Bright Star

Jane Campion's new slow-burn period romance "Bright Star" tells the story of a love triangle -- a man, a woman and that famously verbose seductress Poetry.

The film exists in decidedly rarefied air -- it's probably the only recent romantic script that never made it into the in-box of Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Aniston -- and, with its unapologetic embrace of the most exalted of human literary expression, it only shows that most romances these days may reach for poetry, but only settle for hackneyed sentimentality.
In telling the doomed story of love between the famous British poet John Keats and his seamstress muse Fanny Brawne, Campion "The Piano" avoids even a whisper of swelling strings and dewy-eyed speechifying. In that respect, "Bright Star" is decidedly old-fashioned -- and I do mean "old." It's a movie that the contemporaries of Keats might have enjoyed.
Already the subject of considerable Oscar buzz is the film's female lead, the Australian actress Abbie Cornish, who plays Fanny as an impetuous go-getter weighed down by the dowdy conventions of proper English society circa 1818. For purists, such spunk might be considered anachronistic, but that's the same kind of implied spirit filmmakers have been injecting into Jane Austen heroines for years. In this context, it serves as a kind of gender role reversal -- Fanny is the aggressor, while Keats sits back and waits to be wooed.
The film takes place almost entirely in the gorgeous country homes and gardens of Hampstead Village, where Fanny lives with her widowed mother and her two younger siblings. Though she's unmarried, Fanny has earned a sterling reputation in the village thanks to her talents as a seamstress, which have given her family some measure of financial independence.
Moving in next door is the talented but penniless Keats and his friend and protector Charles Brown Paul Schneider. Brown -- a blunt-spoken, burly Scotsman -- and Fanny form an almost instant antagonism that is only inflamed when Fanny gets to know the dreamy-eyed Keats Ben Whishaw.
The relationship is a scandal only insofar as Keats has nothing to offer Fanny in terms of wealth. But Brown's serving as a obstacle to her access Keats only intensifies her ardor. And soon enough, the two comely young people are engaged in a full-blown romance, albeit in the stilted, formalized manner of the time and place. Since Keats is famous for having died young, we kinda know where the film is headed.
It will thrill the literarily inclined to know that Fanny falls for Keats first through his rapturous poetry -- the film's title is taken from a Keats poem dedicated to Fanny. Campion gives the poetry of Keats room to breathe by putting it in the mouths of her young actors with little to no cinematic adornment.
It all adds up to a love story without the artificial sweeteners, a film treat of exquisite taste for audiences who still thrill at the smell of musty old volumes of Romantic-era poetry.

-Trailer-

 Qoutes from the Movie

"I had such a dream last night. I was floating above the trees with my lips connected to those of a beautiful figure."

 "whose lips? were they my lips?"

"I get anxious when I  don't see you"

" When I don't hear from him It's as if I've died.

Its as if the air has been sucked from my lungs"

                                              " I almost wish we were butterflies  and live but 3 summer days,  three such days with you I could fill with such more delight then 50 common years could ever contain"

While Walking

the water fills the glass coating the edges with spills

in the brief moment a calloused hand grips the rimmed bottle and twists it's torso in half

he flings it into the flowing street,

stones like pot holes never fixed

and cars like driftwood flooding into sidewalks

over and through sandbanks and mud piles made of skin

his legs  shift

a force of running water pulling him forward

dragging him by with hooks impaled into his feet

inside each limb disease reeks

it lies an incurable cause

a nausea of swelling bones and bruises

the worth assigned to human life is cheap

he took his pressed out fingers

knuckles white spread out across knotted bones

he walked on butter knives implanted into the asphalt

blunt steel pulling underneath his feet

spreading open gashes in the arches

he wondered if the arches God built into the floating mountains were pulled apart

Did the earth shove their hands out into the sky pressing into blue paint and split their fingers to form white clouds?

Rough Draft

My ideas sat on a central park bench in my stomach
Amidst the lights, noise and lactic abuse
Pigeons made nests along my lungs
on the road thats lined my esophagus  a car drove past
and the man inside told the cab driver, he was going to see her,
and that she needed to hear him sing this song, a song she just needed to hear.
Where are you going?
To the heart of the village the man answered.
The pigeons wildly flew fearful of the coming change in a mess of featherlight objections.
At which point my ideas turned around to see man exiting a cab.
They heard him ask in a voice that implied he was nervous and unsure.
"Is this the heart of the village?"

He Said

He said it was life changing.
He said it all the time.
Every time something happened it was life-changing
And when she asked      —why it is life-changing, he answered,
Because everything is life-changing,
You are not the same person you were after something happens in your life.
Therefore all things and all experiences are life-changing.
It felt – redundant to her,
Yet,
The word—LIFE— repeated so many times made sense.
It was another way to say that there were many people,
       —many lives on earth and that all of them continued to change in every moment—swirls of energy, flowing and molding into and out of each other—taking bits of everything they saw and soaking them up.
He said he was a writer.
Writers, he said
       —soak up from the world around them
Like a sponge, he said
And for a while they don’t write much of anything.
This is their “soaking period”
And then without warning!
        —the sponge begins to leak water that it could no longer hold onto.
Inspiration’s Hand squeezes the sponge and flushes out the water of creativity in a powerful burst of experiences flooding the writer’s senses, the writer says
And then
        —you have to stop
Because you are so overcome with this wash of creativity that you have to use up before the sponge is dry.
Because it rains on your like a freak storm in the summer months.
You never know how long it can last,
And it can happen anytime,
Even in the blue sky,
Even in the car.
No umbrella is needed for this storm because its rains inside your mind.
A microclimate full of sparkling trees,
This rain rushes to the tips of your fingers and sometimes,
They move without a second thought,
Lifting them selves out of the dry barren paper
And staining the blanks with words that flow out of your body.
           —It is such an emotional dance with cannot be stopped
           —And it cannot be wasted.
She said, beautiful, wondrous, and life changing.


P.s. Anybody got any good title ideas?