Your unusual dish of everything.
TiaHoflin
I don't live on the moon.
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Posts by TiaHoflin
Kirsten Dunst’s von Trier-related discomfort becomes internet art
May 25th
Lars von Trier‘s “Nazi” scandal gets even dumber.
Moronic Hitler comments get the Danish director banned from Cannes – and now everyone looks bad. Despite this, Kirsten Dunst, who fell off the radar a bit after the Spider-Man movies, now seems poised for a comeback; critics are praising her performance in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, for which she just won Best Actress at Cannes.
Perhaps you’ve heard some other news recently related to Lars von Trier, Melancholia, and Cannes, but what? Oh, yes, right, von Trier said he was a Nazi.
For Rich Juzwiak (blogger at fourfour and senior editor at VH1.com), Dunst’s response to those remarks constituted an even better performance than she gave in the movie. To commemorate same, Juzwiak assembled this wall of animated GIFs, which finds Dunst’s body language screaming discomfort and a weird kind of grace. It’s pretty mesmerizing.
A still image is above, but be sure to check out the link for the full animated effect.
Bohumil Hrabal’s “I Served the King of England”
May 25th
What is funny and forlorn, where is the comic pathos, in the following sentence? ‘A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind.’
Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man (that slight vibration of a swagger), grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty destiny, eccentric and possibly mad, a talker, rowdy with anecdote. There is a comedy, and a sadness, in the prospect of an ambition so large (‘for all mankind’) that it must always be frustrated, and comedy, too, in the rather easy and even proud way that this character accepts his frustration: is he not a little pleased with the ‘tiny black cloud’ that impedes his destiny? – at least it is the mark of something. So this character may be grandiose in his ambition, but also in his fatalism.
Such are the goods packed in a typical comic sentence by the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, who died in 1997. The character relieving himself of this little confession is a garrulous cobbler, who admits to being ‘an admirer of the European Renaissance’, and is the narrator of Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age.
And there is Ditie, the picaresque hero of I Served the King of England, a waiter in a Prague hotel, who once served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and worked with a head waiter who once served the King of England. Ditie is usually wrong about everything – he marries a German athlete just as the Nazis are invading Czechoslovakia – but sometimes he says something wise or prescient, and whenever he is complimented for this, he replies, ‘modestly’: ‘I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.’
Hrabal wrote in an expressive, highly visual style. He affected the use of long sentences; in fact his work, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé) (1964) consists of a single sentence! Political quandaries and their concomitant moral ambiguities are a recurrent theme. Many of Hrabal’s characters are portrayed as “wise fools” – simpletons with occasional inadvertently profound thoughts – who are also given to coarse humour, lewdness, and a determination to survive and enjoy oneself despite harsh circumstances.
Much of the impact of Hrabal’s writing derives from his juxtaposition of the beauty and cruelty found in everyday life.
The 2006 Czech film, I Served the King of England, directed by Jiří Menzel and based on the novel by Bohumil Hrabal. This film is Menzel’s sixth adaptation of the works of Hrabal for film. The film was released in the UK and in the US in 2008.
A must-see. Here’s the trailer and the review on rottentomatoes.com.
Flight of the Bumblebee
May 25th
“Flight of the Bumblebee” is an orchestral interlude written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, composed in 1899–1900. The piece closes Act III, Tableau 1, during which the magic Swan-Bird changes Prince Gvidon Saltanovich (the Tsar’s son) into an insect so that he can fly away to visit his father (who does not know that he is alive). Although in the opera the Swan-Bird sings during the first part of the “Flight”, her vocal line is melodically uninvolved and easily omitted; this feature, combined with the fact that the number decisively closes the scene, made easy extraction as an orchestral concert piece possible.
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, and a member of the group of composers known as The Five. He was a master of orchestration. His best-known orchestral compositions—Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade—are considered staples of the classical music repertoire, along with suites and excerpts from some of his 15 operas. Scheherazade is an example of his frequent use of fairy tale and folk subjects.
Rimsky-Korsakov believed in developing a nationalistic style of classical music. This style employed Russian folk song and lore along with exotic harmonic, melodic and rhythmic elements in a practice known as musical orientalism, and eschewed traditional Western compositional methods. However, Rimsky-Korsakov appreciated Western musical techniques after he became a professor of musical composition, harmony and orchestration at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1871. He undertook a rigorous three-year program of self-education and became a master of Western methods, incorporating them alongside the influences of Mikhail Glinka and fellow members of The Five. His techniques of composition and orchestration were further enriched by his exposure to the works of Richard Wagner. More >
10 Great Horror Films You’ve Probably Never Seen
Feb 24th
Being a fan of horror, I thought it is high-time I showed some love for the genre on this site. Horror films are great because they appeal to our most base natures, but also because they are allowed to be as loopy and imaginative as they want… well, at lest they used to be. These days, imagination has been replaced by lots of gore and cheap ‘jump-out-of-your-seat’ shocks. Horror films no longer follow you home and haunt your dreams in the stillness of the night. So, here are ten great horror films that you’ve probably haven’t seen. They will provide you with a much needed antidote to the remake-hell that we are stuck in today. More importantly, each one of these films is very imaginative and will provide you with the nightmares you’ve been “lacking”.
