92 Films I Like in Alphabetical Order

31 January 2012 • watchings
tags: cinema, comedy, comics, death, desire, drugs, dystopia, fantasy, fiction, killers, love, murder, sex, suicide

This afternoon I wrote this list with 92 films that I like to make a short video.

01. A History of Violence
02. A Simple Plan
03. A Zed & Two Noughts
04. After Hours
05. Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution
06. Arrebato
07. Back to the Future
08. Barton Fink
09. Blow-Up
10. Body Heat
11. Bubble
12. Buffalo 66
13. Cotton Club
14. Crash
15. Crimes and Misdemeanors
16. Cry Baby
17. Charade
18. Dangerous Liaisons
19. Dead Man
20. Dersu Uzala
21. Die Hard
22. Down by Law
23. Dracula
24. Drive
25. Drowning by Numbers
26. Ed Wood
27. Everyone Says I Love You
28. Exotica
29. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
30. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
31. Fight Club
32. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
33. Godfellas
34. Half Nelson
35. Heathers
36. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
37. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
38. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
39. Kick-Ass
40. L’année dernière à Marienbad
41. L’atalante
42. La pianiste
43. Lars and the Real Girl
44. Leningrad Cowboys Go America
45. Looking for Mr. Goodbar
46. Lost Highway
47. M. Butterfly
48. Manhattan Murder Mystery
49. Match Point
50. My Beautiful Laundrette
51. My Own Private Idaho
52. Mystery Train
53. Night on Earth
54. North by Northwest
55. On connaît la chanson
56. Paris, Texas
57. Peeping Tom
58. Persona
59. Point Break
60. Raiders of the Lost Ark
61. Rashomon
62. Schizopolis
63. Secretary
64. Seven
65. Sex, Lies and Videotapes
66. Simple Men
67. Singing in the Rain
68. Some Like it Hot
69. Splendor In The Grass
70. Star Wars
71. The Adjuster
72. The Age of Innocence
73. The Belly of an Architect
74. The Brown Bunny
75. The Conversation
76. The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover
77. The Empire Strikes Back
78. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
79. The Last Seduction
80. The Living End
81. The Matrix
82. The Moderns
83. The Pillow Book
84. The Princess Bride
85. The Social Network
86. The Usual Suspects
87. Three Colors: Red
88. Underworld
89. V for Vendetta
90. Velvet Goldmine
91. Walkabout
92. Zodiac

Watchings

8 October 2011 • watchings
tags: capitalism, cinema, comedy, documentaries, drugs, economy, humour, love, music, noise, perception, politics, sound, television, tv series, vampires

• Half Nelson (2006)
Ryan Fleck

• Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Craig Gillespie

• Sound of Noise (2010)
Ola Simonsson, Johannes Stjärne Nilsson

• The Shock Doctrine (2009)
Mat Whitecross, Michael Winterbottom

• How I Met Your Mother, Seasons 1-6 (2005-2011)
Carter Bays, Craig Thomas

• Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Nicholas Stoller

• True Blood, Season 4 (2011)
Allan Ball

• The IT Crowd, Seasons 1-4 (2006-2010)
Graham Linehan

• Drive (2011)
Nicolas Winding Refn

Fiction and paper on a summer’s day

5 July 2011 • readings
tags: books, drugs, fantasy, fiction, humour, life, murder, novels, politics, religion, sex

[just ten, in no particular order]

The Toy Collector, James Gunn.
The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi.
The Monk, Matthew G. Lewis.
Vurt, Jeff Noon.
Tales of the Unexpected, Roald Dahl.
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, Thomas De Quincey.
The Cutting Room, Louise Welsh.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino.
Leviathan, Paul Auster.

Watchings

26 January 2011 • watchings
tags: anguish, apocalypse, chaos, comedy, conscience, death, documentaries, drugs, electricity, fiction, humour, television, tv series, uncertainty, zombies

• Arduino The Documentary (2010) [watch]

• Dead Set (2008)
Charlie Brooker

• Misfits, Season 2 (2010)
Howard Overman

• Sherlock, Season 1 (2010)
Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat

• Dexter, Season 5 (2010)

• Breaking Bad, Seasons 1-3 (2008-2010)
Vince Gilligan

• Sons of Anarchy, Season 3 (2010)
Kurt Sutter

• How I Met Your Mother, Seasons 1-5 (2005-2010)
Carter Bays and Craig Thomas

• The Big Bang Theory, Seasons 1-3 (2007-2010)
Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady

Inmorality

15 December 2010 • outer
tags: drugs, fiction, freedom, live, quotes, television, tv series

I’ve always been a TV addict, at least in certain sense. Once T. W. Adorno said “I love to go to the movies. What I hate are the images on the screen”, and I could say something similar. I love to watch tv. What I hate are the images on the screen… and the shows… and the stories… and… and… and… In fact, the last time that my TV was switched on was on July, and it wasn’t even me who turned it on.

