7A \\ Weekend Movies

(attention, it might have spoiler alerts - consider yourself warned)

I have always felt curious about movies. Recently that curiosity moved towards horror movies. When I start to see properly a new genre of movies I feel the need to watch some of the considered classics!

Saturday, for no apparent reason, I felt it was perfect to see Halloween and Michael Myers. I've embarked in a marathon of Halloween movies.
Only after I watched a view that I realized there was more, and many not even related with the first/original movie.

I started properly with the first movie of 1978 - Halloween, directed by John Carpenter, with Jamie Lee Curtis in the main role of Laurie Strode. A quick movie, quite scary - the ambience is very well constructed, the characters are not very deep, but that's perfect for the genre of the film, and for an independent movie at that time, that was a lot! - and probably that's why it was so successful. It's a movie full of gore, there's a lot of chasing and in the end no one knows where Michael Myers is.
1981 - Halloween II directed now by Rick Rosenthal, still with Jamie Lee Curtis in the main role of Laurie Strode -  it's a bloodier and scary continuation of the first film. There's a lot more deaths, more violent too. The whole movie happens just right after Laurie Strode got to the hospital -  continuing the first movie, and the whole plot happens in this small hospital with barely any staff and patients. Some of the scenes in the hospital basement remind me of A Nightmare on Elm Street but it was only released three years after, so it might be other way around the influence - if there was any.

I wasn't aware of next movies (in chronological order): Halloween III: Season of the Witch in 1982; Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers in 1988; Halloween 5 - The Revenge of Michael Myers in 1989 and in 1995 the Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, so I didn't watched them yet.

I jumped to the 1998 movie Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, again with Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode. This happens twenty years after Michael's disappearance. Laurie never got convinced of her brother's death in the fire at the hospital, because his body was never found. She changed her identity, and now is a teacher and director of a posh private school. She also has a son that recently did 17 years. She is psychotic and over controller mother, but she as a point, after all her brother might come back anytime!
It's an ok movie, but in the horror genre it doesn't scare at all. It has some nice persecution scenes, but that's it. The ending is epic, and pretty much seems like the end of Michael Myers.

I haven't see the 2002 Halloween: Resurrection (again with Jamie Lee Curtis), and started to watch instead the Halloween (2007) and the continuation Halloween II (2009) by Rob Zombie. And oh boy! Rob Zombie restores parts of the original storyline but adds so much more to the story! Not just to the story itself but also visually. I don't know if it was because I saw the unrated versions, it's way more violent and gory - sometimes in a disgusting way (like just in the beginning of the Halloween II when Laurie it's in the hospital, all bloody and the doctors are taken care of her and there are some detail shots of her wounds). Both movies are really long, about two hours each, for a horror movie that's a lot! But there is always something to see, a new thing happening, so there isn't a moment of boredom in the movies.
Comparing the Laurie Strode character, I think she, as a character, lose a lot, she is more fragile and thinking well, in the Rob Zombie version the main character is Michael Myers. You can follow Michael path since he was a bullied child and killed is older (and slutty) sister, sister's boyfriend and his mother's (asshole) boyfriend, and then when Michael was arrested at mental disorder facility, because of that. How Dr. (jerk) Loomis was important in his daily routine, and also how his mother's weekly visits were important to him. How he snaps when someone talks about he's little sister, or when some pigs try to violate a girl in his cell and he end up by killing them all and escape from prison. After that is halloween and Michael tries to get to his sister. In the first film she thinks that she killed him, but soon you can found out that he's not dead and he will be back - after all he was just a psychopath boy that wanted to gather back his family! They all died in the end - happy ending? Maybe not, horrifying ending? Well probably, after all it's a horror movie.

On Sunday night I was feeling that I need to change subject so I choose something lighter to watch, something that have been on my watch list for awhile - Ultraviolet, a 2006 movie with Milla Jovovich.
Downside of the movie, I kinda wanted to know more about the characters background stories, there were a lot of questions that I wanted to be answered, but maybe they'll do a sequel!
I adore the opening credits with all the comics references, unfortunately its fake, I mean, there is no Ultraviolet Comic Series, though I think they would be epic, or at least good.
Other issue in the movie is so many references to other movies, scenes and actions that make you think I've seen this before! Which would fine to me if there was something more relevant in the plot, but the plot isn't very deep. Some of the other movies that remind me of were Tron, Matrix, Underworld, Star Wars and Æon Flux, to name a few.
It's entertaining but for such nice graphics it asked for a better character development.

And that was it for this weekend, I hope to see the rest of the other Halloween movies really soon.

