In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody's got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about.
Cameron Crowe
Friday, November 12, 2010
Happy Birthday , Perfect 10 !
She was my childhood inspiration - Nadia Comaneci, the first gymnast ever to be awarded a perfect score of 10 in an Olympic gymnastic event.
"...Romania, 1976.In a communist country where our very few happy moments where the Saturdays "Dallas" episodes or-for the children-the Sundays 20 minutes (only) of "real cartoons" from Disney, Nadia helped us to dream again about what you can do if you have the determination needed.
During the nights of Montreal Olympics (there is 7 hours deference between the East Coast and Bucharest), we use to stay late in the nights to see Nadia competing. Next days, most of us were felling asleep at school or work. My older family members said they didn't have so much emotions and excitement (and late nigh TV broadcast) since the first landing on the Moon back in 60's. I think these both events are somehow connected because they show how much the human being can progress and do for the benefit of the whole world."
Nadia Comaneci- the very first "Perfect 10" World Citizen
"The world's first perfect gymnast"
By BRUCE LOWITT ,
from "Top 100 Sport Stories of the Century"
"The silence was broken only by the sounds of clicking -- hundreds of cameras capturing the moment.
What they caught was perfection. Nadia Comaneci, the 14-year-old Romanian, arched in midair for an instant on her dismount from the uneven parallel bars, then the feet supporting her 4-foot-11, 86-pound body landed softly on the mat.
The silence was shattered by an explosion of cheering and applause that, after a few seconds, turned to consternation. Flashing on the electronic scoreboard was 1.00. It took a moment for the 18,000 spectators at the Forum to realize that Comaneci had, in effect, outperformed modern technology."
Read full original story here.
"...Romania, 1976.In a communist country where our very few happy moments where the Saturdays "Dallas" episodes or-for the children-the Sundays 20 minutes (only) of "real cartoons" from Disney, Nadia helped us to dream again about what you can do if you have the determination needed.
During the nights of Montreal Olympics (there is 7 hours deference between the East Coast and Bucharest), we use to stay late in the nights to see Nadia competing. Next days, most of us were felling asleep at school or work. My older family members said they didn't have so much emotions and excitement (and late nigh TV broadcast) since the first landing on the Moon back in 60's. I think these both events are somehow connected because they show how much the human being can progress and do for the benefit of the whole world."
Nadia Comaneci- the very first "Perfect 10" World Citizen
"The world's first perfect gymnast"
By BRUCE LOWITT ,
from "Top 100 Sport Stories of the Century"
"The silence was broken only by the sounds of clicking -- hundreds of cameras capturing the moment.
What they caught was perfection. Nadia Comaneci, the 14-year-old Romanian, arched in midair for an instant on her dismount from the uneven parallel bars, then the feet supporting her 4-foot-11, 86-pound body landed softly on the mat.
The silence was shattered by an explosion of cheering and applause that, after a few seconds, turned to consternation. Flashing on the electronic scoreboard was 1.00. It took a moment for the 18,000 spectators at the Forum to realize that Comaneci had, in effect, outperformed modern technology."
Read full original story here.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NADIA !
and THANK YOU
Monday, November 8, 2010
To Claire; From Sonny - a review
"You can’t make great movies if the world doesn’t amaze you."
A quote that stays in my mind from the moment when I've read a review about The Fall in 2008. After two years I had the chance to meet the author, James Tatham, the name behind Movie Waffle, one of the best written film review blogs from Wales, UK. James is also an english teacher at a college in Cardiff.
Here is the result of our first collaboration, probably the first film review for an youtube short film created by a teenager.
To Claire; From Sonny – A Review
by James Tatham for MovieWaffle and IO.1
Young love is like dying: a total, blissful, elegiac sense of the world. Youth itself is a finite state; unlike adulthood, which drones on and on. Youth – like pop music – is emphatically present. It crackles: “Now”. And that boldness of feeling floods young love. To be in love at sixteen is to be awash with feeling: filling up and up and up. Again, it makes for that death connection: the tsunami-life, where living surges so fast that death seems like the only possible corollary. Shakespeare didn’t kill off Romeo and Juliet because he set out to write a tragedy; he killed them because young love can only die…or else it cools… or else you grow up. Josh Beattie’s short, To Claire; From Sonny, is a small masterpiece on the subject.
“Dear Claire,” he writes. And then we see her. She’s posing at the back of a ferry, in Brisbane, Australia. The city is behind her. She’s young and beautiful. Sonny’s narration takes the form of a letter to Claire, telling her of his life since their break-up. He writes in a reverie. Claire was his first love. Like all first loves, she gave him the sense that all life’s questions had been answered. But they broke-up, or else… something happened. So now Sonny rides the train, and thinks of his new girlfriend (who, to his bemusement, “voluntarily eats celery”), and Claire is dearer to him than ever, now that she’s gone. He writes to evoke her. He wants her memory to crash over him. The hurt she brings is a powerful love.
