🎬 In & Of Itself

The first time I’ve heard about “In & Of Itself” was through Austin Kleon’s newsletter, where he recommended this movie to be watched knowing as little as possible about it. In an act of trust, I followed his recommendation and hit the play button without watching any trailers or even reading the synopsis.

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It was an unusual experience, I must say, but I was so glad I did it that way. I was so hypnotized and enthusiastic about it, that as soon as the credits started rolling up, I started calling friends to recommend the movie! I wanted them to have the same experience I just had, and I also wanted to have people to talk about what I had just seen.

So, assuming that you enjoy my recommendations, I urge you to follow Austin’s (and now mine) advice. Watch this movie without looking for any information beforehand. If you do that, I’d love to hear about your experience!

Available on Hulu.

🎬 The King of Staten Island, by Judd Apatow

Did you ever watch a movie where you have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen at the end, but you just keep watching because you are so attached to the characters that it doesn’t really matter? That’s exactly what happened to me while I was watching “The King of Staten Island”, the new movie by Judd Apatow.

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It’s a comedy-drama with a storyline that we’ve all seen before many times, sort of a semi-biographical coming-of-age film, as an adaptation of the life of Pete Davidson, who you may be used to seeing more often at SNL. Don’t let the whole “he spends his days smoking weed and dreaming of being a tattoo artist” on the synopsis take you away from a really sweet and emotional journey.

🎬 Bacurau, by Juliano Dornelles & Kleber Mendonça Filho

Have you ever watched a movie that has been so praised by everybody that you can’t figure out if you liked it because you genuinely did, or if because you felt the pressure to like it? That was my feeling towards the end of Bacurau, one of the most acclaimed Brazilian films of recent years. Not that I didn’t like it, otherwise I wouldn’t be here recommending it to you, but it took me a little while to get my head around it and understand what was I really feeling.

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Bacurau is a mixed genre movie that takes place in the “near future”, and sees the residents of a small village going through some obscure events that keep escalating until a turbulent ending. It’s one of those stories that can be as simple or as complex and you want, depending on how further is one willing to go with the numerous interpretations and metaphors that are available to grab. Don’t expect to be completely hooked right at the beginning, but don’t be surprised if you can’t stop thinking about it at the end. An instant classic!

Now on Digital, Blu-ray, and DVD: bit.ly/3ow0Vb1A few years from now... Bacurau, a small village in the Brazilian sertão, mourns the loss of its matriarch, C...

Golden Globes 2021: a Notion Template

I've been wanting to write about Notion for a long time, but I never thought that my first time mentioning the app was going to be by sharing one of my own templates! So without further ado, click on the link below to download the template for free!

Even though I'm calling this a template, since anyone can duplicate it into your own Notion system, this works more as a guide than a template, since all the content is already there ready to be used.

I've been using Notion for a while now to track all my content consumption, like movies I've watched, tv-series I'm currently watching, books I'm reading or want to read, music I'm want to listen to, even video games I'm playing. Especially now having a weekly newsletter where I share recommendations (learn more about it), it's very important for me to have all this content centered in one place.

A few days ago I had an idea to build a page (and database) containing all the films and tv series nominated for the 2021 Golden Globes, and after, in a way that it was easy for me to not only filter through the different categories, but also have an easy way to track which of those movies (or series) I had already seen and what was still on my watchlist.

As I started to put all the work in, I got so excited with what that simple idea was turning into, that I knew I had to share it with more people, after all, I couldn't be the only person excited about Notion and Movies with the same intensity, right?

So here are a few screenshots explaining the basics of the template.

