Watching this right now on SBS, different in a good way to anything else l have ever seen.
Thanks, just watched it and liked it a lot. My favourite films tend to be those that say something about real life, whether doco or fictional, and this is one.
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Bit different but carrying through on the real life idea ā¦ the BBC docufilm called Micro Men sometimes gets an airing. Spotted it a while ago on a Sunday night but seems you can only see it on YouTube these days.
Worth remembering old Clive gave us the slimline pocket calculator, the cheap and cheerful early Z80 home computer, the infamous C5 EV scooter so long ago and a harbinger to vid gaming. He was a visionary.
With Martin Freeman in there its worth a watch if you can find it.
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I have a thing for movies out of Iceland.
Generally really intricate storylines, amazing scenery and powerful performances.
Best two Iāve seen in recent times (despite being a few years old now) are:
Sparrows (available on Stan):
Heartstone (was available to stream until recently but canāt seem to find it now? but surely available elsewhere?)
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I watched a New Zealand movie yesterday called Juniper.
Maybe not quite arthouse but itās not a mainstream type movie either.
Set in the 80/90ās, a coming of age and end of life story with the younger generation and older generation having much to learn about each other. Great performances all round, a very touching movie along with some great scenery.
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The Man Who Defended Gavril Princip. Serbian production 2014, 161 minutes.
This link will take you to a film on You tube. I came across this little gem this afternoon, quite by accident. It is a courtroom drama with a difference. The performances throughout are understated, histrionics are avoided. This is reflected in the musical soundtrack, which in places is hardly there at all. It is a long film and makes demands on the viewer, this is not for those after a quick afternoon movie fix. None of the cast are known to me, but the topic is explored in great depth, providing great background to the circumstances that arose to the cause of WW1.
The film is based on actual events and unlike a lot of other efforts this one sticks closely to actual records and memoirs.
More details hereā¦
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Iāll chuck this here simply because both movies were in a foreign language.
I found the live games Friday night a bit boring, so I wandered through Amazon Prime for suggestions, and (I donāt know how) it came up with a rom-com called Tangos, Tequilas y Algunas Mentirasā¦the last bit means Some Lies. Shortly into the credits, they said it was based on the movies Ocho Apellidos Vascos - 8 Basque Surnames - which was shown here as A Spanish Affair, with a sequel Ocho Apellidos Catalanes (Iāll let you lot translate that).
Same essential plot, only the countries were changed and all the relevant personalities were reversed.
This one has Lu, short for (Guada)Lupe, as the co-owner of a bar in Mexico City, who makes a bet that she can get the drunken Argentine man at the bar to fall in love with her. Heās drunk because a week out from his wedding, heās been dumped. They spend the night together, but when she wakes up, heās legged it, leaving his wallet behind. She decides to follow him to Buenos Aires, where he owns a bookshop. Sheās assisted in BA by Tona (short for an Aztec name), a friend of one of her co-owners. His mother wants to meet the bride, and they dine together at a typical Argentinian restaurant, which means heavy on meat and light on salad. Thereās no word for vegan, or even vegetarian, in Argentine Spanish, Iām convinced. And MIL hates Mexicans because her husband legged it with a Mexican woman after a trip to Acapulco. Enough of the spoilers, it does descend into a bit of schmaltz, but it was fun anyway.
In the original film, the bride-to-be was on a hen party in Seville, gets dumped, sleeps with the Sevillian barman, and after the night together, she legs it back to a fishing town in the Basque Country where her father is aggressively nationalistic.
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I didnāt feel like watching the game at Docklands, so I flicked through the new movies on SBS On Demand, and thought "that looks familiarā, Abracadabra. Stars Maribel Verdu who accompanied the two young blokes in Y Tu Mama Tambien. She often plays serious roles, as a police officer in You Cannot Hide and a lawyer in Ana: All-in.
In this one sheās going to her nephewās wedding with her husband and daughter. The husband doesnāt want to go because Real are playing BarƧa in the Cup Final, but he does listen with the earphones, and at the vital stage of the wedding, screams in anguish as āthe dwarfā scores the late winner.
Hypnotist comes in and tries to hypnotise the cynical husband.
Gets a bit serious after that.
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I watched a movie on MUBI tonight called Hester Street, made in 1975. Carol Kane is the only name I recognised. Itās about orthodox Jewish immigrants in New York in the late 19th century. A man comes to America, leaving his wife and young son behind, to follow later. He embraces the Yankee way of life. The wife arrives and heās ashamed of her because she doesnāt quit the orthodox ways and live like him. Very nice little film.
