Several lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginner’s course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives. The film unspools the connections and family drama shared between the students.

Italiensk.for.Begyndere.2000.1080p.WEB-DL.x264-BANDOLEROS.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 47 min
Size: 	4.37 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1440x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	5 684 kb/s
BPP: 	0.146
Audio
#1:  	Danish 2.0ch E-AC-3 @ 128 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/B5133DD64E8F4C3/Italiensk.for.Begyndere.2000.1080p.WEB-DL.x264-BANDOLEROS.mkv

Language(s):Danish, Italian
Subtitles:English, Danish SDH

The post Lone Scherfig – Italiensk for begyndere AKA Italian for Beginners (2000) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Kresten’s dad dies and he returns to the farm on Lolland to take care of things incl. his retarded brother. He employs a hooker as maid. He loses wife and job due to lies. The maid’s kid brother moves in and they’re a family of 4.

DOGME 95 #3

Mifunes.Sidste.Sang.1999.DVDrip.x264.AAC-t0ma5.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 37 min
Size: 	1.97 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x576 ~> 768x576
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	
BPP: 	
Audio
#1:  	Danish 5.1ch AAC LC (Surround)

https://nitro.download/view/F485797F72033F5/Mifunes.Sidste.Sang.1999.DVDRip.x264.AAC-t0ma5.mkv

Language(s):Dannish
Subtitles:English, Spanish

The post Søren Kragh-Jacobsen – Mifunes sidste sang aka Mifune’s Last Song (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

When a bus breaks down in the desert, the passengers decide to stage “King Lear.”

Thinking Inside the Box
Rating * Has redeeming facet

The King Is Alive, directed and cowritten by Kristian Levring, is the fourth film to have the dubious honor of qualifying for certification under the rules of the Dogma 95 manifesto, whose professed aim is to get back to the basics of realism — shooting, for example, in natural locations with handheld cameras, direct sound, and natural lighting. But what’s basic or realistic and what isn’t, in terms of film history and technique? The manifesto also insists that movies be shot in color, a rather ahistorical reading of what’s basic — unless one labels all possible uses of color in film realistic and all possible uses of black and white artificial.

If that’s the operative assumption, The King Is Alive triumphantly refutes it. The movie was shot with three digital video cameras — unlike Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogma film The Celebration, which was shot with only one, and Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (not a Dogma film, but made by one of Dogma’s founders), which was shot with a hundred — and that might make it seem new as well as passe. Certainly the look Levring, one of the original four cosigners of Dogma 95, gets from these cameras is fresh and at times even startling, featuring vivid, deeply saturated colors that practically glow in the dark; African desertscapes that seem sculptural (the film was shot in Namibia); and natural lighting effects that are often beautiful — at least according to conventional art-photography notions — such as sunlight streaming through windows and faces starkly silhouetted in close-ups.

I’m not entirely convinced that the cameras or settings are the only things responsible for this look. If Jean-Marc Lalanne — reviewing this film at last year’s Cannes festival for the newspaper Liberation — is to be believed, most of the film’s “absolutely antinaturalist” color and lighting effects were achieved during postproduction, presumably through lab work, thereby breaking the first part of the fifth rule of Dogma 95, which decrees, “Optical work and filters are forbidden.” I don’t have enough technical knowledge to decide whether Lalanne is correct, but Levring definitely breaks the manifesto’s tenth rule — “The director must not be credited” — as, I believe, all the other filmmakers with Dogma 95 certificates have done. I think Levring has also broken the eighth rule — “Genre movies are not acceptable” — since The King Is Alive clearly belongs to a venerable subgenre in which Westerners traveling through the third world are brought together by chance, become stranded in the middle of nowhere, fight for survival, get on one another’s nerves, and show their worst sides.

Most examples of this subgenre involve plane wrecks, such as Sands of the Kalahari (1965) and Flight of the Phoenix (1966), two of the better entries that come to mind. Of course, given that both of these examples are from the 60s, what seems familiar or even shopworn to me might seem fresh or even innovative to someone younger — another example of how subjective any notion of “getting back to basics” can be.

