Happy Late Night, Sweet Baby,
I hope you had a nice day. I saw several posts today, one of which was about Bratfest, so no doubt you were there and shooting tons of pics. Another post was about the Sonic Boom Launch Party tonight, so I hope you had a blast at that as well. :) Lots of stuff happening as we head towards Summer!
I was at Costco today and I looked at some cams while waiting to pick up The Pinscher's Prescription. They had last year's Lumix model for 350 bucks. I've been reading up on point-and-shoots, and it seems that since I bought my Lumix in 2012, the market for lower priced cams has bottomed out because so many people are simply using their cell phone to take pix. So, the market is moving toward higher-end cams, and most of the new point-and-shoots are in the 450 to 1200 dollar range. The 1200 dollar ones are supposed to be almost as good as SLRs. I don't wanna spend that much, not yet anyway, and when I do it will be on an SLR. My Lumix ZS-8 was 280 in 2012. The new model for this year will be the ZS-70. So they've gone through 62 numbers in five years, lol. Seriously, though, the thing with me is that I don't need a ton of features. I probably won't be using any video, because (for me) the video I tried shooting already was extremely difficult to upload to Youtube. I'm sure I am probably not doing it correctly, but the thing is that I don't have the time. All I wanna do is shoot still photos. Just so long as it has good image quality and black and white capability. I'll spend 450 or 500 if that's what it takes.
Well anyhow, the camera search continues. The Sony RX 100 is supposed to be good also.
Tonight's movie was called "The Naked Island" (1960, Criterion). It was made by the Japanese filmmaker who also directed the classic Kabuki horror films "Onibaba" and "Kuroneko". In "Onibaba" there is very little dialogue, and in "Naked Island" there is none. It's like a silent movie. The story is about a farmer and his wife who live an isolated existence on a small island in the middle of a bay. The island is in the shape of a steep hill, and everything they do to keep their subsistence farm operating is a chore. To obtain fresh water, they must row a boat across the bay to a small town. Every day is filled with repetitive, hard physical labor. Their two small sons attend a modern school across the bay however, so they are not averse to society. They just seem to be existentialists, or at least the husband does. He is domineering over his wife.
The first half of the film plays out like a National Geographic travelogue, and is a bit dry, despite the beautiful black and white photography and rhythmic editing. But in the second half, a story begins to develop, and we see the family venture out into the world a bit.
Then something happens, and...........well, I'd better not say. No spoilers. You may not see "The Naked Island" anytime soon, but you will probably one day see it, and it is well worth seeing, a very moving and poetic film from a brilliant director. I was watching, kinda going "okay, I've seen them carry water up the hill several times", and wondering what was gonna happen next, if anything, but by the time the film ended, I was thinking it was an excellent movie, one that will stay will me for sure.
Last night I watched a movie called "Went The Day Well"?, a semi-legendary WW2 film out of England in 1942, which makes it a very early entry in that genre, made in the early stages of the war. The story is about a small village in the countryside whose townspeople are visited by a group of their own British soldiers, who are performing manouvers and need to be "billeted" during the course of the operation. Billeting means providing food and lodging for the soldiers, and has been standard procedure in many wars. It means putting them up in the homes of the civilians, and that is what happens in the movie.
But then, one woman finds a chocolate bar in the room of her lodger. It is of German manufacture, and lo and behold, she makes the discovery that the soldiers are not English at all, but are Nazi spies!
The Nazis quickly discover they've been found out, and they take the whole town hostage. This happens in the first half hour or so, and the rest of the film involves the efforts of the people to fight back using surreptitious means, and to let the outside world know of their plight. The story was written by a master named Graham Greene, whose books were made into many films. I don't know if he wrote the screenplay or not, but it shows once again what can be put into a 90 minute format if the talent is present. "Went The Day Well" is a straight-up classic deserving of it's reputation as one of the greatest WW2 films. Made at the famous Ealing Studios and featuring a host of talented actors and actresses from a very early era, and shot in dramatic black and white (evocative of 1940s England), it's five stars on every level. I had been meaning to see it for a long time, and it was finally released on the Nostalgia Family label for a very affordable price, $5.99, and the print is crystal clear.
So those were the movies of the last two days. Everything is per usual at Pearl's.
See you in the morning, SB. I Love You. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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