1990s

User at Imdb: This movie gives a eyeopening glimpse of the 1930’s and a hidden agenda of a very moralistic time. It is a charming story of the maid’s attempt to walk the line between her own natural inclinations and the societies expectations for her. Laura Dern offers a very realistic and convincing performance that marks her as a great character actress. The interaction with her own mother, in the supporting cast, shows a natural adaptation to a role that is rare in such a young actress. Duvall is wonderful in a role that demands a vast understanding of human emotion and character study of his part. The set and old automobiles lend a real authenticity to this period in history. It takes you back to a simpler time, but underscores all of the attitudes of the time. This is a movie to be enjoyed again and again at each opportunity. I highly recommend itRead More »

Jonas and Emir are members of a criminal gang of 14-15 year-olds in Oslo. Emir has slight brain-damage after being beaten by his father as a 5-year-old, and Jonas’ biggest problem is stopping Emir from hitting people on the head. One day, they are offered a job by a gang of drug-dealers: Deliver a packet of heroin to one guy and beat up another. This is the start of a chain of events that sends their lives spiraling out of control.Read More »

Quote:
Drink Deep is a lyrical vision of friendship, hidden secrets, and desires. Cohen uses several types of film image to add texture to the layered composition. Beautiful shades of grey, silver, black and blue echo the water, reminiscent of early photography and silverprints. Cohen says, “The piece was constructed primarily from footage I’d shot of skinnydippers at swimming holes in Georgia and rural Pennsylvania. It’s about water and memory and stories just submerged. It is also, in part, a response to thinking about censorship. I would say that Drink Deep is both unabashedly and deceptively romantic. Surface, flow, and undertow. What looks like paradise is always paradise lost.”

Music composed by Stephen Vitiello and performed with Gabriel Cohen and Mary Wooten.Read More »

Re-view 1: Memories of a Hyperstitional Practitioner
A review of a Chris Marker ‘event’? One is never enough. Not only because Chris Marker is, as we were told this weekend more than once, more than one. But also because re-viewing, seeing again, looking back is so integral to the Marker experience.
Chris Marker is a systematic con-fuser of fact and fiction, best known for La Jetee (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982), explorations of time, memory, images and revolution (terms whose contiguity – and near synonymy – is a consistent theme of his work). The form that Marker perfected in the rightly celebrated Sans Soleil has been called the ‘film-essay’, though this does little justice to the astonishing singularity of his theory-fictional time-travelogues, which conjoin politics, pop culture and ethnography in a breathtakingly lyrical but intellectually clear-eyed plane of consistency.
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Werner Schroeter’s adaptation of a novel by Ingeborg Bachmann, Isabelle Huppert portrays a writer who suffers from an interminable case of existential angst.

Synopsis:
An unusual story of a triangular relationship set in Vienna. A woman shares an apartment with a man named Malina. The woman meets Ivan and falls in love. It will be her last great passion. The singlemindedness of her love is so great that it is more than the man can comprehend or respond to. The film’s subject is nothing less than love- and the loneliness of the lover. Read More »

Synopsis:
This is a movie within movie, which is almost recursive, i.e., the movie inside looks like director Ceylan’s previous movie, Kasaba. It is about the movie director, Muzaffer, going back to his hometown to make a movie using a cast of local people. While Muzaffer is around, his mother complains about simple health problems, his father is in a legal fight against the government for his land, his cousin gets out of his job to help Muzaffer who promises him to find a job in Istanbul, and his little cousin Ali tries to carry an egg in his pocket for 40 days so that he’ll get the watch of his dreams. In the meantime, they get to form the cast for Muzaffer’s movie as wellRead More »

Synopsis
A short, silent, black and white story about life, survival, death; animals, objects, trees; young and old. It is mostly an aggregation of a bunch of good photos which is not surprising for Ceylan who is also a photographer.Read More »

Based on the 1836 novel by Balzac (wiki)

Quote:
Script-writers who adapt Balzac or Dostoievsky excuse the idiotic transformations they impose on the works from which they construct their scenarios by pleading that the cinema is incapable of rendering every psychological or metaphysical overtone. In their hands, Balzac becomes a collection of engravings in which fashion has the most important place, and Dostoievsky suddenly begins to resemble the novels of Joseph Kessel, with Russian-style drinking-bouts in night-clubs and troika races in the snow. Well, the only cause of these compressions is laziness and lack of imagination. The cinema of today is capable of expressing any kind of reality. What interests us is the creation of this new language. (…) The fundamental problem of the cinema is how to express thought.
Alexandre Astruc, The Birth of a New Avant-Barde: La Camera-Stylo (1948)Read More »

Quote:
The Sweet Hereafter deals with the effects of a tragic school bus crash on a ravishingly beautiful small town set amid the scenic mountains of British Columbia. Outsider Ian Holm arrives, much like the Pied Piper, a lawyer trying to lure the citizens of the town into a class-action suit that would allow the mourning parents to try to sate their immense loss with the small solace of cash. Where Egoyan has dealt with emotional traumas of different sorts of outsiders and marginal characters in the past, with this adaptation, he has made a stirring portrait of the effects of loss within a community. –Ray PrideRead More »