La greine et le mulet

It takes a closer peek at arabs living in france. very slowpaced, it takes you into their lives, you feel that you're actually living with them, that you're part of their lives. There are lot of unneccasry conversations and repetition, but this makes it even more real. There's something I realized lately, that humans in general repeat their conversations all the time, they see each other every day and talk about the exact thing they were talking about yesterday, maybe the choice of words would be different but people tend to do that, repeat conversations. I like the oriental feel at the end of the film. "Hafsia Herzi" did a splendid job, she deserves all the awards she got, I especially liked the close-up scences on her.

Utterly beautiful. I love it. Death in Venice, based on the novel by Thomas Mann, takes place in Venice where composer Gustav Ashenbach, spends his last days. The film is very slow paced, capturing every moment. It has many long shots that just depict the mellow mundane days in Venice at the beach. Kids are playing, people are laughing, strawberry sellers are walking around. However, I wouldn't put this film in the category of realism.

What is beauty? Is it aestetic quality or is it what lies beyond that? What is an artist? All those questions were raised in the film.

I especially liked the scene where the composer was watching the sand in the sanclock going down. The words in that scene were deep and thought inducing.In the film Gustav Ashenbach develops this infatuation with a boy called Tadzio. He follows him and watches him from afar. There was little dialogue but their expressions said it all. Eventhough one might regard such an infatuation as perverted, seeing that the man is old and the boy is in his early adolescence, in the film it didn't feel that way. It felt like it was the purest and most pristine forms of love.

Ghost of a smile

Ghost of a smile is a collection of 8 short stories in modern day Tokyo.
This was a very entertaining read. It is written by, Deborah Boliver Boehm, an American whose well aquainted with japanese culture. Her western take on things made it easy for me, a non-japanese interested in japan to learn more about this mysterious culture. There were many different charachters in her stories like a sumo wrestler, a goldfish seller, a teenage japanese girl, a librarian and many more. The stories combined the natural with the supernatural, the east, with the west in a witty delightful erotic way. The story takes you in, I personally couldn't put the book down. It just takes you to a different world where everything is possible and gives you a closer peek to the everyday life of Tokyo. Each story was unique in its own way, and totally different from the other yet there was a resemblance in some aspects in all stories. They all had some relation to japanese mythology and the supernatural world and most of them were about love, lust and desire. Her style is a comibination between american modern in search of romance type of novels, spiritual questioning afterlife and the unknown books and fantasy ghost stories. I wouldn't say that it is an intellectual literary book that you would think about when you put down, I would say it's more of cross cultural book that would make you well aquainted with japanese culture and a delightful collection that would transfer you in a three, if not 4 or even more, dimensional world.