My Favorite Movies

Every once in a while, I decide I'm going to dismantle my vocabulary and try to learn to speak filmically all over again, but then I discover new ways of expressing myself in this primitive fashion that make me as excited as a kid on the first day of kindergarten with a new box of crayons.
? Guy Maddin, Indiewire

Part thriller, part horror, part drama, this is a mysterious, surreal and beguiling effort from director Kirill Serebrennikov, which invites the audience to take on the role of detective in the mystery of a young man's disappearance from an isolated Russian community.

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A swaggering floozy with a monumental drinking problem, 40-ish Julia Harris (Swinton) staggers from one booze-fueled hookup to the next. When she?s fired from her job, her ex-b.f. Mitch (Saul Rubinek) pleads with her to slow down and attend AA meetings.

When a ditzy fellow attendee, Elena (Kate del Castillo), begs Julia to help kidnap her son Tom (Aidan Gould), whom Elena is not allowed to see, it?s a measure of Julia?s sheer desperation that she goes along with the plan -- or what passes for a plan. Julia ends up with Elena?s boy stuffed in her trunk, engineering inept ransom negotiations with the boy?s never-seen industrialist grandfather and eluding some Mexican lowlifes when she literally crashes her car across the border to Tijuana.

Everything feels emotionally skewed in Zonca?s English-language debut. Pic?s first half-hour yields precious little flavor of the Los Angeles milieu (shifted from Cassavetes? beloved New York); scenes awkwardly improvised at an emotional fever pitch go on far too long; and sequences in which the boy is held at gunpoint or hogtied to motel-room water pipes are uncomfortably exploitative.

Helmer made his rep as an eloquent portrayer of marginalized French young people caught up in the tumult of day-to-day existence, and vestiges of that remain here. Yet pic is defeated by a tin ear for the kind of slangy, musical English dialogue that made Cassavetes? films what they are. Last reels devolve into a series of screaming matches between Julia and the absurdly exaggerated Mexican toughs.

As she seems to do with each successive role, Swinton becomes the character with a fierce alchemy. Unfortunately, by the time Julia is actually meant to care for the boy, the redemption feels more convenient than emotionally earned. Pic?s most authentic perf is turned in by German-born Canadian mainstay Rubinek, whose monologue about striking his child while drunk during a long-ago marriage marks a rare moment when pic is firing on all cylinders.

Petra Karin Kelly (29 November 1947 - 1 October 1992), a politician, was instrumental in founding the German Green Party, the first Green party to rise to prominence worldwide.

Kelly was born in Günzburg, Bavaria (then American Occupation Zone, Germany) in 1947, with the name Petra Karin Lehmann. She changed her name to Kelly after her mother married her stepfather, a US Army officer. She was educated in a Roman Catholic convent in Günzburg and later attended school in Georgia and Virginia after her family relocated to the United States in 1959. She lived and studied in the United States until her return to West Germany in 1970. She retained her (West) German citizenship throughout her life.

An admirer of Martin Luther King, Jr., she campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 U.S. elections. She studied political science at the School of International Service at American University (Washington, DC), from which she graduated in 1970. She graduated from the European Institute at the University of Amsterdam in 1971.

While working at the European Commission (Brussels, Belgium, 1971?83), she participated in numerous peace and environmental campaigns in Germany and other countries.

Petra Kelly was one of the founders of Die Grünen, the German Green Party in 1979. Between 1983 and 1990, she was a member of the Bundestag (German Parliament).

Kelly received the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 1982 "...for forging and implementing a new vision uniting ecological concerns with disarmament, social justice, and human rights."[1]

In 1992, she was shot dead in Bonn while sleeping, probably by her partner, ex-general and Green politician Gert Bastian (born 1923), who then killed himself. Kelly's friends believe her death was totally unexpected and occurred without her consent. She was 44; he was 69.[2] [3] Her body was discovered on 19 October, and it was determined she had died on 1 October.[1] Petra Kelly was buried in the Waldfriedhof in Würzburg, near the village of Heidingsfeld in Lower Franconia, Bavaria.

With the goal of furthering Petra Kelly's ideas and political message, the Petra Kelly Foundation was founded in 1997 as part of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Since 1998, the foundation has presented the Petra Kelly Prize for Human Rights, Ecology, and Nonviolence. The city of Barcelona has established the Jardi Petra Kelly on Montjuïc.

Entry sign, Jardi Petra Kelly, Barcelona, Spain.

In the words of her friend, the Dalai Lama: "Petra Kelly was a committed and dedicated person with compassionate concern for the oppressed, the weak, and the persecuted in our time. Her spirit and legacy of human solidarity and concern continue to inspire and encourage us all." Another of her close friends, philanthropist and Greatest Planet founder David Gilmour, wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "EVERGREEN is the word that comes to mind when describing Petra Kelly. If not quite a daughter of the soil, she was a granddaughter of it, and her concern for our planet led her to become an environmentalist, indeed the first female environmentalist to achieve such resounding political success."

Oui, je suis la. Excellent.

Film remind me an old French woman's sad story. She was about 70 years old and killed her son who has been living in a bed since he was borned. She killed her son because she feld too old to look after him. She did not trust anyone in this word to look after him. There was no-one. After that she called police.

Panahi says that his main intention ?is to tell a story honestly and objectively.... It?s up to the viewer to reflect and interpret what I present on his or her own. I expect my audience to be willing to reflect.?

A remarkable film by Huston, who displays his innate talent for extracting easily recognisable and very vivid themes out of a rather tortuous narrative. The farcical action takes place during peacetime in the married quarters of a Deep South army base.

Marlon Brando plays a homosexual major while Elizabeth Taylor plays his wife. He fancies a young private who likes to ride nude on horseback, while she is having an affair with their neighbour, whose neurotic wife is having an affair with her Filipino houseboy while the young private gets off on watching Taylor as she sleeps.

EUFS

Perversion and greed, Tennessee Williams' recurrent themes, are worked over again in Suddenly Last Summer. The play was concerned with homosexuality and cannibalism. The cannibalism has been dropped, or muted, in the film version. It has some very effective moments, but on the whole it fails to move.

Perhaps the reason is that what was a long one-act play has been expanded in the screenplay to a longish motion picture. Nothing that's been added is an improvement on the original; they stretch the seams of the original fabric without strengthening the seamy aspects of the story.

