FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

[Harvey]

Wristcutters: A Love Story from 2006. How I did not encounter this before now? Y'all seen this? Wonderful.

[Harvey]

A Hidden Life was indeed amazing.

Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway starts off inscrutable but is very worth it. It also doesn't get any more scrutable. Really nice, oddly timeless, euro-afro surrealsploitation.

You had me at surrealsploitation. Tonights film, hopefully.

Edit: Wow. I'll have to look at all the other films Miguel Llansó has worked on. Remarkable, and frankly, it kicks the living shit out of Ready Player One. Thanks!

[Grizzly]

sixty one pages of excellent films, but where can one see any of these? Where do you guys watch these magnificent productions? Up until ten years ago we had an incredible iconic video rental place here in Missoula, called The Crystal theatre, where one could find many, many foreign , independent and provocative films that broke out of the Amorica mundane 7 literary plots. I so miss those times.

[lucky]

sixty one pages of excellent films, but where can one see any of these? Where do you guys watch these magnificent productions? Up until ten years ago we had an incredible iconic video rental place here in Missoula, called The Crystal theatre, where one could find many, many foreign , independent and provocative films that broke out of the Amorica mundane 7 literary plots. I so miss those times.

It's pretty easy to find most movies on torrent sites (use a VPN if your security conscious) batflex.org is one i use but there are loads reddit has a good list.

[Harvey]

Very dark, thought provoking (lowish budget?) and thankfully not at all graphic. The sheer malice inherent in the premise isolates the specific relationships in way which is entirely purposeful. The theme has cropped up in similar form a few times but I found this go around particularly fruitful and came away with several distinct readings of it. Elizabeth Harvest.

[Harvey]

Just came across this, so apt.

[cptmarginal]

A huge step up from 2005's "The President's Last Bang" in meaningfully taking on the assassination of Park Chung-hee at a KCIA safehouse in 1979.

Between the Koreagate hearing scene in this film & the beginnings of the WACL being depicted in 2018's "The Drug King," Korean cinema goes deep.

[Harvey]

Watched Soylent Green after 35 years. It's today. Literally.

[Harvey]

This rings true:

[Harvey]

I saw Dark City again for the first time since childhood (Edit: hah! I remember it as being much further back in time than 1998!). Fittingly, it's a different story altogether, although it isn't the film which has changed. Perhaps the ultimate comment on the themes operating behind the Mandela effect.

Due to proximity more than anything, I see similar themes emerging within the rather excellent series Raised By Wolves which I've just seen. The story is dense with allusion and symbolism, the images profoundly unsettling and both the repetition and upending of science fictional tropes particularly well handled. Ultimately the show poses more questions than answers, packing more philosophical enquiry into a small screen science fiction epic than anything I've seen for a while. I enjoyed my cumulative ambivalence, arising from the ambiguities built into almost every scene. And I'm actually looking forward to a second series!

[Harvey]

A couple of small but rather engaging films exploring the shifting territory we know and love, both very enjoyable.


Without Name 2016





The Wave 2020

[DrEvil]

I saw Dark City again for the first time since childhood (Edit: hah! I remember it as being much further back in time than 1998!). Fittingly, it's a different story altogether, although it isn't the film which has changed. Perhaps the ultimate comment on the themes operating behind the Mandela effect.

Due to proximity more than anything, I see similar themes emerging within the rather excellent series Raised By Wolves which I've just seen. The story is dense with allusion and symbolism, the images profoundly unsettling and both the repetition and upending of science fictional tropes particularly well handled. Ultimately the show poses more questions than answers, packing more philosophical enquiry into a small screen science fiction epic than anything I've seen for a while. I enjoyed my cumulative ambivalence, arising from the ambiguities built into almost every scene. And I'm actually looking forward to a second series!

Huh, I had the exact opposite reaction. The more I watched the more I hated it. Granted, I came at it from a scifi-nerd angle and was looking forward to a big-budget science fiction show. What I got was another Ridley Scott abomination that masquerades as science fiction but is anything but. Peter Watts has an excellent review:

Raised by Wolves. Written by Idiots
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=9444

[Harvey]

Thanks for that. I think the review perfectly exemplifies why I rate the show so highly. The reviewer scratches at many of the seams of his unease but can't quite place himself in the centre of the show's concerns. He sees the show as primarily about others, religious fanatics perhaps, about their failure to be like him.

Tellingly:

It was almost as though “Raised by Wolves” had somehow regressed us...

To get at some of what I see, imagine the robots as gods manufactured by men through science but given form and purpose not so much by myths as by the unconscious source of all such myths. Imagine these robots then hastily reprogrammed and repurposed by a later adept, imagine they now represent corporate technocracy, to embody the degraded and regressed knowledge of the programmer himself, sending them off to rear children on an alien world he's never known, to create a society he's never known and you have a metaphor for world crashing hubris in the form of human desperation. Recall Father's abstracted self after being brute force reprogrammed again? (He contains ghosts.) The robots are the real innocents while the children come with a billion years of tooth and claw pre installed. All of these observations are stories about story.

In other words, imagine a being which is programmed and reprogrammed endlessly. Better still, imagine an ancient book endlessly re-written and re-writing itself and over written by you as you read it. A living palimpsest.

Then wake up from the dream and look around.

[JackRiddler]

A couple of small but rather engaging films exploring the shifting territory we know and love, both very enjoyable.

[...watched...]

The Wave 2020

Fun and engaging puzzle snack. Still, it made me yearn for something more ambitious, willing to be untidy, political, realistic.

Now...

Who in the Anglosphere has made anything like this recently? Cinema verite meets media theory, nouvelle vague crossed with social realism. Cassavetes, Godard, Robert Drew in one package. Can't believe I only just saw it for first time.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA5BXLIdOec

Note: Was initially rated X! X for politics, apparently.

.

[Harvey]

Cheers Jack. The opening scene is stunning. Will report back momentarily.

Wanted to say, together with After.Life and Comet, The Wave seems to form an unintentional trilogy of sorts.