificent score, or the two first-rate performances The Hours has to offer.
2.
Three women are connected through time and space via a novel: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
In the English countryside of the early 1920s, the depressive and suicidal Virginia Woolf (Kidman), attempts to recover from a nervous breakdown by working on Mrs. Dalloway, a novel in which she chronicles a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a woman whose obsession on throwing a party is disrupted by remembrances of things past. Despite her newly flourishing creativity, Woolf's depression worsens even as her husband, Leonard (Dillane), struggles to help her.
In the Los Angeles of the early 1950s, suburban housewife and mother Laura Brown (Moore) is reading Mrs. Dalloway. When she finds out that her neighbor (Collette) may be suffering from a fatal illness, Laura expresses her love for the woman and then suffers a nervous breakdown. She abandons her son and husband, and sets out to kill herself.
In New York at the dawn of the 21st century, bisexual literary editor Clarissa Vaughan (Streep) is obsessed with throwing a party for her former boyfriend Richard Brown (Harris), an AIDS-stricken author who has just won a prestigious literary award. In the meantime, Clarissa must deal with her jealousy of Richard’s current lover, Louis Waters (Daniels), and with Richard’s burning desire to end it all.
