forclosure

Well-known member
What about Bi Gan, would he also fit in with these guys? Gotta say that this is something I'm quite ignorant of - ok Weerasethakul is fairly well known and I am aware of Pedro Costa, but until a few days ago I had literally never heard of Yang or Ming-Liang.

I've never seen any of Bi Gan's films so i can't speak on them but Yang and Ming-Liang on the foreign film circuit they're both very respected names part of what's known as Taiwan's 2nd wave, you actually know one of the directors from that generation and its Ang Lee but why you might not be familiar with them is cause at the time they struggled to compete with hollywood and hong kong

Hou Hsiao-hsien is another one of this lot but only film i've seen of his is Goodbye South Goodbye which was very good @IdleRich
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I do know him. But really I guess it was it's fair to say that this kinda whole generation and movement is a huge gap in my knowledge. Seeing as I enjoy Tarkovsky and Paradjanov so much though I guess I should be checking all of this out. I think you said above that Tarkovsky et al are an influence on these guys and the same must be true of Bi Gan as it occurs to me that in one of his films there was a scene which struck me as some kind of homage to the scene in Stalker wherein the bottle is rolled off the table by the psychic baby.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Saw this thing A Prayer Before Dawn on telly last night. True story of this English boxer who was locked up in a Thai prison.

I remember when it came out and I read the reviews I was intrigued by the decision to not subtitle the Thai to give the viewer something of the confusion that assailed the protagonist. And yeah that was pretty effective. The film was solid in every department in fact, maybe not inspired, but (I can't get through this without saying that it was) gritty, raw and had really good performances, from the main guy of course, but equally from the backing cast of prisoners who combined to create this cacophony of savagery, leavened with occasional and surprising moments of humanity.

Edit: anyone know anything about the soundtrack? The credits list some stuff but not the wailing - I guess traditional - Thai sounds which I really liked. If I'd heard it without context I would have guessed it was, I dunno, Armenian or maybe North African or something.

You can hear some of what I'm on about here

 
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DLaurent

Well-known member
The Peanut Butter Falcon - I hardly ever watch new films but was recommended this on another forum. Gave it a go and enjoyed it. It's remarkably acted by the Downs Syndrome actor, and if I'm looking to describe it, a feel good road movie.
 

version

Well-known member
Azor (2021)

Really unsettling. A Swiss private banker heads to Argentina during The Dirty War in an effort to hang onto his clients after his business partner disappears.

The whole thing's drenched in paranoia. Everything's happening beneath the surface. Everyone's watching and being watched. Imagine Eyes Wide Shut or the first season of True Detective, but it's about international finance and you never see the cult or its victims, people just disappear.

It looks great too. A lot of it takes place in hotels and mansions, beside swimming pools, in restaurants, and everyone's immaculately dressed.

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version

Well-known member
... decided to follow up Azor with Missing (1982) -- they work great as a pair as you go from the paranoia and self-interest of the upper classes under dictatorship in the former to a much more personal and emotional look at what's happening on the ground and to the people being disappeared in the latter, admittedly the focus is on Americans stuck in Chile rather than Chileans but the point still stands.
 
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wild greens

Well-known member
The Predator (2018)

The main bizzy from the first series of Narcos is an army sniper with detachment issues and has an autistic son with his estranged wife. Encounters the Predator in Mexico and robs some of his shit, sends it home to the autistic son, gets arrested by military police and coincidentally ends up being taken to the same facility where theyre storing said predator with some other army outcasts. Kid plays with the weird computer thing in the predators arm. Love this film man. It is not the Arnie one but a different approach really, though they do both end up with a big team fighting the Predator

Why does the Predator have dreads? Never understood that bit
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
@version I just saw Crimes of the Future and found it very interesting. Excellent world-building and concept, and of course great props and set design. The plot itself is also somewhat interesting.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Today I watched this film called Qui Etes-Vous Polly Maggou as mentioned in the googie thread in fact. It's billed as a satire on the fashion industry which I guess it kinda is but if it was supposed to be funny then I didn't laugh once - and yet I enjoyed it all the same. At times it's incredibly stylish and lush to look at - cos I guess they got loads of fashion people in to make it. Which I suppose is an irony of the film - that it wouldn't be worth watching if it didn't look so good and so the photographers, designers and models prove their value - that they are necessary even - in the making of the very film that questions that. But whatever, I enjoyed it, a post-modern film which is (in part) about a This is Your Life type programme which gives the film its title. The discussions between the producers and directors of that programme about what fashion means and what tv means and how the latter should portray the former - and then the director taking those arguments to the star, with increasing anger when she refuses to sleep with him. And then there is another plot somehow intertwined with that about the prince of some made-up country trying first to find Polly and then marry her.

The end effect is a kind of debate about fashion and so on spliced together with a surreal fairy tale of the kind that might be directed by Bunuel, and that makes for an enjoyable and uncategorisable film which has the added bonus of being stunningly stylish in parts; particularly the famous bit with the black bobbed girls in front of black and white stripes, and the fashion show at the start inside what looks like a giant termites' mound, which introduces the Anna Wintour type character who gets some of the films best lines and appears every now and again to give a bit of an explanation of what is happening, or what she thinks should happen. Oh and the funeral fashion show is pretty good too. In fact, speaking of surrealism, the designer whose metal clothes are literally at the cutting edge of fashion (they cut one of the model's arms, get it!) is called Isidore Ducasse, which was the real name of the Comte de Leautremonte who wrote Maldoror the famous proto-surrealist text. I read a number of reviews of the film, all of which said basically the same things, seemingly regurgitated from the same source and not one of them picked up on that.

William Klein the director made a film called Mr Freedom which as I remember is a similarly unfunny yet interesting "satire" of superhero comics with Serge Gainsbourg. And the girl who played Polly Maggou was apparently a real model really from Brooklyn called Dorothy Magraw, who after this film suddenly stopped acting and modelling and was never heard of again.


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IdleRich

IdleRich
I watched a film called Pleasure yesterday. It's about a Swedish girl who goes to LA to try and make it in the porn industry. It's very much a warts and all type thing that does very well to walk a line in which it's extremely explicit yet not titillating.

It's grim and unpleasant but not needlessly or even unremittingly so and it moves along at a decent pace. My only gripe would be that later they introduce a perhaps unnecessary tension between the characters that maybe impinges on the inherent interest that arises from the situation and I wish they had concentrated more on the truly weird world of pornography (at least it appears that way to me) instead of bolting on an unnecessary and fairly standard story. I get that maybe that was a choice to highlight the mundanity - or banality - that this world still has but for me was the wrong one.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I watched a film called Pleasure yesterday. It's about a Swedish girl who goes to LA to try and make it in the porn industry. It's very much a warts and all type thing that does very well to walk a line in which it's extremely explicit yet not titillating.

It's grim and unpleasant but not needlessly or even unremittingly so and it moves along at a decent pace. My only gripe would be that later they introduce a perhaps unnecessary tension between the characters that maybe impinges on the inherent interest that arises from the situation and I wish they had concentrated more on the truly weird world of pornography (at least it appears that way to me) instead of bolting on an unnecessary and fairly standard story. I get that maybe that was a choice to highlight the mundanity - or banality - that this world still has but for me was the wrong one.
 
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