SYNOPSIS
Reading the other comments on this film I have to say I might view this film differently if I understood the current socio-political climate in Serbia or the mindsets of the peoples living there. While it had definite moments of social commentary and a few political digs thrown in, I watched this movie primarily as a commentary on what people are willing to go through to fit in and to stand up for the people whom they love.Read More »
Quote:
One of the most influential and iconoclastic figures of the 20th century, French philosopher and father of “deconstruction” Jacques Derrida has single-handedly altered the way we look at history, language, art, and film. In the spirit of Derrida’s work, acclaimed filmmakers Kirby Dick (SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST [torrent available here]) and Amy Ziering Kofman have created an innovative and entertaining portrait by questioning the very concept of biography itself. Featuring a mesmerizing score by Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (THE LAST EMPEROR), DERRIDA is a playful and provocative glimpse at a visionary thinker as he ruminates on everything from SEINFELD to the sex lives of ancient philosophers.Read More »
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Dream (or Bi-mong, as is the Korean title) is already Ki-duk’s 15th film. It’s also the 15th Ki-duk film I watched so obviously you can consider me a fan. Ki-duk is a director who’s known to stay pretty close to what he does best, so even though the differences between Dream and his earlier films might not seem stellar, they do present a big deviation for Ki-duk standards. Yet in the end, Dream is still 100% Ki-duk and couldn’t have been made by any other.Read More »
Review from DVDTalk
THE FILM
For his 17th film, Pedro Almodovar doesn’t exactly break new ground with “Broken Embraces,” instead fine-tuning his gifts and decadent cinematic appetites to a satisfying routine. A spiraling, sensual story of noirish obsession and paranoia, “Embraces” is a riveting sit, due in great part to the filmmaker’s incredible storytelling gifts, and the cast, who articulate a dreamy series of toxic encounters with sniper-like precision, tightening Almodovar’s noose with exceptional skill.Read More »
AMG: One couple’s rocky road toward togetherness is mapped in this comedy drama which melds elements of documentary and fiction. Arin (Arin Crumley) is a struggling independent filmmaker who pays the rent by shooting and editing wedding videos; he loathes the “four-eyed, two-mouthed, eight-limbed” beasts known as couples in love, but he would also prefer to be less lonely than he is. However, Arin is terrified of talking to women, and has a borderline phobia about sexually transmitted disease. On an Internet dating site, Arin meets Susan, (Susan Buice), an artist who wants to pursue a career in painting but in the meantime supports herself by waiting tables at a coffee shop. Susan’s attitudes about romance are only slightly more optimistic than Arin’s, but after exchanging photos and messages, the two sense they have something in common.Read More »
From the Buddhist Film Foundation’s website:
Pema Tseden (The Search, Old Dog) is the first Tibetan graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, and this is his dramatic feature debut. Made on location in a village in the Amdo region, the film follows a young lama assigned for Tibetan New Year to attend to the seven-year-old Living Buddha (tulku) of a mountain monastery. The young lamas try to balance their strict training with explorations of the outside world through the novelty of television, and make some surprising choices. Like all great neo-realist films, The Silent Holy Stones has the immediacy of a documentary, and Tseden delivers a compelling and intimate insider’s view of everyday life in his home town.Read More »
With Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonnegut revealed that humour can be exploited in two ways: to make people roll over the floor laughing and to underscore the graveness of earnest problems. While Antonio Mercero’s Spanish dramatic comedy Planta 4ª (The 4th Floor) doesn’t tackle WWII but “only” possibly terminally ill children, its use of humour is similar. While it would be harsh to nickname the film Slaughterhouse 4 (the young patients of the cancer ward on the titular fourth floor all have at least one amputated limb), it shares with Vonnegut its exploitation of laughter in the face of the incomprehensible, or indeed the only sane way to confront the inexplicable madness of disease and death.Read More »
IMDB Plot summary :
Richard and Philippe live hand to mouth, backing up a gang of Spanish pickpockets on the streets of Paris, posing as policemen who arrest a gang member while the others rifle the pockets and purses of gawkers. When all of the gang except Richard and Philippe are pinched, things look grim. Plus, Richard insists that they take in a wide-eyed immigrant lad, a deaf-mute left behind in the arrests. Philippe suggests a three-person pickpocket trick, using the boy, but when that goes spectacularly badly, they hit rock bottom. Then, at the cinema, the lad finds a solution. It’s time to celebrate.Read More »
Review from BBC news:
Newly released audio tapes of interviews with John Lennon’s assassin reveal Mark Chapman’s self-confessed “compulsion” to kill the former Beatle.
“It was like a train, a runaway train, there was no stopping it,” Chapman told interviewers in a New York prison more than a decade ago.
The singer was shot by Chapman in New York on 8 December 1980. The tapes were recorded in the early 1990s by journalist Jack Jones, who wrote a book about Chapman and his crime. Chapman describes how he shot ex-Beatle Lennon five times in the back outside the Dakota apartment complex, adding “nothing could have stopped me”.”I was under total compulsion,” he says. “I’m thoroughly convinced in my conscience and in my heart that there was nothing I could do beyond that point to help myself, totally convinced of that.”Read More »