a chilly frightening movie!!! the scenario is awful, and the ending a farce... but the special FX, the photography, and the suspens is killing. i like scary movies but there was scenes i was scared to watch because it's so creepy. nothing really gore, it's mostly in our head, just shadows and pace.
special mention to the ghosts photo-design

director's cut 2h59
Co-produced by Coppola & Lucas, this giant epic won the golden Palm in Cannes.
At the antipode of Hidden Fortress this war epic features numerous rich settings and the finest costumes. All about clan wars in feodal Japan around the original capital Kyoto. Sieges, battlefields, troups revue, diplomatic plots, cunning strategy, and palace intrigues. Less stylized and more insightful than Ran on the rivalry between warlords driven by ancestral hatred and the deepest respect for the opponent's honor and skills.
Tatsuya Nakadai plays Takeda's clanhead, the mythical warrior Shingen, nicknamed The Mountain, and Kagemusha, his stunt substitute (Sadam Hussein didn't invent anything new). Shingen's brother (Tsutomu Yamazaki) former body-double, complete a catching trio of look-alike samourais (so well impersonated that each character is named in the subtitles to know who's who).
The new kagemusha, ex-criminal, will be puppetered by the war generals to deceive everyone, both enemies and the court, in order for the feared reputation of warmonger Shingen to live out after his death.
The conclusion of the ultimate asault, revealing the bloody and violent battle only afterward with beautiful silent shots of half-dead horse twisting on the ground layered of dead corpses.

this is a powerful war movie about survival and sacrifice, showing the uncertainty of the short term future and the very limited knowledge of what is going on around behind both enemy lines and inside friendly areas.
the siege of Varsaw is 46 days of insurgeance in the ghettos of the city center, burnt down and bombed massively by the german army. impressive footage of the ruins in 1944.
this story of an exploded company trimmed down to a section-size, is highlighted by the behavior of several main characters who will have different reaction to despair and humiliation... some face death to save the group, some afraid to be caught ignore basic rules of honor and moral, some lose their mind. the settings could be melodramatic, but the development is original and unexpected. this run away through the dark sewer undergrounds is outstanding!

very theatrical, largely based on moralist speeches and emotional setup. each character represent a face of the jewish people, each a different origin, a different spirit of belonging, a different take on history, different hopes and a different reason to go "home" and fight for it. this episode of the immigration to Zion in 1948 is an oportunity to describe the fate of the jewish people. an history of wandering, exodus, persecution, fights and the never ending revival for the people they belong to.
i appreciated the way this illegal invasion on a british protectorate, is entirely filmed within the small group, without any contextual situation, no big picture of what is going on around, and no scope on the international scene. this enhance the feeling of being there, part of this desperate group, clueless as we are. we dont know where we are, who to trust, what is going to happen, nowhere to go, the only thing we know is to carry on, and get as far as possible without being killed.
i dont think Gitai is very religious... and no nationalist either. he always questions the israeli authority, and the jewish dogma.
i dont remember everything from the ending monolog, it was certainly a great piece of theatrical acting and mise en scene, but a bit long and redundant like if he wasnt sure what to believe in. a long doubtful complaint more against his own fate than against the people, hopeless fatalism, a grief against the doom of God.

Cassavetes beating up Reagan! yay that's the fun
the story premise: killers who start reconsidering why they are paid for, because it trouble their conscience (?) was a cool excuse to edit together all the flashbacks, but it takes itself too seriously and becomes redundant and uncredible the futher we go. anyway, i enjoyed all the Cassavetes-driver story, and there were some surprising twists. the killers attitude was kind of funny too. but nothing great.

A plain made-for-TV comedy, follow up of The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, where the 2 wizards, who can freeze people with a song and teleport themselves, will help a banished teacher to overthrow an evil dictator who brainwash his subject with a futurist machine.

witty absurd cynical drama/comedy.
the post WW2 industrial expansion of the western world has developed many optimisation programs to produce efficient workplace and tools (taylorism). In Sweden the infamous Institute of Private Homes Research has successfuly achieved a study on the average housewife moves in her kitchen, drawing diagrams of weighted connections between the sink and the table, the towel and the lightswitch... in order to understand the uses and design the universal kitchen model.
Now they open a program on the single bachelors and their habits in the kitchen! Observators are sent to Norway in a snowy country village of farmers living miles apart from eachother, settling in a funny little trailer next to their subject's house (they call them "host"). for the scientific objectivity of the operation, observators and hosts are forbidden to make contact, or interact at any time!!! observators mounted on a high chair in the corner of the kitchen, should be ignored like if he wasnt there... which isnt as easy as it sounds to the engineers. this will lead to hillarious situations, of course the rule of silence will be eventualy broken!
a horse was promised to all volunteers, in fact they get a toy-horse. Isak (Joachim Calmeyer, the Pete Postlethwaite lookalike), a lonely taciturn norwegian farmer already regrets his registration, and refuses to open his door to Folke Nilsson (Tomas Norström, the Jonathan Pryce lookalike), the archetypical swedish bureaucrat. he also refuses to "play the game" and cooks in his bedroom to avoid the unconfortable peeping of this stranger.
the whole film is a satire of objectivist experiences of all sorts (think of efficiency tests, industrialisation, real TV shows, or even UN observators...), with a good dose of self derision : loads of swedish "private jokes" targeted at the left side traffic (that was later changed to match the rest of Europe and especially Norway), the history of dominance of Sweden over Norway, the neutral position during WW2, the stereotype of the cold naive swedish policy to shape society with rigorous logical pattern...)
the photography, 50ies nostalgic is awesome, bathed in vinyl tunes, and fitted with electrical gadget of the time. the pace is deliciously slow, while we observe one observing the other (and vice versa), and we realize how human beings react when their private sphere is invaded, and they behave unaturaly. the forbidden communication will take various forms, and the 2 aging men will meet, within the deepeness of their solitude, despite all expectations.
Northfork meets Human Nature in a scandinavian Tati's world, somehow...