The story is that of a doting mother (Katharine Hepburn) and her son. The son was a homosexual and his mother his procuress. When she had passed the age when she could function effectively in this capacity, he enlisted the services of his beautiful cousin, Elizabeth Taylor.

The question is whether Taylor is fancifully insane or ruthlessly sane. Hepburn wants a lobotomy performed on Taylor, to excise the memory of the son's death, by detaching a portion of the brain. It is the job of Montgomery Clift, as the neuro-surgeon who would perform the operation, to decide if Taylor is deranged as Hepburn insists.

Hepburn is dominant, making her brisk authority a genteel hammer relentlessly crushing the younger woman. Taylor is most effective in her later scenes, although these have been robbed of their original theatricality. Clift is little more than straight man to the two ladies.

Although Joseph L. Mankiewiez' direction is inventive in giving the essentially static narrative some movement and rhythm, it must be faulted for blunting Taylor's final scene so it fails to match Hepburn's opening monolog. (The play was actually only two monologs of almost equal power and length.)

By AnaMaamjarmoluk

you will find this movie for download here
http://www.avaxhome.ws/video/genre/drama/chehovskie.motivy.html

I didn't try the links. I guess it takes time to download, and with language I am not sure, maybe there are any subtitles.
Although here the language matters, because it is the adaptation of Chehov's "Dificult people", and it is so reminiscent of the play "The bold singer" by Eugene Ionesco.
But again, you told me that you don't like the "absurd theatre".
I enjoy it very much, be it by Roy Anderson, or by Lars V. Trier.

By Jari Paavonheimo

In his childhood, ?the sun was always shining, even at night.?

Aki Kaurismäki (born April 4, 1957, in Orimattila) is a Finnish film director, screenwriter, and producer.

Kaurismäki had his first encounter with film at Orimattilan Kino, the cinema in Orimattila, in the early 1960s. ?I don't remember much of the film except that Arab-looking guys were chasing Tarzan,? Kaurismäki has reminisced about the experience. ?It is probably just the other way around, but as we know, a child does not understand anything about film editing.? Aki Kaurismäki made his film debut as a co-screenwriter and the lead actor in The Liar (1981), directed by his brother Mika Kaurismäki. The co-operation between the brothers continued in Saimaa-ilmiö (1981), a documentary about Finnish rock music, and in The Worthless (1982), directed by Mika Kaurismäki. Aki Kaurismäki made his directorial debut with Crime and Punishment (1983), an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's classic novel. Crime and Punishment was followed by Calamari Union (1985), Shadows in Paradise (1986), and Ariel (1988), among others.

The most successful of Aki Kaurismäki's films so far has been The Man Without a Past (2002), which was awarded the Grand Prix at the Festival de Cannes in 2002, among other prizes and awards. The director's acceptance speech was short: ?First of all, I would thank myself and second, the jury.? His latest film, Lights in the Dusk (2006), was submitted as Finland's Oscar nominee for the Best foreign language film, but the director subsequently withdrew the film from the competition.

According to Sakari Toiviainen (2006), Lights in the Dusk is ?a film about the crimes committed in our society and the challenges we will face in the future. It is a story about a human being, one of us, who bears all the characteristics of humanity and who, amid lights and shadows, shows us the way toward a brighter future.?

When asked about the meaning of life by a grade schooler in a Helsingin Sanomat monthly magazine interview in 1994, Kaurismäki answered: ?The meaning of life is to acquire personal moral principles that respect the nature and other human beings and then follow them.? A simple phrase and a demanding goal. The way he replied to the question supposedly reflects the world in his films. Kaurismäki's social statements have also got him plenty of attention over the years.

In addition to the prizes given by the film industry, Aki Kaurismäki has also received awards from several organizations outside the field: Animalia ? Federation for the Protection of Animals (Finland), Amnesty International, and the Finnish Sociopolitical Association, among others, have awarded him. The Man Without a Past also received the Ecumenical Jury Prize in Cannes. In its statement, the jury found the film to be ?full of tenderness and humour and a parabole about the rebirth of a person and the birth of a community.?

Aki Kaurismäki knew early on that he wanted to express himself through art: ?I was very young when I decided that I would do something creative for a living. I had, however, decided to become a writer. . . . Film was meant to be just a side step, but I have walked on the same path for over twenty years now,? he recently said in an interview with Parnasso, a Finnish art magazine. He has named the Finnish language as the home of his thinking, and his dreams of writing seem to be alive and well.

Kaurismäki has often declared his love for books; in an interview with Peter von Bagh, a Finnish film scholar and director, he said, as if joking with a friend: ?On average, they [books] don't let you down and they allow more freedom of imagination than films, for example, which you, of course, won't admit.? The dialogue in his films, the scripts published as books, his sharp statements in interviews, and his experiments towards literature clearly show that he is a true master of the Finnish language.

With Kaurismäki, the choice between film and literature does not seem a natural one; he is fond of them both. He has said of the relations between different art forms: ?My head is full of books and films, but when asked what my influences are, I would have to say that I have been influenced by all the different types of literature, visual arts, comics, and films.?

Peter von Bagh (2006) thinks Aki Kaurismäki's originality lies in his ability ?to melt and absorb.? Lauri Timonen (2006) also emphasizes this side of his talent in his essay, titled ?The Memory of the Camera,? and considers Aki Kaurismäki to be the most skillful filmmaker of our times in respect of combining different elements and styles.

The first years of his life in Orimattila have merged into a web of experiences, memories, and details. The director has said that his ?early years were happy and that he spent them reaching for pea pods in the neighbor's field. The sun was always shining, even at night.?

President of Finland Tarja Halonen nominated Aki Kaurismäki as Academician of Art on May 23, 2008, in a ceremony held at the Government Banquet Hall. Requested by Kaurismäki, accordionist Matti Rantanen played ?Siks oon mä suruinen,? a Finnish tango by Toivo Kärki. In his thank you speech, Kaurismäki said: ?I want to thank all parties concerned for your trust. I can only think of one sentence. It can be found at the end of Henri Murger's novel: ?We're only young once.?

The first half of Thai protégé Apichatpong Weerasethakul's second feature film leisurely observes a budding romance between a soldier and a country boy. With little narrative drive, the two men meet, take walks, visit caves, listen to old women tell stories, and, in a climactic moment, smell each others' fingers. The apparent aimlessness is purposeful . In the second half, "Tropical Malady" moves past the merely leisurely into the territory of the dreamy and bizarre.