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And last night I watched Howards End, a Merchant Ivory film from 1992 with all the usual suspects: Emma Thompson (she won the Best Actress Oscar for this) being reasonable and sensible but human; Helena Bonham Carter being flighty and impetuous; Anthony Hopkins being repressed and misogynistic; Prunella Scales being motherly; Vanessa Redgrave being unworldly and spiritual and just a bit weird.
The book by E M Forster is about the impact of a chance encounter between a bank clerk with a sensitive soul and intellectual interests and a very non-intellectual and sexy wife, and a wealthy family who unwittingly do him a great harm. Itās also about a house. Iām not usually a huge fan of Merchant Ivory, and this one suffers from a lot of their usual faults (principally excessive tweeness), but itās probably one of their best and a good watch.
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They remade Howardās End into a mini-series maybe 5 years ago, starring Matthew McFadyen and Hayley Atwell.
Not a movie but just finished Close To Home: Murder in the Coalfield, on Netflix, set in Lauchhammer, Brandenberg, south-east of Berlin. Itās set maybe 10-20 years after German reunification, and itās a bleak environment, a strip mine, with shades of the DDR and its secrecy, climate protests and a serial killer.
Donāt expect blue skies and green fields. Interestingly, they always refer to the fall of the DDR as the āturnaroundā. Maybe itās just the subtitling.
Now to finish the last episode of Triptych, starring Maite Perroni as identical triplets who grew up separately and seem to be the result of experimentation, Mengele style. Said to be based on a true story.
I have to say, you lost me at āserial killerā. Does there have to be a serial killer in everything? Isnāt one murder enough? Does there even have to be one murder?
They are 3 over 30 yearsā¦so on the edge of the definition.
Last episode of Triptych was disappointing.
The War Below. 2021 96 min 8/10
During World War I, a group of British miners are recruited to tunnel underneath no manās land and set bombs from below the German front in hopes of breaking the deadly stalemate of the Battle of Messines.
This is a low name cast, as opposed to a no-name cast. Certainly there was no one in it that l recognized. This plot covers much the same territory as the Ozzie movie, Beneath Hill 60. I have seen both and rate this movie superior to Hill 60 in every way. There is a palpable sense of foreboding in scenes and the suspense factor is much higher. The characterization was also better than the Ozzie effort.
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Last night to avoid the snorefest of the Freo/Doggies game l turned over at half-time to SBS and watched Recon, 2019 95 min 8 / 10.
This is a WW2 drama, set in winter in northern Italy. The colour palette throughout is based mainly on various shades of blue and white which becomes more oppressive by design as the movie develops. The cast is small, only a couple of dozen characters at most and the only actor l recognized was Franco Nero, who plays an elderly peasant who gets pressed by a small American patrol into being a guide as they search for German positions high in the mountains.
The soldiers on patrol are still reeling from a brutal execution style killing of a woman civilian, by another soldier. As they ascend a mountain they are met with a series of incidents which tests their resolve and commitment to continue on. The movie then becomes as much a treatise on the nature of war and even existentialism, as it is about anything else. The movie also mixes in an element of mystery and palpable tension as the patrol finds evidence of a sniper who then begins hunting them.
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Saw that last year, top notch movie. Pretty much my worst nightmare to be in, small confined claustrophobic tunnel, setting up bombsā¦with a war zone happening above
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Thirty years ago l visited the Cu Chi tunnels in the DMZ of Vietnam. A whole village moved underground. I am not a big man by any stretch, standing an optimistic 167, but my shoulders brushed both walls as we made our way through the complex. My mateās wife refused to go underground in such a confined space. I found an old chili sauce bottle while we were underground and donated it to their museum once we finished the tour. The bottle had probably been underground for 20 years. At one stage the caves opened up to a cliff overlooking a lovely looking beach. Another time we emerged next to a 10+m crater, created by B52.
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This was my Cu Chi Tunnel experience
I left my 2 daughters and wife stranded in the darkness and pushed past everyone else to get back out of the entrance.
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Eating Rock Lobster in that Love Shack?
A German film just lobbed on Netflixā¦Blood and Gold.
Closing days of WW2, a German soldier decides heās had enough of war and starts to walk home, but is captured and strung up from a tree by a renegade SS squad. Heās cut down by a local farm girl, and they discover that the SS are searching for gold theyāve discovered a Jewish resident has hidden under his house in the nearby village. Thereās a bit of blood from then on.
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I actually enjoyed being out of the heat for a while.