Synopsis:
Song of the Scarlet Flower was Teuvo Tulio’s first independently produced film, and the earliest of his surviving films. The plot was about Olavi, a farmer’s son who leaves his home after a dispute with his father and leads a life of a womanizing logger.Read More »
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Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Enslin, and Jean-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state. The movie has several vignettes, including an extended set of scenes with the famous director Rainer Werner Fassbinder discussing his feelings about Germany’s political situation at the time. Fassbinder’s scenes almost seem to be candid documentary footage, but aren’t. Other scenes include documentary footage of the joint funeral of Baader, Enslin, and Raspe.Read More »
Synopsis:
Pathological, triggered by the unbridled desire to take the story of jealousy towards the film noirs, the film shades of black crime, when Riitta decide to carve adulterous sister, imagining in their path. Again, Tulio used effectively ellipse: a meeting room floor of the Chamber of flashing clothes play almost frame by frame Riitta viettelysessiota own – except that it is now a narrow perspective to give a distorted picture of the situation. Similarly, recalling the horrors huteralla hanging: a child fell into the water past his own clumsiness, Riitta now use the tools to ensure that the structure to give up and his rival for its own sister ends up in the rapids.Read More »
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Based on a real Swedish petty-crime wave, Play troubles the waters of any smugly held view, liberal or conservative, about how society should regard and handle its own rogue elements — a dilemma Östlund obviously thinks is vital in countries such as Sweden that are over-comfortable with their own homogenous reasonableness. (His characters cannot help moralizing to each other like scolding parents.) Still, his camera strategy remains fascinating and elusive, always partially obscuring distant action with foreground reality, and patiently letting incidents play out in breath-holding takes that never look away. It’s the rare contemporary film that’s as majestically and gruelingly rigorous in its form as in its thematic interrogations.Read More »
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A man is thinking about his relationship with his girlfriend, while checking out a gorgeous woman in a bar.Read More »
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Somewhere along a desolate highway in Western Montana where the scorched grass burns brown and cotton-ball clouds dissolve into an endless ocean of white, a decrepit old pick-up truck speeds along. The driver, a shifty, uneasy man named Tom Bates fidgets and cackles a rapid, kookaburra laugh. “I mean, what you ever get the feeling that everything was just, just going by you like WHOOSH — just going by, it’s all, all too fast. You can’t, can’t see anything,” he philosophizes to a lanky hitch-hiking hippie sitting in the passenger seat. “I guess, well I guess what I got to do is sort through some of this shit, y’know, just get some of this shit outta my life,” he continues as his passenger sits in solemn silence.Read More »
Linda Blair’s gay son gets raped by Nazis, so she tracks down the father, played by Wings Hauser, and helps him deal with his alcoholism, and eventually they kind of fight back.Read More »
Synopsis:
Three people live in a remote Buddhist monastery near Mount Chonan: Hyegok, the old master; Yong Nan, a young man who has left his extended family in the city to seek enlightenment – Hyegok calls him Kibong!; and, an orphan lad Haejin, whom Hyegok has brought to the monastery to raise as a monk. The story is mostly Yong Nan’s, told in flashbacks: how he came to the monastery, his brief return to the city, his vacillation between the turbulence of the world and his hope to overcome passions and escape the idea of self. We also see Hyegok as a teacher, a protector, and a father figure, and we watch Haejin make his way as a curious and nearly self-sufficient child.Read More »
Himala is a landmark 1982 film directed by Ishmael Bernal. It tells the story of a young woman in a small town in the Philippines who claims to have seen an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary and suddenly begins to exhibit healing powers. More than a movie about faith-healing, the film is an excellent commentary on Third World poverty and backward and contradictory rural customs. The lead role is superbly played by one of the country’s premier dramatic actresses, Nora Aunor.Read More »