For the last hour, we watch the soldier walk through the jungle, afraid of a mysterious monster, some kind of unseen shapeshifting shaman.There are disapperances, ancient stories, monkeys with dire warnings, but "Tropical Malady" is no "Blair Witch Project" in the jungle: in artfully composed shots, time passes and not much happens at all. The deliberate pace and endless nature noises might lure you into a quick nap, and perhaps that's even intended. At the border between the real and the imagined, the present and persistent memories, legend and the mundane, Weerasethakul is balancing the fertile and mysterious with the out-and-out boring, and somehow, it works.

What the hell? Unless you're utterly beguiled by the cinema of the Thai people you'll likely find yourself baffled by Mysterious Object at Noon, and even if you do manage to follow the tale, you'll ask yourself why you're supposed to care.

In a nutshell, director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (say that five times fast) wanders through the whole of Thailand, capturing random people as they tell random stories. Fir 85 minutes we overhear radio broadcasts and hear fanciful tales, largely set against the backdrop of the ridiculously poor. The stories aren't really related, and they aren't necessarily true and they aren't necessarily fiction. It's a curious documentary on the subject of... absolutely nothing.

Shot with a 16mm camera that fades in and out of focus (and with a varying exposure that sends the film careening from complete darkness to full white-out), it's difficult to say there's much mastery in Weerasethakul's 85-minute production. If he'd done this in America, the film would have been dismissed as art-school crap (at least if it was not the work of Errol Morris). But over-nice critics see this as genuine entertainment because it's so down-to-earth and in a foreign language.

Sadly, it isn't more than an oddball experiment and a failed one at that. There's no lesson about humanity here, no insight into the Thai people. And it's dismal from a technical perspective aside from a handful of quirky shot setups. A spare few engaging speakers make some of these stories worth hearing but most are not... unless listening to someone read an unyielding list of prices at the local market sounds like your cup of tea.

http://www.andrzej-zulawski.com/Possession.html

By AnaMaamjarmoluk

You can download it from
http://film.arjlover.net/info/astenicheskii.sindrom.1.avi.html
http://film.arjlover.net/info/astenicheskii.sindrom.2.avi.html
and
http://kinozal.tv/details.php?id=125545
This is her strongest movie. It doesn't need subtitles because there is little dialog.
all of her movies are available to download by this address
http://kinozal.tv/persons.php?s=%CC%F3%F0%E0%F2%EE%E2%E0&trn=11
of course you must be regis
Kira Muratova is one of the first russian art-house filmmakers.
By the way, it has nothing to do with Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona.
So, be ready for discomfort, I mean, other cinematographic "experience".

Muratova inspired many interesting filmmakers
"Place on earth" by Aristakisian, is a good example
http://kinozal.tv/details.php?id=183197
if you have a good stomach to resist this experiment (really was an experiment recorded, of course some episodes were reconstructed for dramatic purposes) However, I am not sure you can even tolerate this kind of cinema.

Andersson nails the rhythms and the details of the courtship process: for the first half of the film, the kids communicate only through silent, sidelong, pseudo-secret glances while pouting their lips, sporting leather jackets, smoking cigarettes and awkwardly struggling to project cool. On the margins, Andersson features a gallery of wretched adults, cautionary tales for the young lovers: miserable, middle-aged marrieds; Annika's aunt, prone to crying fits; and Pär's grandfather who, with tears in his eyes, pronounces that the world is no place for lonely people like him.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is perhaps most famous - "least obscure" might be a more appropriate phrase - for the recent Tropical Malady, which is a bonkers film, set in a jungle, focusing on two gay soldiers, one of whom turns out to be an ancient shadow-tiger spirit of some form.

Blissfully Yours, a dreamlike depiction of the reality of several ordinary people, is a little less bizarre, in terms of the scenario, though barely in terms of structure and editing. Even if the result is merely head scratching and bemusement, when much of Thai cinema revolves around factory line melodramas, it is refreshing to see directors such as Weerasethakul and Pen-ek Ratanaruang (the mesmerising [film]Last Life In The Universe[/film]) try to work outside of the box. Weerasethakul has even set up a company, Kick The Machine, to help budding young Thai auteurs realise their projects.

The film revolves around three central characters, whose relations are never precisely defined. Min is an illegal Burmese immigrant, who can barely speak a word of Thai. Roong is his lover and main channel of communication. The older Orn looks after and over the two, as events unfold in real time.

At first, we see Orn and Min in the doctor's surgery, trying to get some advice and, through bribery, a certificate of good health, essential in Min's quest for a job, followed by the two traipsing around town on errands until they meet up with Roong and leave for the country. It is at this point that the director really turns convention on its head. The music and credits strike up 45 minutes into the film and you realise that this has all been merely an introduction.

For the rest of the time, the main characters are in the jungle, and superimposed on the whole affair are Min's narration and drawings, which serve to illuminate (or complicate) relations between them. Min takes Roong to a secluded spot for a romantic picnic, whilst Orn is occupied elsewhere, and the camera focuses on the two as they move around and talk until the finale - or end scenes, as there is no culmination in the narrative - when Orn interrupts the couple.

Weerasethakul says the film is meant to be an "emotional disaster movie", and you can see why. The uneasy "love" triangle becomes more obvious as the two women come into conflict over small things, like wading in the water - underlying this friction is a split of far greater depth.

In contrast to these long-term resentments, the director seems to be extolling the joys of the present. The view of the rolling hills that Min shows Roong, the berries that they pick, Tommy trying to attract Orn's attention on a speeding bike, or in the sexual encounters - Roong fellating and masturbating Min, for instance - appear to seek gratification. As if to stress this idea of the moment, all of these pleasures the protagonists seek are interludes in their normal lives.

The visit to the jungle is itself a break from city life, depicted in the first part of the film, but the relationships, too, are only brief. As the subtitles tell us, Roong is only with Min for a short period, before getting back with her ex. Min is only in Thailand until he can find himself a job elsewhere and seeks enjoyment in an attempt to escape from the pain of his skin condition. Orn, meanwhile, seeks pleasure through an affair with Tommy, but in the long term wants another child with her husband.

Such earnest intentions and celebrations, as well as the bright and beautiful cinematography, do not necessarily make for an interesting, or enjoyable, film. Also, its duration (two hours and counting) detracts from the overall experience. You can't help but feel that the drawing out of scenes, no doubt to illustrate the relations between the characters, begins to teeter on the brink of tedium.

As the blurb says, Blissfully Yours is a "languid celebration of the pleasures of the moment" but, in its dilatory nature and theme, there lies an element of boredom for the viewer.

