Category Archives: films to watch

Fahrenheit 451 | I

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Del Rey, 1991. (First Ed. 1953.)

“One time, as a child, in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon…” p. 7

“It was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon has set. Complete darkness, not a hint of the silver world outside, the windows tightly shut, the chamber a tomb world where no sound from the great city could penetrate.” p. 11

“He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow.” p. 14

“Montag’s hand closed like a mouth, crushed the book with wild devotion, with an insanity of mindlessness to his chest. The men above were hurling shovelfuls of magazines into the dusty air. They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood below, like a small girl, among the bodies.” p. 37

Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley martyred by being burnt at the stake. John Foxe’s book of martyrs. 1563 edition. Via Wikimedia.

“”‘We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out,'” said Beatty…. “A man named Latimer said that to a man named Nicholas Ridley, as they were being burnt alive at Oxford, for heresy, on October 16, 1555.”” p. 40

“”I had a nice evening,” She said, in the bathroom.
“What doing?”
“The parlor.”
“What was going on?”
“Programs.”
“What programs?”
“Some of the best ever.”
“Who?”
“Oh, you know, the bunch.”” p. 49

“The parlor was exploding with sound.
“We burnt copies of Dante and Swift and Marcus Aurelius.”
“Wasn’t he European?”
“Something like that.” p. 50

“And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before.” p. 52

“Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”
“Snap ending,” Mildred nodded.
“Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume.” p. 54

“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digests-digests-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in midair, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” p. 55

“The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!” p. 57

“With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.” p. 58

“We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.” p. 58

“”Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.”” p. 59

“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the goverment is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible date, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.” p. 61

“the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think.” p. 63

“”‘We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.'”” p. 71

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.” p. 82-83

“That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.” p. 83

“Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the two.” p. 84-85

“The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.” p. 86

“A minute later, Three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other’s limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter. Two minutes more and the room whipped out of town to the jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and bashing each other again. Montag saw a number of bodies fly in the air.” p. 94

“Fat, too, and didn’t dress to hide it. No wonder the landslide was for Winston Noble. Even their names helped. Compare Winston Noble to Hubert Hoag for ten seconds and you can almost figure the results.” p. 97

“By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been gone to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.” p.104

to read:

Martian Chronicles (1950)

To watch: Fahrenheit 451 (1966) | Dir. François Truffaut |

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Blue Jasmine

Watched:

Blue Jasmine | Woody Allen | Woody Allen | DP: Javier Aguirresarobe |2013

Watch:

A Streetcar Named Desire | Elia Kazan | Tennessee Williams | DP: Harry Stradling | 1951 |

Read:
Woody Allen article from the Guardian … “You’re probably happier in life if you can forget things,”

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The Things They Carried

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York, N.Y.: Broadway Books, 1990. Print.

“He wondered how the tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology.” p8

“They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there-the tunnel walls squeezing in” p. 10

“just sailing that big silver freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways” p. 23

Banyan tree

“There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood.” p. 32

“The old guy walked with a limp, slow and stooped over, but he knew where the safe spots were and where you had to be careful and where even if you were careful you could end up like popcorn.” p. 33

“Forty-three years old and I’m still writing war stories. My daughter Kathleen tells me it’s an obsession, that I should write about a little girl who finds a million dollars and spends it all on a Shetland pony.” p. 34

“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” p. 38

“Courage, I seemed to think comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down.” p. 40

USS Maddox, DD-731, 1960s. Via Wikimedia.

USS Maddox at the Gulf of Tonkin. Tonkin Resolution.
Gulf of Tonkin incident

Rainy River. Via Wikimedia.

Rainy River, Minnesota/Ontario border.

 

“He was a witness, like God, or like the gods who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them.” p. 60

“I was a coward. I went to the war.” p. 61

Chapter Enemies p.62-66

Chapter How to Tell a True War Story. 67-85

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.” p. 68

“Weird echoes and stuff. Like a radio or something, but it’s not a radio, it’s this strange gook music that comes right out of the rocks… They can’t get on the horn and call back to base and say, ‘Hey, listen, we need some firepower, we got to blow away this weirdo gook rock band.’ They can’t do that. It wouldn’t go down. So they lie there in the fog and keep their mouths shut.” p. 73

“The dark was coming on hard now, and off to the west I could see the mountains rising in silhouette, all the mysteries and unknowns.” p. 73

“It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” p. 78

On war: “It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference–a powerful, implacable beauty–and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.” p. 81

“But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts.” p. 83

“Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be truer than total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” p. 83

“For Rat Kiley, I think facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.” p89-90

South Vietnamese Regional Force flag (RF). Via Wikimedia.

