The shooting diary of a film shot in France and in the United States. Using photos of Paris and of New York City, excerpts of his former films, statements by friends of his and shooting sequences of the film itself, tormented filmmaker Marcel Hanoun has made a heterogeneous and unclassifiable film about the difficulty of filming.Read More »
A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods. Foolishly unprepared to deal with Mother Nature and their situation, they wander around lost for days and weeks, becoming more and more fatigued, hungry, and desperate. A brief encounter with a pair of epicureans on a bridge fails to garner them any of the gluttons’ feast due to a language barrier. Eventually their party begins to die, and the survivors ration their meat among them, attaching a religious-type ritual to its dispensation.Read More »
A global peace film produced in 1983-86 by the Swedish Peace & Arbitration Society and local support groups in Sweden, Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, USSR, Mexico, Japan, Scotland, Polynesia, Mozambique, Denmark, France, Norway, West Germany, with post-production support from the National Film Board in Montreal, Canada.Read More »
Synopsis:
This film’s based on Yuri Pakhomov’s short story “Test priyekhal” (Father-in-law Arrived). An elderly man arrives on a visit to his daughter in Moscow. She is away on a business trip, so he is looked after by his son-in-law, who has a very different character from his…Read More »
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A sardonic and irreverent contemporary adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet Goes Business is an idiosyncratically whimsical, yet incisive satire on corporate greed, materialism, corruption, and vengeance. Shot in black and white and employing high contrast lighting, the film achieves an atmospheric noir that reflects Aki Kaurismäki’s irrepressibly droll sense of humor and penchant for understated irony. Kaurismäki incorporates traditional, often manipulative and hackneyed stylistic devices of lush, overarching music, directed stage lighting, expressionistic gestures, skewed camera angles, and meticulously composed slow motion shots in order to playfully subvert dramatic convention: Lauri’s angered departure from Hamlet’s office; Hamlet’s self-consciously tormented delivery of a poem to Ophelia; the overdramatic, but anticlimactic plot device of the Murder of Gonzago play-within-a-play episode to expose Klaus’s treachery; the exquisite choreography of Ophelia’s final moments of despair. By integrating muted emotion with exaggerated theatricality, Kaurismäki creates a delirious and incongruent fusion of highbrow art film and pop culture kitsch – a patently iconoclastic comedic tragedy on indecision, inertia, and alienation.
(filmref.com)Read More »
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Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, only became a metropolis when it got its first serial killer. The said killer is a big, fat, shy and mother-fixated man, played to deadpan perfection by one of Serbia’s greatest comedians, Tasko Nacic. He lives with his cruel mother in a gothic apartment resembling those from Mario Bava’s films. He sells flowers and lives by the motto, ‘Those who don’t like carnations don’t deserve to live!’ His victims are the young women who refuse to buy his flowers and humiliate him in public. The film follows the exploits of three main characters: the strangler, the incompetent and highly neurotic inspector on his trail and the nerdy rock singer attracted to the killer’s exploits. The latter’s oedipal desires and sexual angst turn him into a promoter of the strangler’s crimes (through a song devoted to him) and a potential strangler in his own right. –IMDbRead More »
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This film is one of Ruiz’s greatest. Once, I read, with his film Ruiz pay tribute to Jean Luc Godard’s Le Mepris. So then, I asked Ruiz (Santiago, 2005)… You were influenced by this Godard’s film… ? – which film ? – … This film Le Mepris with Jack Palance and… your film features same kind of music (Georges Delerue’s music is an actor in Le Mepris, and as far as I can feel Jorge Arriagada composed great music for Ruiz’s film, but does not top Delerue’s), (…) close atmosphere, and two languages… – more than two languages ! – (answered Ruiz). Yes, you are right (…), and then Ruiz goes : “Probably I took it from there”. So, as far as art form and influence is concerned we are aware where inspiration is coming from. Read More »
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This three part French TV serial for children (alternate versions exist as a feature, Manoel’s Destinies, and a 4 part Portuguese TV serial, Adventure in Madeira) is the favourite of many devotees of Raúl Ruiz. This is because it ties the enchantment and mystery of Lewis Carroll, Carlo Collodi and the Brothers Grimm to the filmmaker’s experiments with narrative strategies and what he calls the pentaludic model of storytelling (where characters are thrown dice-like into combinations and situations governed by the play of Chance and Destiny).Read More »
This erotic and violent story taken from Emily Bronte’s classic novel, and Georges Bataille’s analyzes, takes place in medieval Japan instead of 19th-century Yorkshire. Onimaru (Yasaku Matsuda) is an orphan boy taken in by a group of priests who worship the Mountain Of Fire and try to appease the gods of anger. He loves Kinu (Yuko Tanaka), the beautiful daughter of a local family. When she marries an heir to a rival family, his heart is broken. When she dies in childbirth, Onimaru loses what is left of his mind.Read More »