An outwardly fragile and introspective man named Simon (Stanislas Merhar) stands in a darkened room poring over an audioless film footage of a group of holiday revelers at a seaside resort in Normandy. Repeatedly cueing the film to the excerpt of a beautiful young woman, Ariane (Sylvie Testud) and a friend, Andrée (Olivia Bonamy) overlooking the beach, Simon attempts to decipher Ariane's passing comment, concluding that her inaudible articulation to an unseen, off-camera listener must have been "I really like you". The enigmatic and curiously alienated prologue provides an insightful, yet forbidding glimpse into the relationship between the reclusive Simon and his lover Ariane: an obsession that is also manifested in the image of Simon trailing behind the oblivious Ariane as she drives alone to a secluded residential hotel (in a slow, labyrinthine pursuit that pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo). Relegated to a life indoors due to chronic allergies and the entrusted care of a frail, elderly grandmother (Françoise Bertin), Simon has brought the seemingly acquiescent Ariane into his suffocating, insular household where he has furnished an adjacent room for her so that he may summon her at his discretion (deriving profound intimacy from observing her sleep), and has made arrangements with Andrée, an accommodating and trustworthy mutual friend (and reliable spy), to accompany her on brief excursions into town to stave off boredom and restlessness. However, as Simon becomes increasingly suspicious of Ariane's time consuming personal activities and mystified by her complacent inscrutability, he embarks on a consuming and ultimately destructive quest to possess his elusive lover completely.

Perhaps the most Bressonian of Chantal Akerman's minimalist and dedramatized cinema (most notably, in the bookend structure and psychological deconstruction of A Gentle Woman), La Captive is an elegantly sinuous and provocative exploration of obsession, madness, and intimacy. Although inspired by Marcel Proust's La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of his epic masterwork In Search of Lost Time, Akerman distills the lush texturality and baroque elements of Proust to create a spare and essential portrait that nevertheless retains the thematic density and emotional ambiguity of the psychological novel. From the estranged opening sequence as Simon studies a celluloid image and speaks for a silent and physically absent Ariane, Akerman establishes the film's subjective point of view and implicit objectification of - and control over - a voiceless (or more appropriately, silenced) Ariane. Visually, Akerman further reflects Simon's literal projection of Ariane through disorienting images of converging and diverging shadows cast on anonymous streets and an unfinished alabaster sculpture at an empty museum that represents both idealized perfection and dimensional incompletion. Moreover, Simon's perception of Ariane's untenable opacity is subsequently illustrated through an oddly distanced, non-coital sexual encounter between Simon and an unconscious Ariane - her impenetrable thoughts occluded by sleep. By presenting psychological interiority through an overarching narrative circularity and incorporating visually austere and oppressively isolating landscapes, Akerman creates a haunting and irresolvable odyssey of possession, passion, disconnection, and myopia.

Thomas, recently discharged (dishonorably) from the German army is relieved of his discharge funds from his alienated friends, to whom he owes a large sum of money. Broke, with the financial means of renovating the decrepit family home completely evaporated (along with his friends), he is only barely getting by with unemployment office posted jobs. Things take a decided turn when he encounters Ali, a well off owner of a series of falafel huts, with a penchant for drinking and driving. After finding Ali and his Range Rover in the Elbe River, he lies to the police about who was driving. This leads to Thomas getting gainful employment as a driver for Ali as he collects from all his shops. Ali, a wealthy self made Turkish immigrant, doesn?t trust anyone, and Thomas physical presence comes in handy for keeping his shifty franchisees in line. Thomas quickly becomes close to both Ali and his gorgeous German wife, played exquisitely by the über talented Nina Hoss (one of the best (and beautiful) actresses currently working in German cinema). See where the film is going? Perhaps you do. Maybe not.

The trio of performances are pitch perfect insofar as they are both skin deep and subtly vague. Thomas (played by the flexible Benno Fürmann) is a blank slate, smart enough, and watching, he still has some elements of the classic patsy, his posture hints at cockiness although it may just be aloofness or stoicism. Hoss is cool, sexy, desperate and perhaps not as bright as she lets on. Ali (Himli Sözer) is a fireball of suspicion, arrogance, calculation and yet somehow, his immigrant/outsider status offers an interesting form of sympathy. The film as the tiniest morsel to say about how easily money (or lust) compromises trust an where exactly the line between temptation and entrapment lies. But mainly the film lets the actors bump and grind along, against the varied backgrounds of the town shops, verdant countryside and empty beaches. The pacing and construction create comforting notion (perhaps a smugness) of where the film is headed before yielding a twist that is not a twist. In the end, it is a fun and interesting ride, but less revolutionary or re-inventing than it is simply a flippant riff on the genre.

At a Portuguese coastal resort, 15-year-old Jeanne meets Brian-Wilson-obsessed surfer dude, Heinrich. Their tentative holiday romance is rudely interrupted when Jeanne's parents - terrorists who've been on the run since before Jeanne was born - fail to rendevous with a contact and are robbed.

Fleeing back to Germany, the family meets an old colleague who no longer has the stomach for revolution.

"I'm through with that kind of crap," he tells them.

On the move again and running out of options, Jeanne realises the family can hide out at an abandoned house Heinrich described. Jeanne tries to avoid him, but inevitably they confront one another. As the teenagers try to sort out their feelings, Jeanne's parents hatch a desperate plan...

Christian Petzold's debut feature, co-scripted with Harun Farocki, has clearly been made with care. The characters, their interior/exterior conflicts and inter-relationships, are well-observed, while the consciously cold, clinical mise-en-scene is appropriate.

The director also elicits good performances from all concerned. Especially worthy of mention is Julia Hummer as Jeanne. On screen for almost the entire running time, her convincing portrayal of the emotional turmoils of an ordinary teenager in an extraordinary family situation, carries the film.

The State I'm In deserves your attention, marking its director and lead as talents to watch in the future.

Everything is fine. Nothing is special. Luckly , not boring. S.Frears is in declane. He could manage better. Don't expect too much.

Dreaming freedom is the best part.

TETRO is Francis Ford Coppola's first original screenplay since THE CONVERSATION. It is his most personal film yet, arising from memories and emotions from his early life, though totally fictional. It is the bittersweet story of two brothers, of family lost and found and the conflicts and secrets within a highly creative Argentine-Italian family.

http://www.tetro.com/

28th Int.

