Tuesday, April 22, 2014

american beauty / ginger and rosa / white oleander / wasabi

can you send me this list of your favorite movies about girls?

I can, I even can write little introductions to each of them, and this is what I'm doing now, because I want to introduce to people as many movies worth watching in this "genre" as I could, especially when I was asked to do it. And I'm happy to do it :)

[ I'm the kind of person who enjoys watching somebody's (especially girls') stories, to observe their behaviors, to mark their oddities etc. That's why I can rewatch movies countless times without getting bored once they become my favorites. I like to literally "learn how to live" from the protagonists of this movies. I'm a bunch of girls. ]

  • These four are about the girls' and their fathers'/mothers' problems

a m e r i c a n   b e a u t y


There was a girl


she had a kind-of-friend-but-not-really hot classmate


she also had a father


and her father had a vivid imagination (and a mid-life crisis)


Both daughter and her father go through their own crises. And even though the father was being all "today is the first day of the rest of your life", he was the one who failed to escape. And the girl didn't seem trying at all. We all had this phase of depression when we were just a big *sigh*, absently watching the world and skeptically waiting for something to change. And often it does change. For Jane Burnham this change happened to be a weird neighbor guy with a passion to...conceptual art?


And even though it's obvious, that 5 oscars, 93 wins and 74 nominations goes to the movie not because of the "a girl dealing with her life" part, but because of the "a middle aged father with a mid-life crisis who is also craving sex with his daughter's classmate" part, it's cool that it got so much attention. It's always nice when the film is two sides of one coin, i. e. equally perfect for both teenage girls and adults.


P.S. There is one message in this movie which i don't like. When Angela, the Hot Girl, says "I don't think that there's anything worse than being ordinary". I disagree. There is nothing wrong with being ordinary. Ordinary people are cool, they don't fall over themselves to seem so enigmatic and stuff. They just err live? accepting everything as it is, feeling ok with their everyday life? We'd better learn from them to appreciate simple things, sometimes it really helps to make your life a bit happier.

g i n g e r   a n d   r o s a


First of all: Elle Fanning (she was 13 when she played 16 yo Ginger, and got 2 awards for this role. she is just a ball of emotions in this movie and all are so accurately performed)! And then, it's London, 60s, two girls trying to figure out how people live in this world. It's just so comforting to watch their friendship blossoming, and intriguing to follow its brutal decay.


The reason of everything falling apart... society's fear of the future, confusion, never ending pro-peace movements? All this absorbs two not-formed-up-yet girls. And while one of them stays a father's girl interested in politics and anti-war organisations, the other girl, Rosa, chooses love (which also means craving sex with Ginger's father).


While one girl chooses to grow up, trying so hard to become a desirable woman, another girl stays a child, letting adults (her new elder friends as well as family friends) influence her interests, taking the events of 60s very seriously, and helplessly watching her dad's affair with her 16 yo friend. She is not ready for any of this. The movie is somehow similar to American Beauty, only there is more girl's than father's feelings are shown (which means -100 points to public attention), and the friendship between girls i(wa)s real.




P.S. the colours!




w h i t e  o l e a n d e r



Aghh, I want to rewatch this movie.. Ok, sorry. So, this movie has a tagline, which is so accurate, that all I'll write below it, will be just paraphrasing of this one line: Where does a mother end and a daughter begin?



It's a very strong, powerful movie about mother-daughter relationship, where the mother is an absolute leader with her daughter, Astrid, as a subordinate, who feels no need to free herself, and then can't figure out how to do it, asking her mother to let her go.




Ingrid: No! No, no, no. You don't just walk away from me. I made you, I'm in your blood. You don't go anywhere until I let you go!

Her mother, well, a truly smart and strong woman, goes to prison for life after poisoning a man who betrayed and humiliated her (this kind of women doesn't forgive) at the very beginning of the movie, leaving her tamed daughter to a child support center. For the next ten years Astrid moves from one foster family to another trying to find herself, but her mother still doesn't let her go.


And it's a really sad situation. You have a strong worldview and a couple of good life principles to share with your daughter, but you are a bad teacher if you fail to teach her to create her own world where she is the protagonist.


w a s a b i


One of my favorite movies ever! This, and another two movies (Kill Bill, Memoirs of a Geisha), instilled a love of Japan in me when i was a kid. It has so many aspects, and it's SO fun to watch. I rarely love funny films, but this is Luc Besson, so it had to be good. And it is good.  Japanese 90s pop culture overlaps the "old Japan", police still fights yakuza, a japanese teen, Yumi Yoshimido, loses her mother and is left to solve all the mysteries, and find her father whom she saw and knows nothing about.