Bites & Bits | é um ciclo vicioso {personal rant}

Hoje acordei a pensar na vida.
Isto de acordar tarde não dá com nada. Acordo com a mente turva e primeiro que clarifique um pensamento coerente, pode demorar algum tempo. A solução aparente seria deitar-me mais cedo, mas na verdade é que se estou a fazer algo interessante não quero interromper o fio à meada para ir dormir. Outra solução seria pôr um despertador... e depois não ignorá-lo.
A parte mais parva desta conversa toda é que este diálogo repete-se ciclicamente, todas as semanas. Penso é desta que me levanto cedo e faço 1001 coisas. Sim, resulta um dia, no outro já tenho sono, ou não tenho nada muito importante para fazer que justifique acordar já já.
Uma desgraça!

E como uma desgraça nunca vem só...
A minha cabeça está sempre a pensar em mais coisas para fazer, até parece que só conhece a soma e a multiplicação, sejam novos desenhos, novos projetos... Tudo é possivel! Mas o tempo não estica, e aqui a moça tem uma maneira muito peculiar de trabalhar. O que muitas vezes resulta em stress desnecessário. E quando a prima preguiça e irmã procastinação vem visitar e instalam-se alegremente sem vontade aparente de partir, cria-se um 31 de tal ordem!! Que por norma significa um par de dias a comportar-me como uma barata tonta cheia de stress que não sabe o que fazer! Até acalmar e achar uma solução... ou o contrário.
É um ciclo vicioso, mas hei-de quebrá-lo!

Bites and Bits \\ Uptaded Layout Blogs

I've been really busy with exciting projects and I wasn't able to get some time to blog. And oh boy how I miss it.

One of this projects is a partnership with my best friend. We got together and created the Nuts for Paper brand and all the notebooks and other paper ephemera. We recently opened our Etsy Shop, though we are just starting I'm always thinking about new products and new ideas to spice it all up. We are also preparing a exhibition for september and I am beyond excitement.

Besides all that I'm also working as freelancer designer.
I'm happy. And I will be even happier when I can conciliate everything together and go back to blogging every week.

I had this in mind for a couple weeks already, and little by little started to change the layouts and organizing better my blogs. Because I can't have just one, and I don't want to mix different things, like inspiration images (that belong to I'm not afraid of the dark and to Pinterest), my photo diary and my drawing/illustrations. I just feel that they don't belong together.
Last night I was playing with the new layouts for the blogs.

Scribbling Drafts \\ Illustration & Drawings 

Octo vel Octoginta \\ Photography Dairy

I'm always changing my mind about the layouts in the blogs. However I tend to gravitate more into a more minimalist layouts, where the content and mainly the images are the king/queen of the posts.

For now, they'll remain like this. But in a couple of months... who knows?

Wanna keep up with everything? I might want to follow me on twitter.
See you soon

7A | Brave

Sometimes I feel like releasing my inner child and watch cartoon movies.
And then I see movies like Brave, that gathers a few things that I LOVE - leading female role, curly redhead, great graphics, relatable characters, funny characters (like the chiefs of the clans, Merida little triplet brothers and her father) and it all happens in a celtic land (and that almost equals perfection in my dictionary).
The accents in the english version are amazing, and I refuse myself to see it in any other language.
And then you have the whole music... my favourite it's the Song of Mor'du, it's perfect to me, because reminds me many of the books that I've read that are supposed to happen in a celtic era, and it translate how I imagine the music that they use to sing.

It's a kind of film I know I will be watching again, and again, and again....

Noam Chomsky on Children and the advertising industry...

" The advertising industry is a huge industry, and anyone with their eyes open can see what it's for. First of all, the existence of the advertising industry is a sign of the unwillingness to let markets function. If you had markets, you wouldn't have advertising. Like, if somebody has something to sell, they say what it is and you buy it if you want. But when you have oligopolies, they want to stop price wars. They have to have product differentiation, and you got to turn to deluding people into thinking you should buy this rather than that. Or just getting them to consume - if you can get them to consume, they're trapped, you know.

 It starts with the infant, but now there's a huge part of the advertising industry which is designed to capture children. And it's destroying childhood. Anyone who has any experience with children can see this. It's literally destroying childhood. Kids don't know how to play. They can't go out and, you know, like when you were a kid or when I was a kid, you have a Saturday afternoon free. You go out to a field and you're finding a bunch of other kids and play ball or something. You can't do anything like that. It's got to be organized by adults, or else you're at home with your gadgets, your video games.

But the idea of going out just to play with all the creative challenge, those insights: that's gone. And it's done consciously to trap children from infancy and then to turn them into consumer addicts." -   Noam Chomsky

"My personal feeling is that citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for more meaningful democracy." - Noam Chomsky - Necessary Illusions

Portugal Independence day

Illustration by Google