Ruffs and Puffs: Regional Force / Popular Force

“The Greenies were not social animals. Animals, Rat said, but far from social.” p. 92

“Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary.” p. 106

“We all heard plenty of wackier stories. Some guy comes back from the bush, tells you he saw the Virgin Mary out there, she was riding a goddamn goose or something. Everybody buys it. Everybody smiles and asks how fast was they going, did she have spurs on.” p. 106

“And bones. Stacks of bones–all kinds. To one side, propped up against a wall, stood a poster in neat black lettering: ASSEMBLE YOUR OWN GOOK!! FREE SAMPLE KIT!!” p. 110

“But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one overlapping the next, the tips curled upwards as if caught in a final shrill syllable.” p.110-111

“She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill.” p. 116

Batangan Peninsula

“Sometimes, like that night in the shit field, the difference between courage and cowardice was something small and stupid.” p. 147

“Some of the men began shooting up flares. Red and green and silver flares, all colors, and the rain came down in Technicolor.” p. 148

“it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.” p. 158

“The rain made quick dents in the water, like tiny mouths, and the stink was everywhere.” p. 165

“The countryside itself seemed spooky–shadows and tunnels and incense burning in the dark. The land was haunted. We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-century science.” p. 202

“You don’t try to scare people in broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over.” p. 204

“It was a feeling VC must have. Like a puppeteer. Yank on the ropes, watch the silly wooden soldier jump and twitch.” p. 208

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.” p. 230

The Man Who Never Was (film, dir. Ronald Neame, 1956) (Book by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu)

“But in a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging.” p. 236

“We kept the dead alive with stories.” p. 239

There was a story for instance, about how Curt Lemon had gone truck-or-treating on Halloween. A dark, spooky night, and so Lemon put on a ghost mask and painted up his body all different colors and crept across a paddy to a sleeping village-almost stark naked, the story went, just boots and balls and an M-16-and in the dark Lemon went from hootch to hootch-ringing doorbells, he called it-and a few hours later, wen he slipped back into the perimeter, he had a whole sackful of goodies to share with his pals: candles and joss sticks and a pair of black pajamas and statuettes of the smiling Buddha.” p. 239

“To listen to the story, especially as Rat Kiley told it, you’d never know that Curt Lemon was dead. He was still out there in the dark, naked and painted up, trick-or-treating, sliding from hootch to hootch in that crazy white ghosts mask. But he was dead.” p. 240

**'”Well, right now,” she said, “I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like … I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading… An old one, It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checkout for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”‘ p. 245

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Kirk Baxter & Angus Wall | Film Editors

Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter

Angus Wall

Seven (1995) David Fincher title designer

Fight Club (1999) David Fincher editorial consultant

Architecture of Reassurance (1999) Mike Mills [short]

Panic Room (2002) David Fincher

Carnivàle TV series (2003-2005) Title design

See title sequence

Thumbsucker (2005) Mike Mills

Rome TV series (2005-2007) Title design

Zodiac (2007) David Fincher

Game of Thrones (2011-) Title design

Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) David Fincher

The Social Network (2010) David Fincher

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) David Fincher

Kirk Baxter

Gone Girl (2015) David Fincher

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Tumbele

Heard Hugo Mendez Tumbele DJ Mix

Tumbélé! Biguine “Afro and Latin Sounds from the French Caribbean, 1963-74

Read Variety article Charlie Kaufman on Indie Filmmaking: ‘I Have to Have One Commercial Success’

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival largest film festival in the Czech Republic

Listened

To read Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye

Melissa Mathison: Screenwriter

Melissa Mathison: Screenwriter

New Yorker Article The Screenwriter of “E.T.” and “The BFG” Says Goodbye

The Black Stallion (1979) Carroll Ballard from a book by Walter Farley (See half-hour long scene without dialogue) (Produced by Francis Ford Coppola)

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) Spielberg

The Indian in the Cupboard (1995) Frank Oz

Kundun (1997) Martin Scorsese (original score by Philip Glass) (DP: Roger Deakins)

The BFG (2016) Spielberg.
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Dark Roads

Concept similarities between music videos from Radiohead, Chet Faker and Bat for Lashes.

Chet Faker’s Gold (2014). Smooth, robotic camera, panning and tilting over a night road lit by headlights.

Director: Hiro Murai
DP: Larkin Seiple

much like Karma Police (1997).

the car in both videos is similar in style (1976 Chrysler New Yorker in Karma Police).
Directed by Jonathan Glazer

Or perhaps Bat for Lashes‘ What’s A Girl To Do

Bat For Lashes – What’s A Girl To Do from Blink on Vimeo.

Directed by Dougal Wilson | Blink Productions

David Lynch‘s Lost Highway, (1997).

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Chet Faker. Talk is Cheap (2014).
Directed by Toby & Pete
www.tobyandpete.com
DP: Dan Freene

Camera angle, set up, and progression.  Similar point of view with different interpretations of the passing of time.

Radiohead. No Surprises (1998)

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Directed by Grant Gee

See imvb article

More on Murai

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Harris Savides | Director of Photography