mad love (1935)

 

 

king kong (1933)

Some people are so daft that they will go a mile or so out of their way to hunt for a good word: 'They do not fit words to things but look for irrelevant things to fit to their words!' Or again: 'There are authors who are led by the beauty of some attractive word to write what they never intended.' I myself am more ready to distort a fine saying in order to patch it on to me than to distort the thread of my argument to go in search of one. It is, on the contrary, for words to serve and to follow... I want things to dominate, so filling the thoughts of the hearer that he does not even remember the words... So we do well to lean towards the careless and natural...

— Michel de Montaigne,
'On Educating Children'

the end of man (1971)

giant (1956)

Instead of pre-existing ideas, then, we find in all the foregoing examples values emanating from the system. When they are said to correspond to concepts, it is understood that the concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.

— Ferdinand de Saussure, 

'Course in General Linguistics'

even dwarfs started small (1970)

thirteen days (2000)

"There is no Wise Old Man" :: another in the line of incredibly-long-okay-films containing kevin costner. it's a nice primer on the cuban missile crisis in the sense of historical mental-orientation: for those who know nothing or little on the subject, it will not hurt to watch this film and gather a sense of what one side of this four-sided debate (the United States government / the people of the United States / the Cuban government [i.e.: Fidel Castro] / the Russian Government) was in consideration of. the basic theme of the picture, though, appears to be of the very classical Transition of Times; kennedy is in constant reference to 'the guns of august', a pulitzer-prize winning book published in 1962; this cross-referencing with a (now publicly obscure) contemporary (to the depicted time) text, especially from the character of a united states president, is a very intriguing quality: the scene in which kennedy reads an excerpt from this book is, perhaps, the intellectual saving grace of the entire production. however, dylan baker as robert mcnamara, — especially the moment when he informs the old-man general that the cuban blockade is A NEW KIND OF LANGUAGE and not a ye-olden gung-ho battle, — as well as steven culp's performance as robert kennedy, are really quite good. costner is always costner, and his accent gets silly :: bruce greenwood bleeds into the character of kennedy at many moments, and although he may not initially look and sound like him, when all the military advisers and misc white house columns are gather in a room, sweating and panicking, greenwood certainly reigns the aura of a dignified neo-ciceronian president. there is an overall feeling, however, wrapped invisibly into the texture of the film (and punctuated deeply by the final images) of a, 'oh! what could have been!' had every single kennedy not been assassinated. what is the lesson of 'thirteen days' (2000)? [good] movies about presidents are movies made for sitting presidents.

giant (1956)

this is the best kind of long film: over three hours, in mirror'd halves incredibly distinct, distant poles of tone/imagery/behaviour relating to the other, yet the whole of an immersive poetic resonance ...  james dean's performance is mystic; it's science-fiction unto itself: a classic example of the cinema at its purest, medium-specific, dramatic form :: the capturing of rare and intense presence. ...because he was passionate, and passion holds sway over the universe...  Lots of Texas; a woven texture of the state's founding act of Violence over the native Mexicans,  lots of drawl, lots of cowboy hats :: the performing ensemble, — including a young dennis hopper with a significant role, acting almost as the virtuous neurotic visual counter-point to james dean, — is equally brilliant in its support; never did i desire to not see what was happening in front of me, nor wished to return once it was gone. Fellini-evoking Crowds :: large groups of synchronized people, persons composed, treated as cultural colour; swirling movement and motion. Giant (1956) is the prototype of the television mini-series, so, dig it.