Martin Scorsese

The fast talking, thick eye brows, black horn-rimmed glasses Martin Scorsese loves movies, he likes them so much he dedicated his life making them, to name a few: Mean Street, Good Fallers, After Hours,  Ragging Bull, The Temptation of Christ, The Age of Innocence, The Departed, Shutter Island and of course – Taxi Driver.

Everything about Martin involves film, from music short film with Michael  Jackson to overseen the restoration of  Peeping Tom, The Red Shoes, Rashomon and The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp. Martin is obsessed with films  and  the character in his  films like Boxcar Bertha, Jake LaMotta, Newland Archer,  Rupert Pupkin,  Henry Hill, Travis Travis Bickle, Howard Hughes are filled with personal struggle and obsession, as Martin is calling them all “God’s lonely man”. Almost every film is a confession of sin and insanity, and you are the witness. Weather the role is played by Robert de Niro or Leonardo DiCaprio or  Ellen Burstyn, they have the same soul, they are disturbed lunatic in need of redemption,  a lost child in search for salvation.

The relationship between man and woman in Martin’s film is always  destructive, as you can see in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, New York, New York, Casino.

In March 1976 a Roger Ebert interview with Scorsese and Paul Schrader the writer of Taxi driver -

Ebert: In a lot of your movies, there's this ambivalent attitude toward women. The men are fascinated by women, but they don't quite know how to relate to them . . .

Scorsese: The goddess-whore complex. You're raised to worship women, but you don't know how to approach them on a human level, on a sexual level. That's the thing with Travis, the DeNiro character - the taxi driver. The girl he falls for, the Cybill Shepherd character - it's really important that she's blond, a blue-eyed goddess.

Schrader: He goes from a goddess to a child godsdess. The 12 year-old prostitute he's trying to rescue - she's unapproachable, too, for him.

Scorsese: She has the candles burning in her bedroom, she's like a saint to him. He can't imagine these pimps treating her the way they do. Before he goes to avenge her, it's almost like he cleanses himself…

In 1977, a film almost finished Scorsese, New York, New York with De Niro and Minnelli, as the critics called" maddeningly uneven 'coke movie" leaving the director in a spiral of drugs and depression because of the failing to cover its $14m production. This film, which I still think was a personal note of Martin, a letter of his sadness and lost of his marriage with Isabella Rossellini.

There are many articles about Scorsese, we know he was born in little Italy in New York and wanted to be a priest then turned his love to movies and music, we know that he produced a successful  TV series Boardwalk  Empire, and his best friend and favourite actor is Robert de Niro, like Hitchcock he likes to have a cameo in his own film, but to understand him you can’t read about him but to watch his film, his struggle and his passion, his film is personal, full of emotion and guilt, love and nightmare.

  “When you make a film... there are times in your life when you're burning with a passion and it's very, very strong. It's almost like a pathology of cinema where you want to possess the people on film. You want to live through them. You want to possess their spirits, their souls, in a way. And ultimately you can't stop. It has to be done until you get to the bitter end.” ----- Scorsese.

Maybe he is insane, maybe  John Ford,  Capra, Welles, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Coppola are all insane. But Scorsese is always my favourite.

“Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?” ----- Teddy, Shutter Island.

Pink Martini

I was in Paris many years ago and that was the first time I listen to Pink Martini at Virgin record Mega Store. It was a cold afternoon, just walked out the cinema from “Amilie”, wondering along the famous Champs-Élysées between the tree-line, everything was so strangely familiar, wanted to buy a CD that would remind me of this time, this is almost a traditions of my own, every country I go I buy a CD to be part of the memory, I also collect bus and train tickets but that is another story.

Pink Martini gave me the impression that they are a European group and later I found out they are from Portland, USA, lead by pianist Thomas Lauderdale. The CD “Sympathique” was in my hand and the song Amado Mio caught my attention. If you know the old movie classic, you will know this is the song from Gilda with Rita Hayworth, I closed my eyes and imagined Rita is dancing  

 ... Amado Mio, when we're together. I'm in a dream world. 

of sweet delight. Many times I've whispered ...

 

Pink Martini‘s music spent more than 10 years with me, from Sympathique, Hang on Little Tomato, Hey Eugene! till 2012, finally saw them live in Barcelona. Almost 2 hours of stylish music, audience clapped and sang together, although China Forbes could not be here due to the recovery from her vocal chord surgery, but the replacement singer Strom Large is almost as good if not better. She has an amazing sexy energy and knows how to have fun with the audience. Little bit of shaking and twisting, she invited some girls to be on stage to dance to the song “Tuca Tuca” with her and at this time everybody in theater was dancing with them.

