Acer Aspire AH340-UA230N
Apple Mac mini MB463LL/A
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Thursday, July 30, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Today for high school!
Masa Sekolah menengah, masa dimana gw puber dengan keterlaluan, gw mengalami kekalahan yang parah dalam persaingan akademik.
Coba tebak berapa kali gw menangis gara-gara kalah. 10 kali dari 12 semester. Gw pernah mendengar pepatah yang mengatakan, hanya orang bodoh yang jatuh dua kali pada lubang kemalasan. Dan di masa sekolah menengah,gw bukan hanya jatuh dua kali, gw jatuh sepuluh kali dalam lubang yang sama. Lubang kemalasan.
Malam ini, gw tersadar bahwa semua ini harus diakhiri. Gw harus berubah. Saat ini gw diberi kesempatan untuk memilih, masih mau menjadi orang yang terus-terusan kalah atau bertransformasi menjadi pemenamg. Jika gw memilih opsi yp pertama, gw ga perlu melakukan apa-apa. Gw cukup menjalani hidup seperti biasa. Malas-malasan dan online setiap saat. Gag usah belajar, toh yang menjadi ranking satu juga tetap lia ataup septi. Tetapi jika gw memilih opsi yang kedua, maka gw harus mengatakan "CUKUP SUDAH!" pada semua ini dan mulai berdisiplin diri. Apa yang terjadi esok hari, ditentukan oleh apa yang kita lakukan sekarang.
:-)
Berjuang sampai akhir.
Jika gw ga bisa mengeluarkan 100% kemampuan gw, maka gw akan mengeluarkan 200%.
Coba tebak berapa kali gw menangis gara-gara kalah. 10 kali dari 12 semester. Gw pernah mendengar pepatah yang mengatakan, hanya orang bodoh yang jatuh dua kali pada lubang kemalasan. Dan di masa sekolah menengah,gw bukan hanya jatuh dua kali, gw jatuh sepuluh kali dalam lubang yang sama. Lubang kemalasan.
Malam ini, gw tersadar bahwa semua ini harus diakhiri. Gw harus berubah. Saat ini gw diberi kesempatan untuk memilih, masih mau menjadi orang yang terus-terusan kalah atau bertransformasi menjadi pemenamg. Jika gw memilih opsi yp pertama, gw ga perlu melakukan apa-apa. Gw cukup menjalani hidup seperti biasa. Malas-malasan dan online setiap saat. Gag usah belajar, toh yang menjadi ranking satu juga tetap lia ataup septi. Tetapi jika gw memilih opsi yang kedua, maka gw harus mengatakan "CUKUP SUDAH!" pada semua ini dan mulai berdisiplin diri. Apa yang terjadi esok hari, ditentukan oleh apa yang kita lakukan sekarang.
:-)
Berjuang sampai akhir.
Jika gw ga bisa mengeluarkan 100% kemampuan gw, maka gw akan mengeluarkan 200%.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Well, Okay, Now That You Ask, Why A Duck?
My one hundredth posting—it's nice that it can be about one of the reasons I became a movie fan in the first place, the Marx Brothers. Just wait until we get to 1933 and I explain how Duck Soup landed me a job in Washington!
For faithful reader Who Am Us, I post here a famous sequence from their first movie (not counting a now-lost silent short from 1921 called Humor Risk, which Groucho later said was lousy), the 1929 hit The Cocoanuts.
For faithful reader Who Am Us, I post here a famous sequence from their first movie (not counting a now-lost silent short from 1921 called Humor Risk, which Groucho later said was lousy), the 1929 hit The Cocoanuts.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Apropos Of Nothing, This Note About The Cocoanuts
The Marx Brothers' first movie, The Cocoanuts, was based on a stage play that has the distinction of being the only Irving Berlin musical not to feature a hit song.
This wasn't Berlin's fault, however.
The original song list he submitted included "Always" which went on to become a standard. The playwright, George S. Kaufman, whose friend was having an affair with a younger woman at the time, joked to Berlin that he should change the song's first line from "I love you always" to "I love you Thursdays."