10. I, Madman
This twisted gem from the eighties owes a lot to Freddy Krueger, but is also original and creepy in its own way. Jenny Wright (Near Dark) stars as a mousy book worm who discovers a very strange novel in the back of the used book store where she works. The dimestore paperback is called “I, Madman” and tells the story of a lunatic scientist who falls in love with a beautiful woman. The woman tells him she can’t stand the sight of his face, so he begins to slice it off piece by piece and replace it with the skin of his many victims. As Wright continues to read, events from the novel begin to happen in her real life and she starts seeing a strange man, dressed all in black and carrying a scalpel, everywhere she goes. The movie is creepy, but also great campy fun. It knows how silly it is and flaunts it. It also has much more fun with the premise of books coming to life than the much later, bigger budgeted In the Mouth of Madness from John Carpenter. The finale of the film is as wicked as it is hilarious and makes great use of classic stop-motion animation. From Hungarian director Tibor Takács.
9. Sauna
This Finnish horror film moves at a deliberately slow pace, but is unsettling as all hell. It takes place in the 1400′s and tells the story of two Finnish brothers who have just finished fighting a twenty-five year war with Russia. With the war over, they are tasked with meeting up with some Russian allies and mapping out the new border between the two countries. However, before they begin this task, the brothers commit an atrocious crime that I cannot reveal here. Once they begin mapping out the border, they come upon a remote village that has a sauna right in the middle of the woods. The villagers tell them that the sauna can wash away their sins ‘without the presence of god’. Naturally, the two brothers step inside and begin to be haunted by ghosts and demonic images that may or may not be in their own heads. More >
Codex Seraphinianus
Jan 19th
The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing.
Who were the people who had invented Tlön? The plural is unavoidable, because we have unanimously rejected the idea of a single creator, some transcendental Leibnitz working in modest obscurity. – Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
Like a Borges story, this is as much about the quest for knowledge as it is about the knowledge itself. It involves books missing from libraries, lost translations, and people not answering letters.
The Codex is divided into eleven chapters, partitioned into two sections. The first section appears to describe the natural world, dealing with flora, fauna, and physics. The second deals with the humanities, the various aspects of human life: clothing, history, cuisine, architecture and so on. Each chapter seems to treat a general encyclopedic topic.
The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in our world: bleeding fruit; a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one; a lovemaking couple that metamorphoses into an alligator; etc. Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with a delicate appearance, kept together by tiny filaments. There are also illustrations readily recognizable, as maps or human faces. On the other hand, especially in the “physics” chapter, many images look almost completely abstract. Practically all figures are brightly coloured and rich in detail. More >
Another 20 Games That Make You Think About Life.
Jan 8th
First we gave you five. Then we gave you ten. Now we are giving you 20 games that make you think about life. If you have developed a taste for games of a philosophical nature, then you should be in for a treat – we have some seriously innovative games here, everything from Elude, a game that explores the nature of depression, to Ulitsa Dimitrova, a tale about a street-urchin in Russia.
1. Elude
Developed by Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, Elude is a dark, atmospheric game that aims to shed light on the nature of depression. You play a little guy exploring a beautiful yet forbidding world. The world has three distinct levels, each a metaphor for a different mental state.
The forest that you start the game in represents a normal mood. You can ascend to a higher plane – happiness – by climbing the trees in the forest. From, here you can leap joyously up into the sky by jumping on floating flowers and leaves.
The leaves and flowers disappear after you have touched them and eventually none are left to keep you aloft and y
ou plunge down into the third game area: depression.
This is a gloomy underground cavern, with a sticky muddy base that sucks you down. The first time you end up in this dark place, it is quite simple to escape, but as you progress through the game, you will end up here again and again, and each time you will find it more difficult to drag yourself out of. Elude is a mesmerising gaming experience with a serious message. You can play it here.
2. Air Pressure
You will have to play through Air Pressure – a Flash port of an interactive novel by Bentosmile – more than once to truly understand the characters and themes in this game. And even then you may need some time to think on it. You might, for example, simply see the game as a study of a relationship breaking down. Or, alternatively, you could argue that the girl in the game is a metaphor for some kind of addiction. Or you might… That’s the beauty of the game – there is so much you can read into its multiple stories, and each person will probably draw their own unique conclusions. You can give it a try here. More >
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope
Jan 7th
Two young men strangle their “inferior” classmate, hide his body in their apartment, and invite his friends and family to a dinner party as a means to challenge the “perfection” of their crime.
