Maximus Powers' Short Film Collection

[Alpha Blondy]

SomaliPhilosopher;944006 wrote:

Boy did this movie take a turn...

it was quite something wasn't it, inaar?

 

i thought about it for at least a couple weeks. :confused:

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Jim Carrey stars as Joel Barish, a man who is informed that his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has had her memories of their relationship erased from her brain via an experimental procedure performed. Not to be outdone, Joel decides to have the same procedure done to himself. Over the course of an evening, in his apartment - Joel struggles in his own mind to save the memories of Clementine from being deleted.

 

9/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

A young man leaves his middle class existence in pursuit of freedom from relationships and obligation. Giving up his home, family, all possessions but the few he carried on his back and donating all his savings to charity Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) embarks on a journey throughout America. His eventual aim is to travel into Alaska, into the wild, to spend time with nature, with 'real' existence, away from the trappings of the modern world. In the 20 months leading up to his Great Alaskan Adventure his travels lead him on a path of self-discovery, to examine and appreciate the world around him and to reflect on and heal from his troubled childhood and parents' sordid and abusive relationship.

 

When he reaches Alaska he finds he has been insufficiently prepared for the hardships to come. Despite making it through the winter his plan is ill-judged and prepares to return home in spring, only to find the stream he crossed in the snow has become an impassable raging torrent and that he is trapped. With no means of sustaining himself adequately he takes to eating berries and fauna, that he identifies using a book. Unfortunately, he awakes one morning to find that the berries he consumed the night before were in fact poisonous, and causes him to starve in his so sought after isolation. Throughout his epic journey the people he meets both influence and are influenced by the person he is and bring him to the eventual and tragic realization that "Happiness is only real when shared".

 

9/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

The Man Without a Past opens with the title character being savagely beaten. At the hospital he is declared dead, but he sits up and walks out on his own power. He is taken in by a mother and her two sons, discovers an old jukebox that inspires local musicians, and discovers he has skills as a welder. When he becomes unwittingly involved in a bank robbery, and the man is unable to give the police his name, the cops send out feelers trying to figure out the man's identity. Soon his wife appears. A powerful film made with minimal means, it's a story of poor people on the fringes of society, done without sentimentality or condescension but with wicked humor. The Man Without a Past was screened at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival where it was awarded the Grand Prix, the most storied prize after the Palme D'Or.

 

9/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

A gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, Revanche is the stunning, internationally acclaimed breakthrough of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann. In a ragged section of Vienna, hardened ex-con Alex works in a brothel, where he falls for Ukrainian hooker Tamara. Their love for each other is not the only bond, they are both determined to escape their current wretched situation. Their desperate plans for escape unexpectedly intersect with the lives of a rural cop and his seemingly content wife. In order to find the money they need, Alex decides to rob a bank in a small country town. He knows the region well. But Tamara senses danger and is vehemently against his plan. Only when Alex assures her that his gun is not loaded and that she can wait for him in the car, does she agree.With meticulous, elegant direction, Spielmann creates a tense, existential, and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption, and a journey into the darkest forest of human nature, in which violence and beauty exist side by side.

 

10/10. Excellent.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

 

this is not bad. not bad at all.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Upon his release from a mental institution, Spider (Ralph Fiennes) takes up residence in a halfway house. Paranoid, quiet, and forever making notes, Spider spends much of the film remembering scenes from his youth, specifically a horrific event from his childhood that occurred after he came to believe that his father was having an affair on his mother (Miranda Ri. The psychological terror builds to a climax that challenges how much the viewer can believe Spider's recollections of the event.

 

9/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Brutal but brilliant, "Peppermint Candy" follows the sinister career of a Korean cop in a suspensefully constructed, politically charged, emotionally intense story told backwards, taking the viewers back through 20 years of a doomed man's life, while chronicling the sentiments and changes of modern Korea. Masterfully written, beautifully made and powerfully acted, "Peppermint Candy" is a jewel that sparkles with intelligence and emotion but cuts like a diamond. Every scene, potent with both danger and inner emotion, subtly changes our view what we've already seen. Even the smallest details of film-making contribute to the film's power. Its harshest scenes are punctuated with a view from the back of a train — shown backwards to look like it's moving forwards through the beautiful, mountainous countryside — accompanied by soft, melancholy string quartet music that traces a line back to the guilt-free past while never letting us forget the wretched man's death on the tracks in the future. The symbolism of small everyday items like peppermint candy is profound, and the difficulty of creating a fresh, new present out of a rotten past is something we come to feel on a personal level. This is a story from Korea, but its human implications apply to humanity all over the world. There has rarely been a better film made, ever.

 

10/10. Excellent.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Superlatives are entirely warranted for immensely assured Turkish arthouse drama Uzak, which is filled with a palpable sense of loss and yearning. Written, produced, photographed, edited, and directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, it's the story of Yusuf (Emin Toprak), an unemployed young man from the countryside who comes to a wintry, present-day Istanbul in search of work on the ships. He stays in the apartment of his divorced cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), a successful yet cynical photographer, who's soon irritated at having his solitary routine disrupted by the presence of his rural relative.

