Cinema of the World

Quote:
Bored, horny, and frustrated, a woman begins an affair with a teenage boy.

Recently widowed samurai Kanjūrō (Nomi Takaaki) puts down his sword and abandons his master, with nine-year-old daughter Tae (Kumada Sea) in tow. Now wanted for desertion, Kanjūrō is captured by a rival lord (Kunimura Jun), who makes an unusual offer. Kanjūrō will be released if he can bring a grin to the lord's son (Shimizu Shūma), who hasn't smiled since his mother's death. If Kanjūrō can't succeed within thirty days, he must commit seppuku. With the help of his jailers -- and some harsh reinforcement from his daughter -- the humorless Kanjūrō devises comically desperate (or desperately comic) methods to save his skin and crack the son's stony exterior. Though more sentimental than writer/director Matsumoto Hitoshi's previous films (Big Man Japan, Symbol), Scabbard Samurai is unmistakably in the same spirit, with deadpan absurdism and bizarre stunts recalling the variety shows that made his name.)

Plot Synopsis from All Movie Guide
Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso wrote and directed this spare and contemplative mood piece, inspired by Tsai Ming-liang's portrait of an empty movie theater, Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Argentino Vargas, who appeared in one of Alonso's previous works, Los Muertos, is invited to attend a special screening of the film, and travels from his small rural village to Buenos Aires for the event. When he arrives, however, Vargas discover only two other people have shown up -- Misael Saavedra, the protagonist of another of Alonso's films, and Alonso himself. Vargas begins exploring the mammoth theater where the screening is taking place as images of himself and his community flash on the huge screen. Fantasma received its North American premier at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival.

Reviewfrom Scott Foundas
In Fantasma, another film of intermediate length making its Cannes premiere on the same day as Signs, the 31-year-old Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso spends an hour imagining what might happen if Argentino Vargas, the nonprofessional "star" of Alonso's extraordinary 2004 feature Los Muertos, were to get lost inside Buenos Aires' Teatro San Martin theater complex on his way to a screening of the film. (Also on his way to the screening, and similarly lost, is none other Misael Saavedra, who starred in Alsono's 2001 debut feature, La Libertad.)

On my own way to see Fantasma, an Argentine film critic friend advised me, only half-jokingly, that in order to properly understand the film, one must not only be Argentinian, but be familiar with Alonso's previous work and the building plan of the Teatro San Martin — a sprawling complex that houses seven performing arts halls, multiple gallery spaces and the offices of a couple of in-house theater companies. Well, two out of three ain't bad: while I can't claim Argentine citizenship, I have seen Alonso's films and I did spend a great many hours ensconced in the San Martin's tenth-floor Leopoldo Lugones cinema during the 2004 edition of the Buenos Aires Film Festival. So trust me when I say that this is a building in which there are many possibilities for detour, and it's little wonder that so much of Fantasma takes place in stairwells and elevators.

But I would argue that no "insider" knowledge is required to appreciate Fantasma's highly playful study of architecture and space and time, as Vargas and Saavedra, who hail from rural areas far removed from Buenos Aires' bustling center, pass unnoticed through the building's various floors, observing men and machines going about their daily business. Whereas Alonso's first two features (which detailed, respectively, the daily life of a woodcutter and the homeward journey undertaken by a recently released convict) were notable for their church-mouse quiet, Fantasma represents one of the most complex and sophisticated uses of sound in a movie I've heard in years. It is the city as perceived by unaccustomed country ears, full of car alarms, toilet flushes and airplanes passing by, all as if we were hearing them all for the first time. Dialogue, however, is employed as sparingly as if Alonso had to pay a steep tax for each word, and watching Fantasma, I thought about the significant number of directors working in world cinema today (from Alonso to Claire Denis to Sophia Coppola) who have grown tired of storytelling through dialogue, and how many others might be wise to follow their example.

The penultimate joke of Fantasma is that, when Vargas finally arrives at the Los Muertos screening, he is the only one in the audience — a highly plausible happening, given that Alonso's films have been barely distributed on his home turf, let alone elsewhere. Of course, it's one of those ageless ironies that many great artists are not duly recognized in their own lifetimes, either by their own countrymen or by the world at large. But by continuing to present the work of filmmakers like Lisandro Alonso and Eugène Green, Cannes makes a valiant stab at curbing that trend.