28th Int. Istanbul Film Festival.

Director Atom Egoyan's latest is an ambitious film that doesn't quite succeed, despite some genuinely affecting moments and an original concept. The story revolves around a high school student's unorthodox take on a French translation assignment. Simon's (Devon Bostick) decision to insert himself in the story being translated - about a terrorist who plots to blow up a plane by hiding explosives in his pregnant spouse's luggage - and then pass it off as truth, with his teacher's blessing, causes a firestorm of controversy in the community.

28th Int. Ist.

28TH INT. ISTANBUL FILM FEST.

ARGENTINA

We learn every day new things. It is worth to re-start. Why not ? Nathalie Baye is fantastic. Relationships specially in Paris is too complicated. For instance Hollywood script binds this subject as a happy ending with marriage. In France , toooo complicated. Don't ask me reason why.

28th int. Ist.

The film posits Pascal Greggory as a man fleeing a nameless fascist dictatorship currently in the throes of a power struggle. Fleeing the nation, he can?t seem to find his wife and in searching for her winds up in brothels, alleys and avenues of power. As in the best magic realism, the country is a place of surreal dislocation, with people doing appalling things apparently against their personal dispositions and making peace with insane circumstances.

new one also. blood appears, 2008.

28th. int. ISTANBUL film festival.

One fine day in 1907 in the Swedish village of Malmö, Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) wins a Contessa camera in a lottery. That camera accounts for the title of the latest film by the Swedish master and Oscar nominee Jan Troell. Over a decade, the family grows from three to seven children, and Maria struggles to keep her home and family together in the face of the Great War, hard times, a workers? strike, unemployment and a chronically philandering and abusive husband (Mikael Persbrandt). Still, under the tutelage of the kindly village photographer, Sebastian Pedersen (Jesper Christensen), Maria enthusiastically masters the camera, producing, from her own darkroom, fragile images of the family cat, the children, her neighbors, village parades, her friend Pederson and, finally, herself. ?Not everyone is endowed with the gift of seeing,? Pederson tells her, an unspoken love in his eyes. ?You see a world there to be explored?to preserve, to describe. Those who have seen it cannot merely close their eyes. You can?t turn back.? This is a family album, a humane and compassionate series of glimpses into lives we care about and are grateful to know. And all of it is captured not just through the camera eyes of Maria, but through the affectionate viewfinder of Troell himself.

Terrence Malick is an American director whose films can be characterized as radical reevaluations of the current understandings of cinematic concepts such as image (and sound), character, and narrative. His films are intensely visual, abound in beautiful nature imagery and they elude explanation, in the sense of the reduction of a given phenomenon (say, a character's behaviors) to various (psychological, sociological) causes, usually favoring expression of moods instead. To articulate the intentions behind such choices would be the task in hand in trying to make sense of his films. Malick studied philosophy and worked in journalism before he turned to film. He produced a translation of one of Heidegger's short texts (1) and the philosopher's writings appear to have influenced the films greatly. Malick also worked for publications such as Life, New Yorker and Newsweek. (2) His other influences seem to be the writings of philosophical figures such as Wittgenstein, (3) the works of realist, non-abstract modern painters such as Hopper and Wyeth, and silent films, embracing both the documentary tradition of Flaherty and the expressionist tradition of Murnau (by questioning, or ignoring, their ?oppositional? status).

A voiceover narration recounts an ominous, ancient oriental tale of a young man who was destined by the stars to kill a woman from the family of Liu Bao and who, in the aftermath of the commission, was sheltered from communal justice by a mysterious, accommodating woman. However, as the bizarre story unfolds, his new benefactor (and lover) is revealed to be the ghost of his victim who had reassumed a physical form in order to be able to exact retribution on her cold-blooded murderer. It is a strange scenario that is seemingly replayed with eerie semblance to an event one stormy night at an unidentified chateau in present-day France as a young man named René (Melvil Poupaud) scurries away from the vicinity of a woman's lifeless body in an upstairs lounge, turns out the household lights, and attempts to dispose of a bloody knife in a nearby vacant lot. Days later, his legal defense is referred to a perennially unsuccessful attorney named Solange (Catherine Deneuve) - a woman reputed to have a sentimental weakness for advocating hopeless cases - who receives the notorious assignment from her supervisor Mathieu (Jean-Yves Gautier) on the same day that she discovers that her own son had perished in a motorcycle accident. Perhaps motivated by René's peripheral resemblance to her late son, or having struck a sympathetic cord in the overwhelming evidence alluding to his guilt - including a purported eyewitness account by a respected psychotherapist from the elusive Franco-Belgian Psychoanalytical Society named Georges Didier (Michel Piccoli) - the adrift and emotionally distant Solange agrees to defend the evasive and casually indifferent young man, a fateful decision that would inevitably draw her into a strange, interconnected web of secret societies, judicial cover-up, and justified unaccountability.

Raoul Ruiz creates a deliriously irreverent, exquisitely intricate, and modern-day comic fable on predestiny, human will, and folly of manipulative (and exploitive) psychological study in Genealogies of a Crime. Using immediately identifiable signature shots of elegantly sinuous tracking, baroque stylization, shifting perspective (through variation in focal length), and odd angle framing (particularly ceiling shots that suggest a machinistic, overarching point-of-view), Ruiz creates an indelibly tactile and immersive surreality that retains the serious-minded intellectuality and (often excessive) analytical deconstruction of modern psychology even as the filmmaker's agile camerawork provides a lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek whimsy to the characters' humorless pedantism and paranoia: familiar Freudian elements (most notably, in the recurring references to eggs, transpositions of words, and in the interior monologue, free association of lipstick), elaborate role-playing (through counsel interviews, psychoanalysis, and staging of tableaux vivants), and formulation of conspiracy theories (through covert, ethically questionable tactics employed by the competing psychoanalytical societies represented by Didier and Christian (Andrzej Seweryn) in the name of scientific research). In the end, it is Ruiz's sophisticated, intelligent, and infectiously playful anti-intellectualism that transforms the seemingly rote psychological drama on instinctuality and compulsion into a sublime and effervescent exposition on the interconnection between art and life, the foibles of rationalized, amoral behavior, and the innate recursiveness of human history.