 

Uzak is richly contemplative and languid filmmaking, in which Ceylan's camera observes with calm detachment two men who are struggling to cope with the loneliness and transience of modern urban living. Disillusioned with his work — "photography is finished", he declares — Mahmut has been shocked by the news that his ex-wife Nazan (Zuhal Gencer Erkaya) is emigrating to Canada with her new husband. Yusuf meanwhile vainly tries to find a job at the docks, and is too shy to talk to the pretty women he sees on the city's snow-laden streets. (A capsized, rusting boat symbolises Yusuf's thwarted aspirations.) Both individuals are shown smoking and gazing out mournfully over Istanbul and its surrounding waters; both seek refuge in watching television. Few recent films have been so accomplished in capturing the way people drift through their lives, unable to communicate their emotions and feelings. That the actor Emin Toprak died in a car crash after filming was completed only deepens Uzak's memorably melancholic mood.

 

10/10. Excellent.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

The neo-realism film is built around an elderly man's cynical line directed at two naive younger men whom he spots handling a stolen purse: "If you want to arrest a thief, you would have to arrest the world."

 

Jafar Panahi directs this quietly brilliant psychological drama without a false note. The sharply observant screenplay about the class divide in Iran. It's a poignant humanistic drama about one of Iran's many forgotten heroes from the Iraq war, who has never fully recovered from the psychological and physical injuries sustained during the conflict. The film magnificently makes use of long pregnant pauses, the hero's deadpan expressions and long takes of the bustling city while the protagonist calmy maneuvers on his motorbike through the heavy traffic and the lines that divide the rich and poor neighborhoods of Tehran. These long silences give the viewer time to digest the ongoing social conflicts in modern Tehran and to ascertain the hurt felt by the suffering gentle giant. Hussein eventually decides to commit an act that he hopes will make his life more comfortable. This criminal undertaking (and the fates of all involved) is revealed within the first 10 minutes of the movie; the rest of the time is spent detailing the petty humiliations that propelled Hussein to make this ill-advised lunge for a piece of the pie. The film was inspired by a recent story in the news about a pizza man killing a jeweler and committing suicide during a robbery.

 

10/10. Excellent.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

A dour westernised Iranian, who seems to be questioning the value of living, is riding around Tehran looking for someone to help him kill himself. It might be a big let down if you were expecting to see this fable come to a necessary resolution, but the film ends rather abruptly and it allows you to come to your own conclusion about what the story means. It is a film that gets better as you step away from it and realise how much intellectual weight there actually was in the telling of its austere story. It is vividly shot with a cast made up of mostly non-professional actors. The director, Abbas Kiarostami, who many film critics consider to be one of the greatest living film directors, is known for his use of the long shot. He uses it to pan the harsh mountainous vistas and the faces of those itinerant Iranians who are seen through the eyes of a forlorn and, at times, loquacious, middle-aged driver of a luxurious Land Rover, Mr. Badii. Taste of Cherry is an emotionally complex meditation on life and death.

 

10/10. Excellent.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Maria Alvarez, 17, is convinced this life shouldn't be hers. She works in a flower plantation in Colombia, stripping the thorns from roses, one nervous eye on her relentless supervisor. It's tough work, and she doesn't take orders well. No matter how hard she works, the money never seems to be enough for her family, a tense home full of complainers, including her sister and child, her mother and grandmother. And then there's Juan, her good-looking but nonchalant boyfriend, who doesn't seem to appreciate her. When she tells Juan she's pregnant, his immediate request to get married is dutiful rather than romantically enthusiastic.

 

A character named Maria? Carrying an unborn baby? A Maria who removes thorns? Let the religious allusions apply wherever you want them to. Writer-director Joshua Marston has clearly made a modern allegory. The people she meets along her way are various moral archetypes: good, bad, ugly. They're there to test her. And she'll meet others like her, people like the nervous Lucy and her friend Blanca, who are making the same trip, putting their bodies and lives at risk. Maria Full of Grace provides an authentic and compelling view of a drug mule's experience.

 

9/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

NOTICE

 

most of these films seem rather strange or better yet, 'foreign' in nature, ma istidhi? my incredible collection of Turkish, Iranian, Korean, German, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and other classic films from around the world are inaccessible to most. i'm more than happy to share these films with y'all. i'll put them up on dropbox, that is, if y'all are interested. send me a PM with the subject title: Maximus Powers' Film Thread.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Exploring the effects of a family's dealings with an underhanded politician, this crime drama avoids showing the violent outcomes of its characters' misdeeds, resulting in a lingeringly potent film. Set in the areas of Istanbul rarely visited by foreigners, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's strange detective story traces the journey of a family that is suddenly dislocated when minor shortcomings explode into exorbitant deceptions. Now their only hope of remaining together is to cover up the truth, but can ignoring the hardships and responsibilities that would be impossible to endure ever really invalidate the existence of the truth?

 

10/10. Excellent.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Engaging, powerful and absorbing drama that doesn't offer any easy answers but exerts a tight grip. Disgrace is based on the Booker Prize-winning post-apartheid novel by J. M. Coetzee and stars John Malkovich as David Lurie, a divorced professor of romantic poetry who's forced to step down after he initiates a rather one-sided affair with a black student, for which he refuses to apologise. Far from feeling guilty or contrite, David takes his sudden unemployment as an excuse to visit his semi-estranged lesbian daughter Lucy on her farm in the country but he's disconcerted to find that her lover has left her and that she's sharing the land with a black worker named Petrus.

 

David's fears that Lucy may not be safe are confirmed after a horrific incident occurs when Petrus is not around. As David struggles to come to terms with Lucy's reaction to what's happened, he's forced to examine both his own character and his relationship to both his country and his daughter.

 

8.5/10