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Language:Spanish
Subtitles:English srt

about the production
The film began production as a silent film. To cash in on the new found popularity of talkies the film's producers, British International Pictures, gave Hitchcock the go-ahead to film a portion of the movie in sound. Hitchcock thought the idea absurd and surreptitiously filmed almost the entire feature in sound along with a silent version for theatres not yet equipped for talking pictures.

Lead actress Anny Ondra was raised in Prague and had a heavy Polish accent that was felt unsuitable for the film. Sound was in its infancy at the time and it was impossible to post dub Anny's voice. Rather than replace Anny and re-shoot her portions of the film actress Joan Barry was hired to actually speak the dialogue while Anny lip-synched them for the film. This makes Ondra's performance seem slightly awkward.

Hitchcock used several elements that would become Hitchcock "trademarks" including a beautiful blonde in peril and a famous landmark in the finale. Hitchcock used the Schufftan process to film the scenes in the Reading Room of the British Museum since the light levels were too low for normal filming.

The film was a critical and commercial hit. The sound was praised as inventive. A completed silent version of Blackmail was released in 1929 shortly after the talkie version hit theaters. The silent version of Blackmail actually ran longer in theaters and proved more popular, largely because most theaters in England were not yet equipped for sound. Despite the popularity of the silent version, history best remembers the landmark talkie version of Blackmail. It is the version now generally available although some critics consider the silent version superior.

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Language:English
Subtitles:English Intertitles (original)
no pass

Description

A portrait of socialist Poland circa 1971 that recounts the last years of Polish poet Rafal Wojaczek, a rebel who became a legend.

Review from the New York Times

Wojaczek is a charming, maddening poète maudit whose every waking moment is a rebellion against the world around him. That world, Poland in the late 1960's -- the real Wojaczek died in 1971, at the age of 26 -- is presented in gorgeously grim black and white. Mr. Majewski's camerawork has an almost classical austerity, and for its first half the movie seems as static and distant as his shots. But just as Wojaczek's nihilism has a core of passionate wit, so too does the movie as it moves deathward, picking up glimmers of humor amid the gloom. The funniest scenes -- which might have come from the imagination of Jim Jarmusch or the young David Lynch -- take place at a cavernous literary cafe, where a band called the Secret performs deadpan pop tunes while Wojaczek glowers and rants. Mr. Majewski's view of him is candid, but also unmistakably romantic; he would rather present Wojaczek's enigma than unravel it.

Review from Reel Movie Critic

“Wojaczek (1999)” is an irreverent and wickedly funny film that can be roughly classified as an absurdist biopic. “Wojacek” is about a mentally unstable and self destructive poet. The film is based on the life of Rafal Wojaczek, the great Polish poet who took his own life in 1971 at the age of 26. Wojaczek inspired future generations of Polish poets who struggled against the shackles of communism. Interestingly enough, instead of using an experienced actor, the film stars a modern poet, Kryzystof Siwczyk, who is utterly convincing in the title role. In his debut, he even managed to get nominated for best actor at the European film awards. Rafal Wojaczek is depicted as an iconoclastic rebel in the film. When he isn’t writing great poetry or making profound statements, he is creating chaos or trying to kill himself. The only three people who seem to be able to tolerate any prolonged exposure to him are Mala, a caring nurse and Wiktor, an old drunk. The utterly spontaneous Rafal does anything he wants at all times-- like having passionate sex standing up with his nurse girlfriend in the hospital. This happens right after she berates him for not going to church with her. Rafal’s erratic behavior seems to be in part a response to communist oppression and repression, and there is some sly political commentary in the film. At one point, we see a sign which reads “The Party Steers All Energy,” and the film jumps to an ironically placed scene with a couple pushing a car. The make-it-up-as-you-go-along aesthetic and the grainy look of the film reminded me of Vincent Gallo’s works, but “Wojaczek” has a decidedly original vision. In today’s world of cookie cutter films, it’s increasingly rare to see a film that is so startlingly unconventional and boldly infomercial.