Berlin—who had written the song as a tribute to his wife—was so offended, he withdrew the song from consideration until he could find a more suitable vehicle for its debut.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Best Screenplay Of 1929-30: George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews (All Quiet On The Western Front)
Now this is how you adapt a classic novel for the big screen.
Being a (failed) writer myself, it has often struck me how few great movies have been based on great books. They are such radically different media—one visual, one verbal—that what works brilliantly in a book doesn't work at all on the screen, and vice versa. I mean, despite at least four attempts (and a reported fifth on the way), no one has ever figured how to translate the last line of The Great Gatsby—arguably the greatest last line in all of literature—into anything other than the most banal cinema.
Faithful attempts to film great books often wind up turgid (For Whom The Bell Tolls), incomprehensible (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues) or nine hours long (Greed). And that's when Hollywood is bothering to be faithful at all. Who can forget the liberties Demi Moore took with The Scarlet Letter to disastrous effect, or the unmitigated mess Brian De Palma made of The Bonfire of the Vanities?
That an adaptation of the best book ever written about World War I should have resulted in the best movie ever made about World War I is, in context, a bit of a miracle.
If you don't know the novel All Quiet On The Western Front, you certainly should. Written by Erich Maria Remarque, it's the story of a schoolboy's journey from gung-ho volunteer to disillusioned war veteran. Remarque had been a soldier, conscripted along with his friends at the age of eighteen, serving in the trenches with the German army in France, and the novel captures both the horrors of war and the lust for empire and glory that led to it. The novel sold 2.5 million copies in the eighteen months after its publication in 1928 and was quickly acquired by Universal Pictures.
The adaptation of Remarque's novel was handled by two celebrated Broadway playwrights with an assist from a veteran Hollywood director of silent B-pictures.
Maxwell Anderson is best remembered now for such Broadway hits as What Price Glory, Anne of a Thousand Days and The Bad Seed. He worked on screenplays throughout his career, with All Quiet On The Western Front earning him his only Oscar nomination. He primarily wrote political dramas and often wrote his plays in blank verse, including Key Largo, later adapted into the classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. In 1933, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Both Your Houses, a polemic aimed at seedy Washington politics.
George Abbott began his Broadway career as an actor before turning exclusively to writing. Like Anderson, he was a successful playwright, penning mostly musicals such as Pal Joey and Damn Yankees. He won five Tony awards, became a Kennedy Center honoree in 1982, and, for his play, Fiorello!, a musical based on the life of reform-minded New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Abbott was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Unlike his two co-writers, Del Andrews was primarily a director, and not a well-known one either. He directed forty movies, mostly westerns at a time when westerns were strictly B-picture kiddie fare, and comedy shorts featuring actors you've never heard of. So far as I can tell, none of these films still exist, although the westerns did star Fred Thompson and Hoot Gibson, two of the biggest western stars of the Silent Era. I can't tell you much more about him than that—he was born in 1894, he died in 1942, he was married and he had a son—but I'm willing to bet he knew plenty about how to get a story on film in a hurry and I suspect he was paired with Anderson and Abbott, who were great playwrights but knew little about Hollywood, to tutor them on the finer points of movie-based storytelling.
Despite the feeling that you are watching a completely faithful adaptation of the novel, the movie actually differs significantly in its structure. The novel begins in medias res, the novel's hero Paul already a grizzled veteran of a long and pointless war, revealing most of his back story through a series of flashbacks as he muses on how he and his classmates moved from the classroom to the trenches, and for most of them, to the grave. The book is elegiac, both haunting and haunted, and one of the finest anti-war novels ever written.
The movie straight- ens out the chro- nology, beginning with a school teacher's patriotic harangue and then following the students as they first volunteer and then discover the reality of war's horrors. As an audience, you arrive at Paul's conclusions at the same time he does, giving the movie an immediacy and growing tension. Both approaches are effective, but I suspect each approach is best suited for its respective medium.
