Gregory Crewdson’s Dream House portfolio for the New York Times, 2002.
“The catalyst for these pictures was an empty ranch-style house in Rutland Vermont. The furniture, lamps, even the hand-towels in the bathrooms, were exactly as the owners had left them ten years earlier when they passed away. It was an eerie and beautiful place, painted with memories. Absence was one of the furnishings.”
— Kathy Ryan, photo editor of The New York Times Magazine.
“…I just brought two unrelated ideas to the table. One was that I had always wanted to photograph Tilda Swinton and the other was that I also wanted to make a series of photographs in a particular uninhabited ranch house in Vermont. […] We amassed an additional list of actors, who I felt could inhabit the world of my pictures. […] We had mapped out a concept: to spend the entire month of August, with a production crew, in the house, separately photographing these actors. My parameters were that I would have complete artistic control and that the actors must come alone, unaccompanied by assistants or entourage. What ensued was a magical adventure, strange, enchanting and totally unique magical adventure.
— Gregory Crewdson
Posts tagged with Tilda Swinton
The Dream House, Rutland, Vermont
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Tilda Swinton
Dylan Baker
Dylan Baker
Jullianne Moore
William H Macy
Tilda Swinton
William H Macy
I’m a strong believer of the “less is more” method of acting and tend to think that the more nuanced, thoughtful and muted the acting, the more vibrant and emotionally genuine it looks on screen. There’s of course a fine line between a subtly rendered performance and plain wooden acting. Sometimes, less is just less.
Vincent D’Onofrio as Mike Cobb in Thumbsucker is the perfect example of less is more. Like all the other adults in this film, he’s fumbling in the dark, completely lost and therefore incapable of offering his 17-year old thumbsucking son any real guidance. I find Cobb’s awkwardness, inarticulacy and constant frustation at not being able to connect with his son particularly moving. The way he delivers the line “I was just… getting used to you” (upon hearing that his son is leaving for New York) is absolutely incredible. By managing, with that one line, to encapsulate so brilliantly the whole father-son relationship and what the character of Mike Cobb is all about, D’Onofrio launches this movie into the stratospheric heights of cinema magic. Well, that’s just me.
Sidenote 1: I kept referring to D’Onofrio as the guy in Law & Order, but when I looked him up on the imdb after watching Thumbsucker, I was gobsmacked to see he had been Full Metal Jacket’s Private Pyle all along. All those years and I never made the connection. How awesome.
Sidenote 2: In the “less is more” department, other great examples are Richard Farnsworth in The Straight Story, Timothy Spall in Mike Leigh’s films and Tobey Maguire in films such as The Ice Storm, Pleasantville and Wonder Boys.
To all of you worriers who occasionally think they’ve fucked up at work in such a monumental way that the end is nigh… Just watch Tilda’s spiralling descent in Michael Clayton (2007); that will give you an idea of what being totally out of your depth really feels like and and how bad things can really get. Well, yes, sometimes you do need fiction to help you get some perspective in life.
Trailer for Jim Jarmusch’s up-coming The Limits of Control
(via zehnuhr)
1. I’m rolling my eyes as I’m writing this. This trailer really looks up its own ass and it just happens that I’m going through a phase of being rather intolerant of pretentious cinema that (most of the times) is just a cheap cover for shallowness.
2. I’m ambivalent about Jim Jarmusch: he does great stuff like Dead Man, but then again, he does BS like Broken Flowers, which is the perfect example of the point I’m making above [cool score by Ethopian musician Mulatu Astatqe though].
3. The Limits of Control’s got Gael Garcia Bernal who can annoy the hell out of me in some/most of his movies, but hey, there are also plenty of cool actors in this film.
4. And then, there’s Tilda of course…Ah, Tilda. And not in a 5-second cameo part, it seems. Plus she gets to wear a groovy white wig.
Sidenote: no release date for the UK as yet. Which does not bode well. Fuck the UK and their complete lack of interest in cinema. That’s it, I’m moving back to Paris.