Awards for Wojaczek

Prix Don Quixote, Barcelona 2000
Best Actor Nomination, European Academy Awards, Paris 2000
Best European Film, Corato 2000
Grand Prix, Klajpeda 2000
Best Director, Best Cinematography, Trencianske Teplice 2000
Prix special, European Cinema Forum, Strasbourg, 2000
International Federation of Film Societies Prize, 2001






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Language:Polish
Subtitles:Hard coded Englsih

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

“You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem,” Eldridge Cleaver is often quoted: as documentaries go, “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975″ solves a few common production problems with its origins, drawing on a splendid cache of black-and-white and color 16mm interviews, shot in the United States by Swedish journalists with a seemingly radical bent, and unearthed in 2005. (To paraphrase another figure, this potential revolution was televised, even if only in Scandinavia.) Göran Hugo Olsson’s documentary of fierce, open exchanges with Black Power Movement figures captures the moment’s intensity (and intermittent naiveté) from its subjects, including Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Cleaver and William Kunstler. (The crispness of the long-unseen footage is startling.) Earnest activism and protest meet setbacks, as the historical record already shows. Yet these curious Swedes, gaining the trust of their subjects, captured invaluable, contemporary reflections of a turbulent time, after the early days of the civil rights movement, when filling the streets was thought a way to prompt societal change.

Danny Glover’s Louverture Films co-produces. With voiceover commentary by Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Harry Belafonte, Melvin Van Peebles, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Robin Kelley, Abiodun Oyewole, Sonia Sanchez, Bobby Seale, Questlove.










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Language:English, Swedish
Subtitles:English (srt included)
no pass

Plot:
A dramatic account of three women and their lives, seen through the looking glass of sex, words, madness, death, and family, Guilty of Romance — the new crime noir from the award-winning director Sion Sono (Love Exposure, Cold Fish) — tells the tale of three women entangled in a mystery...a mystery that is the gate to a hell-bound love like no other!

Set just before the turn of the 21st century, a grisly murder occurs in Maruyama-cho, Shibuya — a love hotel district — a woman was found dead in a derelict apartment in the pouring rain. Whilst the police investigate, the story interweaves with that of Izumi, the wife of a famous romantic novelist whose life seems just a daily repetition without romance. One day, to break away from the loveless monotony, she decides to follow her desires and accepts a job as a naked model faking sex in front of the camera. Soon she meets with a mentor and starts selling her body to strangers, whilst at home she hides behind the facade that she is still the wife she is supposed to be.

Bombarding the audience with graphic images and assaulting the emotions with classical music, Sion Sono has produced a movie that provokes all your senses, blending genres of film noir with drama and mystery, and showcasing the directors trademark style and use of vivid colour to portray emotion and mood, Guilty of Romance is the final and most exhilarating part of Sono's "hate" trilogy.









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Language:Japanese
Subtitles:English .idx/sub

Kill List – review
4/5 stars
If Ricky Gervais or Mike Leigh made a horror film, it might look something like this unsettlingly strange offering from British director Ben Wheatley
The title, and the fact that this was popularly acclaimed at London's recent FrightFest event, will tip you off about what kind of film it is. Or will it? Even now, I'm unsure how or whether to describe it generically. It's partly an occult chiller with shades of Wicker Man and Blair Witch – and be warned right now: there are some ultra-violent and infra-retch scenes that have had people making for the exits. I wondered if director Ben Wheatley considered putting a death metal version of Maxwell's Silver Hammer over the closing credits.

Yet Kill List is also something else entirely. It often looks like a film by Lynne Ramsay or even Lucrecia Martel, composed in a dreamily unhurried arthouse-realist style that is concerned to capture texture, mood and moment. The long expository scene looks like the beginning of a downbeat, miserablist film whose only object is to tell the story of a married man attempting to recover from depression through rebuilding friendship and re-entering the world of work. And in some sense this could be what Kill List is. But the drifting scenes of ordinariness are especially disquieting, both while they are happening and in retrospect, after the nightmarish situation has begun to reveal itself, and after the brutal explosion of violence.