Yumi Yoshimido: I never spend more than I have.
Hubert Fiorentini: That's a good principle.


I actually mentioned her in a post i wrote a year ago (!bad english alert!). She was and still is my ultimate hero. I beg you to watch this movie when you feel like watching action-comedy about 90s-00s japan.


Yumi!

Ryôko Hirosue aka Yumi Yoshimido from Wasabi

Saturday, April 19, 2014

p e r s o n a l m e s s a g e

i promised some very nice anon to update my blog today. and asking me to update my blog is one of the most effective ways to make me write more here.

so.

Personal message are the first and only guys in my life whose "pictures with words" artworks i really like and appreciate. truth is, i was surprised to realise how many artworks i downloaded while scrolling backwards through their blog. 

because, usually pictures with words on them...


...are never any good.

but these guys are completely different. they're funny, they're witty, they're sarcastic, and they never want to teach you how to live. they just make you feel things.

these are my absolute favorites:






















p.s. i and M are on holidays in japan (M didn't want to miss cherry blossom + we had to pick up 80kg of our stuff from our friends and transport it to new zealand somehow), so if you want pictures, you're always welcome to my tumblr / instagram.

have a nice day/weekend/spring/life you all! (❁ ˘ ◡ ˘ ❁)*✲゚* 

Thursday, April 3, 2014

l ' a t e l i e r a u t o p o r t r a i t


The self-portrait workshop week ended on March 21, and on March 25 there was an exhibition in our art school where we could invite our relatives/friends or whoever else to show them what we've achieved.
"Or.. not." 
said the curator and the students started to laugh nervously. The same happened when he said that he would give us knives when we were done.
"I meant, you'll have to accurately cut away all the unused space!"
During the workshop week we were required to work in the studios at least 7 hours a day, however, the doors were opened from 8 am till 10 pm. We weren't allowed to bring our works home or take a day off. And we must work in acrylic paint. The deadline was on Friday 12am. So, at the end we had to show the curators our at-least-30-hours-of-work self-portraits, and the least important requirement was... alikeness. So, the whole thing had actually nothing to do with drawing a self-portrait after all. Instead, we were tested on how well we can scale/grid a picture and mix colors:
Students had to scale a small photographic source to a larger format (aprox 90x120cm) using a specific 88-square grid to create a minimum of 352 spaces. Each required a minimum of two colours; at least 704 colour mixes overall.

It's funny how the text in the invitation said "the paintings of the Fauves were referenced". However, we still couldn't really work in fine fauvism, because as long as the grid wasn't clearly seen it meant that you would fail. Instead, they showed us an hour-long presentation which consisted exclusively of Chuck Close's works + the works of students from previous years. I didn't like this Chuck Close and it made me quite upset that he had to be our major source of inspiration. I still hoped that I could do whatever I want as long as it was up to all the colour mixing requirements. Then, the two of the curators showed up and started asking me not to forget about the grid, while I was working on my beanie in fine pointillism, the father of the fauvism! *Nope. Grid it.* And did I grid it. When the work was almost finished I drew a thin black almost invisible grid over it.
"It's look.. weird now. What do you want to do with it next?" 
"Err.. Nothing? Should I do something else?" 
"... Well, technically it's a grid, so.. I think, you are fine." 
"Yay, thank you!"




A little victory :) Because I liked what I was doing, and I saw that other people liked it too, students were coming to me telling nice things several times a day everyday (they still come!) which meant (means) a lot to me, really a lot.



Oh, I remembered a story (sorry!^_^): I was drawing in the same room with these two ~yo fuck man~ guys who never used headphones while listening to their ~music~ at school. But this time, they turned it SO loud, I couldn't stay in the room any longer. So, I just went out and sat on the floor to calm down and read a book for a while. And a teacher, v cute and V energetic woman, saw me and got worried. The boys turned the music off (without feeling uncomfortable to turn it on again the next day though), and I returned to the studio (I didn't ask the lady anything, it's just one of those boys was accidentally passing by while i was explaining to her why I'm not in the studio drawing).



Later, she came to me, asked if everything was alright, complimented my work, asked where I was from/where I studied before etc, and then she introduced me to the whole studio and even jokingly asked a girl if she said "hi" to me that day. Ha haa killmethatwassoemberrassing. But she is such a lovely lady!


When we came to the exhibition we saw my self-portrait hanging among the selected works! ^__^ Ahh, I love my/not-even-my teachers and [some of the] students from my college so much I want to lie down on its floor in a star position pretending  I'm hugging it.

P.S. Here are my favorite portraits from the selected works + mine in the end: