At Eternity's Gate

Light streaming through the window, dreamy reckoning, exotic pause, patient nimble expression sparrow soaring eyes adoring, vortex, texture, blends, illuminated unconscious spiritually orchestrated canvas, brush strokes, supernatural brevity denoted enchantingly, floral vigour, spellbound charm, relaxed contemplative feeling, emotion, embrasure, less concerned with exacting aesthetics, less enamoured with splayed bedazzle, shyly swaddling landscapes in waves, in vivid undulating coy windswept waves.

Unaccustomed to traditional lifestyles, he struggles to say the right thing.

Unaware of what he's done, he rests for brief periods at times.

It can be very dark, how you have to think to understand what drives some people, sometimes, not everyone by any means, but some people care about such meaningless things, and seem to find motivation through ill-willed spite.

At times.

Many people don't fit roles that suggest they should act a specific way.

Many people which advocate for these roles don't fit them well either.

The roles exist to avoid confusion, I suppose, although I imagine broadening them, expanding them to include more spice, more variability, would make both spice and variability seem just as natural as rigid structure, and communities would correspondingly benefit from the increased diversity, teaching those whom it frightens to have no fear, regardless of whether or not everyone liked the same things.

Vincent van Gogh's (Willem Dafoe) actions are out of line at times and he doesn't realize it. But the violence he encounters doesn't teach him anything, in fact only makes things much much worse.

In the film.

His style, like intuitive observations of incorporeal intangible invisible imperceptible resonances, carefully balancing the sincere and the awkward with realistically composed imagination, perhaps mistaken for humorous representatives of inarticulate blooms in his time, clearly synthesizing wonder with amazement through recourse to the mundane to me, tasks hesitant poetic lucidity, the unobserved omnipresent joys that pass unnoticed as one ages, as dismissals of innocence replace innate fascinations, they never did with Vincent van Gogh, and, according to the two films I've seen about him, he remained unassuming till the end.

Perhaps touched, ingenious, perspicacious, naive, he had a vision anyways and worked hard to clarify it, as if he could never quite realize what it was, but sought to enliven it nonetheless.

The film's a carefully crafted thoughtful investigation of Van Gogh the artist, rich with performances from great actors, the dialogue perhaps too lofty and condensed at times but poignant and revealing at others, Julian Schnabel presenting his own artistic gifts most prominently perhaps when nothing's being said at all.

A gifted filmmaker.

A wonderful film.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel's latest portrayal of the life of a famous artist examines the process whereby Jean-Dominque Bauby wrote his novel The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon). In the opening moments, Janusz Kaminski's delicate cinematography brilliantly accentuates life through the eyes of a paralyzed man who wakes up to discover he can think, hear, and understand, but cannot move or speak. Diagnosed with locked-in syndrome, Jean-Dominque (Mathieu Amalric) suffers in the immediate aftermath but quickly learns to use his imagination to revitalize his life. A speech therapist helps him to express himself with the aid of a linguistic technique whereby she recites the letters of the alphabet and he blinks whenever the letter uttered corresponds to that for which he is searching. By engaging in this process, Jean-Dominque is able to communicate with the outside world and produce his first novel, a testament to the strength and endurance of the human spirit.

There were several points during the last 40 minutes where Diving Bell could have concluded successfully, and this feature was likely deliberately stitched into the narrative, symbolically highlighting the fact that Bauby's novel (and life) could have ended at many points had his intransigent imagination not held true to his vision. Certainly sad, definitely daunting, if a paralyzed man who can only communicate with the movement of his right eye can manifest his chef d'oeuvre, anyone can. All it requires, is a little less self-pity, and a little more self-realization.