• Jeff Feuerzeig – Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King (1993)

    1991-2000CultDocumentaryJeff FeuerzeigUSA

    Jad and David Fair are Half Japanese, “The World’s Greatest Underground Band” and the most unlikely pair of rock heroes as can be imagined. Half Japanese play their hearts out on rooftops and nursing home back porches while overzealous fans and rock critics plot the next Beatlemania that never comes. A conspiracy of the Corporate Rock world? Perhaps.Read More »

  • Amleto Palermi – Cavalleria rusticana (1939)

    1931-1940Amleto PalermiDramaItalian Cinema under FascismItaly

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    PLOT & Review:
    (Contains some spoilers)

    Quote:
    This film was not based on the famous one-act opera of Pietro Mascagni but rather on the original story by the Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga. It’s the story of Santuzza, her love Turiddu, and his passion for the married Lola that leads to his death in a duel when Lola’s husband Alfio exacts satisfaction. Santuzza’s curse leveled at unfaithful Turiddu, “A te la mala Pasqua!” (“Hope you have a bad Easter!”) is a memorable moment… as it was in Mascagni’s opera.

    All Sicilian passion and emotion, the film is shot against authentic Sicilian backgrounds. There are wonderful colorful sequences of villagers riding in decorated traditionally decorated carts. Those scenes are so vivid you almost don’t notice the absence of color in this black and white film. Mount Etna looms in the background, suggestive of the smoking volcanic passions of some of the characters we see living near it.Read More »

  • Isao Yukisada – Ribâzu ejji AKA River’s Edge (2018)

    2011-2020CrimeIsao YukisadaJapanMystery

    Synopsis:
    Haruna is a high school student whose, school-mates, school and life is topsy turvy and often tragic. One of her classmates is the homosexual Ichiro. The boy is often bullied, derided and beaten. He has the scars to show for it. Haruna stands by Ichiro‘s side and comes to know Ichiro‘s secret. Then they discover a corpse by a river beside the tall grass.Read More »

  • Shin’ya Tsukamoto – Tetsuo (1989) (HD)

    1981-1990AsianCultJapanShinya Tsukamoto

    A strange man known only as the “metal fetishist”, who seems to have an insane compulsion to stick scrap metal into his body, is hit and possibly killed by a Japanese “salaryman”, out for a drive with his girlfriend. The salaryman then notices that he is being slowly overtaken by some kind of disease that is turning his body into scrap metal, and that his nemesis is not in fact dead but is somehow masterminding and guiding his rage and frustration-fueled transformation.Read More »

  • Michael Tully – Silver Jew (2007)

    2001-2010DocumentaryMichael TullyUSA

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    IMDB member description:
    An intimate portrait of reclusive poet/musician David Berman and his band the Silver Jews. In the midst of their first ever world tour in the summer of 2006, David, his wife Cassie, and the rest of the band–Tony Crow (keyboards), Brian Kotzur (drums), Peyton Pinkerton (guitar), and William Tyler (guitar)–stopped off in Israel to play two shows in Tel Aviv and visit Jerusalem.Read More »

  • Oskar Fischinger – Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films (1926-1947)

    USA1921-19301931-19401941-1950AnimationExperimentalOskar Fischinger

    Spirals (1926)
    Study no. 6 (1930)
    Study no. 7 (1931)
    Kreise (1933)
    Allegretto (1936-43)
    Radio Dynamics (1942)
    Motion Painting No. 1 (1947)

    and 3 Early Films:

    Wax Experiments (1921-26)
    Spiritual Constructions (1927)
    Walking from Munich to Berlin (1927)

    Special Features
    * Never-released early experiments, animation drawings and tests
    * Home movies of Oskar, Elfriede and Hans Fischinger in the Berlin Studio, c. 1931
    * Biographical Photographs
    * A Selection of Paintings by Fischinger
    * Film notes by Fischinger and others
    * Biography
    * Preserved films, high definition digital transfers and digitally remastered audio

    Decades before computer graphics, before music videos, even before “Fantasia” (the 1940 version), there were the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), master of “absolute” or nonobjective filmmaking. He was cinema’s Kandinsky, an animator who, beginning in the 1920’s in Germany, created exquisite “visual music” using geometric patterns and shapes choreographed tightly to classical music and jazz. (John Canemaker, New York Times)Read More »

  • Philippe Garrel – Liberté, la nuit (1984) (HD)

    Drama1981-1990ArthouseFrancePhilippe Garrel

    ‘Liberte, la nuit’ is not really a political film, or, at least, a film about politics. Its central figures are an aging revolutionary helping Algerians in the anti-colonial war against France, his separated wife, a dressmaker who gives them guns, and his mistress, a French Algerian emigree. Such a set-up might offer opportunities for allegory – white Algeria returning to the aging bosom of the fatherland, and all that. The film’s most dynamic sequence is pure political thriller, an assassination by the OAS, confusingly shot and edited on grainy stock that evokes both documentary immediacy and the whirring of a surveillance camera, complete with exciting car chase. The human relationships – especially the drawn-out separation of Jean and Mouche, are said to be caused by his political activity, while his contact with others has some basis in his ‘work’. Even, as I say, his final escape with an apolitical menial has political overtones; and their idyll is ultimately no escape from history.Read More »

  • Raphaël Jacoulot – Avant l’aube (2011)

    2011-2020BelgiumDramaMysteryRaphaël Jacoulot

    Frederic is a young man in social rehabilitation. He has just found a night internship, in an isolated hotel in the mountains when, one evening, he sees his boss, Jacques, together with this son, hiding a car in the parking lot. The day after, he learns that one of the clients left the hotel without notice… (IMDB)Read More »

  • Orson Welles – The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

    2011-2020DramaOrson WellesThrillerUSA

    The story of a legendary director named J.J. “Jake” Hannaford, who returns to Hollywood from years of semi-exile in Europe, with plans to complete work on his own innovative comeback movie, also titled “The Other Side of the Wind”.

    Quote:
    It’s a film about an unfinished film – and it looks as if it may never be finished. The Other Side Of The Wind was made by Orson Welles in the early 1970s. The New York Times published a story in late 2014 suggesting that the film would soon be ready. In 2015, a crowdfunding campaign raised more than $400,000 (£304,000) for the project. Earlier this year, there were reports that Netflix was ready to put up $5m to fund the completion of the movie and to distribute it worldwide.Read More »

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