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Archive for March, 2003

2009 Lost Memories

Category: Uncategorized

From the bifff, a South-Korean movie by Si-Myoung Lee. There are not so many movies using alternate history so one could say it’s always worth checking out. This one happens in a world where Japan fought alongside the Americans in WWII, an atomic bomb was dropped over Berlin and Korea is now part of Japan. Promising alternate history that is absolutely not used. It’s merely the background for sentimental nationalism and some action scenes that are ok but nothing exceptional. And it’s very long.

cypher

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cypher.jpg
From the bifff again : New movie by Vincenzo Natali (Cube). Corporations are spying each other using brainwashed agents. The idea is that the identity can be changed, it’s just a software that has to be properly installed. And there are some software conflicts in the head of our protagonist, Jack/Morgan/?. Manipulations within manipulations never cease to unfold.
This could be nice but it’s not (though i like the brainwash sequence). It kind of degenerates into an information age James Bond, Bond girl included courtesy of the always beautiful Lucy Liu. The ending, supposedly a surprise, is very predictable indeed.

a forest with no name

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yokohama.jpg
Seen yesterday at the bifff the new Shinji Aoyama film, first in a series of adventures of private detetive Mike Yokohama. Mike, wearing incredible, beautiful and hilarious clothes in every sequence, is hired by a rich man to bring his daughter back. She’s hiding in a retreat house where people are named by numbers and are looking for who they are and what they really want to do, under the guidance of a woman simply called “the doctor”. The students, when they “graduate” (i.e. when they know what they want to do, be it kill somebody, or commit suicide), have to leave the retreat even if they don’t want to and are frightened by the external world.
Mike, with his butterfly printed shirt, sunglasses and fake leather vest, seems completely alien and hyper active when compared to the otehr zombie like students. On his second day in the retreat, the doctor tells him that there is a tree in the forest that looks just like him. Very funny and strange, playing around an atmosphere that is a bit “film noir”, i still don’t really know what i think of it except that it was an exquisite pleasure from beginning to end. Nice music by Dowser too, and an end credits song by Phew.
Future Mike’s adventures should be directed by KUROSAWA Kiyoshi (Cure, License to Live), ISHI Sogo (Gojoe, Labyrinth of Dreams), YAGUCHI Shinobu (Adrenaline Drive), and OGATA Akira (Boy’s Choir).

Pauline Oliveros_Saturday Morning

Category: Sounds

You asked me: ‘and you what did you think of it?’.Time to answer, but the way, what if temporarily we call this blog HUPOMNÊMATA (il s’agit non de poursuivre l’indicible, non de révéler le caché, non de dire le non-dit, mais de capter au contraire le déjà-dit; rassembler ce qu’on apu entendre ou lire.’) To go back to saturday morning http://www.arsmusica.be/agenda/15-1.htm, I had the feeling to assist to the remake of an historical moment when every instrument is explored, deconstructed. Where every musician give to hear every tone possible deconstructing their gesture, their instrument. We saw their relationship sometimes intimate to their instrument, could be also the sound of a voice for one woman. What was surprising and and the same time desappointing was that the experiences, the sounds were placed side by side, in place and time. They were playing their partition, not going very far in their intimate relation to their instrument, to the space avoinding us to become voyeurs or alone facing a solitary pleasure exhibited, even if we had pleasure looking at the light on a neck, a face, a decolleté, an arm, a face. This exercice of making hear, seems to make impossible to play together, to play against each other, to play with, to exagerate, to leave. What was the relation between each other, with the audience, with time? The only relation they seemed to have is to a notation.

Go

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So here’s the new blog, time to decide what we’ll talk about (its name should change, i think). Right now there are three of us typing stuff here (Laurence, Harrisson and me), about science-fiction, movies, manga… we’ll spend the two first weeks of this blog to talk about the bifff (Brussels international festival of fantasy film), because, yes we are in Brussels and we’ll try to find something to say about the films we see before completely forgetting them (and i’ll see an unhealthy lot of them).

welcome

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hello Pierre,

Happy birthday
ceci est l entry body
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