Unabashed feeling is valid here, because, to render young love accurately, you can’t dodge feeling with cynicism. In some respects, To Claire; From Sonny is reminiscent of the kind of heartfelt movies Alejandro González Iñárritu makes, where the shimmering beauty of life is constant, and death is like a complimentary space. There’s always death in an Iñárritu movie, because, without it, life wouldn’t glisten. Iñárritu makes elegies, and To Claire; From Sonny shares that wistful sentiment. Director Josh Beattie is remarkably deft at avoiding maudlin overtones, or the threat of despondency settling over the short. Again, like Iñárritu, he’s able to make you feel transported rather than entombed. Half the pleasure of watching the movie comes from the life it catches: from Claire’s eyelashes brushing Sonny’s chest, to the way the world flows past a train window, silently unmooring passengers’ thoughts.
The young actor who plays Sonny looks a little like Nicholas Hoult, the young actor who played the embodiment of youth in Tom Ford’s A Single Man. The actress who plays Claire looks a little like Gossip Girl’s Michelle Trachtenberg. Neither is required to speak in To Claire; From Sonny. But they do look like they could be a real couple; you believe in their romance. This isn’t meant to be an actor’s showcase, after all; it’s a director’s calling card. What stands out most, watching the short, isn’t the brilliant quality of the acting; it’s the prodigious skill with which the film is made. A graveyard sequence is shot in panoramic miniature, as if it were a diorama, illustrating grief. Time-lapse photography depicts Brisbane as aloof.
At seventeen, director Josh Beattie displays the kind of instinct a twenty-year professional should envy. Like all natural film-makers, he knows intuitively when to cut and how long a scene should play. He frames his actors wonderfully: one shot in particular, of Claire walking down a suburban road, has her centre-frame – insistently pacing toward us – moving closer and closer to the camera, until she’s so close… we lose sight. When Sonny thinks back on his favourite moments with Claire, intimacy is conveyed through close-ups of her feet, eyes, hands. The film isn’t a moment too long or too short. It takes up only the space of a letter, saying the one thing every letter says: Now, I’m thinking of you.
Young love isn’t about marriage, or having children. It’s a two-man show, where every night you both split your heart open, and every morning you both treasure the pain. Nothing competes with love when you’re sixteen. Homework doesn’t hold a candle to the heart-stricken wait for his-or-her next call. When you grow-up, love is clouded by other love affairs: the heart gets paunchy, balconies are rarely scaled. Jobs come to pummel love. Routines set in. Years chip at certainties. For a spark to be a spark, it can only last a short while. To Claire; From Sonny is about the tumult of love, the part that’s most exciting, and the shortest lived. We all cherish our first love. We all mourn the loss of our heart-quaking youth.
http://moviewaffle.com/
A quote that stays in my mind from the moment when I've read a review about The Fall in 2008. After two years I had the chance to meet the author, James Tatham, the name behind Movie Waffle, one of the best written film review blogs from Wales, UK. James is also an english teacher at a college in Cardiff.
Here is the result of our first collaboration, probably the first film review for an youtube short film created by a teenager.
To Claire; From Sonny – A Review
by James Tatham for MovieWaffle and IO.1
Young love is like dying: a total, blissful, elegiac sense of the world. Youth itself is a finite state; unlike adulthood, which drones on and on. Youth – like pop music – is emphatically present. It crackles: “Now”. And that boldness of feeling floods young love. To be in love at sixteen is to be awash with feeling: filling up and up and up. Again, it makes for that death connection: the tsunami-life, where living surges so fast that death seems like the only possible corollary. Shakespeare didn’t kill off Romeo and Juliet because he set out to write a tragedy; he killed them because young love can only die…or else it cools… or else you grow up. Josh Beattie’s short, To Claire; From Sonny, is a small masterpiece on the subject.
“Dear Claire,” he writes. And then we see her. She’s posing at the back of a ferry, in Brisbane, Australia. The city is behind her. She’s young and beautiful. Sonny’s narration takes the form of a letter to Claire, telling her of his life since their break-up. He writes in a reverie. Claire was his first love. Like all first loves, she gave him the sense that all life’s questions had been answered. But they broke-up, or else… something happened. So now Sonny rides the train, and thinks of his new girlfriend (who, to his bemusement, “voluntarily eats celery”), and Claire is dearer to him than ever, now that she’s gone. He writes to evoke her. He wants her memory to crash over him. The hurt she brings is a powerful love.
Unabashed feeling is valid here, because, to render young love accurately, you can’t dodge feeling with cynicism. In some respects, To Claire; From Sonny is reminiscent of the kind of heartfelt movies Alejandro González Iñárritu makes, where the shimmering beauty of life is constant, and death is like a complimentary space. There’s always death in an Iñárritu movie, because, without it, life wouldn’t glisten. Iñárritu makes elegies, and To Claire; From Sonny shares that wistful sentiment. Director Josh Beattie is remarkably deft at avoiding maudlin overtones, or the threat of despondency settling over the short. Again, like Iñárritu, he’s able to make you feel transported rather than entombed. Half the pleasure of watching the movie comes from the life it catches: from Claire’s eyelashes brushing Sonny’s chest, to the way the world flows past a train window, silently unmooring passengers’ thoughts.