Perhaps inspired by Thomas Clay's The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, Wheatley has set out to supersaturate ostensible normality with a flavour of evil. In many scenes he succeeds impressively. It's not entirely clear if Kill List is more than the sum of its startlingly disparate parts, or if the ending lives up to the promise of something strange and new, but its confidence is beyond doubt.

Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley give very good performances in the lead roles of Jay and Gal, two men who are best mates and professional colleagues, though their friendship is fraught, to say the least. Gal is a Northern Irish guy who is humorous, laid-back and relatively calm; Londoner Jay is moody, anxious, resentful and depressed. After a year of unemployment, Jay is going spare in a boxy detached house in the middle of the suburban sprawl, which he shares with his Swedish-born wife, Shel (MyAnna Buring), and their young son. The action begins mysteriously to accelerate when Gal shows up with his new girlfriend, Fiona (Emma Fryer), for a dinner party at Jay and Shel's house, a dinner party that shows every sign of becoming a tense and embarrassing disaster. Wheatley and his co-writer Anna Jump sketch this out with a Mike Leighish shrewdness and wit. The dialogue is partly credited to the cast, so some lines are presumably improvised: this could have been true of the brilliantly toe-curling moment when Jay complains to Shel about spoiling their dinner table display by putting out a measuring jug of gravy, "like a chemistry experiment".

As well as conjuring bourgeois social tension, Wheatley discloses that Jay's unemployment is self-imposed. A previous job they did together a year before had gone very wrong. But Gal wants Jay to get a grip, to get back on the horse. They have had a new and lucrative offer of work from a shadowy client: work for which they are highly qualified.

This new job is to lead them into situations of extreme fear and revulsion, but also into extreme banality and boredom. Wheatley's trick is to suggest the banality is never quite extinguished by the fear; the fear leaches into the dullness and the normality. Somehow, Jay's visit to the GP is one of the film's most unsettling scenes. Jay and Gal have to do a lot of travelling around the country on behalf of their employer and stay in featureless chain hotels with soul-sappingly dull interiors. The conversations they have there are appropriately tedious, yet always hint at the horror of what they are doing. Gal asks Jay if the soap in the bathroom is in a sealed packet and is relieved to find that it is: "I hate dirty soap." Later, when driving back after a difficult engagement, he sharply asks Jay if he knows the sign of a good painter and decorator: clean overalls. A competent professional does not make a mess. The Wheatley double act is very different from a Tarantino double act or a Pinter double act. Jay and Gal are closer in spirit to Gervais and Merchant.

The moodscape of Kill List is inspired, the climax less so, and the more like a conventional scary movie it becomes, and the more clearly it reminds you of other scary movies, the less effective it is. But Wheatley is so distinctive a film-maker, and Michael Smiley and Neil Maskell gently create a convincing friendship: two men, pathetically dependent on each other's company, yet often scrapping like 10-year-olds. There is a superb moment when it all kicks off in Jay's kitchen and one man actually grabs a mug from the twee little mug tree and smashes it over his friend's head. They're all friends again in a little while, yet a bizarre and inexplicable miasma of evil continues to wash over them. As far as British horror goes right now, Kill List is pretty much top of the range.
Peter Bradshaw, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 September 2011








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no pass

Synopsis
Celebrated documentary director Frederick Wiseman spent ten weeks with his camera exploring one of the most mythic places dedicated to women, ‘CRAZY HORSE’. This legendary Parisian cabaret club, founded in 1951 by Alain Bernardin, has become, over the years the Parisian nightlife ‘must’ for any visitors, ranking alongside the Eiffel tower and the Louvre.

Wiseman’s impeccable eye allows us to enter into this intriguing international temple of the Parisian club world and to discover what makes the CRAZY HORSE tick: elegance, perfectionism and a grueling schedule (with 2 shows a night and 3 on Saturdays, 7 days a week). The film takes us to the final curtain up, and the unveiling of the brand new show. DESIR is created by the greatest French choreographer Philippe DECOUFFLE and is an artistic, modern, humorous and colorful outburst that is the pinnacle of ‘NUDE CHIC’.