Scenes From A Career #8 - Dario Argento

_______________________________________________

The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes

top: Passion (1982)
bottom: Film Socialisme (2010)


___________________________________________________

And just because I want to post it, here's my single favorite image (at least for the moment) from Godard's latest (last?) masterpiece - a near-abstraction of shadowy limbs pushing and pulling away at cruise ship gaming machines, cutting into the lulling expanse of the Mediterranean Sea.

Five From A Favorite - House of Bamboo (1955)

___________________________________________________

Sam Fuller's House of Bamboo is a sleek, haunting marriage of location and implication, revolving around the infiltration of cop Eddie Spanier (Robert Stack) into a band of Tokyo bank robbers led by Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan). Hazy, insinuation-laden relationships develop, between both Eddie and Sandy, and Eddie and Mariko (a courtesan played by Shirley Yamaguchi), all the while beautiful, somber post-war Japan lurks in the background, filling every dazzling CinemaScope frame with muted dread. A masterpiece.

Five From A Favorite - Stop Making Sense (1984)

__________________________________________________

Masterfully filmed and brimming with both warmth and a deep sense of mystery, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense is the luminous account of a three-night concert the Talking Heads performed in Los Angeles during December of 1983. A breathless frenzy of imagination, conviction, and of course brilliant music, it's been acknowledged over the years as one of the greatest rock movies of all time. Why bother with the rock part?

If you haven't noticed...

If you haven't noticed by now, the ol' blog of late has become slanted mainly towards various screencap presentations. This will be the direction The Blue Vial will be taking for at least the foreseeable future. As much as I enjoy writing about the movies I've watched, it can be quite a time consuming endeavor, and with as much stuff as I view, even the enterprise of choosing what to write about at any given point these days has become frustrating, and quite frankly I just don't have the motivation at the moment to give it my all.

So, in order to keep the blog alive and active (to a degree), I will be focusing on doing various still presentations and the like - through continuing the Scenes From A Career series, which focuses on favorite/important images from the directors that mean the most to me, as well as just any kind of generally fun, variously themed interactions between images from things I've viewed recently. I will also be starting a new feature, tentatively titled "Five From A Favorite", that will be my own spin on similar series from a few of my very favorite blogs (Peter Lenihan's The Shock of Glimpsing, Jeremy Richey's Moon in the Gutter, and Ed Howard's Only the Cinema) where I will present five stills from a favorite movie, as well as occasionally some brief thoughts on the film. I will also try to frequent and comment more on other blogs, something I've relished in the past but has likewise fallen to the wayside as of late. Hopefully this change-up will provide a spark and motivate me to get more involved around these parts, as the passionate film bloggers I've become acquainted with are a fantastic bunch.

I look forward to future interactions with all of you, and hope that you stick around!

Scenes From A Career #7 - Jim Jarmusch

_____________________________________________________

By the Bluest of Seas

from top to bottom: At Sea (P. Hutton); Miami Vice (M. Mann); As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (J. Mekas); Film Socialisme (JLG); City of Pirates (R. Ruiz); Water and Power (P. O'Neill)