Monday, September 3, 2012

Charlie Chapman — The Great Dictator

"We think too much and feel too little: More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate – only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural.

In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written ” the kingdom of God is within man ” – not one man, nor a group of men – but in all men – in you, the people.

You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. "

Friday, August 10, 2012

The True Meaning of Thanksgiving


The scene (starting at 1:23) gave me chills...it's so sad because it's true.

You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, you will play golf, and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller.

 I'm surprised the Native Americans haven't risen up to seek vengeance for grievances unpaid for.


 
Oh and Christina Ricci was amazing in this film and in "Black Snake Moan."

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Mesmerizing Burlesque Video

This was filmed in Dallas by my friend. She's rather butch for my taste but she's really good at this! I'm completely mesmerized. 0_0


Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Arrival of the Birds

By Cinematic Orchestra, one of my favorite new bands.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Fear is Your Friend

Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body:

"So, fear is your friend.  Fear is an indicator.  Sometimes, it shows what you shouldn't do, more often than not, it shows you exactly what you should do.  And the best results that I've had in life, the most enjoyable times, have all been from asking a simple question:  'What's the worst that could happen?'  Especially, with fears that you gained when you were a child.

Take the analytical frameworks, the capabilities that you have, apply them to old fears, apply them to very big dreams.

When I think of what I fear now, it's very simple:  when I imagine what my life would have been like without the educational opportunities I have had.  It makes me wonder."


Friday, July 6, 2012

Lesbian Love on "Skins"

The UK version beats the US version, hands-down.  I tried watching the US version once for more than 5 minutes and utterly failed due to boredom.

This is lesbian love, well any love, boiled down to its raw and visceral nature.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Head On (1998) by Ana Kokkinos

I'm gonna live my life, I'm not gonna make a difference, I'm not gonna change a thing. No one's gonna remember me when I'm dead. I'm a sailor, and a whore, and I will be until the end of the world.


I'm halfway through "Head On" (1998), an indie Australian film about a gay Greek 19 year old, who is searching for meaning in a racist, homophobic society that rejects his culture and his lifestyle.  He seeks escape from this harsh reality by indulging in a seedy underworld of sex, drugs, gambling, and other ephemeral means to chase a high.

It's also the first film, I've seen that's delved into Greek culture so unabashedly and uncensored.  I loved the scene where the father tenderly dances with his son to a traditional Greek song and presses his forehead on his son's.  This tender moment is rare amidst all the yelling and fighting between father and son.  Ana Kokkinos did a great job in blending the cultural as well as sexual struggle that Ari deals with growing up in an unwelcoming Australia.

After Ari tries to but finds sex with a female unappealing.  The girl calls him a "poufter" at first but then settles down and says, "I'm glad you don't act like a faggot, Ari" to which he replies:  "I'm a man...I don't take it up the ass."  She snorts, "Of course you do, you're Greek.  They all take it up the ass. [...] Fucking life!  I hate this fucking life!  I fucking hate it..."

At a bar, an intellectual girl states,  "That's what wrong about this country.  Everyone hates everyone.  The skips hate the wogs.  The wogs hate the Asians.  And everyone hates the blacks."

(If you're from the states and aren't familiar with Aussie slang, like me.  Check out this site.  The racial slurs used in the quote above:  skip = white Australian, wog = Mediterranean person.)

This certainly ain't "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."

The best bildungsroman movie I've seen in awhile.

Trailer:



I liked this review on IMDB by mattydee74 (Sydney):

Head On is an amazing film. Its beauty and treasures lie in not judging the journey taken in the film but opening up to the experiences of a young man lost and hidden. Its not a bright, gay film but rather a fiery drama which doesn't offer answers but depicts a painful truth which many would prefer to disregard. This is a film about the loss of hope in the jaded nineties. It is very much a local film (shot in Melbourne) and an Australian film, but I think it offers up wider and more general issues. 


Few films capture the mood of the 1990s quite like Head On. It is a film embedded with characterisitics which intuitively identify the strangely blank decade that edged up to the 21st century. If the eighties was - though simplistically - regarded as the decade of high paced materialism. The 90s can be seen as a time of conservatism and cautiousness - again too simplistically - which could be regarded as the tired decade. A time imbued with a feeling that everything had already been done. Grunge embodied this, as did the increasing popularity of pastiche and remakes such as the way television shows were more and more the source for films. It was a time where even moreso than in previous decades - the answers and ideas were sort in ready-made forms. Reused, resurrected and exploited. Sarcasm and cynicism became law. Pettiness became more and more common. Many of us were just tired out. 

Friday, June 8, 2012

Trippy Music Video & "Weekend"




This song was played at the end of "Weekend," an indie UK film, which was pretty subdued but the script was beautifully and intelligently written. It was a very thought provoking film.

The director and writer, Andrew Haigh, wrote this for the synopsis:

"On a Friday night after a drunken house party with his straight mates, Russell heads out to a gay club, alone and on the pull. Just before closing time he picks up Glen but what's expected to be just a one-night stand becomes something else, something special. That weekend, in bars and in bedrooms, getting drunk and taking drugs, telling stories and having sex, the two men get to know each other. It is a brief encounter that will resonate throughout their lives. Weekend is both an honest and unapologetic love story between two guys and a film about the universal struggle for an authentic life in all its forms. It is about the search for identity and the importance of making a passionate commitment to your life."