Auspiciously set in the nebulous and indeterminate milieu of "Switzerland, in the near future", Raoul Ruiz's eccentric, surreal fable opens to the shot of an abstracted and dotty young woman named Livia (Elsa Zylberstein) sitting on a park bench overlooking a fog obscured dirt road that is curiously located near the entrance of the San Michelle mental health institution. While jotting down a series of random, fleeting thoughts into her journal, she meets a cyclist who is abruptly thrown from his bicycle and, convinced that he is an angel (since, as her idiosyncratic theory goes, all angels on earth have fallen), proceeds to explain that tomorrow is destined to be the best day of her life, or rather - as she corrects herself - the most important day, which she comes to realize is not the same thing. Soon after the encounter, Livia is whisked away by her faithful and devoted servant Treffle (Jean-François Balmer) and brought home to the family's country estate where a crowd of snide and unscrupulously calculating relatives amass near the front steps awaiting her father, Harald's (Michel Piccoli) return home to celebrate his birthday. The morning of Livia's fateful day, December 28, arrives with the ominous news that a psychopathic killer, Pointpoirot (Bernard Giraudeau), has escaped from San Michelle (aided in part by a nefarious, enigmatic character named Warff (Féodor Atkine) who has a dubious task in mind for him). Detouring briefly from his assignment by visiting a pharmacy in order to pick up a digital blood glucose test monitor, the seemingly fastidious Pointpoirot arrives at the secluded estate, followed in dawdling, lukewarm pursuit by a pair of under-motivated police officers, Raufer (Jean-Luc Bideau) and Ritter (Christian Vadim), who decide to bide their time at a nearby café instead (whose owner, Morelli (Jacques Denis), acquiesces to Harald's fickle whim to ban a ubiquitous bottled seasoning called Salsox from the restaurant). Left to her own devises after Harald schemes with her brother to send the protective Treffle away for the day, the naïve Livia observes Pointpoirot calmly shaving through his reflection on a glass paneled door and soon invites the complete stranger inside the home, unwittingly setting off a grimly bizarre chain of events in Harald's opulent but forbiddingly desolate chateau.

Unfolding with the atmospheric and drolly sinister tone of a seemingly conventional murder mystery, Ce jour-là is a mischievously imaginative, deliriously hypnotic, and whimsical exposition on compulsion, personal will, greed, and destiny. Shot primarily from the idiosyncratic perspective of Livia and Pointpoirot - protagonists whose outward geniality and personal eccentricities also reveal a tenuous grasp of reality - Ruiz nevertheless retains the film's overarching structure of off-balanced surreality within an absurdist narrative structure through isolating (almost hermetic), but inconstant and vacillating points-of-view and elegant camerawork: the resplendently fluid, levitating tracking shot as the camera shifts focus from Livia to the San Michelle patients' bicycle ride; Pointpoirot's literally warped and hallucinatory vision as he suffers from an episode of hypoglycemia; exaggerated and deceptively shifting camera depth within the Harald estate (particularly hallways) that obscures referential position and reinforces visual (and individual) subjectivity. Deceptively framing the conundrumic moral fairytale within the familiar and accessible structure of a noir whodunit, Ruiz boldly illustrates his indelibly sophisticated and iconoclastic cinema of malleable logic, puckish wordplay, wry humor, and elaborate conspiracy.

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/22/hui.html

If you're interested in Karl Malden (real name Mladen George Sekulovich; he was of Serbian ancestry but was born in Chicago), you may want to try and find "Fear Strikes Out," based on the book Jimmy Piersall (have read part of it) wrote about his struggles with mental illness as a professional baseball player. Karl played Jimmy's dad.

Spanish trip in the Hispanic-Land by African tranquility in order to avoid American vortex. I personely liked very much this magic bag which carries several different colour suits.

Jim Jarmusch, one of leading independent American movie makers.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 ? August 12, 1988) was an American artist and the first African-American painter to gain international fame.[1] He gained popularity first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a successful 1980s-era Neo-expressionist artist. Basquiat's paintings continue to influence modern-day artists and command high prices.

Zombie is over. Now comedy side of zombie. Future ???? Who knows. Ready for payment. OK. No problem.

Film is extremly Positive, optimistic and sincere. I love it. Catch the better mood , forget blood and bullets.

I liked very much. Very possitive film since ''Visitor'' . Actually Visotor was made in 2007. Both same director. Word needs this kind of Americans really. Moreover, I used to love train chassing. Later I got borred and started travelling by train. Then train guards started chassing me. What a fun was.

Excellent interculturel beauty. I have not seen this much nice American film since VISITOR http://www.thevisitorfilm.com/main.html.

You just know you're in for a weird ride with any movie opening up with Gerard Depardieu being consensually raped by a militant feminist theatrical troupe led by Italian cinema starlets Mimsy Farmer (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Autopsy) and Stefania Casini (Suspiria, Andy Warhol's Dracula). Sure enough, this is one hour and a half guaranteed to leave most viewers speechless, either in awe or horror.

The world where we live.

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/2765/chytilova.html

The Italian cinema has lost one of its most original artists, one of its most personal authors (...) No one was more demanding nor more allegorical than he in showing the state of crisis of contemporary man.
Gilles Jacob, Artistic Director of the Cannes Film Festival, upon Ferreri's death.

Spike Lee is point out a serious matter in the States. A day lasting Brooklyn story is the tip of the iceberg.

Extraordinary.

The Goddess of 1967 may be the most philosophical of all Law films. In terms of structure and characterisation, it bears a remarkable similarity to Autumn Moon: the chance encounter of a Japanese tourist with a local girl and their joint journey in search of self-discovery and self-salvation.

A family tragedy from DENMARK. World is full of tragedy. We have to confront of it. T. Vinterberg is disclosing one of them. What is yours ?

http://www.dogme95.dk/celebration/

A weary, expressionless acting troupe arrives at a near empty train station in a rural Greek village. The itinerant actors have arrived into town to perform a popular, idyllic, pastoral play entitled Golpho The Shepherdess. The actors seem indistinguishable from each other, and only their literary names, derived from the Aeschylus Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides), provide a glimpse into their true character: the father, Agamemnon (Stratos Pachis); the adulterous mother, Clytamnestra (Aliki Georgouli); the traitorous uncle, Aegisthus (Vangelis Kazan); the avenging daughter, Elektra (Eva Kotamanidou); the revolutionary son, Orestes (Petros Zarkadis); and the self-involved daughter, Chrisothemis (Maria Vasileiou). The Travelling Players chronicles the turbulent recent history of Greece, from the Nazi occupation of World War II to the devastating Civil War between the Royalists and the Communists. Throughout the film, the troupe inexhaustibly attempts to perform the same play from village to village, only to be invariably disrupted by air raids, arrests, gunfire, and murder. Even their attempts to reach the next town often prove to be daunting as they encounter the bodies of executed rebels, are detained by supercilious Allied soldiers seeking entertainment, or are terrorized by their own countrymen searching for partisan rebels hiding in the mountains. Figuratively, the travelling players are transient, anonymous supporting players in their nation's own unresolved history - refugees within their own decimated country - eternally doomed to wander aimlessly through the austere and turbulent landscape, unable to go home again.

