It’s the summer holidays in the city and young Hana is trying to get her warring parents to reunite. But she’s distracted from her quest one day by a couple of younger girls, nine-year-old Yoomi and seven-year-old Yoojin. As she swiftly becomes an older-sister figure to the pair, the trio’s recess becomes one of imagination and adventure – from playing tricks on the landlady to going on a seaside reconnaissance – that leads to the bittersweet glimmerings of maturity.Read More »
Two curious extraterrestrials land with their dustbin at a panel-house estate one day. Their task is to study the human race by studying Dr. Jánský, an average worker of the Institute for Relations with the Extraterrestrial Civilizations, whom their presence drives mad. Who would like to be selected as a perfect sample of mediocrity and insignificance that, moreover, cannot lie? The playful comedy by Oldřich Lipský is entirely based on the central couple, Mr. A and Mr. B, performed by the comedian duo Lasica – Satinský, topped up by the drawings by Vladimír Jiránek.Read More »
Doppelgänger, Kurosawa Kiyoshi
Michio Hayasaki, a brilliant developer of medical instruments, is working on a robot chair, equipped with artificial limbs, for people who are completely paralysed. He feels he is being pressed by his employer Medical Cytech to come up with a successful design at short notice and he is in danger of burning out. Then, one evening, he thinks he sees his double. Hayasaki has the shock of his life: superstition suggests that meeting your double means you will soon die. But, after a confrontation with his maladjusted doppelgänger, it becomes clear that Hayasaki could take advantage of his violent tricks. The double reduces Hayasaki’s lab to rubble, clears another double out of the way, hires an assistant for Hayasaki and comes up with a new lab. But in the end, one of them will have to perish…Read More »
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According to the code of the gamblers, Tokijiro, though he dislikes killing, has to join in the fighting when afforded a night’s stay and meals at the home of a town boss. He will be tested again and again in the bloody tale.Read More »
A scientist invents a potion that allows vampires to be able to live under the rays of the sun. When the word gets out to the vampires of the world, they fly to Cuba to gain control of the potion. It becomes a battle between the American and the East European vampires. A trumpet player is the scientist’s nephew and holds the formula for the elixir.Read More »
letterboxd wrote:
Toyoichi Otomo suffers from psychological and spiritual troubles after a horrific industrial accident. He lives with his elderly mother and wife near Mt. Aso in rural Kyushu. He seeks solace in a small religious group run by Buddhist nun Chishu-bo who claims to be the 68th descendant of famed 11th century poet Izumi Shikibu. The members of her sect regard her as a living saint. Yet instead of balming his soul, she riles his libido by playing a sexual cat-and-mouse game with the fragile Toyoichi. When she does bed him, it leads to a miracle healing – followed by a terrible calamity.Read More »
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It is difficult for me to articulate quite why it is that I adore Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie (2007), or Before I Forget as it is known to English speakers. Ostensibly your typical French drama about middle class angst, alienation and spiritual decay, the film deals with an ageing gay man who looks back over his life with considerable bitterness as he considers all the things he lost and all the things he failed to gain. However, while filled with negativity about his own past, the central character Pierre (played by Nolot) is gripped by terror when he thinks about the future as his health dwindles, his sex drive sputters and his days come to be consumed by talk of money, food and how he will most likely die alone. Read More »
From Charles Tesson, Cahiers du cinema 333 (March 1982):
Raul Ruiz filmed the gardens of the Château de Versailles. The first one, French, focuses on the King’s Square (a space where everything is arranged in order to be seen). The other one, English, is the exact opposite, because from any point within it, one falls out of view. Within these two constructions, the labyrinth and the concentric circles, Ruiz conceives a ‘photo-roman’ plot: a husband and his mistress rendez-vous in the English garden (one understands why) and, through a series of accidents and afraid of being seen, he relocates to the other garden. There he runs into his wife who is with her own lover, into the ex-husband of his wife who is with his new mistress, and into the new lover of his ex-wife….Read More »
PLOT SUMMARY
a new film about the birth of man from director Elias Merhige, video artist and composer David Wexler, composer Ben Gillespie, visual artist Ariana Tosatto, visual philosopher Leigh J. McCloskey, and psychophysicist Miguel P. Eckstein.Read More »