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Festival Estátuas Vivas, Tomar

The Festival returned and it was about legends and traditions.

Miró

Blade Runner 2049

I have not been to the movies in some time.
I enjoyed the movie. It is not like the original one, but it has nice settings and a good story.
It sets in 2049. There are still some original replicants that need to killed.

open house Lisboa

This is a great initiative from Trienal da Arquitetura that enables us to visit a lot of places during one weekend. Some of these places do not have access to the public.
This year I went to:
Central Triagem de Resíduos Sólidos do Parque das Nações
Mercado do Bairro Alto
Loja Claus no Chiado
Fundação Champalimaud
Palácio da Justiça

The hitchhicker's guide to the galaxy

The Earth is destroyed to build a highway. Arthur has an alien friend and they both hitchhike in the galaxy.
An insane movie!

Van Gogh alive the experience

An interesting exhibit on Van Gogh's life. His paintings in interactive screens accompanied by music.

The girl before

A thriller about a girl that moves to an apartment full  of rules where another woman lived and died.
It is one of those books that when you start to reading you want to continue because you want to know what happens.

Into the water

The newest book from Paula Hawkins.
I enjoyed it but it has a lot of characters and sometimes it is a bit difficult to follow.

Festival ao Largo

Every year there are concerts outdoors in the S. Carlos Theater in Lisbon.
This year I was able to go twice: in the day dedicated to Richard Wagner and in the dancing day from the National Ballet Company.

Dunkirk

A nice movie from Christopher Nolan about the Dunkirk battle, an event of the 2nd World War.
The English were trapped in a beach and had to wait for help and vessels from their countrymen while the Germans kept coming.

Lady Macbeth

A story of a woman that is forced to marry someone she doesn't love and that is not allowed to leave the house.
When the husband leaves she experiences freedom for the first time and gets involved with another man.
The husband then returns...

Despicable me 3

I like animations and this one was very funny and twisted.
Gru discovers he has a twin brother, Dru.
The villain is a 1990 enthusiastic. It was good to remember those days :)

Ma vie de Courgette

An animation about an orphan boy. His mother dies. He has never met his father. He moves in to an orphanage with other orphan kids. It is nice but it is a bit sad.

The Circle

This is a movie about the being online and give up our privacy. It raises a lot of questions. Should a company hold a lot of personal data of a person? In sake of transparency should we give up our privacy? How will the future be? Will we always be connected? How will life be?

April: All quiet on the western front

A book about the First World War that tells the story of Paul Bauemer and his friends.
A crude view about the war.

Mais respeito que sou tua mãe

A very funny theater play  starring Joaquim Monchique as the mother of a family that lives in Baixa da Banheira, near Setúbal. Her husband is unemployed and they have 3 children, one of them no longer lives with them. Also living with them is the grandfather.
If you want to have a good sunday afternoon don't miss this play.

Beauty and the Beast

The remake by Disney with real actors. It is very faithful to the animation and to the play.

Dois homens completamente nus

A play about two men that wake up naked lying on the sofa. They don't recall what happened, why they are naked. The wife of one of them enters the room and they try to come up with a story to explain the whole scene.
Very funny!

March: A Ilustre Casa de Ramires

A book by Eça de Queirós that tells the story about the Ramires family that is a metaphor of Portugal.

Gold

A very interesting movie about a fraud related to gold mining.

February: The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

A novel about a society presided by Mr. Pickwick. It has very funny episodes :)

20th century women

This is an interesting movie about women living in the 1970s and how different society was before.

Annette Benning plays a very good role. She is a single mother and sometimes she is not able to cope with all the changes and all the challenges. She has the help of a punk photographer, a handyman and another teenager those his son is in love with.
There is a very funny part when the teenager is reading a book about women and tries to tell other guys that they sometimes fake orgasms and the importance of the clitoris.

Moonlight

A movie about a black gay boy named Chiron that is beaten up and bullied in school. His mother is a drug addict and he finds a friend in a drug dealer.
We accompany his rough life from boyhood to manhood.
It is a heavy movie.

Almada

An exhibition about the painter, actor and writer Almada Negreiros is at Gulbenkian until June 2017.
It has a lot of his works and even some scripts for movies.
Almada Negreiros was born in 1893 and died in 1970. He was a futurist and a modernist. With Fernando Pessoa he founded the magazine Orpheu. He has a lot of works scattered throughout Lisbon.
 

