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A film about the absurdities of everyday life, Cosmos is not so much six short films as it is one film with multiple storylines which interlace seamlessly. The styles, interests and rhythms of the six filmmakers blend together, producing a cohesive whole that is often comic, often tragic – and, at times, both. Cosmos, an immigrant Greek cab driver, leads us through storylines as intricate as big city traffic.Read More »
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The short film was made from material shot for a Levi’s commercial on which Gus Van Sant was given complete freedom. Van Sant delivered the ad, and separately made his own short film; one that feels complete in and unto itself. The stunning, natural-lit frames are the result of what might be the filmmaker’s first collaboration with his long-time collaborator, the much revered, and sadly passed, cinematographer Harris Savides. The pair later worked together on all of Van Sant’s features from Gerry (2002) to Restless (2011). In Four Boys in a Volvo, repeating images of a car driving through a desert road remind us of Van Sant’s later films Gerry or Last Days (2005). This elliptical film conveys one of the filmmaker’s most beloved themes; a portrait of youth in search of meaning and escape.Read More »
The companion film to “Before Stonewall” by Greta Schiller & Robert Rosenberg (link), “After Stonewall”, narrated by Melissa Etheridge, explores gay history in the U.S. from the 1970s through the 1990s. Like its predecessor, After Stonewall attempts to cover much ground in a short amount of time; however, with only three decades to span, the assignment is more manageable. – Amazon.comRead More »
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Screenwriter turned director Lee Chang-dong, who scripted the acclaimed A Single Spark, creates this tale of personal evolution and national history. Told backwards, the film opens in the spring of 1999 where a family outing is spoiled by a raggedy old man, Yeong-ho, who threatens to throw himself in front of a train. Rewind to three days earlier, Yeong-ho is seen buying a gun to off himself. Recently ruined by bad stock deals, terrorized by loan sharks, and dumped by his adulterous wife, Yeong-ho is a typical victim of the Asian financial meltdown. He pays his dying ex-girlfriend a visit in the hospital and, though she is unconscious, he gives her the same peppermint candy that she used to send him. Rewind further to the summer of 1994, Yeong-ho hires a detective to tail his philandering wife, though he is involved with a pretty office assistant. Rewind to 1987, which reveals Heong-ho as a thuggish policeman known for dispensing horrific amounts of brutality. This film was a critical favorite at the 1999 Pusan Film Festival.Read More »
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Jean-Luc Godard’s densely packed rumination on the need to create order and beauty in a world ruled by chaos is divided into four distinct but tangentially related stories, including the attempts by a young group of idealists to stage a play in war-torn Sarajevo and an elderly director’s efforts to complete his film.Read More »
Plot Outline: A groups of Korean anarchists in 1920s China are determined to overthrow the military and government. Read More »
This three-part documentary by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill explores D.W. Griffith’s career.Read More »
A bizarre tale about London, a lonely teen yearning for affection and a leather jacket, who lives in a dysfunctional family home where the mother keeps popping and sexually playing with her other child, X-Ray, a member of a gang of Mods who are constantly at war with a gang of Asian Bikers. Amidst this turmoil, London and her soul mate M16 search for meaning in a phantasmagoria without it.Read More »
Timely in terms of current Indonesian politics but in other respects long overdue, Nugroho’s extraordinary film looks back to 1965, when the assassination of seven army officers was unconvincingly pinned on communists—giving the dictator Suharto all the excuse he needed for decades of authoritarian rule and arbitrary arrests. There were mass arrests and executions in Aceh, then as now considered Indonesia’s most fractious province. One lucky survivor was the poet Ibrahim Kadir. Nugroho invites Kadir (now 56) to perform some of the didong narrative poems he has written in the intervening years, amid a recreation of events in the Takengon Prison. The film focuses on cells 7 (for men) and 8 (for women); the inmates keep their spirits up with songs, stories of local courtships and tales of government stupidity. More elegiac than angry, the film is presented—very poetically—as a slow transition from monochrome to delicate colour.Read More »