The young actor who plays Sonny looks a little like Nicholas Hoult, the young actor who played the embodiment of youth in Tom Ford’s A Single Man. The actress who plays Claire looks a little like Gossip Girl’s Michelle Trachtenberg. Neither is required to speak in To Claire; From Sonny. But they do look like they could be a real couple; you believe in their romance. This isn’t meant to be an actor’s showcase, after all; it’s a director’s calling card. What stands out most, watching the short, isn’t the brilliant quality of the acting; it’s the prodigious skill with which the film is made. A graveyard sequence is shot in panoramic miniature, as if it were a diorama, illustrating grief. Time-lapse photography depicts Brisbane as aloof.
At seventeen, director Josh Beattie displays the kind of instinct a twenty-year professional should envy. Like all natural film-makers, he knows intuitively when to cut and how long a scene should play. He frames his actors wonderfully: one shot in particular, of Claire walking down a suburban road, has her centre-frame – insistently pacing toward us – moving closer and closer to the camera, until she’s so close… we lose sight. When Sonny thinks back on his favourite moments with Claire, intimacy is conveyed through close-ups of her feet, eyes, hands. The film isn’t a moment too long or too short. It takes up only the space of a letter, saying the one thing every letter says: Now, I’m thinking of you.
Young love isn’t about marriage, or having children. It’s a two-man show, where every night you both split your heart open, and every morning you both treasure the pain. Nothing competes with love when you’re sixteen. Homework doesn’t hold a candle to the heart-stricken wait for his-or-her next call. When you grow-up, love is clouded by other love affairs: the heart gets paunchy, balconies are rarely scaled. Jobs come to pummel love. Routines set in. Years chip at certainties. For a spark to be a spark, it can only last a short while. To Claire; From Sonny is about the tumult of love, the part that’s most exciting, and the shortest lived. We all cherish our first love. We all mourn the loss of our heart-quaking youth.
http://moviewaffle.com/
Saturday, November 6, 2010
In Loving Memory of Andy Irons
Wikipedia:
Philip Andrew Irons (July 24,1978 – November 2, 2010) was a professional surfer. Irons learned to surf on the dangerous and shallow reefs of the North Shore in Kauai, Hawaii. Over the course of his professional career, he won three world titles (2002, 2003, 2004), three Quiksilver Pro France titles (2003, 2004, 2005), two Rip Curl Pro Search titles (2006 and 2007) and 20 elite tour victories including the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing four times from 2002-2006. On September 3, 2010 he won the Billabong Pro in Tahiti.
He and his family hosted the Annual Irons Brothers Pinetrees Classic, a contest for youngsters. The governor of Hawaii declared February 13 forever 'Andy Irons Day'.
His younger brother, Bruce Irons, is a former competitor on the World Championship Tour of Surfing (WCT). During his childhood Andy regularly lost to Bruce in contests, but that changed once he entered the World Championship Tour.
Billabong produced an "Andy Irons" line of board shorts.
Irons married Lyndie Dupuis on November 25, 2007 in Princeville, Kauai. She was seven months pregnant with their first child at the time of his death.
He was inducted into the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach, California in 2008.[3]
He is the only surfer to have won a title at every venue on the ASP calendar.
The 2004 movie Blue Horizon (directed by surfing filmmaker Jack McCoy), paralleled his life on the WCT tour with that of free surfer, David Rastovich. The film also touched on his long-time rivalry with ten-time world champion Kelly Slater. Although the film was created in a documentary-like style, there has been some debate over whether or not the film offered an accurate and fair portrayal of Irons' surfing lifestyle. In addition to "Blue Horizon", Irons was also a subject of many other surf films, including his last screen appearance in Trilogy, which starred himself, Joel Parkinson, and Taj Burrow.
Surfing king Kelly Slater found the perfect way to highlight his incredible career and then dedicated it to rival and friend Andy Irons who died last week. Slater marked his unprecedented 10th world title victory with a 10 out 10 wave score to also win the Rip Curl Pro Search event in Puerto Rico on Saturday.
The ASP World Tour paid its respect to Andy Irons with a massive memorial paddle-out in Puerto Rico on Wednesday, 3 November 2010.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
My Dream Flower Machine created by Angelo Vermeulen
Angelo Vermeulen is a visual artist, filmmaker, biologist, author, activist, and DJ.
How you can name him in a single word ? Probably the language has to adapt itself for the complex human beings of the future.
I name Angleo a IO . IO (10) is my tag for all the 2.0 Renaissance people.
And the "Ultimate Flower Machine" is the dream computer for my film.
Watch Angelo Vermeulen's presentation on his project, Biomodd – a computer that coexists with a living ecosystem.
Discover more ! You will be fascinated.
http://www.angelovermeulen.net/
Many thanks to WILDCAT2030
How you can name him in a single word ? Probably the language has to adapt itself for the complex human beings of the future.
I name Angleo a IO . IO (10) is my tag for all the 2.0 Renaissance people.
And the "Ultimate Flower Machine" is the dream computer for my film.
Watch Angelo Vermeulen's presentation on his project, Biomodd – a computer that coexists with a living ecosystem.
Discover more ! You will be fascinated.
http://www.angelovermeulen.net/
Many thanks to WILDCAT2030
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