Theo Angelopoulos creates a harsh, bleak, and profoundly tragic portrait of the dissolution of the national soul in The Travelling Players. Angelopoulos frames the characters through medium and long shots in order to create a distant camera perspective, and reflects their own insignificance in their reluctant roles as peripheral witnesses to the country's turmoil. The unemotive, Byzantine countenance of the actors, similar to the muted expressions of the characters in Robert Bresson's films, further manifest, not only the ravaged, desolate villages of the Greek countryside, but also the emotional toll of the unending violence. The lyrics of a repeated ballad echoes the hopelessness and melancholy of the wandering players: "You will come back, no matter how many years go by, you will come back, full of remorse, to ask forgiveness, one night in shame you will come back". It is an elegy that mourns the loss of a great love, and solemnly awaits the return of a broken soul despite the ravages of time - a haunting, passionate serenade for a wounded nation still attempting to reconcile with its devastating, self-destructive past.

28th. Int. Istanbul film festival

Liverpudlian filmmaker Terence Davies trawls the archives and his own memories to deliver a heartfelt ?visual poem? about his ever-changing hometown. Sharpening the nostalgia with wit and honesty, it?s a lyrical and wistful history of post-war Britain among the working classes.

Skolimowski shoots primarily in cold tones, contrasting palettes, and darkness that reflect the myopia and moral ambiguity that underlies Okrasa's obsession. Using a fragmented, asequential structure that reflects the characters' fractured lives, Skolimowski illustrates the impossibility of reconciliation and closure in the wake of unreconciled trauma and complicit silence.

Goodbye Again is a poignant, honest, and bittersweet film about the tragedy of unrequited love and impossible relationships.

In 1961, at the Cannes Film Festival his Goodbye Again was nominated for the Palme d'Or.

ZanziBar. Final is increadiable. Real story.

Aleksandr Pushkin: "Even if you kill me, I see no trace, this land is unknown, the devil is probably leading, going round and round in circles."

The first collaborative project between Hungarian novelist László Krashnahorkai and filmmaker Béla Tarr (along with Tarr's editor and wife, Agnes Hranitzky), Damnation is a bleak and nihilistic portrait of isolation, emotional betrayal, and ennui.

Sátántangó opens to a languid, insidiously ironic shot of cattle traversing the muddy field of a near desolate, neglected communal farm in rural Hungary, as the cows concurrently attempt to mate during the process of migration.

62nd Cannes Film Festival.

Lars von Trier is re-establishing his own and private 16th century. Indicating burned virgins as a witch by religeous barons of the Middle Age, when Nature was the church of Satan and three beggars appeared for pain, despair and grief, life will be re-started. Don't scare it. Just lie down on the grasses with new epilogue. Dedicated to Andrey Arsenyeviç Tarkovski .

All Bela TARR films.

John Alton would be proud of much of The Man From London?who needs story when everything can be expressed in opaque pools of light and the void of darkest, deepest shadow?

Changing destiny of her son from dark to light when there is no chance for her-self.

I see some people are not able to read this film when they have no-problem with their eyes.

Gus Van Sant's hypnotic Gerry is like the love child between Samuel Beckett, Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tar (who Van Sant admits was a huge influence on the film), and Van Sant himself circa 1985. Similar to the Polish Brothers' inferior Northfork, Gerry is absolutely transfixing at one moment and unbearably boring the next. Two guys (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck), both of whom are called Gerry, drive out into the middle of nowhere, follow "the path" toward some unspecified "thing," and then get lost in the wilderness, where they battle exhaustion, the elements, and a disquieting sense of existential doom. The film is primarily comprised of long scenes featuring Damon and Affleck walking silently through rocky ravines and dusty plains interspersed with time-lapse images of ominous cloud formations engulfing the sky.

Metin ERKSAN is the most controversial film director in Turkey. He was making films when others try to make out what a camera is. DRY SUMMER (Susuz Yaz), 1964 is in top ten Turkish Cinema. Dry Summer, a village story whose source is the struggle over land and water, is one of the most stunning examples of the clash between good and evil in the Turkish Cinema. Repeating the success he achieved with The Revenge of the Snakes, a Fakir Baykurt adaptation shot in 1962, in Dry Summer, Metin Erksan shows the confrontation between two brothers, Osman and Hasan. Osman surrounds the water that springs from their lands with barriers to prevent the village from using it. Being a good man, Hasan argues that the others should also use the water. Confessing a murder actually committed by his brother, Hasan is convicted and sent to jail. After his release he learns that Osman used deception to take away his wife and marry her. Hasan loses control. In the ensuing fight, he drowns Osman in the water and then clears away the barriers.

One of the best examples of the social realism that first appeared in Turkish Cinema in the early 60's, Dry Summer, due to its success in portraying the sexuality of rural areas and its ingenuity in handling erotic elements, earns a special place in our film history. One should also emphasize that the film marked the rise of Hülya Koçyigit's career.

Metin Erksan worked as a cinema critic in various newspapers and magazines. He graduated from the Department of History of Art in Istanbul University. In 1952, he directed his first film, The Life of Poet Veysel written by Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu. He directed social realistic films such as Beyond the Nights, The Revenge of the Snakes 1962, Bitter Life and created his own style in his later films such as Dry Summer, Time to Love, 1965 and The Well, 1968. He won the Golden Bear with Dry Summer in Berlin Film Festival in 1964 and became a pioneer in the recognition of Turkish cinema abroad.

Too much mess less sweet. Experimental. Wild Bunch.

1969

Winter Wind opens in a snow-bound forest, concentrating on a small band of seemingly hero-worshiping rogues.

In his poem America, Allen Ginsberg includes the line, Sacco and Vanzetti must not die.
Carl Sandburg described the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in his poem Legal Midnight Hour.
Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem after the executions entitled Justice Denied In Massachusetts.
William Carlos Williams wrote a poem entitled "Impromptu: The Suckers" in response to the Sacco and Vanzetti trial.
Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet has a poem titled "Sacco ile Vanzetti" (Sacco and Vanzetti) hailing the two as revolutionaries.

Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch departs from his familiar aesthetic of landscapes as abstract manifestations of internal states to create a spare and intimate, yet equally provocative exploration of absolute faith, martyrdom, and God's silence. From the opening shot of an ascetic postulant, Céline (Julie Sokolowski) making her way across the woods to visit a Pietà at a nearby church, Dumont channels Robert Bresson's cinema, suggesting an updated version of the frail country priest in Diary of a Country Priest walking to his new parish. Sent back to live in the "real world" after disobeying the Mother Superior's entreaties that she end her self-imposed mortification, Céline's reality proves to be far from the terrestrial grounding that the nuns had in mind, returning to a comfortable, if aimless bourgeois life as the daughter of a cabinet minister. Befriending a young man from the banlieue, Yassine (Yassine Salim), Céline becomes increasingly drawn to his older brother, an imam named Nassir (Karl Sarafdis) whose theological discussions on the Koran mirror her own unrequited quest - a connection that would lead her further into spiritual darkness. In its portrait of disaffected youth in the aftermath of traumatic history, Hadewijch converges towards The Devil, Probably, where revolution is borne of uncertainty and displaced passion. However, inasmuch as Dumont invokes the spirit of Bresson throughout the film, the concluding shot of Céline by the river proves to be a subversion of the iconic sequence from Mouchette, achieving transcendence, not from immolation, but from salvation.

Jacques Rivette returns to the rigorous formalism and claustrophobic interiors of La Religeuse to create a refined, bituminous, and cooly smoldering tale of seduction, obsession, and manners in The Duchess of Langeais. Remaining faithful to the spirit of Honoré de Balzac?s nineteenth century novel (the second installment featuring the adventures of a secret organization known as the Thirteen), the film, nevertheless retains the imprint of Rivette?s recurring preoccupations with the stage, performance, conspiracy, and malleable time. In The Duchess of Langeais, the tell-tale signal for the start of the performance is cleverly concealed behind the rakish military officer and Napoleonic war hero, Armand de Montriveau?s (Guillaume Depardieu) impatient tapping of his cane during mass at a remote Spanish cloister, sullenly registering his displeasure at not being able to catch a glimpse of Las Descalzas, the barefoot nuns of St. Theresa, during services. Having arrived at the desolate peninsula on the Mediterranean after sailing to the ends of the earth over the past five years in search of his lost love, a Parisian aristocrat named Antoinette de Langeais (Jeanne Balibar), Montriveau is quick to dispense with formalities and exploit his influence in order to obtain a meeting with the order's sole French initiate who, accompanied by a Spanish-speaking chaperone, seems willing to consent to Montriveau's request for an audience by claiming him as her brother (note the reinforcement of the theater image in the parting of curtains that separate the cloistered nuns from the outside world). However, when Antoinette exposes the ruse in order to escape Montriveau's desperate entreaties, he is forced to confront the ghosts of their unreconciled past as he hatches a plan to liberate her from her spiritual captivity and compel her to return to face their impossible destiny. In presenting Antoinette and Montriveau's courtship as a choreography of performance, mise-en-scène (especially in Antoinette's feigned illness during one appointment, adjusting the room's lighting and accoutrements that reinforce their encounters as exercises in role-playing), and timing (in Antoinette's insistence on punctuality that provides the irony - and denouement - for their uncoupling), Rivette creates a potent metaphor for performance as both a mask and a nakedness, where the impenetrability of the human heart is exposed through frustrated, arbitrary rituals and untenable desire.

The police capture Charles Edmund Reece, a serial killer who slaughters entire families and drinks their blood. District Attorney Anthony Fraser is assigned to the case and must present an argument of culpability in favour of Reece receiving the death penalty. But as the case progresses, Fraser comes to doubt the rightness what he is doing.

A new excellent Manhattan comedy from W.Allen. Actually , I liked some of his works from London and Barcelona. Later I realised that I missed his intellectual Manhattan monologs. I can be getting bored soon. Better enjoy now. Forget tomorrow. Important tip; W.Allen is much better when he is just behind the camera.

62nd Cannes Film Festival

http://www.smart.co.uk/dreams/parnfact.htm

Hot War is over, but Cold War is just started.

As the 20th century disfigures a city, groups of teen-age boys skirmish over its last remaining vacant lot. A territorial imperative drives them into paramilitary gangs, complete with bugles, spears and articles of war. As is common with armies and youths, the weakest individual is the most brutalized. He is Nemecsek (Anthony Kemp), the smallest and most sensitive of the Paul Street boys, who would sacrifice anything?including his life?to gain the recognition of his classmates. His chance soon comes. Already snuffling with a severe cold, Nemecsek ventures onto the turf of the dreaded Red Shirts, gets caught and thrown into a lake. He contracts a fatal illness; burning with fever, he helps the Paul Street boys to victory, then is taken home to die. A week later the disputed ground itself is sentenced to death as the site of a new apartment house. The sacrifice, the armies, the war itself were only a series of absurdities.

http://www.ce-review.org/00/41/kinoeye41_partridge.html

In ARMY OF SHADOWS, we learn that a group of French Resistance fighters, in Lyons, were just ordinary men and women who had to learn the details, as we do in the audience along with them, of resisting the Nazi occupation. They weren't born killers. But, they were born to resist the oppressive ideology of a despicable enemy and not simply ignore it, or join the Vichy, like many of their countrymen did.

the film is excellent. E.Yang has been establishing a spiritual contact with the meaning of life for 3 hours. Beginning is too noisy. Then you get calmness and tranquility when u are searching your past. There is nothing to regret.

Ostensibly an adaptation of Charles Perrault's baroque fairytale, Bluebeard is also a distilled and densely layered exposition on Catherine Breillat's recurring preoccupation with socioeconomic and sexual politics. Structured as a tale within a tale, the film alternates between past and present, childhood and adolescence, fiction and reality.

The chirps, tweets and croaks, along with the rush of the river itself often threaten to drown out the fairly minimal dialogue and engulf the brother and sister with a pulsating rhythm which hints at the passions bubbling away below their placid demeanors. The cinematography is also very imaginative, and there are moments, such as when a flotilla of boats gathers for a funeral service, when both sound and vision combine to magnificent effect. During this sequence, among others, one can surely detect echoes of the films of Terrence Malick and the early work of Peter Weir.