Writing credits in old Hollywood movies are often confusing and the credits for All Quiet On The Western Front are no different. Del Andrews was credited with the "adaptation," Maxwell Anderson with the "adaptation and dialogue," and George Abbott with the "screenplay." The technical meaning of each is a bit murky, especially since they've evolved over the years, but my understanding is that in 1930, "adaptation" referred to the overall structure of the piece, "dialogue" to the words the actors spoke and "screenplay" to both dialogue and the physical staging of the work.
Further confusing the issue is that the studio released two versions of All Quiet On The Western Front, the sound version we know today and a silent version, with Walter Anthony providing titles, for those theaters which had not yet made the conversion to sound.
Judging from the way the credits read, I would guess that Anderson, with the guidance of veteran director Andrews, decided on the basic flow of the story—which scenes to include and in which order—and then went on to write a draft of the screenplay's dialogue. Then for whatever reason, I'm guessing that the producers brought in Abbott to significantly rework Anderson's draft. But I could just be talking through my hat.
What I do know is that All Quiet On The Western Front is a terrific movie based on a terrific book and for that miracle, its screenplay wins the Katie Award for best screenplay of 1929-30.
Being a (failed) writer myself, it has often struck me how few great movies have been based on great books. They are such radically different media—one visual, one verbal—that what works brilliantly in a book doesn't work at all on the screen, and vice versa. I mean, despite at least four attempts (and a reported fifth on the way), no one has ever figured how to translate the last line of The Great Gatsby—arguably the greatest last line in all of literature—into anything other than the most banal cinema.Faithful attempts to film great books often wind up turgid (For Whom The Bell Tolls), incomprehensible (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues) or nine hours long (Greed). And that's when Hollywood is bothering to be faithful at all. Who can forget the liberties Demi Moore took with The Scarlet Letter to disastrous effect, or the unmitigated mess Brian De Palma made of The Bonfire of the Vanities?
That an adaptation of the best book ever written about World War I should have resulted in the best movie ever made about World War I is, in context, a bit of a miracle.
If you don't know the novel All Quiet On The Western Front, you certainly should. Written by Erich Maria Remarque, it's the story of a schoolboy's journey from gung-ho volunteer to disillusioned war veteran. Remarque had been a soldier, conscripted along with his friends at the age of eighteen, serving in the trenches with the German army in France, and the novel captures both the horrors of war and the lust for empire and glory that led to it. The novel sold 2.5 million copies in the eighteen months after its publication in 1928 and was quickly acquired by Universal Pictures.The adaptation of Remarque's novel was handled by two celebrated Broadway playwrights with an assist from a veteran Hollywood director of silent B-pictures.
Maxwell Anderson is best remembered now for such Broadway hits as What Price Glory, Anne of a Thousand Days and The Bad Seed. He worked on screenplays throughout his career, with All Quiet On The Western Front earning him his only Oscar nomination. He primarily wrote political dramas and often wrote his plays in blank verse, including Key Largo, later adapted into the classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. In 1933, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Both Your Houses, a polemic aimed at seedy Washington politics.George Abbott began his Broadway career as an actor before turning exclusively to writing. Like Anderson, he was a successful playwright, penning mostly musicals such as Pal Joey and Damn Yankees. He won five Tony awards, became a Kennedy Center honoree in 1982, and, for his play, Fiorello!, a musical based on the life of reform-minded New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Abbott was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Unlike his two co-writers, Del Andrews was primarily a director, and not a well-known one either. He directed forty movies, mostly westerns at a time when westerns were strictly B-picture kiddie fare, and comedy shorts featuring actors you've never heard of. So far as I can tell, none of these films still exist, although the westerns did star Fred Thompson and Hoot Gibson, two of the biggest western stars of the Silent Era. I can't tell you much more about him than that—he was born in 1894, he died in 1942, he was married and he had a son—but I'm willing to bet he knew plenty about how to get a story on film in a hurry and I suspect he was paired with Anderson and Abbott, who were great playwrights but knew little about Hollywood, to tutor them on the finer points of movie-based storytelling.
