After killing a man that raped one of his students, teacher Wakizaka finds himself embroiled in a plot being blackmailed into looking after a huge amount of cash. With tensions mounting and anxiety setting in, Wakizaka decides to spend the money, knowing the consequences of his actions will be of the most dire kind.Read More »
Aspiring to be admitted to a good university and to become a lawyer, Tasiro Yuusuke, a tenth-grader from Kyushu, enrols in a prestigious high school in Tokyo. Plans are made for him to live in his uncle’s house, part of which is rented out while his uncle is abroad on business. A realtor’s mistakes leaves Tasiro sharing the house with Kei Yamaba, the most beautiful girl in the school, who is also his classmate. There is the risk that their unexpected ‘co-habitation’ will be discovered by the school authorities. While he grows increasingly attracted to her, he is often irritated by her innocent and nonchalant attitude towards their predicament. They each develop other romantic attachments, but end up turning to each other.Read More »
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Dream (or Bi-mong, as is the Korean title) is already Ki-duk’s 15th film. It’s also the 15th Ki-duk film I watched so obviously you can consider me a fan. Ki-duk is a director who’s known to stay pretty close to what he does best, so even though the differences between Dream and his earlier films might not seem stellar, they do present a big deviation for Ki-duk standards. Yet in the end, Dream is still 100% Ki-duk and couldn’t have been made by any other.Read More »
Review from DVDTalk
THE FILM
For his 17th film, Pedro Almodovar doesn’t exactly break new ground with “Broken Embraces,” instead fine-tuning his gifts and decadent cinematic appetites to a satisfying routine. A spiraling, sensual story of noirish obsession and paranoia, “Embraces” is a riveting sit, due in great part to the filmmaker’s incredible storytelling gifts, and the cast, who articulate a dreamy series of toxic encounters with sniper-like precision, tightening Almodovar’s noose with exceptional skill.Read More »
After a stroke leaves her husband mentally disabled and fundamentally changed, spirited Irish housewife Vanetia struggles to keep her family together in the wake of tragedy. A research grant from American doctor Ted Fielding, interested in documenting the family’s recovery process, allows them to get by. Though Vanetia initially resents living under Ted’s microscope, she soon finds comfort in his calming presence, while Ted responds to Vanetia’s dynamic, unpredictable personality.Read More »
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Three bothers live together with a father who treats them as a dog in the house. The first son desires for food and the son lost his face after he got burned by fire. He desires for sex. All he does is masturbation and painting in his cooped room. The second son is the normal one in the house where the Chinese stranger comes in and he starts living with them. The boy is father’;s lover and has sex with a father in the presence of three sons. One day, a crazy girl gets into the house, the house is full of sexual desire and lust.Read More »
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Tibetan yogi Milarepa is one of the main teachers of Buddhism. His autobiography is filmed here parallel with a story of a youth of our days, both seeking answers to same questions. They have masters whose decisions they don’t fully catch, and there are women whose roles are ambiguous. Master and disciple depend in each other, in fierce search for truth; only belief and honor count. Cavani made an extraordinary movie which has not lost any of its charm within years. It is a meditation of man’s destiny and also a narrative of the parallel but non- tangential lives of man and woman. This film can be read as a visual philosophical tract and an homage to Milarepa. Aside of that, the film is very beautiful visually and the great actors fully contribute to the ideas of both Milarepa and Cavani.
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With Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonnegut revealed that humour can be exploited in two ways: to make people roll over the floor laughing and to underscore the graveness of earnest problems. While Antonio Mercero’s Spanish dramatic comedy Planta 4ª (The 4th Floor) doesn’t tackle WWII but “only” possibly terminally ill children, its use of humour is similar. While it would be harsh to nickname the film Slaughterhouse 4 (the young patients of the cancer ward on the titular fourth floor all have at least one amputated limb), it shares with Vonnegut its exploitation of laughter in the face of the incomprehensible, or indeed the only sane way to confront the inexplicable madness of disease and death.Read More »
San Francisco is a 1936 film directed by W.S. Van Dyke, written by Anita Loos, starring Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracy and Jack Holt. It was nominated for six Oscars, of which it won one. The film tells the story of Mary Blake, who, out of poverty, starts singing at a local gambling hall. When she moves on, the owner of the gambling hall, Blackie, keeps following her. The confrontations between Mary and Blackie are suddenly put to a stop with the advent of the San Franscisco earthquake.Read More »