Rope is a 1948 American crime film based on the play Rope (1929) by Patrick Hamilton and adapted by Hume Cronyn (treatment) and Arthur Laurents, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions. Starring James Stewart, John Dall and Farley Granger, it is the first of Hitchcock’s Technicolor films, and is notable for taking place in real time and being edited so as to appear as a single continuous shot through the use of long takes.
The original play was said to be inspired by the real-life murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Rope has similarities to Agatha Christie‘s short story “The Mystery of the Spanish Chest” from the collection The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding.
On a late afternoon, two brilliant young aesthetes, Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan, murder a former classmate, David Kentley in their apartment. They commit the crime as an intellectual exercise: they want to prove their superiority by committing the “perfect murder”.
After hiding the body in a large antique wooden chest, Brandon and Phillip host a dinner party at the apartment which has a panoramic view of Manhattan’s skyline. The guests, unaware of what has happened, include the victim’s father Mr. Kentley and aunt Mrs. Atwater (his mother is not able to attend). Also there is his fiancee, Janet Walker and her former lover Kenneth Lawrence, who was once David’s close friend. More >
Ástor Piazzolla and the nuevo tango.
Dec 15th
Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla (March 11, 1921 – July 4, 1992) was an Argentine tango composer and bandoneón player. His oeuvre revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music. A virtuoso bandoneónist, he regularly performed his own compositions with different ensembles.
Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 1921 to Italian parents, Vicente Nonino Piazzolla and Asunta Manetti. His grandfather, a sailor and fisherman named Pantaleone Piazzolla, had immigrated to Mar del Plata from Trani, a seaport town in the southeastern Italian region of Apulia, at the end of the 19th century. 
Ástor Piazzolla spent most of his childhood with his family in New York City, where he was exposed to both jazz and the music of J.S. Bach at an early age. While there, he acquired fluency in four languages: Spanish, English, French and Italian. He began to play the bandoneon after his father, nostalgic for his homeland, spotted one in a New York pawn shop. At the age of 13, he met Carlos Gardel, another great figure of tango, who invited the young prodigy to join him on his current tour. Much to his dismay, Piazzolla’s father deemed that he was not old enough to go along.
While he did play a young paper boy in Gardel’s movie El día que me quieras.
He returned to Argentina in 1937, where strictly traditional tango still reigned, and played in night clubs with a series of groups including the orchestra of Anibal Troilo, then considered the top bandoneon player and bandleader in Buenos Aires. More >
Animated Films for Grown-Ups
Dec 14th
Definition: animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways. The most common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video program, although there are other methods.
Anyone who’s seen Princess Mononoke knows animated films can hold their own with their live-action counterparts. For those who still think cartoons are for kids, here are, for starters, has 6 reasons why you’re wrong.
Animal Farm (1954)
Holding the title of “first British animated feature film on general release,” this adaptation of George Orwell’s novel is not entirely faithful to the source text, but hews to the book’s central premise. It was (much) later revealed that the C.I.A. secretly funded the film in an effort to promulgate the anti-communism message. Fun fact!
You can watch the entire film on YouTube.
Fantastic Planet (1973)
Given the Gilliamesque animation and crazy-far-out setting in the trailer, you’d never guess that this movie won the 1973 Cannes Special Jury Prize. Set in the far future, the film depicts a world in which humans are kept as pets by an indifferent race of blue giants who apparently lack animal cruelty laws. The surreal imagery is paired with a trippy soundtrack for an experience that can be enjoyed with, or in place of, the mind-altering substance of your choice.
Masters of Photography: Brassai
Dec 9th
“When you meet the man you see at once that he is equipped with no ordinary eyes.” Brassai (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) – 9 September 1899–8 July 1984 – was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century.
Gyula (Jules) Halász (the Western order of his name) was born in Brassó, Transsylvania, Kingdom of Hungary (since 1920 Brașov), in Romania, to an Armenian mother and a Hungarian father. He grew up speaking Hungarian. When he was three, his family lived in Paris for a year, while his father, a professor of French literature, taught at the Sorbonne.
As a young man, Gyula Halász studied painting and sculpture at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem) in Budapest. He joined a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War.
In 1920, Halász went to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist for the Hungarian papers Keleti and Napkelet. He started studies at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste).
There he became friends with several older Hungarian artists and writers, including the painters Lajos Tihanyi and Bertalan Pór, and the writer György Bölöni, each of whom later moved to Paris and became part of the Hungarian circle. More >