Instead of a plane wreck, The King Is Alive has a bus full of tourists that runs out of gas in a small, deserted mining town in the African desert after steering off course because of a faulty compass. Otherwise the film differs from its genre predecessors mainly in its sexual candor, in its multifaceted unpleasantness — almost everyone in the group despises almost everyone else and goes out of his or her way to prove it — and in its odd decision to have the oldest member of the group, Henry (David Bradley), stage a production of King Lear while waiting for Jack (Miles Anderson), the most practical member of the group, to return with fuel for the bus.

Another spin on the formula is the inclusion of a wizened and hermitlike black sage, Kanana (Peter Kubheka), who sits around all day; he doesn’t speak a word of English, but as the offscreen narrator, he delivers a vague, poetic, and highly implausible commentary in his native tongue (subtitled in English) about the stranded people, all of whom, except the bus driver, are white. A sample of Kanana’s folk wisdom: “They ate a bit less every day. They said words the rest of the time.” The tourists’ only food, incidentally, is canned carrots — some of them dangerously spoiled — left behind by the miners. Kanana’s source of food, or whether he eats at all, is never revealed.

Henry’s decision to rehearse and stage King Lear is no more plausible, unless one translates the bored and unresourceful tourists into a troupe of bored actors — which is possibly what Levring had in mind. Taking his actors into the Namibian desert, he encouraged improvisations, some of which he used, and it appears that when he ran out of these he followed the lead of Henry in furnishing his cast with lines from King Lear. Some of these lines match the situations and the characters, but more often they don’t — an interesting device in itself, though its connection with the rest of the film is unclear.

Henry furnishes his companions with lines from the play by jotting down the ones he can remember on separate rolls of paper, then distributing them. How is it that he happens to remember most or all of the lines in Lear? The movie never gets around to explaining. In the press notes, Levring does say that his inspiration was an Englishman he knew who lived in the Mojave Desert and arranged evenings of Shakespeare with someone who worked in a nearby diner and someone else who worked at a filling station. Presumably it’s easier to substitute an African desert for one in the American southwest if you regard both as abstract or symbolic locations — fitting metaphysical backdrops for a figure like Kanana.

If I’d been interested in this movie’s acrimonious characters I might have appreciated the actors’ performances more. French actress Romane Bohringer seems mainly wasted playing a woman who’s Henry’s first choice for Cordelia, and Jennifer Jason Leigh acts up a storm playing an American bimbo who turns out to have more brains than expected; she winds up with the role. The other actors play characters who are too narrowly conceived to make for much interesting acting — Bruce Davison and Janet McTeer are cast as an American couple, Chris Walker and Lia Williams as an English couple, David Calder as a cynical Brit wrestling with a midlife crisis, the late Brion James (who played Leon, one of the replicants in Blade Runner) as an alcoholic businessman, and Vusi Kunene as the bus driver. Only the characters played by Kunene, Anderson, Bradley, and Kubheka are allowed to retain even a trace of dignity.

To be fair, Levring sets up some interestingly jagged editing patterns when he crosscuts toward the end of this movie, and the shots throughout are almost always visually striking. More generally, The King Is Alive justifies itself periodically as a set of experiments, a film more interested in seeking than in finding. But if this metaphysical stew is getting back to realistic basics — in terms of perceptions about human nature or aesthetics — I can only wonder what an artificial, decadent cinema must be like.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader, 2001

The.King.Is.Alive.2000.DVDRip.x264-E411-CG.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 45mn
Size:	1.47 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Not met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	718x574 ~> 765x574
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	1 596 Kbps
Audio
English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 384 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/E81C929DFD4767A/The.King.Is.Alive.2000.DVDRip.x264-E411-CG.mkv

Language(s):English,French
Subtitles:English,Dannish,Finnish,Swedish,Norwegian

The post Kristian Levring – The King Is Alive (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