Despite the feeling that you are watching a completely faithful adaptation of the novel, the movie actually differs significantly in its structure. The novel begins in medias res, the novel's hero Paul already a grizzled veteran of a long and pointless war, revealing most of his back story through a series of flashbacks as he muses on how he and his classmates moved from the classroom to the trenches, and for most of them, to the grave. The book is elegiac, both haunting and haunted, and one of the finest anti-war novels ever written.
The movie straight- ens out the chro- nology, beginning with a school teacher's patriotic harangue and then following the students as they first volunteer and then discover the reality of war's horrors. As an audience, you arrive at Paul's conclusions at the same time he does, giving the movie an immediacy and growing tension. Both approaches are effective, but I suspect each approach is best suited for its respective medium.Writing credits in old Hollywood movies are often confusing and the credits for All Quiet On The Western Front are no different. Del Andrews was credited with the "adaptation," Maxwell Anderson with the "adaptation and dialogue," and George Abbott with the "screenplay." The technical meaning of each is a bit murky, especially since they've evolved over the years, but my understanding is that in 1930, "adaptation" referred to the overall structure of the piece, "dialogue" to the words the actors spoke and "screenplay" to both dialogue and the physical staging of the work.
Further confusing the issue is that the studio released two versions of All Quiet On The Western Front, the sound version we know today and a silent version, with Walter Anthony providing titles, for those theaters which had not yet made the conversion to sound.
Judging from the way the credits read, I would guess that Anderson, with the guidance of veteran director Andrews, decided on the basic flow of the story—which scenes to include and in which order—and then went on to write a draft of the screenplay's dialogue. Then for whatever reason, I'm guessing that the producers brought in Abbott to significantly rework Anderson's draft. But I could just be talking through my hat.
What I do know is that All Quiet On The Western Front is a terrific movie based on a terrific book and for that miracle, its screenplay wins the Katie Award for best screenplay of 1929-30.
Monday, July 20, 2009
two zero zero Nine Of War
Tahun 2009 merupakan tahun yang sangat sangat penting(dan krusial) bagi semua siswa kelas 3 sekolah menengah atas diindonesia. Pada tahun 2009 ini, ada 2 hal besar yang harus dihadapi dan keduanya adalah yang menentukan masa depan. Dua hal itu adalah Ujian Nasional dan UMB-SPMB. Gw, sebagai siswa kelas 3 SMA yang menghabiskan sebagian besar waktu belajar untuk menggosip dikelas ma temen temen cewek gue pun merasakan takut yang amat sangat. Menjelang UN dan UMB-SPMB Gw ga bisa tidur, ga selera makan, ga mood pacaran(padahal karena ga ada yang mau), dan ga bisa hidup tenang.
Gw sendiri yang saat itu takutnya bukan main ga tau apakah gw bisa melewati itu semua.
. . . . .
Sekarang, setelah 6 bulan perjuangan yang merontokan bulu idung, gw udah lulus UN, lulus di USU, dan lulus lagi di UNIMED.
Alhamdulillah.
Hanya sekarang gw dihadapkan lagi dengan ketakutan yang baru.
Apakah gw bisa bertahan diperkuliahan?
Gw, sama seperti dulu, ga tau apakah gw bisa melewati ini semua.
Eh Bukan(gw ga boleh melakukan kesalahan yang sama dua kali), maksud gw, semua ini harus gw hadapi dengan gagah berani(seperti NARUTO)
Gw pasti bisa.
Kalo dikomik naruto pernah bilang gini:
"i never gonna give up, because its my way!"
Maka gw akan bilang:
"I never gonna give up, because i'm gonna rule the world!"
Ha ha
Gw sendiri yang saat itu takutnya bukan main ga tau apakah gw bisa melewati itu semua.
. . . . .
Sekarang, setelah 6 bulan perjuangan yang merontokan bulu idung, gw udah lulus UN, lulus di USU, dan lulus lagi di UNIMED.
Alhamdulillah.
Hanya sekarang gw dihadapkan lagi dengan ketakutan yang baru.
Apakah gw bisa bertahan diperkuliahan?
Gw, sama seperti dulu, ga tau apakah gw bisa melewati ini semua.