Tracked down and finaly watched because of CD warm recommendations. How come Polanski could film this artistic mood piece and commit tasteless flicks like Pirates or the Pianist? Involving the confrontation of social class gap, as well as the generation gap between 2 men boasting and striving to impress the other male, this trio study, is delicately composed on a tight place a yatch can be. The screen composition of presence of the bodies on screen, blocking the view, dwarfing the perspective, crossing, swinging, balancing the frame makes the cinematography a key support to add meaning to the silent gestures of these people going in circle around their pulsions, tamed by social education.

B&W (spoiler free)
from a novel by Soseki Natsume: in 1912, in Tokyo, the emperor Meiji dies after a long uncurable sickness... the admiral of his fleet commits suicide with a gun, on the day of his funerals, 45 days later. we learn that this admiral, humiliated by a severe defeat 35 years earlier never found a decent way to make it up, the death of the emperor was the perfect excuse for his suicide, in honor of his name. this is the end of the Meiji era, a difficult step for Japan.
from this historical fact, and around it, the film portrays the psychological investigation through the life of a mysterious aging university professor, Nobuchi who seem so detached from his lovely and caring wife, and his own life. He visits his best friend's grave, Kaji every week, and refuses to go with his wife. she ressents being ignored and blames herself. only one young student, Hioki, visits him, and seems to get in touch with him.
the story uses clever flashbacks, unveiled drops after drops, to reveal more of this silent man's existential pain. the storyline covers his life before Kaji's death, while they were students, after his marriage, intricated into a few days of present life when the emperor and Hioki's father die. through laborious scarse confessions, memories or distant letters monologue, we'll learn all about the curious attitude of this man who appears to all eyes to be successful, married to a beautiful wife in a perfect couple, or how the past can play an overwhelming role to ruin a whole life.
unfolding the reasons why the lasting presence of this dead friend's memory stands between a man and his wife who love each others more than anything is a bittersweet shattering drama shining with many powerful images. even with hindsight on his life, the mystery remains... this is very disturbing. but we understand why the death of the emperor illustrate this meticulous character study. this is also about the quest of 2 men for the quintessence of life, between meditation or humanity, the complex bound of friendship, the matter of honor, the weight of the past, and guilty love : all things that make life impossible, the mechanism of the Heart.
undersignificant narrative cues, meaningful scenes and images, telling some, calling for questions, later explained by other whispering images... i loved it. the mystery sets in because we find the behavior of this couple rather peculiar on the verge of uncredibility. the relationship between the characters is confusing, what they say contradicts what we observe. the characters largely discuss the distance between ideals and actions. we need to know more, and with each new clue we realize the mystery lies somewhere else. what matters is not what happened, but why.
Ichikawa portrays a close family circle, more oriented on the existential exposition (in a very Bergman way: Wild Strawberries 1957), than in the social way as Ozu used to (Early Spring 1956, Tokyo Twilight 1957). i cant say it's as powerful as either filmmakers i mentionned but it's certainly an excellent mix of both! the deconstruction of Resnais comes to mind too (Muriel 1963), not as experimental formaly tho.

a small swedish cynic comedy full of ideas! (already bought by an american studio for a remake)
the tiny town of Högboträsk in the Swedish country side is very very very quiet. 6 zealous cops patrol the hood, eat their lunch at the hot-dog junk, play poker with 2 old ladies, checking on uneventful rumors... a very boring job! not enough crimes : the police station must shut down because of budget cuts.
Jakob, a single cop looking for a match through blind-dates, with his friend, Benny a fan of american TV cops methods, who becomes a super-cop in his dreams, will try to boost the crime stats in the area, by faking offenses and to change the mind of the cute Police manager who came to shut down their career.
they are loosers and useless but so touching and honest. this is not a canned laugh comedy, the situations are not made up, the fun comes from their vain struggle to save their jobs, against their principles, and they try so hard without success. all the characters are true and play right without pushing the comedy.
hilarious action scenes like u never seen. Josef Fares became a big hit with this film in Sweden and received proposals from Hollywood, he's only 25! his brother is the lead cop and his father is part of the cast too