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tilbageidanmark · 8 months

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Movies I watched this Week #138 (Year 3/Week 34):

Past Lives, another brilliant debut feature from a young female director, Celine Song. Exquisite, mature filmmaking, in full control of all aspects of the craft, juxtaposition, edit, use of music, layering, balance, staging. F. Ex. , at 55:00 min, the exact midpoint of the movie, when they finally meet for the first time, Song lets the camera lingers on train crossing the bridge... Tremendous, devastating accomplishment. Greta Lee is my new crush. 10/10.

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“I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life. But you, you’re 20 minutes…”

Before 'Sweet smell of success' and ‘Network’ and ‘Nightcrawler’ exposed the corrupt cynicism of mass media, Billy Wilder's Ace in the hole told the story of one newspaperman sensationally manipulating a story for his own sleazy benefit. Viciously unscrupulous, savagely frank, a sunlit, bright Noir.

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2 films about pianists who pretend to be blind:

🍿 Andhadhun, a Hindi crime thriller about a musician who pretends to be blind, who witness a murder happening in front of him, because the killers assume he can't see them. A mishmash of tropes. 3/10.

🍿 Supposedly, Andhadhun was inspired by a 2010 French short film L'Accordeur (The Piano Tuner).

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First watch: John Huston's classic adventure-romance The African Queen, "Shot in Africa", as the titles state. Humphrey Bogart, Gruff, scrappy, in dirty clothes (!) is talking and gesturing exactly like Noah Cross. Excellent!

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2 more by François Ozon:

🍿 Sitcom, a surrealist satire of a proper, uptight, upper middle class family, with a house in the country, a maid, etc. whose whole life turns degenerate, when the father brings home a pet, white rat. The rat acts like a 'Magical visitor', f. ex, in Pasolini's 'Teorema', and soon all the males start acting gay, and everybody's starts sleeping with everybody else, conducts orgies, and attempts suicide. Buñuel-lite: 4/10

🍿 By the Grace of God, a sober documentary-like true-story from Lyon (which is nice). A respected banker and a practicing Catholic with a family of 5 children, remembers how he was abused by the local priest, and starts a process to sue the church. Very much like Tom MaCarthy's 'Spotlight', it's measured, empathetic and un-sensationalist.

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Tokyo Decadence ("Topâzu"), my second by writer/director Ryū Murakami [He wrote, but didn't direct ‘Audition’]. A depraved, convoluted "Pink" film about a young submissive and delicate prostitute, who works at a high-end call girl service, specializing in SM and Bondage. Erotic art, slightly different from 'real' Japanese fetish porn. Disturbing. (Found here)

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2 more by Damien Chazelle:

🍿 Whiplash (2014). I'm not so crazy about stories of emotional abuse and humiliations between mentors and disciples, especially when one is an absolute asshole, and the other an obsessive over-achiever, and both are male "Perfectionists" who’ll stop at "Nothing" to become "Great Artists". But the use of music, especially jazz was so lovely, and innovative.

🍿 The English-speaking Spanish Grand Piano was written by Chazelle just before 'Whiplash'. It's a high-concept musical thriller, about a pianist attempting a comeback performance and an assassin who threatens to kill him on stage. But for that you have to suspends all belief and accept Elijah "Frodo" Wood as a ridiculously classic musician, and a preposterous "Play a wrong note and you die" plot. 2/10.

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Where the Crawdads Sing, another woman-directed Southern Gothic drama, a story of abuse, pain and neglect. Flat 'Swamp Girl' full of clichés. The only, mild surprise was the final disclosure, of who was the real killer. 2/10.

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Before directing his two masterpieces, ‘Columbus’ and ‘After Yang’, Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada was known for his sublime video essays, sometimes commissioned by Criterion, or ‘Sight & Sound’. 16 of his short-form video poems are posted on his old Vimeo account, including ‘Hands of Bresson’, ‘Way of Ozu’, ‘Auteur in space’ (Tarkovsky), ‘Tarantino, from below’, Sounds of Aronofsky, ‘Wes Anderson from above’, ‘Breaking Bad / POV’, Kubrick / One-point perspective, and 8 more.

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And one I couldn't finish: The new German Seneca – On the Creation of Earthquakes. A philosophy-themed metaphor for today's Authoritarianism with over-indulgent John Malkovich grotesquely hamming it out, and just never stop talking, talking talking. And a 12-year-old Nero without any charisma.