Eh Bukan(gw ga boleh melakukan kesalahan yang sama dua kali), maksud gw, semua ini harus gw hadapi dengan gagah berani(seperti NARUTO)
Gw pasti bisa.
Kalo dikomik naruto pernah bilang gini:
"i never gonna give up, because its my way!"
Maka gw akan bilang:
"I never gonna give up, because i'm gonna rule the world!"
Ha ha
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Ulang tahun yang bau badan
Gw mau bercerita tentang kado ultah terburuk yang gue berikan ma orang yang pernah gw sayangi. Kemarin siang dia merayakan ulang tahunnya yang ke-17. Gw yang saat cuma punya uang 10 rebu pun kebingungan mencari kado yang pas. Dengan uang segitu gw bisa beli apa? Gw pun memutar akal. Lama-lama diputar jadi makin pusing. Gw pun bertanya kepada teman-teman dekatnya(yang cowok) dan mereka dengan sepakat bilang kalo dia bau badan. Gw yg terakhir berhubungan dengan dia pas SMP pun kaget, ternyata dia baru puber. Jadul banget.
Mereka juga merayu gue agar mengeluarkan dia dari lingkaran hitam dunia bau badan. Tiba-tiba otak gw bekerja. Gw mendadak jadi pinter. Gw langsung membeli rexona disupermarket terdekat dan membungkusnya dengan kertas kado. Gw berdoa mudah2an di usianya yang ke-17 ini, dia ga bakal bau badan lagi. Temen-temen gw pada cekikikan ngeliat gw. Ga tau kenapa. Mungkin mereka iri karena ide brilian gw. Ha ha ha.
Kok perasaan gw ga enak?
Mereka juga merayu gue agar mengeluarkan dia dari lingkaran hitam dunia bau badan. Tiba-tiba otak gw bekerja. Gw mendadak jadi pinter. Gw langsung membeli rexona disupermarket terdekat dan membungkusnya dengan kertas kado. Gw berdoa mudah2an di usianya yang ke-17 ini, dia ga bakal bau badan lagi. Temen-temen gw pada cekikikan ngeliat gw. Ga tau kenapa. Mungkin mereka iri karena ide brilian gw. Ha ha ha.
Kok perasaan gw ga enak?
The Katie Award Nominees For 1929-30
Six days after the April 3, 1930 Oscar ceremony in honor of the best movies of 1928-29—a public-relations debacle where a five-member panel of Louis B. Mayer's hand-chosen lackeys handed all the statues to insiders and Mayer's own entry for best picture—the Academy junked the Central Board of Judges and for the first time set in place procedures to leave the task of selecting winners to the full membership of the Academy itself. They didn't wait long to see the results of the new system, holding the next ceremony just seven months later, the only time in Oscar history awards were handed out twice in the same calendar year.For a first exercise in democracy, the Academy did pretty well.
All Quiet On The Western Front, not just the best picture of the year, but one of the best pictures of any year, won both the top prize and an Oscar for its director, Lewis Milestone, the second Oscar of his career. George Arliss was the best actor with a solid performance in Disraeli, a role he had first crafted on Broadway. And The Big House, a highly-regarded prison drama, nabbed a pair of awards, one for legendary screenwriter Frances Marion, the other for sound editor Douglas Shearer, the first of his fourteen career Oscars.The only controversy was generated by Norma Shearer's win for best actress in the movie The Divorcee. "What do you expect," said Joan Crawford afterwards. "She sleeps with the boss," referring to powerful MGM producer Irving Thalberg.
Whether you agree with Crawford's assessment may depend in part on your opinion of Shearer's abilities as an actress. Katie-Bar-The-Door can't stand her, but judging by the number of complimentary postings about her on various sites, somebody must love her. I myself have, at best, mixed feelings about Norma Shearer and will later share them at some length in a pair of postings, one about Shearer the actress, the other about Shearer and Thalberg as Hollywood's quintessential power couple.