The first time I heard Nat king Cole when I was five, since then my taste of music is always swimming in the element of Jazz, Classical, Tango, Latin music from Stan Getz, Antonio Jobim, Frank Sinatra,Chet Baker, Billie Holiday, Harry James, Miles David, Debussy, Mozart and so on, one minute, I am in Rio and suddenly I am waking up in Japan and hear the voice of Saori Yuki singing "Mayonaka no Bossa Nova".

All of the good old music rather it is the sensitive sound of a piano and the smooth touch of orchestra with string or the dramatic big bang with brass. They are all became part of my DNA, and now I have pink Martini, the little orchestra to prove that I am not the only one. Somewhere in this world at this very moment, someone is playing my favorite tune, singing my favorite song, the beautiful ballads with the charming lyrics. Pink Martini makes it possible and doing it fun like a sweet treat. They put the sound to the word beautiful. They put the rhythm into my life and I hear the sound of “Brazil” everywhere I go, dance with that pretty girl I love with “Never stop falling in love “ so, come with me, enjoy their music, enjoy life, living is a wonderful thing.

Christmas is on the way, this is the best time to get to know them by getting their holiday Album ‘Joy To The World’ and buy their collection CD “A Retrospective“ as a gift.  My dream is someday I can sing with Pink Martini but for now I might just make one to drink.

PINK MARTINI

Ingredients:

1 part gin

2 parts vermouth

½ part guava nectar or juice

Dash of Cherry brandy

Shake well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with raspberries if you like.

Green Curry Chicken with lemongrass and potato

Always love Curry, different kind of curry, I think they are all good.

Different than Indian curry, the Thai curry always have the flowery fragrance , must be the lemongrass, I think this is one of the happy comfort food, it’s easy to cook at home and quick to serve. 

If you can’t find lemongrass that’s ok. you can always use lime or lemon instead. The best thing about cooking curry is that you can do what ever you like. You don’t want potato? Use carrot or even frozen peas. If you don’t like vegetable at all, don’t put any, all up to you. 

You can also cook it with beef, duck, fish or even lamb, just improvise, measurement is not important. You got the key ingredients. Just use your taste, find that curry taste that you love.

Remember Curry is Jazz in the food world. Enjoy.

Green Curry Chicken with lemongrass and potato

    2 shallots , or 1 small onion

    1 stalk lemongrass

    1 tsp turmeric powder  

    1 tsp vegetable oil

    3-4 tsp green Thai curry paste- more or less up to you.

    4 boneless chicken leg with skin on

    1 tsp fish sauce

    some salt

    1 chopped red chili

    1 tsp sugar , plum sugar is best, or brown sugar is ok

    2 kaffir lime leaves

    400g potato or more if you like potato

    100g green bell pepper

    400ml can coconut milk

    20g fresh coriander or basil .

Peel shallots or onion and cut in half and thinly slice. 

Very finely slice the lemongrass, starting at the thinner end, stopping at the 'woody' part. 

Pan fried the chicken without oil. Chicken skin face down until the skin is crispy then turn it over 

and cook the other side for about 3 minutes, take it out of the pan, put it aside and let it rest.

If you don’t like skin then skip this part , just cut the chicken pieces and cook it later .

Heat the oil in a wok or large saucepan add the shallots or onion. 

Fry it and Stir in the curry paste and lemongrass ,stir fry for 1 minute and then put in potato pieces and add a little coconut milk and let it cook for about 5 minutes.

When you are cooking the potato, cut the chicken in pieces. 

5minutes is up add chicken pieces with the fish sauce, sugar, kaffir lime leaves , turmeric powder  and more coconut mil and stir fry it for 5 minutes, add in more coconut milk and bring slowly to the boil.

Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, for 15 minutes until the potato is cooked.

Stir the curry a few times while it cooks, to stop it sticking, before you serve, add in green bell paper and basil, stir a bit more and Taste the curry.

If you think you like it hotter then put more curry or chili, sugar if you like it sweet , fish sauce even coconut milk depends on your taste. 

Now you like the taste? Good , this dish is ready. 

Sprinkle some coriander or basil and chili over the top. 

Serve with rice or bread and grab yourself a beer.

The Life of Pi

Do you know which movie is the mixture of Cast Away + Slumdog Millionaire + Planet Earth? But much more.

The answer is The Life of Pi. 
A film by Ang Lee, based on a popular novel of the same name. 

A story about an Indian boy who survives a shipwreck with a tiger.

