World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday
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So, the weather's shitty, and the TV's worse. Time for some cinema. But if we're watching cinema, we might as well make it something worth watching. Something not very "Hollywood", where, rather than being saved at the end of the film, the family dog is disembowelled.
World Cinema!
And if we're introducing the uncultured scum on here to world cinema, what country is best as a starter?
Belgium!
So, here it is. A (student) film that is in equal parts hilarious and horrifying, and almost certainly not safe for work. For mature audiences only.
Man Bites Dog.
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One of my favorite non-English movies ever: In China They Eat Dogs.
Made in Denmark.
On the surface, it's a dark action comedy. But like most good European films, it has a deeper meaning underneath the surface (in this case, examining the relativity of morality).
There's only one clip on YouTube, but it's untranslated and spoilerish. Best watch it blind.
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I usually do not like non-mainstream Cinema, because they do not make SciFi/Fantasy
In case you want a good foreign movie, well different from most of Cinema:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFFkf0hNgVw
More info:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYo_SkERMNI
Delicatessen. Very dark, very weird and pretty post-apocalyptic.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y1DcAGHmgw
Dragon Head. Starts as a weird train-crash survival-against-insane-classmate thriller, turns into post-apocalyptic film, turns into poignant social commentary (with an amazing premise I'm surprised I've never seen in sci-fi before this). It's like 3 movies in one.
That trailer's kind of spoiler-y. I guess it's based on a manga, so maybe the figured most of the audience would know the plot-- in the actual film you actually have absolutely no idea that it's post-apocalyptic until well into it, and they emerge from the train tunnel-- and it's an amazing reveal. I guess it would have been weird to have a trailer consisting only of scenes from the first half of the film, but still.
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@tufty said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
Man Bites Dog.
Classic. But not for the faint of heart.
Cinema!
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@Rhywden Pretty much all of Jeunet's stuff is wonderful. Apart from the 4th "Alien" movie. That sucked.
Here's Werner Herzog's "Even Dwarfs Started Small". If you need a bigger Herzog fix, which you do, go here, which features the equally awesome, although slightly less odd, "Fitzcarraldo".
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So, Sunday again.
This time, it's the UK's ultra-pretentious king of the arthouse, Peter Greenaway.
His little cock and balls are perfect.
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@boomzilla said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
Man Bites Dog.
I now only realized you guys where talking about "C'est arrivé près de chez vous" ...
Benoit is a great actor ... I liked Rien à déclarer/Nothing to Declare as well but I might be more of regional thing since a lot of the jokes play with cultural differences between France and Belgium a, like Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis plays with the cultural differences in France. "Welcome to the Sticks"
who made up that translation? It's a well populated area ... no sticks to be found chez les Ch'tis.
Oh and Ghislain Lambert's Bicycle/Le vélo de Ghislain Lambert but only if you give at least a small rats'ass about cycling.
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A conventional pick, but still one of my favorites.
Another movie examining futility of our efforts to affect our fate. Hey, it was the 90-ies, man.
Btw, here's some soundtrack to get you into the mood.
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@Luhmann said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
Oh and Ghislain Lambert's Bicycle/Le vélo de Ghislain Lambert but only if you give at least a small rats'ass about cycling.
Oh, that's a wonderful film, that is. Love it.
Here's Kusturica's "Underground", brilliantly surreal and well worth the effort (2 parts, couldn't find a single video version with subs)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU1rWoc3mTY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iBZ8d9lii4
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@tufty said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
Here's Kusturica's "Underground"
I would have posted this or maybe Pretty Village Pretty Flame, but I feel these movies are so steeped in the Balkan culture and history, that I don't see how foreigners will get even half the nuance in some scenes, not to mention jokes.
Which only makes me depressed, because I'm sure that's equally true for all the other Euro films I enjoy. Only American culture is universal culture.
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@cartman82 said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
Which only makes me depressed, because I'm sure that's equally true for all the other Euro films I enjoy. Only American culture is universal culture.
Perhaps that's because they mostly don't bother with nuance?
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@cartman82 said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
Only American culture is universal culture.
That's not true. Are there any non-Americans who would understand, say, Friday Night Lights?
@dkf said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
Perhaps that's because they mostly don't bother with nuance?
Seriously?
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@blakeyrat said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
Only American culture is universal culture.
That's not true. Are there any non-Americans who would understand, say, Friday Night Lights?
I haven't seen that one, but I bet I'd understand 99% of it. You spend enough time absorbing a culture, it sort of becomes your culture.
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@cartman82 Ain't no way someone in Euroville can understand Texas football culture. I live in Seattle and it's alien to me.
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@blakeyrat said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
@cartman82 Ain't no way someone in Euroville can understand Texas football culture. I live in Seattle and it's alien to me.
Depends what you mean by "understand".
Maybe I can never really imagine living that life.
But if I heard them talk to each other, would I understand the historic references, in-jokes, political underlays? Yeah, probably, for the most part. So would you.
But if you tried watching one of these Balkan-centered films, you'd probably be completely lost.
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@blakeyrat said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
I live in Seattle and it's alien to me.
If I thought you understood metaphor I'd say "it's like coffee 'culture', only about football instead of coffee".
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@cartman82 said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
Balkan-centered films
Ah ... yeah that somehow triggered a reference to No Man's Land
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@Luhmann said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
Ah ... yeah that somehow triggered a reference to No Man's Land
I liked Pretty Village Pretty Flame better. That one's pretty good too, but it's a bit too obviously targeted at western audiences (basically, the Euro version of Oscar bait).
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@cartman82 said in World Cinema for a drizzly Sunday:
obviously targeted at western audiences
I can live with that ...
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OK, here's something horrible. Truly horrible. I can sit through gore films without blinking, but this one made me cringe.
Dario Argento's "The Stendahl Syndrome".
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It's Sunday, it's raining, it's World Cinema time again.
Pasolini's "Medea". Italian with English subs.
Gabbeh (1996) ⭐ 6.9 | Drama, Mystery, Romance