As I put together my own list of Katie Award nominees, I realized that my only problem with All Quiet On The Western Front was that it was so good it obscured the fact that overall, 1929-30 was a very weak year for movies. Silent movies had all but disappeared from theaters, but unfortunately, the talkies that replaced them were saddled with a primitive technology that practically bolted the camera and the actors to the floor. Moreover, most directors clearly had no idea what to do with sound, treating it as a novelty rather than an opportunity, sticking in a song or two, or worse going overboard and cramming every nook and cranny with talk-talk-talk.To fill out the roster of nominees, I had to range far and wide, drawing heavily from the German film industry for three best picture nominees and from the few remaining silent pictures for nominees in the acting and screenwriting categories. As for nominees from the pool of sound pictures, at times I based my picks as much on how well they overcame the limitations of the new medium as on their objective merits. But I believe that by the time I am done handing out Katies to this year's crop of nominees, the winners will be those who have established their worth through the ages.
At least I hope so.
PICTURE:
All Quiet On The Western Front (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
The Blue Angel (prod. Erich Pommer)
Diary Of A Lost Girl (prod. Georg Wilhelm Pabst)
Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor)
Pandora's Box (prod. Heinz Landsmann)
ACTOR:
Lew Ayres (All Quiet On The Western Front)
Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade)
Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond)
Gary Cooper (The Virginian)
ACTRESS:
Louise Brooks (Diary Of A Lost Girl and Pandora's Box)
Marlene Dietrich (The Blue Angel)
Greta Garbo (Anna Christie)
Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade)
DIRECTOR:
Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front)
Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel)
King Vidor (Hallelujah!)
SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Wallace Beery (The Big House)
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Our Modern Maidens)
Louis Wolheim (All Quiet On The Western Front)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Marie Dressler (Anna Christie)
Nina Mae McKinney (Hallelujah!)
Seena Owen (Queen Kelly)
SCREENPLAY:
George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews (All Quiet On The Western Front)
Elliott Lester; adaptation and scenario by Marion Orth and Gerthold Viertel; titles by H.H. Caldwell and Katherine Hilliker (City Girl)
Frances Marion; additional dialogue by Joseph Farnham and Martin Flavin (The Big House)
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Love, weak or strong?
Ada satu pernyataan dahsyat yang masih gw pertanyakan hingga saat ini. Suatu pernyataan yang masih amat gw ragukan kebenarannya. Katanya, "seseorang bisa menjadi kuat jika mencintai."
Apakah pernyataan itu benar? Terus terang gw masih ragu. Memang, selama gw mencintai si "keriting", gw memang berubah menjadi kuat dalam satu sisi, gw yg awalnya pemalas kelas paus malah jadi keranjingan belajar sehingga bisa masuk kedalam jajaran 3 besar kelas. Semua itu gw lakukan agar dia memperhatikan keberadaan gw. Tetapi, karena si"keriting" itu juga gw jadi sering nangis, melamun sendirian, dan hampir gila ketika dia jadian ma orang lain. Gw menjadi benar-benar lemah. Cinta itu memang aneh. Keanehan itu tetap terjadi ketika gw mencintai zayanti. Pada awalnya gw memang nampak kuat. Jadi lebih semangat, rajin datang ke bimbel walau gw jerawatan sekalipun [:-P]. Tapi semakin lama, gw malah sering bertingkah aneh. Cemburu ga jelas padahal dia bukan siapa-siapa gw. Nangis darah ketika dia jadian ma cowok lain. Sifat gw jadi seperti waria. Sensitive.
Gw ulang lagi, "Seseorang bisa menjadi kuat jika mencintai"
Yeah, mungkin benar. Tetapi kita juga bisa menjadi sangat lemah jika kita mencintai orang yang ga pernah mau mencintai kita.