Lee, has directed many classic movies such as Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but also the disappointing- Hulk.

Visually The Life of Pi is stunning. Beautiful 3D images and awesome cinematography, the acting is believable but somehow I didn’t get into the story, maybe because I knew Pi will survive, or at least the tiger will not eat him. The shipwreck scene is well executed, but again I don’t have much feeling toward anyone of the crew or Gerard Depardieu (yes, he is one of the crew and his screen time is about 2 minutes) but i think Lee have his reason, why he want to use Depardieu in such a small part? The monkey and the zebra on the boat ? will bananas float?

The major problem of this film is, we have all grown up Pi telling the story right from the start. As a survival movie it's a dead give away. On the other hand this movie is a soulful treat, full of metaphor of coexistence, calm and turbulent, peace and violence, Catholic and Hindu. If God exists in the form of the nature, the Tiger is the trouble we are facing, and the ocean is Life, the life boat represents living and what we own? and what about the island? is that mean something more? this island is the life that we all wanted? all your can eat and comfortable? but it will toxicated us if we stay there to long? like bank loan? credit? sooner or later. we have to get off it and back on the life boat otherwise we will have nothing left.

The main theme of the Life of Pi is to choose what you believe, no matter religion or science, fiction or nonfiction, to have faith or not. Sooner or later we need to take side, do you want to believe a 16 years old boy spent 227 days on a life boat with a tiger in the middle of the ocean and survived? Pi wanted to be baptized and Pi is being baptized by the ocean and storm, an old me is dead and the new me is born. Can anyone prove God is real. what do you believe? will you believe if anyone tell you their experience? if we look the other way, if Pi told you is the real truth without the tiger, then it will be a very terrible turth and it will meant that his mom been killed by the chef and he have killed the chef and he will have to eat the flesh of everything left on the boat to stay alive. The turth about the real world is a cruel one, religion might be the way to make us all feel better, so what do you want to choose? 
 

This story is about faith and I want to love this movie, but something is missing. I can’t pinpoint it! The timing seems off, it almost boring. The CGI is magical like the BBC documentary Planet Earth, the problem is that you know this is not real but a computer work and like someone playing a magic trick you can’t look too close, like the part in the film, when the tiger grabs a goat through the metal bars, what just happened there?Lee is trying to tell us something and main parts of the " story " we know theres something missing, the story is not 100%, something is hidden but what is it ? because this is not a fairy tell but in fact a very brutal story.

Many times now I got disappointed after I went to cinema, I can’t help but ask myself, why they don’t make movies like they used to? Movies like The Shaw Shank Redemption, Forest Gump? The Life of Pi is something else, this movie is more than what you see, behide all the 3D and beautiful image there is something darker,  just like in the opening, you see all the animals. your first impression will be amaze on how beautiful the all are? but this story is telling you. if you think something is beautiful. you've already make a choice on what to beleive. 

 I like Ang Lee’s movies and I love movies and I will never give them up.  Like Pi said “Above all... it is important not to lose hope".

The Life of Pi, is more than a movie, every sence have it own meaning and Lee want us to see beyond this movie, he want us to see the world differently, maybe we are just like those japanese insurance officer and the writer, now you know the story, it's now our choice to make it our own but doesnt change the fact that we are living today. This is Lee's version of Pi , Same story but with different Soul.
 

The Life of Pi could be the best film of 2012

Paella Marinera

Paella. A famous Spanish rice dish originally came from the third largest city in Spain – Valencia. And because of its perfect climate and soil to grow rice, naturally Valencia has became a rice farming region and rice is what’s the farmer will eat.

After a long day working on the rice’s field the farmers will gathering what ever they got fresh – such as vegetable, chicken, rabbit, frog and even snails and cook them with rice, they call it paella Valenciana. And this rice dish passed to Barcelona.

People living in Barcelona don’t see themselves as Spanish but Catalan, and the Catalan people love seafood, so they started cooking this rice dish with variety of different seafood, they call it Paella Marinera or with squid ink rice - Paella Negra and make this dish as their own.

So, if you are in Barcelona, you will see almost every restaurant selling this dish and almost everyone who orders it is not local because locals like to cook it at home. Paella is a happy food, best is to share it with people you love over couple bottles of red wine, after all paella is about celebrating life and harvest.

Like many traditional cooking every house has its own way to do it and here is mine.

