Drama

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For the sake of completeness with regard to the Jacques Brel (feature films) filmography as an actor, I’m uploading this movie though it is a poor quality rip, presumably from a vhs.

Mont-Dragon is probably the most obscure of the movies in which Jacques Brel starred. This goes for its current unavailability as well for its dark and filled with perversion plot. It’s a typical stylish movie of the beginning of the 70s, with many at-the-time shocking dialogues and situations that nowadays has become very much out-of-time and out of fashion, and with the recurrent aim to reveal the hidden dirty affairs of the bourgeoisie.Read More »

Synopsis:
A dutiful, unhappy lawyer’s wife falls in love with a young, mysterious woman she encounters at an art class. Soon their affair involves her husband and the young woman’s impotent lover and together the four slowly descent into a web of tangled passions.

Masumura was the first Japanese student to attend Italy’s prestigious Centro film school, whose alumni include the likes of Michaelangelo Antonioni, Liliana Cavani and Dino de Laurentiis. Filmed in glorious scope, Masumura fills his screen with simple, yet effective compositions. The direction is even, with his cast of players, most of whom have a long association with the director, embodying their roles wonderfully, exuding the passion and turbulence caused by their tangled affair. The exposition is well paced, as twists in the plot emerge with each meeting. The melodrama is high in true Japanese fashion, as pacts and allegiances shift the balance of power throughout the picture. While able to capture the sensuality of his subjects, Masumura does so without excessive voyeurism or blatant sexuality. The result is an exquisite photoplay, rich in the pitfalls of human desire, with interesting and dire unexpected.Read More »

Jim’s Reviews/Fassbinder
From Slant:
By Fernando F. Croce
October 4, 2005

The Stationmaster’s Wife’s first image sets up the template for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s magnificently excruciating study of romantic degradation-frozen in embrace over the opening credits, newlyweds Xaver (Kurt Raab) and Hanni Bolwieser (Elisabeth Trissenaar) kiss and grope ardently, until she abruptly pushes him away (“We don’t want a baby for the moment, all right?”). Watched from outside the bedroom window, the couple is framed in pitiless flat space, Fassbinder’s camera movements terse and entrapping, distilling the director’s maxim of love as “the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.” The love is Xaver’s, the titular stationmaster and arguably the greatest of Raab’s stump-like petit bourgeois jobs for the director; infatuated with his new wife, he’s unable (or, given Fassbinder’s preference for characters implicit in their own misery, unwilling) to believe the sensation-hungry Hanni is enjoying affairs with various men in their provincial burg in late-1920s Bavaria. Actually, “enjoying” is a misleading word: Hanni’s promiscuity, rather than liberating her, plunges depths of self-loathing, as when, fresh from some afternoon delight with handsome butcher Merkl (Bernhard Helfrich), she gazes at her new Garbo locks in the mirror and spits at her reflection. Venomous gossip promptly spreads throughout the town, derisive cackling ringing in Xaver’s ears as he leaves the pub and marches home to confront his wife, only to be inevitably shouted back into hen-pecked submission.Read More »

Plot
Autumn in the 1990s. An Estonian village in Abkhazia. Forest-covered hills, the sea, tangerine orchards. The Abkhazian War in Georgia. Two villagers – an old man Ivo and his neighbour Markus – are the only ones who haven’t left. Markus wants to harvest his tangerine plantation, although Ivo is against cropping during wartime. As the war approaches and the conflict takes place before their very eyes, Ivo finds a survior on the battlefield – a wounded Caucasian man Akhmed. Despite the danger Ivo takes him to his place. When Markus, while burying the perished Georgians, also finds a survivor. The tangerin harvesters now must resolve their own war, happening under their roof with enemies from both sides.Read More »

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The original story of amazingly greedy people with cheat, embezzle and corruption, is an original, written by Kaneto Shindo. It’s all set in this little apartment of the Maeda family. The son’s taking money from the talent agency that he’s working for. But the money’s somehow missing. Who’s taking it? Parents, who act like they’re poor, seem to be hiding something. Or is that the daughter, the writer’s mistress? Maybe the tax man, who was helping the agency to evade a tax? The singer looks like he lost so much money, too. Who’s the most greedy, clever, smart, sexy and strongest but never seems to show that and always behave gracefully?Read More »

Synopsis:
After six months of marriage, the attractive, free-spirited and sexually insatiable housewife, Marta, already feels the passion wane and the desire for her literary editor husband, Dario, wither. However, in the background of Mantua’s renowned literary festival, young Marta will fall for the charms of an intriguingly handsome stranger, the French Leon, while admiring Palazzo del Te’s vivid murals. Of course, Marta’s scandalous affair behind her husband’s back will soon be noticed, as the suspicious Dario is engulfed little by little by the impatient and fierce flames of lust. Perhaps a dash of infidelity is all that Dario needs to awaken his dormant enthusiasm for the neglected Marta.Read More »

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Director Istvan Gaal’s feature film debut was well received in the international community as well as his native country, Hungary. Sodrasban/Current is about a group of young people who have vacation around a small town. They spend their time playing around, taking life lightly. One day while they are diving at a nearby swimming area, they discover that one of their friends is missing. After an extensive search for the boy, his drowned body is eventually found and identified. This tragic incident changes the children’s perspectives of their lives as they now consider their own mortality, marking the end of their youthful innocence.Read More »

10 Days in North Korea takes the audience on a trip around Pyongyang, the focal point of power for the North Korean regime, to speak with citizens of what the filmmakers consider a very interesting “social experiment” that has been going on for about seventy years.

The film kicks off by demonstrating the allegiance of the Pyongyang workforce – interviews with an accomplished biologist and a few factory workers convey a genuine high opinion of “Grand Marshal” Kim Jong-un and enthusiasm towards contributing to the regime’s collective productivity. The terminology used to describe the government’s control over their daily lives is they are being “protected.”Read More »

A film of spellbinding visual beauty and brilliant resonant performances, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust has become a landmark of independent film. With great lyricism, Daughters tells the story of a large African-American family as they prepare to move North at the dawn of the 20th Century. Using this simple tale, the film brings to life the changing values, conflicts and struggles that confront every family as they leave their homeland for the promise of a new and better future.Read More »