Photograph: Hipolito Pereira/Agencia O Globo

Yesterday was very calm. X and I watched "Cidade de Deus", which was a lot better than I expected - and I had very high expectations; the direction, the acting, the cinematography, the sheer consistency and story-telling was very high. I'll give it 8/10. I strongly recommend it. Prejudiced, I thought it'd be about violence and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, but that's just sheer lack of truth; it lucidly follows a boy and the people around him as they grow up, mature and/or disintegrate. The film conveyed the sense of urgency in the shape of crime that I have learned of through international media, by using humor much in the same way that Bill Hicks did to show how the American government was corrupt and filled with terrorists. I'm looking forward to seeing "Tropa de Elite", which is supposed to be a follow-up of sorts. By the way, the Brazilian government has recently claimed that it has cleared out all criminal elements from the City of God. I'm sure that isn't just an unintended euphemism to say that the criminal elements have merely moved a few feet outside them city limits...

Late in the evening we saw "Eyes Wide Shut", the last film that Stanley Kubrick made. Seeing it for the second time in appx. seven years was highly interesting; I interpreted the relationship between the Harford couple (Nicole Kidman/Tom Cruise) with more depth than before, along with Kubrick's use of light, colours and signature photography. Thanks to "The Stanley Kubrick Archives" I've read a lot about the film. Kubrick was really a master director. His use of colours particularly grabs me, as if transcended from his other works, in my mind from when he started shooting in colour. I love how he tastefully uses works from his family in the film, as well as how extremely meticulous he was; instead of filming in New York, a replica of a couple of New York blocks were built in Pinewood Studios, England. Almost all indoor shots were very under-exposed and "lit up" using a process of force-developing the film during post-production, i.e. letting the film sog for a longer time in bath than it usually did. Kubrick wanted two people who were a couple in real life to play the main characters. He wrote open-ended contracts with Kidman/Cruise, meaning that they were to work on the project for as long as Kubrick wanted them to. The music was picked by Kubrick, as usual. Everything in the film has a dreamy quality, and I think Kidman shines while Cruise is woody, as usual. I like dreamy films. I long to see "L'Avventura" again.

This morning X and I talked about Salvador Dalà­. I thought of the dream sequence he made for Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound":

I then came to think of the video for Cypress Hill's "Illusions", which culls mentioned scene ((Not to mention the introduction scene from Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now".)):

Cypress Hill - Illusions by madafonka2

Today will be easy. We're off to eat dinner with my parents. Yeay!