Synopsis:
Everything involving Patrick Dewaere is pretty cultish, i guess, but i must confess it is a bit of a default category here : arthouse / drama / romance / comedy / politics…none of those really fit in my book…this is one of those bittersweet social satires like they used to do in 70s french cinema…above all, this is a buddy movie / road movie, with a factory worker, a journalist, and a boxer :
— gabbyheinzeRead More »
A landowning farmer busies himself in his free time by bedding down the women on his farm and then tossing them aside. The farmer does not reform his ways and is soon chasing after the young manager’s wife, the woman he dropped not that long ago. The results are disastrous.Read More »
PLOT:
The attempted suicide of his fiancée prompts a Japanese salary-man to read his family chronicles and look back at the life of his ancestors. They were samurai, the military nobility caste who carried out acts of violence at the behest of feudal lords, but suffered even more so under their cruelty, often forced into ritual suicide (seppuku). The women were under constant threat of kidnapping and rape, and the men subjected to arbitrary disfigurement and homosexual slavery … In a radical departure from the usual romanticisation of the samurai, director Tadashi Imai – using period sets and sometimes graphic images – made a film fundamentally critical of medieval Japan’s feudal system and the inhumane samurai code called bushido. In addition, the final two of the eight episodes in the film draw parallels between that and kamikaze pilots of World War II, as well as Japan’s modern achievement-oriented society. Bushido zankoku monogatari was awarded the Golden Bear at the 1963 Berlin International Film Festival.Read More »
Quote:
On his deathbed, billionaire O.M. Rivers (Howard Duff) is tricked into altering his will by a grasping Catholic priest (Jim Haynie). The dying man is persuaded to add a stipulation to his bequests: one of Rivers’ two offspring must produce an heir within a year of his death or his millions will go to the church. The catch is that Rivers’ son Sonny (Eric Idle) is gay and his daughter Bitsy (Andrea Martin) is a lesbian.Read More »
Quote:
In East Berlin in the late 70s, two boys meet one evening in a disco: Thomas, who is from a working class family and is doing an apprenticeship, and Michael, a 16-year-old school pupil from an educated middle-class family. They both miss the tram home and walk together instead, ending up at Michael’s house where they discuss God and the world into the early hours. Following this encounter the two boys enter into an unusual friendship, united by their mutual desire to get away from the phoniness, the limitations and the restrictions of their parents and of society.Read More »
PLOT: In the middle of a performance of the play “Le Cocu”, a very bad boulevard comedy, Yannick gets up and interrupts the show to take the evening back in hand.Read More »
Quote:
With The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Davies selectively transforms a lesser-known Terence Rattigan play into a broody rumination on emotional freedom and frustrated desire. Davies abandons Rattigan’s linear narrative and compressed timeline in favor of a more free-form structure, one that underlines the ebb and flow of memory as it shuttles between past and present. At the same time, The Deep Blue Sea confirms Davies’s continued engagement with the period melodrama—in this case, the variety of “woman’s picture” exemplified by the doomed romanticism of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a touchstone that The Deep Blue Sea on several occasions blatantly references. Set against the backdrop of post-WWII Britain, a dowdy period of rationing and reconstruction, The Deep Blue Sea hinges on the seemingly irresolvable predicament of its heroine, Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz). Trapped within the confines of a passionless marriage to older, well-to-do Sir William (Simon Russell Beale), Hester vainly seeks satisfaction in an ardent affair with young, impulsive Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). Absorbed in memories of his carefree pre-war days, Freddie ultimately cannot return Hester’s affection, and their relationship soon degenerates into noisy rows and mutual recriminations.Read More »
One of those movies that reminds you of “Alien” and “The Thing” (not the original). The story is simple yet convincing and the special effects were good for its time. There is a little humor though not much. Most of the time it ranges from serious to dead serious. A group of underwater explorers uncover an old Russian submarine called appropriately enough “Leviathan” which translates from an ancient term meaning “sea monster” in the bible. They search the sub and find nothing of interest except a flask of vodka. However, one crew members becomes ill from drinking it and others join him. It appears that something has overtaken the unlucky Leviathan crew and they are next. It was all in all a clever film if not anti-climactic. Worth seeing surely.Read More »
Located deep in the forested hills of the Siang valley of Arunachal Pradesh, at the north-eastern extremity of India, Damro village gathers to build a 1000 foot long suspension bridge, the elegant structures of cane and bamboo, that are the distinctive mark of the Adi tribe. Their only tool is the dao, a blade length of tempered steel, the size of a machete.
Ethnological documentary on the Adis of Arunachal Pradesh as they build one of their cane-and-bamboo bridges against the imminent arrival of “development” as backdrop.Read More »