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Still life, a short Greek film by Dimitrios Karas (2017). A man wakes up on a dirt road in the middle of a desert.

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Asking for Love was a 1973 Icelandic music video made by Egill Eðvarðsson. It showed Jóhann G. Jóhannsson walking backwards around downtown Reykjavík, and then reversed to make it seem everyone else’s walking backwards. Now, fifty years later, Guðmundur Kristinn Jónsson and Ívar Kristján Ívarsson have recreated the video with singer-songwriter Árný Margrét, walking the same route backwards, for her song Waiting. (Via).

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(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

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vankoya · 7 years

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A God’s Blood.

✗ Part of the Across the Multiverse series!

Genre | Greek Mythology AU.

Pairing | Kim Taehyung / Feminine Reader.

Words | 2,501 words.

Conspectus | Not even a God can save her. But oh, does he try his best.

Warnings | Death as a result of illness. Angst with a hopeful ending.

Not much thought goes into the abandoned, neighbouring house on the hill.

Well, until the day Taehyung peers out of his kitchen window and sees the driveway that lays forty-five metres from his own, hosting a shabby car packed to the rafters. Clothing and household items and two women of the same genetics spill out of its doors.

A scowl molds his weary features. The lone cloud that is lazily passing by the sun—smothering its shine—startles and scurries across the early morning stretch of robin’s egg blue, allowing the giant star to douse the scene in its luminous rays. Light swathes the hill in a diaphanous sheet of gold. Now, Taehyung sees clearly that it is certainly a mother and daughter who lift and load, tug and pass, in perfect tandem. Two birds filling their new nest.

It is quite a sight, really, for it is barely eight o’clock and they are both so utterly vivacious. On the other hand, Taehyung is bone tired, and it is most surely showing in the way that the sun lazily ascends, as though it perhaps has something else much better to do. Like staying in bed for another four hours.

Nonetheless, the candescent brilliance glowers at him through the crystalline pane, overlooking the sight of the first sign of human life that he has encountered in about a decade. Give or take.

You should go help them.

Taehyung agrees that it seems the polite thing to do. But before he has had the chance to have his taste buds graced by the heat of his freshly brewed cup of coffee? It could be a bad idea, especially since he is still frowning.

Though another god must be listening in on him, for the younger of the pair suddenly trips on her own feet and sends the contents of the cardboard box she carries flying across the gravel. Some items smash and splinter in a mess of china and glass, while others bounce against the ground and roll this way and that.

Taehyung is already bursting out of the front door, loping down the slope, praying that nobody had noticed the minuscule flare of the sun when the panic struck him like a bullet.

What he does not expect as he nears is for the girl to be coughing, doubled-over, palms pressed to her lips to smother the worst of it. Highly unlike the way that people will loudly expel tight air from their lungs to dislodge whatever infinitesimal particle is stuck to the back of their throat. Rather, she holds it in like she is hiding a secret; something that was never supposed to make itself known to the light of day. She swallows the sound as though she cannot bear for her mother, oblivious to the crash and the outcome inside of the house, to hear it.

Taehyung only understands when the girl calms down, straightens her spine, and her hands come away from her mouth smattered with scarlet.

“Are you alright?” he tentatively calls, five feet away, and she is damn near startled out of her wits, yanking her head around to face him.

The whiplash of how gorgeous she is, all bright eyes and radiant skin, gets him nearly as fierce as her surprised reaction of a shriek.

“Christ!” the girl yelps, licking her red lips and pulling the sleeves of her sweater over her knuckles, concealing the evidence. “What– Where did you come from? Who are you?!”

Taehyung, despite the fact that his heart knocks against his chest, grits his teeth. He should have had that coffee. “I’m your neighbour. That’s my house–” He helpfully gestures up the hill where his home resides, as if they are not the only two buildings within an eight kilometre radius– “Up there. I saw you trip over from my kitchen window and thought I’d come down to help you, but, uh, I guess I saw...”

With the tapering of his sentence, Taehyung’s gaze softens and drifts to her hidden away hands. He flicks his eyes back up to her expression, watching her sigh. Caught red-handed, quite literally.

Suddenly, he feels intrusive. Horribly rude, like he should have never stepped outside of his house in the first place and let his words run so bluntly across the space that separates them. Though such tar black feelings are quick to dissolve when the corners of her mouth curve with a hint of mirth.

