Michelangelo Antonioni, Red Desert, 1964

Anto Carte (Belgian, 1886-1954) • Mélancolie • 1921

what if. animemorphs.

Okay, picture Akira's approach to transformation sequences.

Now picture Akira if Junji Ito had done all the art.

There it is: Anime Animorphs!

Yoshitomo Nara

Sleepless night (Cat). 1999 

BREAKING NEWS! Oarfish faces the wrath of Casa De Neo

some cortex model studies + doodles bc i wanna draw him better

“(Magnani was) an ordinary Roman who was anything but ordinary. Magnani was a volcano, a tempest, a devastating performer who seemed to live and breathe her art and whose best performances would rank among the most vivid and immediate and emotion-rich ever filmed. She was born in Rome in 1908 (and would die there in 1973), and she was a living symbol of the city: its she-wolf, its spirit goddess, the voice of its streets, the face and body of its native population … The piazzas of Rome may have been filled with women like Magnani but on screen, particularly among leading ladies, there was nobody to compare. She would never be mistaken for a beauty pageant contestant or some producer’s girl on the side: she was full-bodied, shaggy-maned, often slightly disheveled, with a long nose and a tendency to sport bags under her eyes. She projected no vanity and few pretenses. But she had a raw, titanic talent, especially for screen acting, where the camera could get close in on her and reveal her wondrous ability to channel the disparate emotions of a moment.”

/ From Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome (2017) by Shawn Levy /

Died on this day fifty years ago: the fiercely sensual, temperamental and magnetic earth mother of Italian cinema and Italy’s single greatest actress, Anna Magnani (7 March 1908 - 26 September 1973). As John Waters concludes, “She was earthy. God knows she was earthy!”

im thinking of trying to make myself draw differently.....

Maximilien Luce - Factories Near Charleroi, 1894.

Menino com Pássaro, 1957

Candido Portinari

Cândido Portinari (Brazilian, 1903-1962) • Colheita de Café (Coffee Harvest) • 1951

Charlotte from Samurai Shodown streamed by LordBBH

Renato Guttuso

Omaggio a Ingres. undated

Thinking Aloud About Film: El imperio de la fortuna/ The Realm of Fortune (Arturo Ripstein, Mexico, 1986)

Dionisio (Ernesto Gómez Cruz) lives with his mother in a one-room hut, scraping a living as a town-cryer. He’s at cock-fight in a village fair and is given a bloodied rooster as a tip. Dionisio heals him and begins a career. The innocent naïve peasant is transformed into a leading gambler, marries a beautiful singer (Blanca Guerra), who brings him even more luck. But in his single-minded pursuit…

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Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (1948)

A man needs his bicycle to work a job to support his family but when it’s stolen he hunts across the entire city to recover it while the money slowly runs out.

 This film is heavy with social criticism, at some point satirical but largely sticks to being pure representation of social and fiscal unfairness. The realism worked well since even the fabricated parts of the plot like contacting the police rang true and any audience member across the countries and decades can attest to having heard of similar occurrences. The movie also exposes the poverty in every area of life from needing one’s own tools for work to religious scams.

 There was an uncomfortable scene with child abuse that the protagonist doesn’t really make up for and excuses his own bad action by blaming his victim and they move on as though their relationship is repaired. The wife and mother doesn’t get much of a role as she disappears after a short while and doesn’t come back for the entire second half of the film so it’s unclear what she’s doing all that time or how she’s affected.

 Father ans son serve as dual main characters and their relationship is the focus on many scenes even as the main plot progresses. This family depiction makes the concluding scenes far more understandable. The Italian community is portrayed as a network of friends and family, however their failures are explored as they unquestioningly protect criminal relations and form immediate mobs to punish outsiders, not to mention all the shouting.

 It’s required by a neo-realist structure that the story end in a likely way so this means it’s necessarily depressing and unsatisfying, such is the lot of underclass life. The subtext of the film was largely lost on international audiences with an inability to understand irony as they voted for it to receive multiple awards and then picked the worst parts of the film to build a society from.

 5/10 -Can’t find a better example of average-

 -The scene which scared American censors the most was the public urination scene.