I liked this review posted about it on IMDB by brocksilvey:

"In "Weekend," a beautifully acted and written indie drama from writer/director, Andrew Haigh, two gay men fall heavily for each other over the course of a 2 or 3 day period, each getting at something in the other that no one before had managed to do. But this is not a "gay" movie, and people who stay away from it because they think it has a gay agenda, or that it has nothing to say to them, or who are simply uncomfortable with the sight of two men having sex, will deny themselves the pleasure of seeing a film with a universal message about what it's like to be lonely and the search for meaningful human connections that kind of loneliness motivates.

It's not that Haigh avoids addressing the complications of being gay in the present day. Part of what I admired about the film was that it put being gay, and the constant energy it takes on the part of gay men to either fight or ignore the ignorance and hostility they must constantly endure, in a context that anybody can understand. The film's central character, Russell (Tom Cullen), has been raised as a foster child in a "straight" environment. His foster brother knows he's gay and is accepting of it, but even at that, Russell's time with his brother and his brother's family only accentuates the desolate fact that the kind of "normal" happiness his brother enjoys (the solidarity of a strong marriage, children) is something that at best he will have to fight for or at worst will be denied altogether. The bitterness this harsh reality can create in gay men is illustrated in the character of Glen (Chris New), a crusader who believes happiness in marriage is a sham perpetrated by the straight community and that attempts at finding contentment and satisfaction in a life partner are akin to tilting at windmills.

Cullen and New deliver award-worthy performances, so it's a shame that this film's size and subject matter will deny it any kind of major awards attention. The film is actually breathtaking at moments, albeit in an unassuming way, in its frankness and its ability to capture perfectly in words ideas about the way our societies treat relationships, commitments and love that I had only half articulated to myself. It would be easy to believe that Haigh found two non-actors roaming the streets, asked them to star in a movie, gave them situations to play out without a script, and filmed the results. It's that authentic."

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Llorando (Crying) by Rebekah del Rio




I like this YT video more, but the embedding is disabled.  It has both the Espanol and English lyrics provided and it has scenes from "Mulholland Drive" (video above) as well as the end of season 3's "Prison Break."

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Fire Spinning!

Brannigan and Greg's Going Away Party happened last night in Dallas near SMU.  I didn't bring a proper camera so my old mobile took a bunch of blurry photos.

Here's two videos that came out rather well though.

Brannigan doing her thing solo:




Brannigan and Greg (partners) getting intimate with fire and each other:




Stay tuned for video footage of yours truly fire spinning for the first time!
Totally unexpected...and I'll have the proof when my friend, Matt, sends me his camera phone footage.  He has the new Samsung Galaxy smartphone and from what I saw, it was the clearer video out of the two.

This is Brannigan's own Youtube channel, zappify 17.  Check it out!

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Spirituality Meets Science

mind=blown

 Dr. Jill Bolte had a stroke where her left hemisphere hemorrhaged. This resulted in her epiphany ("stroke of insight").



Thursday, May 24, 2012

Funny V-Log (2 Bucks)


I normally find Vlogs to be boring but this one cracked me up. (Highlights for me:  the epic sneeze @ 2:00, the ghetto single mom impression, and the hilarious K-pop dance at the end).


Saturday, May 19, 2012

Dead in 5 Seconds

I don't normally likes these types of videos (required viewing for my defensive driving online course for my speeding ticket), but right as I was zoning out, the victim's dad started to speak about his son (scroll to 1:30) and I found it incredibly moving.

You didn't get shortchanged by death. You got swallowed up by life.

"DUI:  Dead in 5 Seconds"

Monday, May 14, 2012

End of Tour Prank on Blake Shelton

After a touching introduction about his protege, Dia Frampton...Blake gets pranked by the production manager.

Blake: "It looked like he might have had...wood in that dress. It's gross. Start it over, please! I don't ever wanna think about that song in this way again...ugh."


Sunday, May 13, 2012

Dia Frampton & Blake Shelton

So I just finished watching the last 2 episodes of Season 1 of "The Voice" and contestant, Dia Frampton has officially captured my heart.  The genuine, touching father-daughter relationship between country music star, Blake Shelton, and aspiring singer, Dia Frampton really moved me.  He seemed sincerely invested in her success on the show and off.

Clearly, Dia was grateful as well as she wrote this song to be sung with her mentor, "I Will."



In regards to the song, she wrote:

Where to begin with this song? I got to record this with Blake Shelton in Nashville. Watching him cut vocals and sing lines I had written brought tears to my eyes. (I'm a cheeseball. Sorry.) This song is the ultimate friendship song. I feel like I could hear it on any of my favorite Disney movies, and I kind of love that. I wouldn't be where I am today without the help of Blake. Whenever I sing this song I just feel so grateful and so lucky.


Off the show, Dia sings with her sister in a band called "Meg and Dia."  Since her sister and her are both half-Korean and half-Dutch, they sang this live English rendition "Lonely" by the Korean band, 2NE1.




One of my favorite songs by Meg & Dia is their amateur cover of Kid Culi's "The Pursuit of Happiness."





One of my favorite songs by Dia (live performance w/ Kid Cudi):


____________________________________________

Blake Shelton, such a stand-up guy.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Arthur Boorman's Remarkable Feat

Arthur Boorman was a disabled veteran, who was told by doctors that he would never be able to walk without aid again.  He started to do yoga and proved the naysayers wrong.

He also lost 140 lbs in only 10 months.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Chillout Muzak

Leave this on in the background while studying or reading....

Really nice chillout music.