epiminondas writes:
I guess Halloween is as good a time as any to take another look at the Mussorgsky piece in Disney’s 1940 film masterpiece Fantasia. However, the music score has been replaced with a modern recording. I think the effect is actually more moving, more viscerally compelling in relation to the visual imagery. What do you think?
Sherbrooke writes:
Myrna Loy–the early years.
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Blowhard, Esq. writes:
Departure of the Witches by Luis Ricardo Faléro, 1878
Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
Paleo Retiree writes:
The way it used to be:
A more recent staging of the same tune:
Fun fact: Bob Crewe, the man behind this wonderfully arousing music — as well as behind rockin’ performances by the Four Seasons and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels — is a gay man. He also supervised the music for that paragon of sci-fi lounge fantasy, “Barbarella.”
Paleo Retiree writes:
Fred Reed thinks that boys should be taught by men.
Women are totalitarian. Men are happy to let boys be boys and girls be girls. Women want all children to be girls. In school this means emphasizing diligence—neat homework done on time, no matter how silly or academically vacuous—over performance, meaning material learned. Women favor docility, orderliness, cooperation in groups, not making waves, niceness and comity. For boys this is asphyxiating. If women wanted to start a bar for women only, men would not care. If men want a private club in which to enjoy male company, women go explode in fury. Totalitarian.
Maybe he’s onto something …
Sax von Stroheim writes:
The first of the Hot Rod Albums. Their third album of 1963, released just a month after Surfer Girl.
Blowhard, Esq. writes:
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
— Gustav Mahler
epiminondas writes:
Among the most beautiful objects of art ever created are the funerary monuments which are to be found scattered around the world in all cultures. Worldwide, there are about ten cemeteries which claim special attention, and among those is the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina. You can view these magnificent monuments in many ways: as architectural statements, as masterpieces of sculpture, stone carving, and stone masonry; as bronze artisanship and mastery in casting; and as works in precision glass artistry. It’s all here and in a variety of styles ranging from Classical, Gothic, Neo-Gothic, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Baroque. The monuments were built beginning in 1822 to the present day. And most are breathtaking. I imagine the feeling one got from walking along the Appian Way 2,000 years ago while viewing those ancient Roman tombs must have been similar to the feeling engendered today during a visit to Recoleta.
I chose primarily to focus on the works of doors and windows in this slideshow, most of them created from amazing bronze castings. You won’t believe the artistic genius behind these wonderful pieces. Most of them were designed and cast in Paris and Milan. As the slideshow progresses, you will simply be overwhelmed by the variety and beauty of these funerary Doorways To Death. The music is the Miserere of Allegri, written sometime in the 1630’s and performed by the Tallis Scholars.
Click on the jump to enjoy a collection of still photos of the Recoleta Cemetery.
Paleo Retiree writes:
Three and a half stars. Set on the harshly beautiful Italian island of Lampedusa, this 2002 film is EZ neorealism — and I don’t mean that as a putdown. For much of its length, the film is an open and attentive portrait of a peasant fishing town, mainly via its rituals, its work, its meals and its children. Events unfold at an unhurried pace — the fascination is in taking in what these people are like and how their traditional, everyone-knows-everyone-else’s-business life works.
The story that slowly emerges is about a young, beautiful fisherman’s wife (Valeria Golino), the mother of three kids, with whom she has a very loving — and maybe too-sensual — relationship. She causes hard-to-understand scenes; she overreacts to everything; she can be disruptive as hell. Whassup with her? Is she mentally ill? Or is she a free spirit trapped in an oppressive small town?
Golino’s darned good, though the chic, waifish thing she physically is struck me as an odd choice for the kind of overwhelming-powerhouse-peasantwoman role that Anna Magnani used to play. The writer/director Emanuele Crialese gives the film a slightly magical, out-of-time aura and an open, unresolved finale. What will up-to-date American filmgoers — addicted as they are to wipe-you-out effects, and to being told exactly where to look and what to feel — make of a quiet, unforced experience like this one, where the whole point is to find your own way through it? That’s a luscious and magnificent (Rossellini, Renoir, Visconti — great names) tradition of filmmaking and film-experiencing that I’m sometimes afraid the world is losing track of.
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