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Somersault in a Coffin (Turkish: Tabutta Rövaşata) is a 1996 Turkish film, written and directed by Derviş Zaim, about a homeless criminal and car thief. The film, which was released on November 15, 1996, received awards at several international film festivals including the Golden Orange for best film at the Antalya International Film Festival.Read More »
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River of Grass has all the elements of a conventional road movie: a car, a gun, criminal plans, and young lovers on the run from an angry father who also happens to be a suspended police officer. But writer and director Kelly Reichardt has instead taken these familiar elements and fashioned an anti-road movie, a deadpan film that is more existentialist comedy than crime drama. The young lovers in question are Cozy, the cop’s daughter, and Lee Ray, a shady character from the wrong end of town.
Lee Ray comes into possession of a pistol, and soon he and Cozy find themselves unintentionally involved in a shooting. Fearing capture by the law, the two make plans to leave town, committing a series of robberies on the way. However, they don’t manage to get very far; indeed, the film’s central premise is how the romantic myth of lovers on the lam proves disappointing in the face of a far more pedestrian reality.
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Yilmaz Arslan directed this Turkish-German-Swiss drama. A woman arrives at an apartment building in a German city to visit her friend Hülya (Yelda Reynaud), only to learn that Hülya has returned to Turkey with her aunt and uncle because of an unspecified illness. There are indications Hülya was kidnapped by her family. Back in Turkey, the unhappy Hülya refuses to speak or eat. At the first chance, she escapes, heading back to Germany without money or identity papers. Beginning the arduous journey, she collapses on the road, is taken care of by peasants, locates her estranged mother, has a run-in with police, and is thrown into a women’s mental institution. Dream sequences are intercut throughout. Shown at the 1998 Venice Film Festival.
— Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
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The Marquis de Sade in a More Complex Guise
Raving lunatic or subversive bad boy? Revolutionary intellectual or fiend from hell? The Marquis de Sade is such an inflammatory figure that when you contemplate his life, the imagination tends to run wild. But as embodied by the French actor Daniel Auteuil in ”Sade,” Benoît Jacquot’s smart, cool-headed costume drama, the marquis is a disturbingly recognizable figure: a sly, charming, ruthlessly arrogant bon vivant with a scary current of rage zipping like a live wire under his reptilian surface.
When Sade casts a hard, beady-eyed gaze on a virginal young woman, his expression is the cold, evaluative stare of a jaded predator. In his too-glittering eyes, you can almost read the graphic sexual scenarios dancing through his mind. Mr. Auteuil’s Sade, with his mixture of tense, coiled civility and ferocious willfulness, has almost nothing in common with the histrionic madman played by Geoffrey Rush in ”Quills.” Mr. Rush’s Sade, for all its high dramatic flourishes, conveniently excused the viewer from having to judge the Marquis. Because his character was so obviously crazy, he was not one of us.Read More »
A lonely security guard can’t even get a decent blind date, so he begins peeping at women through their bedroom windows. Before long he’s paying call girls to come over and secretly videotaping every session.
Within two weeks he’s blown his life savings and been subjected to a lot of verbal and physical abuse. This bizarre black comedy is loaded with naked women!
Starring Andren Scott – with Monica McFarland, Karen Pombo, Becky Van Lewen and Sheila Traister. Directed by Ronnie Cramer, music by Alarming Trends.
“The Best Drive-in Movie of 1992…” Joe Bob BriggsRead More »
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Wednesday, July 19, 1961: it’s summertime and the newspapers are full of the usual articles. The world is comfortably embedded in the Cold War. An average day in Leningrad. 51 girls and 50 boys are born in Leningrad on this day.
One of them is Victor Kossakovsky. Why here and not somewhere else? Why then and not another time? These questions are the starting point for his film. Could it be that this child was mistaken for another in hospital? Who are all the people who began their lives on that same day? Do they somehow share the same fate or are they merely contemporaries?Read More »
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Analyzing the intricacies and variances between differing film titles is something of an indulgence for film critics, especially when they’re searching for a quick, utilitarian lead into otherwise complex films. Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film à clef revisitation (or, rather, a cinematic palimpsest) of a violent 1974 encounter from his past as an angry young fundamentalist went by the title A Moment of Innocence in its European and American releases, but its original Farsi title was actually Bread and Flower. The latter title refers to the two objects that play into the all-important remembered event, when Makhmalbaf stabbed one of the Iranian Shaw’s policemen in an attempt to snatch his gun away, an attack that led to the future director’s incarceration. (Makhmalbaf hid his knife under a circle of flatbread; the policeman was holding a flower he intended to offer the entrancing young girl who, unbeknownst to him, was actually a decoy intended to distract the cop so Makhmalbaf could steal his firearm.) Some 20 years later, while a reformed and de-radicalized Makhmalbaf was directing Salaam Cinema, the now former-policeman approached Makhmalbaf again, their meeting (and triggered memories) spurning A Moment of Innocence, a title of which seems to echo the film’s aura of reflective enlightenment and mutual cooperation between the two men (as opposed to the Farsi title’s emphasis on the fragmented multiplicity of memory).Read More »
Three episodes from three Baltic nations, all about lost love. In Estonia a political prisoner is set free. Meanwhile his best friend had stolen his girl and now defends his political cowardice: “Some of us must be left outside the prisons to pursue the political fight.” – In Latvia a Russian soldier has a Latvian girlfriend. Her Latvian friends accept her boyfriend. But his two closest soldier friends beat him up, tear the clothes of his girl and threaten to rape her. The loving couple understands that they cannot continue their relationship. – In Lithuania a priest student and an Estonian stripper fall in deep love. The student’s uncle is an enlightened priest who says: “I bless you whatever road you choose to go.” The couple sleep together and agree to meet at the railway station the next morning and go to Estonia. But when the student comes home his uncle has died… (written by Max Scharnberg)Read More »
