Cuenca portraits

Ben X

The problem with a blog is, that sometimes you just run out of ideas, what to post!

Luckily I saw a movie today that really cracked me up. And I don't want to say too much about it. But it's great.
Go see it!
More info on http://www.benx.be/

Some more Bali, analog

My Queen Karo (2)

I can´t believe I haven´t told anything about this movie!
But maybe the pictures on itself say enough.
Anyway, if you didn´t know yet, it was my first role as an extra for a feature film.
I´d gotten up at 5:30, went to the meeting place for dressing and make-up. I didn´t seem to need make-up, ofcourse I never do, but it would´ve been nice to sit in a make-up chair for once.
So I just made a picture.

For this particular scene, young people were needed. We started to walk towards our shooting location. There we would find a group of mobile police units, ready to take us on.
We started rehearsing on the sidewalk. Our goal was to rebel against the police. Shouting and fighting were our instructions. So there we stood, face to face, our clan of young squatters with fake mustaches and sideburns standing side by side against the supposedly incarnation of law and order from the sixties.
People were looking out their windows as this was bound to get interesting.
Just as in the second part of Lord of the Rings, it started raining. This wasn´t in the script. And then hell broke loose.
During these rehearsals, people who would stand in front of the line would actually get hit by sticks. I got one slapping my ear against my skull. Even though the sticks were prepared with foam to minimize injuries, I started to walk back in line. This m*therf%r hurt!
After rehearsals we spent half an afternoon in and around a café, waiting. This is the life of an extra, and I don´t know if I could live with that, it being a full-time occupation.

What I got out of it? A great day with wonderful (young) people. And a picture of an actress that nobody knew, but I had seen 2 movies of and therefore consider a celebrity: Déborah François. Speaking of which, the movie l´enfant won a golden palm, and she had a great part in that. The other movie I saw with her is just plain sick, so I recommend not to see la tourneuse de pages.

Déborah François on the background and Anna Franziska Jaeger playing the title-role.

Live from Madrid (2)

What I did mostly before the movie wasn't going to must-see places most people would look up in their travel guides. I didn´t go to Prado. I don´t feel much priority in seeing classical art that much anyway. I went to the park. And to a bookshop. I saw a book titled ´how to repair your underwear´. With phrases like: the guide for a man´s man. A man who doesn´t wash his underwear, but fixes it.
Maybe I will do the touristic places later. And in the perspective of being efficient, if you want to see a lot, you best go to where it´s less crowded first.
When I walked through Madrid, the first thoughts that crossed my mind were:
It´s so much like Paris!
And (after touching the metal railing in the metro): This is the cleanest metro I´ve ever been in!
Or: The smell in the hallway is just like in Malaysia, maybe it´s because of the desinfectant, Dettol it must be, even though I don´t specifically know what Dettol smells like, but I´ve seen so many commercials of Dettol in Malaysia it hardly can´t be anything else.
I found that El Paseo de Las Delicias is just like that street in La Fourche.

I still see a lot of similarities with France, that probably can be explained by visits of the same architects and designers if my feeling is correct.

It´s only the first day in Spain and I have a lot more to go. I won´t be writing every day I guess. Because I feel like I´m already trying too much, without taking good care of the most important thing. The experience itself.

Goodnight!

Live from Madrid: the Clone Wars

Again I think that you can be in a dormant state for a long time and all of a sudden be surprised, changed, revitalised by a single day.
Today was such a day. Though I don´t know where to begin. Technically it´s not even over yet. But I will try my best.

Let´s begin with the ending. Or at least the last thing I did before sitting behind this cosy computer.
I was not going home yet, because my guesthouse-hostess and good friend Miriam was going to draw her friend nude for art-class. She told me the girl was very shy. So I decided it was better to come home until they were finished.
I looked in the distance and saw a cinema. The thing I naturally did was walk towards it and take a look which movies were being shown. I knew for sure I needed an English spoken movie, it´s the first day in Spain and I just wouldn´t be able to keep up with the movie´s plot this way.
The first poster I saw was from ´Wall-E´. An animation movie from pixar. I had seen the introductory film about it somewhere and I didn´t feel like watching this kind of movie.
The Dark Knight I had already seen (see review) and I wasn´t in the mood to see it again.
The last option was a Star Wars movie: the Clone Wars. I knew this was an animation. I had read a little about it. I decided to watch this movie. It turned out to be a wonderful choice.

For people knowing Star Wars and hating it, this movie deserves to be looked at with an unprejudiced eye. I was slightly influenced with the remark I read, that the skin-graphics look bad, but I soon forgot that, because, as a medium Star Wars knower I found this one of, if not, the best Star Wars movie.
I didn´t expect to see such a pleasing film.
This can be the power of going with just a little or no idea what´s going to happen.

I think the makers had gotten exceptional freedom because the original Saga has been completed and the main plot has been explained. This story is between the last 2 movies, and adds more depth to this plot.
The freedom that has been taken works out wonderfully, because the characters aren´t treated as holy anymore. This movie has a lot more lightness to it than the other Star Wars movies and a wonderful new female character. She is still a kid, but proves that girl-power is unmissable in this world by saving her master more than once, and subtly exposing his male weaknesses.
The android robots are even more incompetent this time, which explains perhaps more that the evil emperor has planned this all along, making them ready for failure. To fully enjoy all these things in the movie, you must at least be a medium Star Wars knower. But the relationship between the young girl and her teacher is accesible to all viewers. It´s a character that stays with you all the way.

I went to the movie to keep myself a bit occupied so I could gradually prevent any awkward stumbling upon a girl in a room being drawn naked who is painfully shy. That's really something I wouldn't want to happen. And it would be really, really unlikely to happen, because I would still have to ring the bell to get in the building and take an elevator to get to the top floor. But I think we always imagine the worst possible things, after having experienced a thing like that before, as an automatic prevention system in our brain. Luckily it didn't get to any embarrasing moments.
Exactly after the movie finished and I left the cinema I got a message that I could come home.

My first Murakami

I just finished my first Murakami and now I see how well the pictures can correspond with the story I just read.

If you haven’t read Sputnik Sweetheart yet, I can tell you that it’s sublime. Murakami has a great knowledge of people and a way of making every bit as believable as necessary to keep reading.
Halfway, the book gets really scary. This reminds me of Miike Takashi’s ‘Audition’, which starts of as any other feature-film, but makes a sudden shift to intense horror later on. Though I wouldn’t call Murakami’s book a horror story in the conventional way, because there is no killing and such. It’s more a mystery which keeps you thinking.
And this is one thing I like about books. You get so much more information to think about; I seldom see a movie which really keeps me pondering.
If you read the book than you might have figured out what I mean with the pictures. But even if you don’t see it, it doesn’t matter, because my photography and stories usually don’t get along very well. Maybe it’s better to either describe a photo (without showing it) or show a story (without explaining it).