• Andrew T. Betzer – Young Bodies Heal Quickly (2014)

    Drama2011-2020Andrew T. BetzerCultUSA

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    Young Bodies Heal Quickly, Andrew T. Betzer’s first feature after a storied career as a short film-maker, is about as personal as a narrative fiction can get: Betzer wrote, directed, produced, edited and even color-graded the film. But in this case, “personal” doesn’t mean a regurgitation of the filmmaker’s latest breakup or childhood ups and downs. It means a highly idiosyncratic take on storytelling, in which the viewer is thrown in the deep end from the enigmatic first shot and carried along by the hurtling young bodies of two brothers who do a bad thing and have to get out of town fast. Set in godforsaken parts of Maryland and structured as a picaresque road film in five main episodes, Young Bodies Heal Quickly is as unpredictable as the boys’ off-the-grid father yet crystal clear in its intent to present an unflinching exploration of masculinity and the transmission of violence. If there is anything else out there like it, I haven’t seen it.Read More »

  • Khavn – Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember (2016)

    2011-2020ArthouseKhavnPhilippines

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Synopsis
    A bunch of 10-year-old kids rob pedestrians and kill without mercy. But after a failed bank robbery, the dangerous game comes to an end with twenty years of imprisonment. After two decades, they are released but soon begin to disappear one by one.Read More »

  • Leigh Whannell – Upgrade (2018)

    2011-2020AustraliaLeigh WhannellSci-Fi

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    Set in the near-future, technology controls nearly all aspects of life. But when Grey, a self-identified technophobe, has his world turned upside down, his only hope for revenge is an experimental computer chip implant called Stem.Read More »

  • Dori Berinstein – ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway (2007)

    2001-2010DocumentaryDori BerinsteinPerformanceUSA

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    From Amazon.com –

    The real drama happens behind the curtain in this fascinating and rare look at four high-profile Broadway musicals (Wicked, Taboo, Caroline, Or Change, and Avenue Q) and their fearless journey to the Tony Awards®. Including a star-studded cast, this entertaining film takes viewers on an unprecedented behind-the-scenes view of the creative process that captures all the heartbreak and hilarity of trying make it big in Show Business!

    The playful but intense and vastly informative Show Business: The Road to Broadway is a documentary about four musicals that were contenders for top Tony Awards prizes in the 2004 Broadway season. Following the parallel action between the quartet–“Wicked,” “Avenue Q,” “Taboo,” and “Caroline, or Change”–from concept through casting, rewrites, rehearsals, opening nights and the relative box-office fortunes of each, the film dazzles a viewer by seeming to be everywhere at once. Along the way, one encounters cascades of neuroses and anxieties from the creative community involved in these shows, but there is also tremendous insight shared by the various playwrights, composers, lyricists, producers, directors, and stars who get these productions up and running. There’s sundry drama, too, especially concerning the brief run of “Taboo,” the financially disastrous musical about Boy George that was largely bankrolled by Rosie O’Donnell and ran into a variety of problems. Excellent fly-on-the-wall moments include a dinner sequence involving a handful of well-known theatre critics, whose tastes vary and who often champion shows no one else seems to like. Everything leads to highlights from the 2004 Tony Awards show, which was full of surprises. A final sequence in which one catches up with the many talents involved says everything about how success and failure is often a mere roll of the cosmic dice.
    Read More »

  • Sohrab Shahid Saless – Rosen für Afrika AKA Roses for Africa (1992)

    Drama1991-2000ArthouseGermanySohrab Shahid Saless

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    Between 1991 and 1992 he [Saless] directed Rosen für Afrika, a Psychodrama about how injustice is turned into oblivion about an opportunity worker and a woman from the civil house of a marriage for 30 years . Soon the relationship fails due to the aggressive, also destructive tendencies of the man who enters a deep personal crisis. When the marriage coined/shaped of force and Psychoterror goes finally into the breaks, the man looks for comfort in the alcohol and becomes criminal. It was released on German television in 1991.Read More »

  • Barbet Schroeder – Koko, le gorille qui parle AKA Koko, a Talking Gorilla (1978)

    1971-1980Barbet SchroederDocumentaryFrance

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Penny Patterson, an American psychology student, began an experiment in primate communication in the early 1970s using a young zoo gorilla named Koko, who was loaned to Penny for the experiment. Due to a philosophical predisposition to consider that “humanizing” animals is wrong, and alarmed at the increasing publicity over the experiments, the zoo took back the gorilla, which by then had learned over three hundred signs and showed, to many observers, an almost human comprehension of her condition. This French documentary explores the experiments, the circumstances of Koko’s being withdrawn from them, and the question of the gorilla’s “civil rights,” if any.

    – All Movie GuideRead More »

  • Göran Olsson – Fuck You, Fuck You Very Much (1998)

    1991-2000DocumentaryGöran OlssonSweden

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    In 1998, SVT made a documentary about Leila K’s claim for stardom called Fuck You, Fuck You Very Much. The event focuses on an incident that happened during the 1996 Swedish Grammis awards. In 2000, she appeared on Daisy Dee’s “Open Sesame” video, a cover of her own 1991 hit. Daisy Dee was the presenter of the show “Viva Club Rotation” at the time. In 2003, Swedish media reported that Leila K was living on the streets, stealing her food.

    2009 the rock documentary Fuck You, Fuck You Very Much was released May 2009 in Sweden.Read More »

  • Richard Myers – The Path (1960)

    USA1951-1960Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtExperimentalRichard MyersShort Film

    B&W, SILENT.

    “Light as the symbol of the ineffable. The ‘plot’ of this subjective recreation of a dream seems to concern a mysterious journey; the spectator, however, is visually directed toward forms and substances rather than to the protagonists by a filmmaker who is a master of visionary cinema.” – Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art

    “Richard Myers has, thru his films, given us the ONLY consistently creative variable to dream-thinking in our time. All else, in film, slides toward surrealism and/or props itself with misplaced Freudian symbols, at best, or else gets lost in the Jung-le, at the verses. Myers’ work is rooted in what he doesn’t know about, just exactly what he knows – his own home grounds mid-America, and like D.W. Griffith he takes the great risk of being native to his art, attending it on its home-grown grounds/his-UNowned-dreams.” – Stan BrakhageRead More »

  • Benoît Jacquot – Les enfants du placard AKA Closet Children (1977)

    1971-1980Benoît JacquotDramaFrance

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Nicola (Lou Castel) bears the psychological scars of unbearable guilt. As a boy, he was given the job of looking after his mentally unstable mother and protecting her from herself. One day, he and his sister went instead into a large closet and enacted a childishly intensive “I dare you” bonding ritual, marking one another with the blade of their father’s sword cane. While he was occupied in this manner, the boy’s mother hung herself and died. Now an adult, he still has an unhealthily strong fixation on his sister. This is so obvious that a girlfriend of his sister’s, with whom he has an affair, breaks it off, complaining that she is not interested in being a stand-in for the sister.Read More »

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