165/365 (Tuesday) 06/14/2011

Alas this is another cheated picture. I didn't take any on this Tuesday - so this photo from Monday will have to suffice. We had bought this 19 inch TV with a built in DVD player at Best Buy on Sunday for me to take to Ohio. We decided to give it a test run in the bedroom and Sophie was intrigued. We watched a little bit of the beginning of this movie.

The Joys of Streaming Media

160/365 Thursday, 06/09/2011

Ah yes the joys of streaming media. They sometimes lead me to pick movies I probably wouldn't normally choose to watch--probably because it is so easy to stop and pick a different one, if the first one just isn't working out. That's how I stumbled across this beauty: Female Perversions, directed by Susan Streitfeld and loosely based on Louise Kaplan's book of the same name. It stars Tilda Swinton as a very strange "career woman" and quite a few other fairly well-known actresses. The movie plays around with the notion that - to quote from the Publishers Weekly blurb on the amazon website:
"women's perversions parody feminine gender ideals of innocence and submission, while men's perversions express forbidden and shameful feminine impulses." 
The film focuses only on the women's side of this--and tries to tell a story or fable about what happens to women, because of all these perversions they are all condemned to perform. In order to convey some of the main theoretical tenets of the book, one finds slogans from it in the background, as graffiti and I think the above is another example of this--the ad slogan sounds like it could be another one from the book. I found this aspect rather clumsy. The whole film is rather clumsy in fact - not uninteresting - Swinton is always interesting to watch, but I did not really become invested in these characters or their lives. To be completely honest I've tried watching it twice now and have yet to make it through to the end. Maybe I'll go back and see what happens--if it's something interesting I'll let you know....

145/365 Wednesday, 05/25/2011

I have a bad habit...when watching movies alone I tend to stop and start them pretty randomly, sometimes watching two of them more or less at the same time...such is the case with this one...Werner Herzog's  "Encounters at the End of the World" I liked this image of the team doing survival training--wearing a bucket on their heads is meant to simulate how much they would see in a snow storm. I haven't seen the rest of the film yet but I will.

137/365 Tuesday, 05/17/2011

This is a screen shot of the rather odd movie that I watched while ironing my clothes on this Tuesday. I received a completely unexpected phone call that threw me into a bit of a tizzy for the rest of the day.

This movie, the title of which I don't want to give a way yet, since people are trying to guess it on the very active "Name that film" group on flickr was not nearly as enjoyable and endearing as the Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, which we had seen earlier even though they have somewhat similar subject matter.