“Oh. Well. I apologise,” she speaks gently, something high and beautiful and terrible like the blood stained on her hands. “But I suppose you know why we’re here now. I’m ___, by the way.”

“To spit blood on the hill’s face?” Taehyung, mentally slapping himself, thinks to trap his voice in a box for the remainder of eternity. He deserves Hell for the fact that his first human interaction in years stumps down to him joking about the disease that seeks home within this girl.

Yet her laugh, honey sweet, speaks forgiveness.

“For the fresher air, the warm sunlight.” The girl is radiant, in her words, her tone, absolutely everything. Blood still sticks to the left corner of her lips, yet she is so winsome that it hurts. “To breathe easy and live as content as can be.”

Then, her eyes flick worriedly towards the house; the open door where a mother is about to appear and question who the handsome stranger standing on her brand new front yard happens to be. “Just. Please, let’s keep this little mess between the both of us? My mother knows it’s bad, but she doesn’t know it’s become even worse. Promise?”

Measuredly, Taehyung slides his eyes from the doorway to the girl, staring at her honest, humble face like she is the prettiest possession of a museum. There is a tickle that dances across his lips, something of a smile, and he cannot help but notice the way her eyes widen a fraction. A string of panic is quick to tug at his chest when she does so, hoping to the heavens that he is not accidentally emitting luminesce from his pores. (It would not be the first time.)

“I understand,” he avows, mouth curving upwards as he scratches the back of his head and inclines his chin towards the almost forgotten mess. “My name is Taehyung. Shall we clean this up, ___?”

When she grins in full force at him before turning to the littered items, Taehyung cannot help but think that perhaps, whatever sun he has known and reigned over for the last millennium has been counterfeit. For the real one resides stolen in her smile.

Spring has not seen such extraordinary sunlight in years. Taehyung pulls it from every corner of his side of the world like summertime. They have not heard from the clouds in weeks, and he could not care less about the rotten complaints that the other sky deities spit at his feet.

This won’t last forever, comes the warning he expects. But Taehyung is ignorant; completely blinded by the devotion that spreads in poison ivy throughout his ribcage. All he can think about is the way that she had said the warm sunlight and how those simple words ignited a flame of brilliant determination within him.

Most days, they laze together in the luscious garden that circles Taehyung’s house in a barricade of ambrosia. They bathe in golden light, surrounded by soft pink peonies, blushing carnations, violet anemones; the score to the scenery being the gentle buzzing of bees and her occasional coughing. She never questions him on why he lives up here, how he survives so alone, nor how he can even afford it when he appears to be the same age as herself and has no apparent job to his name.

Instead, the girl stretches out across the neat, green grass. Instead, she pretends she does not notice the way her thin summer dress has hitched up her thighs and has his throat running dry. Instead, she tells Taehyung about the dreams she has when she slumbers forty-five metres from his own bed, and asks him questions that she deems important.

“Would you rather an extra nose, or an extra mouth?”

“If you could name a star, what would you call it?”

“Say I asked you to kiss me right now, would you?”

Four months pass, and the sunlight always stays. Brighter, if anything. Lasting later into the evening, now that summer has made way. She tells Taehyung it is the best she has breathed in years. That the clear, warm air tastes undeniably sweet in her lungs.

When he finally kisses her, he expects sugar and syrup and warmth. Not the taste of iron and salt and a guillotine just waiting to drop.

Taehyung has never wanted, nor needed to save somebody. All he has ever been required to do is bring the illumination to his side of the world. To fill the tenebrosity with handfuls of gold; to tuck light wherever it may fit.

But he has abused his rights, and that is perhaps why the gods are unforgiving at the moment he needs them most.

Her mother is in the town when the world falls to pieces like petals peeling from the receptacle of a withering bloom. Taehyung is the one to bear witness, to have his heart deteriorate alongside her lungs.

A rush, and the clouds flood the sky in a blanket of grey, almost as if they have been waiting for this dent of vulnerability to finally blow. They stream into the soft blue like depraved beasts to watch an end come to the girl who barred them for so long.