---notes from my life
Apakah pernyataan itu benar? Terus terang gw masih ragu. Memang, selama gw mencintai si "keriting", gw memang berubah menjadi kuat dalam satu sisi, gw yg awalnya pemalas kelas paus malah jadi keranjingan belajar sehingga bisa masuk kedalam jajaran 3 besar kelas. Semua itu gw lakukan agar dia memperhatikan keberadaan gw. Tetapi, karena si"keriting" itu juga gw jadi sering nangis, melamun sendirian, dan hampir gila ketika dia jadian ma orang lain. Gw menjadi benar-benar lemah. Cinta itu memang aneh. Keanehan itu tetap terjadi ketika gw mencintai zayanti. Pada awalnya gw memang nampak kuat. Jadi lebih semangat, rajin datang ke bimbel walau gw jerawatan sekalipun [:-P]. Tapi semakin lama, gw malah sering bertingkah aneh. Cemburu ga jelas padahal dia bukan siapa-siapa gw. Nangis darah ketika dia jadian ma cowok lain. Sifat gw jadi seperti waria. Sensitive.
Gw ulang lagi, "Seseorang bisa menjadi kuat jika mencintai"
Yeah, mungkin benar. Tetapi kita juga bisa menjadi sangat lemah jika kita mencintai orang yang ga pernah mau mencintai kita.
---notes from my life
Stars Of The Early Sound Era, No. 12: Marie Dressler
And last but not least, the number one box office draw of the Early Sound Era, Marie Dressler.No foolin'. Number one, and a personal favorite of the Monkey.
Stars Of The Early Sound Era, No. 10 and 11: Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi
Just a couple more photos of Early Sound stars to remind you what you have to look forward to—this from 1934's The Black Cat, but of course we've got Frankenstein and Dracula coming, too—and then it's on to the Katie nominations for 1929-30 ...
Friday, July 17, 2009
My idiot act
Bagi gw, idiot adalah orang yang suka membuang2 waktu.
Inilah kegiatan gw sepanjang liburan yang benar ga produktif
05.00. Dibangunin nyokap tuk shalat. Pura-pura gag denger
06.00.Terbangun
06.01.Tidur lagi
08.45.Bangun setelah dibangunin
09.00.Sarapan sambil nonton tivi
09.00.Buka e-mail. Trus bales kalo yg ngirim cewek.
10.00.Browsing di yahoo answer
11.00.Up date twitter
12.00.Makan siang
12.30.Bersihin kamar. Nemu diary lama. Terus dibaca sambil tiduran.
13.00.Check memory card.
13.30.Maen game harvest moon
17.00.Buka e-buddy
17.15.Tiduran
18.00.Mandi
Kesimpulan: Dont try this at home
Inilah kegiatan gw sepanjang liburan yang benar ga produktif
05.00. Dibangunin nyokap tuk shalat. Pura-pura gag denger
06.00.Terbangun
06.01.Tidur lagi
08.45.Bangun setelah dibangunin
09.00.Sarapan sambil nonton tivi
09.00.Buka e-mail. Trus bales kalo yg ngirim cewek.
10.00.Browsing di yahoo answer
11.00.Up date twitter
12.00.Makan siang
12.30.Bersihin kamar. Nemu diary lama. Terus dibaca sambil tiduran.
13.00.Check memory card.
13.30.Maen game harvest moon
17.00.Buka e-buddy
17.15.Tiduran
18.00.Mandi
Kesimpulan: Dont try this at home
Stars Of The Early Sound Era, No. 9: Joan Blondell
From 1931's Blonde Crazy, everybody's favorite picture of Joan Blondell ... or, well, mine anyway.
Gloria Swanson: Best Actress Of 1919 (Male And Female)
The second in a series of brief essays about the Katie winners of the pre-Oscar era.
I've teased Gloria Swanson off and on for two lines of dialogue that her character, Norma Desmond, spoke in the Billy Wilder classic Sunset Boulevard—"We didn't need dialogue; we had faces!" and "I am big; it's the pictures that got small!"—but she really was one of the best actresses of the Silent Era and for her breakthrough performance in the Cecil B. DeMille drama Male and Female, I gave her the Katie for best actress of 1919.
The movie itself is an odd marriage of Upstairs Downstairs and Gilligan's Island—a group of English aristocrats and their servants are marooned together on a South Seas island where naturally the servants prove much more adept at survival than their indolent, self-indulgent counterparts. Initially, Gloria Swanson plays the most stubbornly indolent of them all, but when she falls in love with her butler, the real leader on the island, she gradually comes to realize what's truly important in life.
