Jun 5, 2017

Time to announce this week's choice, but as always, feel free to continue discussion regarding the Kiarostami films.

We gonna get real obscure here with sum rare Ukranian cinema:

Yuri Ilyenko's Swan Lake: The Zone



@FilmAndWhisky @Twan @Charlie Work @Pinhead @coil @Radeem @RobTheDude @King V @Old_Parr @Moon Age

 

Jun 4, 2017

I watched Life, and Nothing More a few days ago and wanted to allow it to pass over me for a few days. Intended on watching Olive Trees before coming in so I'd post on both at once. Haven't had a chance to watch it though, so here's my thoughts on Life, and later I'll try to watch Olive and the other Koker film and do a fuller writeup after that.

Life, and Nothing More is breathtaking in its simplicity. What may be seen as an overt metaphor is instead realized on a deeply spiritual and philosophical level. Kiarostami gracefully allows the film's landscape to breathe life through the film. He places a camera and allows the passage of time and the passage of movement to be recorded and conveyed through cinema. This is Cinema as life. One could speak on the metaphor of the road as a highway of life or the diversions as the obstacles therein, but what lends power to this otherwise cliche metaphor is how perfectly reflective and austere is Kiarostami's presentation. He lays bare a modest narrative, a few characters, and in doing so he lays bare what we call life... as if to say that anything more would be a perversion of life's essential elegance. This is a beautiful poem.

88/100 - Excellent.

 

May 29, 2017

I'd like to join in if you all don't mind. I need an excuse to watch these two films because they've been sitting on my computer for about a year. I have seen the first film of the "Koker Trilogy" and now seems like a great time to finish it up.

 

May 28, 2017

Great, great film.

Tbf my favorite movies usually have no interest in reality and when they do they still go about conveying that reality in very surreal ways, negating the realist qualities all together. Right Now, Wrong Then and now Woman on the Beach are entirely realist films to me, almost bordering on docu-drama until we go from neutral observer to censorious critics once Soo's characters start revealing themselves.

You're right about the male lead, but I think he was very sympathetic towards the other males in the film. The dude with the glasses was insufferably naive towards how to convey his attraction, cowering multiple times when Mun-suk would call him out on it. The two passerby's who help her out with her vehicle were also visibly nervous when she was trying to converse with them, one having to rush his friend along to get out of the situation quicker. I'm not prepared to make any sweeping generalizations about what Soo was trying to say about attraction from the female side, though it came off to me like dishonesty - from a place of conceit or anxiety - is what keeps men and women apart. With friends, partners, associates, nobody seems to want to talk about the elephant in the room and address their feelings towards each other head on, spurring other insecurities whenever that person isn't directly under their control or supervision.

 

May 24, 2017

Uhhh okey so so Sorryyy op