1980s

Synopsis:
This quirky Portuguese comedy won a silver lion at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. The story concerns the irrepressible Joao de Deus (played by the director, Joao Cesar Monteiro), an ill-kempt, lusty and none-too-honest resident of Violeta’s boarding house, which happens to have yellow walls. Joao, who has no visible means of support, is in his fifties, and is not above cadging money from his 70 year old mother, who still works as a cleaning lady. He has a wistful sort of lust for the young ladies in the boarding house, and gets a kind of thrill when he is permitted to take a bath in their used water. Read More »

A young writer anguished because he finds nothing interesting to write about, strolls through the streets of Izmir. He comes across a series of posters of Sevim Suna, a local singer. She intrigues him and he stops to wonder who she is. At that point a man comes up to him and says that her name is “Vasfiye”. The stranger begins to tell her story. As the young writer listens he finds himself transported into different versions of Vasfiye’s life.Read More »

‘7 UP’/’28,’ BRITISH DOCUMENTARIES
THE twin documentaries ”7 Up” and ”28 Up,” which were shown last night at the New York Film Festival (and which open at the Film Forum 1 on Oct. 16), constitute as fascinating a work of popular sociology as you may ever see. ”7 Up,” which was first shown on British television in 1963, collected a group of 7-year-olds from different class strata and let them describe their values, their prejudices and their hopes for the future. The same project takes on tremendous poignancy and a great deal more breadth in ”28 Up,” a follow-up study consisting of much longer profiles of the same people, revealing how their dreams and aspirations have changed with time.Read More »

During the Suez Crisis of 1956, two young clerks at the stuffy Foreign Office in Whitehall display little interest in the decline of the British Empire. To their eyes, it can hardly compete with girls, rock music (including “Lay Down Your Arms”), and the intrigue of romantic entanglements.Read More »

Plot summary [wikipedia.org]
The narrative opens in the decade before World War I. We are introduced to the central protagonist of the story, Hans Castorp, a young German. We encounter him when he is in his early 20s, about to take up a shipbuilding career in Hamburg, his home town. Just before beginning this professional career he undertakes a journey to visit his tubercular cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, who is seeking a cure in a sanatorium in Davos, high up in the Swiss Alps. In the opening chapter, Hans is symbolically transported away from the familiar life and mundane obligations he has known, in what he later learns to call the flatlands , to the rarefied mountain air and introspective little world of the sanatorium.Read More »

Quote:
A Tokyo student is running full out; we see him in a meadow, at university, then swimming in a river. He reappears in his garden, naked, then at home as he eats with his family, and then as he watches TV. In the school’s sports field as he doodles with some chalk. After a violent quarrel at home with his mother, he starts running through the city again, as he traces his path, sometimes with thread, sometimes with chalk.Read More »

Marilyn Jordan (Susan Anspach) is a bored, depressed American housewife, married to a rich Swedish businessman with two seemingly perfect children. She tries to “spice up” her existence by surprising the family when she eats their entire dinner, setting the bedclothes on fire and poisoning the pet dog’s milk and then advising it not to drink (the dog does not drink). Eventually Martin, Marilyn’s husband, decides to show her to a psychiatrist, but that only serves to further her frustration.Read More »

Quote:
For his career-long excavation of the American national character, James Benning found two of his most striking case studies in a pair of murderers whose crimes took place 30 years and more than half the country apart. Landscape Suicide, like many of Benning’s films, consists largely of footage of places, landscapes, and roads accompanied by—or paired with—speech. The speech, in this case, comes from the court testimonies of Bernadette Protti, who stabbed one of her California high-school classmates to death in 1984 over an insult, and Ed Gein, the infamous Plainfield, Wisconsin, killer who made trophies out of his victim’s bodies, read aloud by actors directly to the camera. Benning’s America is a country terrified equally by the wilderness to which it’s in thrall and the civilization it’s set up to keep that wilderness at bay—and nowhere in his work does that tension become more chillingly clear.Read More »

Aspiring to be admitted to a good university and to become a lawyer, Tasiro Yuusuke, a tenth-grader from Kyushu, enrols in a prestigious high school in Tokyo. Plans are made for him to live in his uncle’s house, part of which is rented out while his uncle is abroad on business. A realtor’s mistakes leaves Tasiro sharing the house with Kei Yamaba, the most beautiful girl in the school, who is also his classmate. There is the risk that their unexpected ‘co-habitation’ will be discovered by the school authorities. While he grows increasingly attracted to her, he is often irritated by her innocent and nonchalant attitude towards their predicament. They each develop other romantic attachments, but end up turning to each other.Read More »