En Kærlighedshistorie AKA Dogme # 21

REVIEW by Scott Tobias (from avclub.com):
The 21st film to receive official Dogme certification, and one of the few unharmed by its minimalist limitations, Ole Christian Madsen’s powerful Kira’s Reason: A Love Story could be the undercard to A Woman Under The Influence, John Cassavetes’ seminal study of a marriage and mental illness. Beginning with a wife’s return home after time in a psychiatric ward, both films gain their tension from the strained attempt to return to normalcy after everything has irrevocably changed, a transitional phase made all the more painful by brief flashes of the couple’s old dynamic. Though Madsen’s middle-class heroes have little in common with Cassavetes’ more combative blue-collar counterparts, their reunion is similarly raw, painful, and unexpectedly romantic, as they try to redefine their relationship around a new set of terms. Looking and acting uncannily like a young Genevieve Bujold, Stine Stengade gives a touchingly unhinged performance as the title character, a madwoman who tries to find her footing as a wife and mother after being committed for an unspecified condition. While she was away, her husband Lars Mikkelsen had an affair with her sister, but he seems genuinely willing to grant her every opportunity to reenter their lives. Though she works hard to keep up appearances, Stengade’s mood swings throw her so far off-balance that even her ecstatic moments are temporary and disturbingly artificial, a hairsbreadth away from collapse. Mikkelsen strenuously professes his love for her and tries to remain patient, but her erratic behavior–highlighted by a breakdown at a public pool and a one-night stand with a random barfly–begins to wear him down. In a desperate gesture, he allows her to make the arrangements for an elaborate business dinner at a luxury hotel, an event that serves as the ultimate test of her withered sanity. The tortured interplay between Stengade and Mikkelsen lies at the heart of Kira’s Reason, but Madsen errs by grabbing for simple explanations for her madness elsewhere, such as the father (Sven Wollter) who abandoned her during childhood or a tragic revelation buried in the third act. Why give the game away when the actors suggest their characters’ inner workings with such delicacy and precision? Until its pat, implausible conclusion, the film has the edgy nerve of a classic amour fou, charting a complex relationship with the sort of bumpy, unpredictable spirit that would do Cassavetes proud.

En.Kaerlighedshistorie.2001.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 28mn
Size:	1.63 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	702x570 ~> 760x570
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	2 421 kb/s
Audio
Danish 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/47F634CD5DA0B29/En.Kaerlighedshistorie.2001.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Danish
Subtitles:English,Danish

The post Ole Christian Madsen – Kærlighedshistorie AKA Kira’s Reason: A Love Story (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The group of people gather at the house in Copenhagen suburb to break all the limitations and to bring out the “inner idiot” in themselves.

+Commentary by Lars von Trier and Jens Albinus
+Commentary by Peter Schepelern and Stig Björkman

3.44GB | 1h 49m | 1108×8304 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0B48E9C718F2184/The.Idiots.1998.720p.iT.WEB-DL.DD2.0.H.264-WELP.mkv

Language:Danish
Subtitles:English,Danish,Finnish,Swedish

The post Lars von Trier – Idioterne AKA The Idiots [+ Commentaries] (1998) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A road-movie about two friends, Peter and Chris, in their late 20′s, one incredibly idealistic and optimistic; the other cynically nihilistic and negative. They pick up a Vespa in South Dakota and travel with it to Los Angeles. As they travel through the northwest to the southwest, they see their country through different eyes. Chris has high expectations and romantic notions of America. Peter sees the emptiness of America with lost ideals and lost people. While they do not discover the identity of America on their road trip, they ultimately find themselves…

	
James Merendino - (2001) Amerikana.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 35mn
Size: 	1.42 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	710x346 ~> 710x383
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	1 749 Kbps
BPP: 	0.238
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps
#2:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps (Commentary)

https://nitro.download/view/AE15EC27B383C2C/James_Merendino_-_(2001)_Amerikana.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/E0BE5E3BCA4749D/Amerikana_trailer.avi
https://nitro.download/view/CD5027F1FC2A5B4/Amerikana_trailer_2.avi

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post James Merendino – Amerikana [+Extras] (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

In a city suburb, a young minister arrives to take up duties at a local church. He is persuaded by his assistant to join an Italian night school class, and he soon becomes the centre of a group of people to whom fate has dealt quite serious blows.

2.44GB | 1h 52mn | 765×574 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/E235C7C85FA307D/Italiensk.for.begyndere.AKA.Italian.for.Beginners.2000.DVD.AC3.2.0.x264-SaL.mkv

Language:Danish (+ some Italian)
Subtitles:English, Danish (for Italian parts)

The post Lone Scherfig – Italiensk For Begyndere aka Italian for Beginners (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.