Paulo Seabra

I have always been sentimental about memory. Nostalgia was surely one of the first big boy words I learned. And all throughout my life I sort of developed a strong attachment memory, and subsequently to things, which became an obsession almost. I never wanted to see them go, even if they had lost any and all useful purpose, because they still retained a strong emotional attachment to me. I had a memory forever entwined with those old things, so I never wanted to see them go. However, in my late teens I realized I was being stupid, I realized there was no memory within the object itself, it was only in me. So I started to throw a bunch of stuff out, I went from a borderline hoarder to a borderline minimalist, and it was pretty good. I came to the realization that all things were inherently temporary. No matter how long I held on to them, eventually I would lose them one way or another, and if someone or some thing were to forcefully take them from me, I would be heartbroken beyond repai...

First of all, this article will be written as a prelude to my very next one, which will a kind of personal interpretation of The Caretaker's Everywhere at the End of Time. I say personal, and I might as well add vague, because I don't know anything about music, but having made memory a recurring theme in my writing, I had a bunch of random thoughts coming to me as I listened to the album, and since some of the ideas I had about it were tied in with its extensive length, as well as the inclination that it is more or less meant to be experienced in one go, I figured I might as well write this article, which I've been meaning to write for a while now. I believe a work of art should be brief. Whenever I come across a long, extensive work of art I always have a kind of hesitation towards it, since as a general rule I believe it will inevitably contain bits that simply should have been cut. If you have two dinner scenes, shouldn't they be merged together? If you have two boa...

My previous article was about Inside Llewyn Davis, one of my favorite winter movies. So now this present article just had to be about yet another one of my favorites, in order to keep it in season I guess, not just in terms of setting and cinematography, but perhaps in theme as well. Because I kinda see both films going hand in hand, probably because I just happened to discover, or rediscover, them at more or less the same time, but then again, there could be some other reason to it. So very briefly, what is Lars and the Real Girl all about? Well, when I initially discovered it I sort of avoided it for a bit. The basic premise made me expect a very cheap and crass comedy, and so I overlooked it. Still, and perhaps because that type of comedy is at times a guilty pleasure for me, I bit the bullet and watched the film. And though I didn't exactly love it right away, I felt it called for a rewatch, and upon doing so, I noticed how the film was finely crafted, so smart, so sweet, and...

As far as winter movies go, this is for sure one of my favorites. It's a sort of hidden gem from the Coen brothers, one I stumbled into sort of by accident, four years ago almost to the day. Time flies, I guess... Now in these here winter times I figured it was high time to rewatch it as part of a biennial ritual, but this time I might as well share my thoughts about it. And those are that this movie, aside from being very smartly written with a similar brand of the weird humor you find in The Big Lebowski, it also has an underlying message I've been recently taking personally. You'll see what I mean when we get there. For now I can say that I've more or less begun to realize that often times, pessimistic movies actually have a distinct silver lining to them, if only you know where to look. And this film, as you may have guessed from the title of this article, is no exception. But full disclosure, the general idea of this essay was one I actually learned from someone o...