That is until they're all rescued and DeMille serves up one of the most reactionary endings in movie history.
That Swanson managed to make all this hokum believable was a testament to her skill as an actress. Overnight, both she and DeMille became major players in Hollywood and both were stars on their respective sides of the camera for the rest of the decade.
Swanson made such silent classics as The Affairs of Anatol and Sadie Thompson and seemed to make the transition to talkies successfully—she received an Oscar nomination for her first talkie, The Trespasser—but her career went into decline and, with one exception, she made no movies between Music in the Air in 1934 and her comeback in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, for which she received her third and final Oscar nomination.
She died in 1983 at the age of 84.
I've teased Gloria Swanson off and on for two lines of dialogue that her character, Norma Desmond, spoke in the Billy Wilder classic Sunset Boulevard—"We didn't need dialogue; we had faces!" and "I am big; it's the pictures that got small!"—but she really was one of the best actresses of the Silent Era and for her breakthrough performance in the Cecil B. DeMille drama Male and Female, I gave her the Katie for best actress of 1919.The movie itself is an odd marriage of Upstairs Downstairs and Gilligan's Island—a group of English aristocrats and their servants are marooned together on a South Seas island where naturally the servants prove much more adept at survival than their indolent, self-indulgent counterparts. Initially, Gloria Swanson plays the most stubbornly indolent of them all, but when she falls in love with her butler, the real leader on the island, she gradually comes to realize what's truly important in life.
That is until they're all rescued and DeMille serves up one of the most reactionary endings in movie history.
That Swanson managed to make all this hokum believable was a testament to her skill as an actress. Overnight, both she and DeMille became major players in Hollywood and both were stars on their respective sides of the camera for the rest of the decade.
Swanson made such silent classics as The Affairs of Anatol and Sadie Thompson and seemed to make the transition to talkies successfully—she received an Oscar nomination for her first talkie, The Trespasser—but her career went into decline and, with one exception, she made no movies between Music in the Air in 1934 and her comeback in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, for which she received her third and final Oscar nomination.
She died in 1983 at the age of 84.
Stars Of The Early Sound Era, No. 8: Edward G. Robinson
One of the greatest actors of all time. Not only did he never win a competitive Oscar (he was given an honorary Oscar two months after his death), he was never even nominated.And you wonder why I started the Katies ...
Thursday, July 16, 2009
This Weekend On Turner Classic Movies Sunday Silents: Broken Blossoms
I've theoretically left silent movies behind but I wanted to mention that TCM is showing my choice for the best movie of 1919, D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, on Monday, July 20, 2009, at 12:15 a.m. (i.e., Sunday night).Like most of Griffith's work, the portrayals of race—in this case, a Chinese immigrant in London played by Richard Barthelmess—may make it a difficult movie for a modern audience. Plus, unlike the genres of comedy, horror or action, silent dramas generally don't hold up that well. But if you're approaching the work of D.W. Griffith for the first time, this might be the route to take.
In reviewing Broken Blossoms for his series on great movies, Roger Ebert noted that it was "perhaps the first interracial love story in the movies" and that it directly influenced Federico Fellini's classic, La Strada. He also said of its star, Lillian Gish, "her face is the first I think of among the silent actresses, just as Chaplin and Keaton stand side by side among the men." (He also passed along this anecdote from the filming of The Whales of August, a 1987 film co-starring Gish and screen legend Bette Davis: "One day after finishing a shot, [director Lindsay Anderson] said, 'Miss Gish, you have just given me the most marvelous closeup!' 'She should,' Bette Davis observed dryly. 'She invented them.'")
From TCM's website:
12:15 AM Broken Blossoms (1919)
In this silent film, an Asian man in London falls in love with an abused child. Cast: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp. Dir: D.W. Griffith. BW-89 mins, TV-PG
Stars Of The Early Sound Era, No. 7: Barbara Stanwyck
... who would be 102 today (if she weren't deader than a doornail).
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