“Don’t,” she manages in a rasp, fingers weightless on his wrist, drawing the phone from his ear. “Please, Tae. This– It’s time...”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Taehyung is a wreck, his insides are shattered and his heart is pouring into his lap where he cradles her wheezing frame, utterly helpless. “You still– You can have more time–”

“I don’t–” She coughs, a harsh sound, flecks of crimson spraying onto his throat and collarbones. The tears roll fatter, faster down his cheeks. A sob is lodged in his chest. “I don’t w-want more time. I’m happy... For this t-to be it, Taehyung.”

All he can do is stare, blink furiously to be rid of the tears that smear his vision of her placid features. It had happened much like the day they met, with him observing through the kitchen window. Though this time, love was touching his eyes as he watched her add to the pile of blooms laying severed from their stems, next to where she had knelt in his garden. Above, the sun had watched and protected with its kindly, golden palms resting upon her bare shoulders, gliding its fingers through the flyaway hairs that curl at the nape of her neck.

She had started coughing. Taehyung had thought it would pass, that her feeble lungs would gradually relent as they always do, and he had went to fetch a handkerchief to clean up the aftermath. It was not until he had stepped out onto the grass and found her completely collapsed over the culled flowers that he had realised he never once thought they would give up entirely.

“Tell m-my mother... I’m sorry. That I love her.” Her eyes are glassy, her bones becoming dead weight against his arms. But the faint, tragic smile stained with her own blood remains. “I love you, Tae. So much.”

Something cracks inside of him, the salt waterfalls gush at a greater ferocity. Yet Taehyung is firm and sure when he stares into the eyes he fell so head over heels for and says, “I love you, ___. I will never stop loving you,” and she smiles at him like she is not resting on her deathbed.

“Make the sun shine...” her voice is barely above a whisper, exhaling thickly, lungs full of the scarlet that belongs to her veins and arteries, pumping through her slowing heart, “... one last time?”

The words ground him, tug his bearings back into sense and have his eyes staring widely into her own like the answer to her question hides somewhere within the shards of her iris. A ghost of her smile still draws at her ruby-stained lips. A truth unspoken. An acknowledgment that she made long, long ago, though never felt the desire to pry. Just like she ceased to do with the personal questions that she could have pulled from his bone marrow with her very own teeth if she tried.

Instead, she let him be, and loved him and the sun all the same.

Taehyung cannot bear to peel his eyes from her face, yet he must. Facing the sky, he focuses on the spot of brightness that is barely apparent through the coverage of thick grey.

I will take her. I will keep her safe. It is all that I can do.

Taehyung knows, and he accepts.

Before he squeezes his eyes closed and presses his lips to her forehead, Taehyung takes in her equable expression one last time. His trembling fingertips tuck her hair behind her ear in a gesture so heartbreakingly familiar that a tear gathers at the corner of her eye, passing down her cheek. With a careful lean, his mouth connects to her skin and she sighs, an utterance like relief, acceptance. The last sound that passes from her tender mouth.

In all of its glorious might, the sunlight suddenly bursts through the overcast in a radiance so effulgent, stories of its intense flare on this day carry through to the next millennium. Taehyung takes his lips from her skin to watch as her shining soul lifts from where her heart lays still. At first, it carefully treads, gradually climbing through the air.

Then, the sun gingerly reaches down to collect her.

It is not until months later, once he believes he has been wrung dry of all emotion, that Taehyung notices something different.

It comes the day after a mother has packed the items she and a daughter had unloaded into their nest, little over a year ago, to chug the shabby old car out of the driveway for the final time. Returning alone to the city that they had left together. Taehyung wakes early, drags his feet to the kitchen, and fills the stovetop kettle with water. Placing it over the glowing element, he pads towards the window, just as he does every single day. A routine to keep him sane.

But here, on this particular morning, he is met with a sight that nearly stops his heart.

The slowly ascending sun resembles her soul more than it ever has.

The voice is quick to follow, completely unlike he has ever known it. Yet holding a familiarity that has him grinning through the tears.

If you were able to name a star, would it be after my smile?

Prompt | Nurse Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character healing yours.

Series | Across The Multiverse is a collection of drabbles based around the prompts from this list, each taking place in a different universe. The updates will occur whenever I am inspired by a prompt to write a small piece, most generally done as a warm-up.

#taehyung x reader #bts drabbles #taehyung angst #bts x reader #bangtan bookclub #kim taehyung #bts scenarios #atm #across the multiverse #gukvory #I titled this 'sun prism' in my head for junip #alt title: 'let's kill junip'#tae is apollo btw #and the oc has tuberculosis #/ mcd

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