Frozen

The story of two sisters, Elsa and Anna. They were best friends when they were growing, but they grew apart when Elsa accidentaly hurts her sister with her powers. She can freeze everything in seconds.
After becoming the queen, people find out she has powers and she runs away, leaving the kingdom in a permanent Winter.
Anna goes to find her with a deer, a boy and a snowman.
Is the kingdom condemn to Winter?
A nice movie about the power of friendship and love.

January: Origin of species, by Charles Darwin

In January, I read the Origin of species, by Charles Darwin. It explains Darwin's theory that species evolved from other species through natural selection and that the stronger thrives.
Throughout the book, he tries to refute the critics with examples from the natural world.
It should be read by everyone with an interest in this subject and wanting to know more about how Darwin constructed his theory.

Hidden Figures

I really enjoyed this movie about three afro-american women working at NASA in the 60s.
Katherine, Dorothy and Mary were brilliant mathematicians that because of their skin colour were discriminated. But they proved their talent and left a vital contribution to the Space Program by calculating the trajectory of John Glenn's pod thus enabling the US to win the space race against Russia.

La La Land

I'm not very fond of musicals, but I enjoyed this one especially because it does not have a lot of singing. It is about a woman that is trying her luck in Hollywood and a man that loves jazz and that doesn't want it to be forgotten. It is set in our time, but sometimes it seems to be in the past. It leaves you with a nostalgia, thinking of how things could have been.
I liked the music and how it triggered memories.

Surrogates

A movie about people that have surrogates living by them. These surrogates may be younger, more beautiful or completely different from the originals. But one day a surrogate dies with a powerful and mysterious weapon and this ends up killing the human that was operating it.
Bruce Willis is investigating the case, his surrogate is damaged and he has to do everything on his own.
This movie questions the replacement of human life by technology.

8 mile

The story of Eminem with Eminem. How he suffered in a musical genre that was associated with black people. How he persevered and got famous.

Brother Bear

An animation about a boy that is responsible for the killing of his brother and a bear that is transformed to a bear to experience a different perspective.

Silence

This is indeed a great movie! Beautifully filmed, it is the story of Jesuits in Japan in 1640. Two Jesuits come to Japan to look for the whereabouts of Padre Ferreira. It is said he apostatized and that he is now living as a regular japonese. The priests see the brutality of the japonese inquisitor that wants to eradicate christians and christianity in Japan. They follow separate paths but they are both caught and we follow Padre Sebastião Rodrigues for the rest of the film. We see him questioning his faith and watching as other christians die because they refuse to step a holy image and they refuse to renounce their faith. Should we question our religion? Should we renounce it to escape certain death? Can we remain christian in our core but act otherwise?
The movie poses very interesting questions and it shows us how Japan was at that time.

Hacksaw Ridge

This is a war movie about a conscience objector that goes to the 2nd World War as a paramedic with no guns or weapons. Based on a true story, Desmond Doss saves 75 people and he does not use a weapon to shoot his enemies. There are some brutal scenes, but it depicts the brutality of wars.

Os dias realistas

The Realistic Joneses, translated as Os dias realistas, is a play written by Will Eno that was translated to Portuguese by Jacinto Lucas Pires.
It is about a couple, Bambi and João Dias, that become neighbours of a couple with the same surname: Margarida and Tó Dias.
Our first impression is that they have not much in common and that they are very different, but then we realise they share the same concerns and even the same illness.
I found this play a little upsetting because it addresses many issues we experience in our everyday lives when we interact with other people.

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso - PORTO LISBOA / 2016-1916

An exhibit about an important Portuguese painter: Amadeo de Souza Cardoso (1887-1918).
He lived between Paris and Manhufe, near Porto, and he had futurist, surrealist and cubist influences in his work.
In 1916 he organized two exhibits, one in Lisbon and the other in Porto, to show his works. 100 years after these exhibits the Portuguese Art Museum decided to comemorate. About 80 works are showed.

Rogue one

The new Star Wars movie. It takes place before episode 4.
I really enjoyed it, but I'm a fan :)

New year resolution: one book per month

This year I'm commited to read at least one book per month.
I started with the Origin of Species from Charles Darwin.

This was a revolutionary book that altered the way human beings are perceived in the world and the concept of evolution.

A mãe é que sabe

A portuguese movie about a woman gathering her family to celebrate the birthday of her father. Her mother died some years ago and she wonders how life would be if she could warn her. Other changes in her life are put the test.

Allied

The movie sets in the 2nd World War. It is the story of two spies, played by Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard that get married and move to London, where Brad Pitt lives.

Suspicions begin when English intelligence suspect Marion Cotillard works for the other side.

A thriller from Robert Zemeckis.