« 1 » This is the home page, where you'll get a quick explanation of how the system works, and links to the specific pages for Film and TV Series:

« 2 » When you click on "Film Nominees", you'll access the database with all the films nominated in all the categories, organized alphabetically by title. Here you're able to quickly mark a film as "watched" and give a rating from 1 to 5 stars:

« 3 » Each film is its own clickable page where you can go a little further, adding a date when you watched (optional), watch the trailer, find a link to learn more about the specific film, as well as a dedicated space for you to write down a few personal comments:

« 4 » Back to the home page, clicking on "Film Watchlist" will bring you to a side by side view for a quick glance of the films that you've already seen and what's still on your watchlist. Once you mark a film as "watched", it automatically moves to the proper column, changing its view to the film poster instead of just the title:

« 5 » And finally, as a bonus, you can access a separate page will all your Favorite Films, which means the ones that you rated as 3 stars or more. That way you can look back and remember your favorite films from the award season!

All of the pages under TV Series works exactly the same, but with related content to the TV categories.

If you download and use this template, please share your thoughts and any feedback with me through the comments section below, on Twitter, or by sending me an email.

If you love movies, like me, consider subscribing to Shuffle Sundays, my weekly Newsletter with personal recommendations of things to watch, read, listen to, and even play. All directly to your inbox for you to consume at your own pace. Click here to learn more!

This is a labor of love (for Movies and for Notion), but you can always Buy Me A Coffee if you want to support my work 🤗

Emicida: AmarElo - It's All For Yesterday (É Tudo Pra Ontem)

When I’ve heard that this historic concert was going to be released on Netflix I got super excited with the idea of being able to watch the live version of AmarElo, one of the best albums of 2019, by Emicida.

Emicida: AmarElo - It's All For Yesterday (É Tudo Pra Ontem) - Netflix, 2020

Emicida: AmarElo - It's All For Yesterday (É Tudo Pra Ontem) - Netflix, 2020

Must say I got a little frustrated when I realized that it was actually a documentary with excerpts from the show and not the whole show, but turns out that little I knew that the experience of learning about the stories behind the songs (and much more) would make the whole experience ten times better! It’s the history of Brazil. A history of the African-Brazilian people through art, music, politics, and social events. It’s exciting, it’s powerful, it’s sad, it’s shocking, it’s all of that and much more!

Sometimes it’s mindboggling to think about how far we’ve come in so many ways, but how far we still are from being able to live peacefully with our differences of race, genre, class. It feels like if for each year we advance in the future, we are forced to set back many more.

In a strange year where so much happened while we were all forced to stay home, this movie becomes an instant classic, absolutely urgent and necessary!

Before I Became A Photographer

It’s been 13 years since I graduated from college and 8 years since I quit my last job to become a full-time freelance Photographer. But that wasn’t my aspiration from the beginning…

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Before I became a Photographer, one of the things I wanted to do in life was to create “opening title” sequences for movies and tv shows. During my last year of college (as a Graphic Design major) I was already completely in love with movies and motion graphics, which I would later work with on my post-college jobs. My admiration for Opening Titles started when I was exposed to the work of the late Saul Bass, especially his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho, Vertigo, and the big-screen adaptation of West Side Story, by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. That, combined with all the possibilities that computers brought to the job in more recent years, got me fascinated with the idea of exploring this interesting art form. While I did work on a couple of small projects here and there, I (unfortunately) never took it seriously enough to turn that admiration into a profession.

But that didn’t stop me from enjoying and getting excited whenever I see something well designed and executed! If you have access to HBO, I’m assuming you are aware of their new take on Perry Mason? Even though period movies/tv-shows were never my favorite type of stories to follow, two things grabbed me on this new version: the gorgeous lighting throughout all the episodes, that a lot of times makes me question if I’m looking at one of Edward Hopper’s paintings and, equally interesting, the brief seconds where they display the title of the show, with a very classic and elegant font choice. For just a few seconds, the characters walk in front of the titles as if it was just another prop in the scene. It’s such a small detail that adds so much to the experience! Check out some examples here.

If you, just like me, appreciate this art form, you will probably enjoy getting lost within the incredible database that the Art of the Title has to offer. You can thank me later!