Anyway, the truth is that I watch a lot of TV, but just TV series. I’ve never been really interested in reality shows, sports, the news, documentaries, etc. I only like TV ‘fiction’ —everything is fiction, of course, but that’s another story.

In the last years, TV series have change a lot, now they are much more explicit, and even daring, but there are some TV series that most people see as quite extreme or ambiguous that in fact are really moralist and reactionary. Take Dexter, for example, in which the hero is a serial killer. This may sound radical for a mainstream TV show, but the truth is that Dexter is an avenger who takes the law into his own hands (a typical topic in American TV series and films). This idea is anything but new, it’s pretty lame and right-winger.

Some friends have discussed with me about Dexter because they don’t agree with me, but in one of the last episodes one of the main characters of the season (a girl who has been brutally raped) make this statement:

“I had imagined a totally different life for myself too. I always did everything by the book, you know? Go, go, go. Never stopped to think. There was high school and college and graduate school… Owen. We were gonna get married at the house that I grew up in. On my wedding day, I tried on the dress, and I looked out the window at the backyard where the aisle was, and I saw everything that that aisle was leading to, babies and matching dinnerware. Sunday barbecues. And I couldn’t breathe. I had to get out of there and find something more. Then everything happened, and I actually thought, this is what I get for trying to live my own life.”

And the moral of the story is… O_O I can’t believe what she is saying! When I watched that episode I remembered another statement from Misfits, a British TV series:

“We’re young. We’re supposed to drink too much. We’re supposed to have bad attitudes and shag each other’s brains out. We are designed to party. This is it. Yeah, so a few of us will overdose or go mental, but Charles Darwin said you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. And that’s what it’s all about, breaking eggs! And by eggs, I do mean, getting twatted on a cocktail of class As. If you could just see yourselves! It breaks my heart. You’re wearing cardigans! We had it all. We fucked up bigger and better than any generation that came before us. We were so beautiful! We’re screw-ups. I’m a screw-up and I plan to be a screw-up until my late 20s, maybe even my early 30s. And I will shag my own mother before I let her or anyone else take that away from me!”

And the moral of the story is… Misfits is funny, cheeky and politically incorrect, Dexter NO!

Watchings

24 October 2010 • watchings
tags: animals, brain, cinema, comedy, conscience, death, documentaries, drugs, fantasy, fiction, hallucinations, killers, love, mathematics, murder, music, nature, particles, perception, politics, science, sound, space, television, time, tv series

• Fringe, Seasons 1-2 (2008-2010)
J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci

• Человек с киноаппаратом / Man with a Movie Camera (1929) [watch]
Dziga Vertov

• Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly

• The Ghost Writer (2010)
Roman Polanski

• El Abecedario de Gilles Deleuze. A de Animal (1988) [watch]

• Some Like It Hot (1959)
Billy Wilder

• Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Sidney Lumet

Modern political terrorism on a indiscriminate scale

30 August 2010 • out of context
tags: books, capitalism, civilization, drugs, politics, quotes, religion

“(…) modern political terrorism on a indiscriminate scale is the monopoly of goverments and is directed at civilian populations.”

“Bakunin claimed that there were three routes of scape from the miseries of life, two of them illusory and one real. The first two were the bottle and the church, ‘debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution’.”

Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction by Colin Ward

El gusto del infinito

15 August 2010 • out of context
tags: books, dreams, drugs, existence, fantasy, hallucinations, imagination, nature, perception, quotes, senses

“Este señor visible de la naturaleza visible (hablo del hombre) ha querido, pues, crear el paraíso mediante la farmacia, mediante las bebidas fermentadas, tal un maníaco que reemplazara muebles sólidos y jardines reales por decorados pintados en tela y montados sobre bastidores”.

Los paraisos artificiales by Baudelaire