Fave Movie Quotes: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Our seven year-old monitor finally gave up, and I'm typing this on a darkened half screen. Won't be getting a new monitor until around early next year. So all I can post as of the moment is this tiny but memorable quote from 1975's Picnic at Hanging Rock. Happy holi-f*cking-days!

What we see and what we seem are but a dream... a dream within a dream.

- Miranda

Subplot: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Nearly forty years since it came out, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock is still a visual poetry of an enigmatic kind, as fascinating as the mystic clairvoyant that is Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert).

Princess Sara Loves Queen Miranda

An Ambitious Fairy Tale

BLANCANIEVES
Pablo Berger, 2012

Blancanieves is a very Spanish take on Snow White, the classic fairy tale by the Grimm brothers.

After his flamenco singer wife — Carmen de Triana (Inma Cuesta) — dies in childbirth, matador Antonio Villalta (Daniel Giménes Cacho) practically abandons his newborn daughter Carmencita to live with Encarna (Maribel Verdú), an opportunistic nurse.

Carmencita (Sofía Oria) is raised by her compassionate grandmother (Angela Molina). Longing for a mother she never met, Carmencita develops a keen interest in flamenco, her mother's career. Her grandmother dies, so Carmencita is sent to her stepmother's mansion, wherein her father is now a paraplegic prisoner.

Rebellion Against Routine

THE SEVENTH CONTINENT
Michael Haneke, 1989

Have you ever felt drowned in your routine? So drowned that you want to off yourself like a goldfish jumping out of an aquarium?

The Schobers are a well-off Austrian family who plans to migrate to Australia, the seventh continent. But why the f*ck would they leave behind a good life just to risk it all in a place they've never been to before? Michael Haneke aims to answer that question — and the ones in this essay's first paragraph — in his existential feature film debut, The Seventh Continent.

The Seventh Continent shows the life and routine of a middle-class family. The film is divided into three chapters: 1987, 1988, and 1989.

Dope Horror Movie Soundtracks

Halloween's here. Time to look stupid for that costume party sh*t, yes? Along with Christmas, Halloween is the time of year when we become extra generous — in terms of creativity and candies. You get busy decorating costumes and the party's set.

While you're at it, why not add a little more touch of terror by playing these film scores from some of the scariest movies of all time?

A Religious Antireligious Absurdism

WISE BLOOD
John Huston, 1979

"It's wise blood. It ain't everybody has it... see, it's a gift... the gift of the prophets."

- Enoch Emory

"A religious antireligious absurdism." That's quite a lot of adjectives there, but Wise Blood is essentially an absurdist tragicomedy about antitheism, which sprouts from the lead character's childhood guilt.

War veteran Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) is a twenty-something ambitious idealist. Driven by his own concept of truth, he starts his own church: The Church of Truth Without Christ, "where the blind can't see, the lame don't walk, and the dead stay that way."

Cinematography: The Virgin Suicides

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999)

Director: Sofia Coppola

Cinematographer: Edward Lachman

One of the things I love about The Virgin Suicides is its cinematography. Mainly employing shades of orange and blue, Edward Lachman (Far from Heaven, Erin Brockovich) achieves a remarkable blend of impossible dreamland and overwhelming dysphoria.

Oranges...

Ghosts of Yestertears

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

Sofia Coppola, 1999

You're probably looking at your keyboard to verify if T is beside Y. Yes, it is. And no, it's not a typo. I use yestertears every time I refer to not-so-happy things in the past, yet here they are crawling their way to the present just to haunt you.

That's what happens to the narrator in The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola's stunning feature film debut. The film tackles the dilemma of angst-ridden adolescence, the downsides of being a girl, teenage sexuality, the anguish of yearning, and — of course — the complexity of suicide.

A Brutally Honest Love Story

AMOUR

Michael Haneke, 2012

In 2012, Austrian auteur Michael Haneke made one of the most emotionally intimate films of the 21st century: Amour. Remember that Adam Sandler song from The Wedding Singer? That somehow describes Amour.

Anne and Georges (Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant) are an octogenarian couple, blissfully married for a long time. Both are retired music teachers. Their forte: the piano. They live by themselves in a Paris apartment. Their only child (Isabelle Huppert) already has a family of her own, and is somewhat emotionally detached from her parents. (She cares more about trivial things like profiting from her parents' house.) One day, the couple suffers a major blow in their relationship when Anne suffers from dementia and then stroke.

The Dirty Laundries of the Church

THE MAGDALENE SISTERS
Peter Mullan, 2002

If The Magdalene Sisters was shown during the Magdalene laundries' "glory years" — no, wait — I don't think it would even be shown at all. The film is a massive punch in the face of those zealots who fantasize that women who don't abide by their religion's "values" are "fallen women," therefore they need to "repent."

Repent so by doing time at the Magdalene laundries, a purgatory where you have to work for hours without pay. It is also where the Catholic Church's dirty laundries are exposed, to the workers at least: a manipulative and corrupt Mother Superior, a perverse priest, basically the Church in their not-so-human form.