Tilda Swinton in Constantine (2005) by Francis Lawrence
The perfect plane movie i.e. the one you’ve always sort of wanted to watch but not to the extend of renting or downloading it (let alone going to see it in the cinema).
I had a great time with this film: it’s got sleek aesthetics, a rather cool Satan (Peter Stormare) and Keanu Reeves was actually more than OK (that happens sometimes). I even jumped on a couple of occasions, but it could have been because of turbulences.
But really, it was all about Tilda for me. She is freaking awesome as Gabriel. Alas, O grand desespoir, she’s only in three scenes but these three scenes are actually well worth watching the rest of the film.
Orlando (1992) by Sally Potter
The story begins in the 1600s. Queen Elizabeth takes a shine to the attractive young Orlando and grants him a large estate at one condition: “Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old.” Orlando takes the queen at her word and doesn’t. “And because this is England, everyone pretends not to notice.”
We then follow Orlando through the next 400 years and see him fall in love, write bad poetry, lounge around in Constantinople, become a woman, lose her estate, have sex, give birth, see her portrait from the 1600s hung in a museum.
Funny, clever writing, quirky story, great acting (Tilda!) and beautiful cinematography.
Sidenote: Jimmy Somerville’s cameo as an angel is slightly disturbing.
Tilda Swinton
I will be referring to this woman a lot in the course of my tumblring. She is the most interesting actress of her time and she looks so alien and beautiful at the same time. We’re fucking lucky to have her grace our cinema screens right now, I’m telling you. So so lucky.
Films I’ve seen with her so far:
Orlando (1992)
Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)
The Beach (2000/I)
The Deep End (2001)
Vanilla Sky (2001)
Adaptation (2002)
Constantine (2005)
Broken Flowers (2005)
Thumbsucker (2005)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)
Michael Clayton (2007)
The Man from London (2007)
Burn After Reading (2008)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Films of hers that I really need to see and that have been recommended by The Once and Future Blonde:
Female Perversions (1996)
For those of you not familiar with Tilda’s work, I strongly recommend you start with Orlando (the movie that is all about her), Michael Clayton (she got a well deserved Oscar for best supporting actress) and Constantine (she has a small but extremely charismatic part in this film).
The Man from London (2007) by Béla Tarr
A black&white Hugarian film adaptation of a book by Belgium crime novelist Georges Simenon.
At first, it feels like this film is trying very hard to put you to sleep but then wake you up from time to time just to make you go “huh?”. It’s very slow-paced, the camera likes to linger on pretty much anything that gets in the frame, the dialogue is very minimalistic, the French and English dubbing by the actors sounds badly done (intentionally so), the music score is monotone, everybody in the film seems depressed (apart from a couple of fur salesmen) and the French town where the action is meant to take place really looks like some remote and desolated town somewhere in Eastern Europe. I loved it. It’s such a unique piece, very arty but done without any pretention, it’s stylistically stunning, it’s got a real story hook, emotional drama and it still makes room for a couple of scenes of pure absurd comedy.
I’ve found on the web a fantastic review that really does the film justice.
Fuengshunut’s visual review of Burn After Reading (2008) by the Coen brothers
I’m in complete disagreement with this review, but I like the artwork so much that I couldn’t resist posting it here. I find Fuengshunut’s visual reviews creative and clever.
As for the movie itself, I thought it was trying too hard in the quirky goofball dark comedy genre and it felt contrived. The whole time I was thinking that Quantin Tarantino had done the same thing with Pulp Fiction but so much better (Brad’s demise in the closet was just too reminiscent of Travolta’s toilet scene in Pulp, even though those two scenes are quite different in their settings).
BAR has got a bunch of great actors, who I really respect and like and who were clealry having a great time on the set, but they all annoyed the crap out of me in this film. The only bit of acting I did like was J.K. Simmons in the first of his two scenes.
Sidenote: now, watching George Clooney and Tilda Swinton sharing screen time in Michael Clayton (2007), that’s something else! Those two are so good in that.