Paella Marinera, serves 6 – 8

Ingredient:

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp turmeric

6 tbsp olive oil

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

200g onion, finely chopped

1 red peppers, seeded and chopped into small pieces

1 green peppers, seeded and chopped into small pieces

1 tsp saffron strands

1kg short-grain paella rice

1 liters fish stock

1 liters chicken stock

400g raw prawns, peeled the prawn and leave their head for later use

500g small clams, washed

50g anchovies, finely chopped into very small almost paste like pieces

600g squid, cut into bite size pieces

350g large mussels, cleaned

600g calamari rings

8-10 cooked langoustines

Place a 50cm – 60 cm paella pan/deep fry pan over 2 burners on a medium heat. Add the oilve oil and garlic and, as soon as the garlic begins to sizzle, add the prawn heads and anchovies, fry them together until you smell the fragrance of the prawn heads and anchovies, squeeze the prawn heads, so the juice inside the head will be mixed with the olive oil, now you put in the onion and fry for 5–6 minutes, put in some wine and fry until onion soft and sweet.

You will need to turn the pan every 2 to 3 minutes throughout the cooking time so that everything cooks evenly. Add the red and green peppers and fry for 5 minutes until the peppers are just softened. Stir in the squid rings and stir-fry for 3–4 minutes, add the rice and saffron, scatter the prawns and clams around the pan, and stir everything together well. Add the stock and 2 teaspoons of salt and bring to the boil, stirring briefly to redistribute the ingredients around the pan.

Leave to simmer for 6 minutes over a medium-high heat, but do not stir it any more, remembering to give the pan a turn, reduce the heat to medium. At the same time prepare other small frying pan , put in olive oil, garlic and give the mussels, langoustines a quick stir fried for 20 second, then arrange the mussels and langoustines evenly around paella pan and push them down slightly into the rice. Leave to cook for further 15 minutes without stirring, by which time all the liquid will be absorbed and the surface of the rice should be pitted with small holes.

Turn off the heat, cover the pan with a clean towel and leave to rest for 5 minutes before serving. Serve warm straight from the pan.

End of Watch

Quite a few documentary style movies in recent years such as Project X and Chronicle, End of Watch is one of them. 

A first person narrative with a cop making a film about his job. Writer-director David Ayers‘s fast-paced editing and shaky hand held camera took audience to witness the front-line police officers caught in a gang conflict in a hostile situation, between hot boiled shootout and street corpse in LA South Central. 

The screen filled with real sense of Drama. A plot full of racial hatred in the community, a task that our hero has to deal with. Gyllenhaal and Pena have fantastic chemistry and have a terrific rapport, it creates the perfect environment for the film, Many characters are believably realistic and the Mexican drug cartel event creates a dark hellish atmosphere for the movie. 

Gyllenhaal delivers an intense, hard-edged character, he manages to capture and hold the audience's attention right from the beginning of the film. Michael Pena played a very complicated character and this maybe his breakthrough from a supporting actor role and finally to become a lead actor in Hollywood. 

No doubt, End of Watch is entertaining but if you look into it, You will find there is no story, only incident. That explains the “documentary style”, because once you use this kind of filming you don’t have to show much of the story because it is “real”. The audience should accept this is in fact the point of view as a “police”, therefore, they have to make you think like a police, right from the opening of the film, don’t think , just listen and watch -

 ” I am the police, and I'm here to arrest you. You've broken the law. I did not write the law. I may disagree with the law but I will enforce it. No matter how you plead, condole, beg or attempt to stir my sympathy. Nothing you do will stop me from placing you in a steel cage with gray bars. If you run away I will chase you. If you fight me I will fight back. If you shoot at me I will shoot back. By law I am unable to walk away. I am a consequence. I am the unpaid bill. I am fate with a badge and a gun. Behind my badge is a heart like yours. I bleed, I think, I love, and yes I can be killed. And although I am but one man, I have thousands of brothers and sisters who are the same as me. They will lay down their lives for me and I them. We stand watch together. The thin-blue-line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.”

Sounds familiar? The same kind of statement we heard over the years on the news, “if you not with us you are against us?” there are always both sides of story and I am sure LA South Central is a complex world, but we as a viewer have to understand that when we are watching this kind of movies, we are also receiving some kind of negative message toward certain images and ideas, we are being manipulated. 

Sometimes it made me wonder if a policeman doesn’t agreed with the law and this law is to ask him to hurt people what should he do? More than half of the century ago there was a party in Europe had executed such law. Should the police follow such order? or make his own judgment? 

Anyway if you can ignore the aspect of police state propaganda and just enjoy it as a pure cop action-drama, then End of Watch is an outstanding movie, otherwise this film could be a little threatening.