2000s

A collective film of 33 shorts

Review:
The specter of the death of cinema and the communal movie experience hangs like an ironic shroud over “To Each His Own Cinema,” a mostly engaging compilation of 33 three-minute films made by leading international auteurs on the occasion of the Cannes Film Festival’s 60th birthday. Venture was conceived and produced by fest prexy Gilles Jacob as a way to celebrate the cinema rather than Cannes per se, and the directors were asked only to express “their state of mind of the moment as inspired by the motion picture theater.” Collection was televised throughout France on Canal Plus simultaneously with its Cannes preem and will be released on DVD in Gaul on May 25.Read More »

Quote:
Unique, arresting and often grotesquely funny, Songs from the Second Floor presents us with 45 obsessively composed dramatic vignettes of decaying civilisation, set in and around a clammy Nordic city resembling a 1930s surrealist prophecy of Y2K apocalypse. There’s no plot, only a cumulative sense of impending doom as the hapless cast of failed businessmen, insurance swindlers, crucifix salesmen and senile fascists fitfully negotiate their way towards the ultimate betrayal of future generations. — BG

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Quote:
Perhaps the reason why this movie is getting such a bad rap is mainly a fault of its well-meaning, but still incoherent style and narrative structure. I have not read any articles on this movie or interviews with the director to know what his overt intention was, but in the end I think the movie falls short of its mark due to Kim’s perennial fixation on obsession, whether it was his intention to delve into this subject matter or not. On most levels, obsession is a largely private affair, and any exegesis of obsession enmeshed within the loaded geopolitical situation that is now Korea would require a broader vision and canvas matched with a technical command of story telling than any that Kim has been able to provide here or elsewhere.Read More »

Romances end in blood and the frail hopes of individuals are torn apart in a vile karmic continuity of colonialism…
Address Unknown (2001) is Kim Ki-Duk’s most political film so far which traces the scars left by the Korean war of the 1950s and its contemporary reverberations on a US Army base.Read More »

Mihram is a small time Turkish black marketeer who gambles and drinks too much. Something that bothers both him and his wife, Elif. He wants to better his life and when he hears about the enormous amount of cell phones being sold, he wants to enter that market. For this, he needs money and when the local doctor asks him to get medicine from Azerbaijan for the sick children, he sets out to get the medicine, aided by his crotchety elderly uncle Fazil. (IMDb)Read More »

Synopsis:
From the award-winning Korean writer/director/editor Kim K-Duk comes this critifcally acclaimed and exquisitely beautiful story of a young Buddhist monk’s evolution from innocence to Love, Evil to Enlightenment and ultimately to Rebirth.

Prayer, meditation, and appreciation of nature are the sacraments by which two monks live a simple life in Korean director Kim Ki-Duk’s SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER… AND SPRING. A wise old monk (Oh Young-soo) is master to a young student, and remains so throughout the changing seasons of the younger monk’s life. In springtime the young monk is a 5-year-old boy, in summer he is a teenager, in fall he is a 30-year-old man, and in winter he is in mid-life. The master and his student live in a tranquil house that floats in the middle of a pond hidden in a vast woodland. Paddling their row boat to the edge of the pond, they roam the forest collecting herbs for medicine, observing animals, and learning deep lessons about life.Read More »

Groundbreaking animator Satoshi Kon (whose credits include Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress, and Perfect Blue) directed this visually spectacular adaptation of a science fiction novel by Yatsutaka Tsutsui. Atsuko is a psychiatrist who uses advanced technology to study the human mind. Atsuko has developed a machine that will allow her to enter the dreams of her patients and study their psyches from the inside. Atsuko also does double duty as Paprika, a high-tech detective who uses this new innovation to find out the truth about what the people she’s trailing really think. However, Atsuko falls victim to a thief who steals the one-of-a-kind machine, and Paprika sets out to find it as a wave of psychological instability tears through the city.Read More »

Quote:
After finding her husband’s infidelity, YEON absent-mindedly heads for the prison where condemned criminal JIN is confined. Although she doesn’t know him, repeated news of his suicide attempts on TV had subconsciously grown in her mind. Their first meeting is as awkward as it can get. YEON treats JIN like an old friend whereas JIN doesn’t open up so easily. To JIN’s surprise, YEON comes back for the interview again and again, with the decorated interview room like sping, summer and fall. YEON sings him seasonal tunes in dresses of that season. JIN gradually accepts YEON’s efforts and opens up to her. One day, her husband witnesses the intimacy between YEON and JIN and tries to separate them. They can’t see each other again while the limited time for JIN is ticking away. But the two are already attached to each other more than her husband assumed — more than life and death.

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Inspired by the Greek myth Medea in which a mother kills her own children. Set in a suburban locale, Medea finds she is incapable of killing her own kids.Read More »