Posts Tagged ‘Drama’
"You know, you should really think about getting a flatscreen; prices are lower than ever."
Reviewed from a screener. Oh, and the review contains spoilers.
What we have here is basically a standard film noir, only told in about 8 minutes, with the on-screen action boiled down to one scene: a man named Judd (Eric Schneier) kills a woman called Lolita (Christy Scott-Cashman). This scene is bookended by two telephone conversations that are played over the opening and closing credits. The conversations both involve Buchanan (Mark Grant), talking first with Judd and then with his wife, Daisy (Jennifer McCartney), who had been having an affair with Lolita. Apparently, Judd is after the money Lolita scammed off Daisy, but runs into trouble in the form of Buchanan’s head of security, Bartlesby (Angel Connell). This leads to Judd killing Lolita (the only on-screen action), followed by the police gunning down Judd. [...]
Tags: 2010s, Angel Connell, Christy Scott-Cashman, Drama, Eric Schneier, Hyper-Real, Jennifer McCartney, Mark Grant, Matthew Wagenknecht
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Esther, Anna, Johan: Objects in space
Two women, Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), travel by train to a hotel in an unnamed foreign city along with Anna’s young son, Johan (Jörgen Lindström). Esther is dying and is left in the hotel room while Anna goes out to have sex with a waiter and Johan explores the hotel.
Like the two preceding films in Bergman’s “trilogy of faith” — Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light — The Silence is a series of failed communications, and continues the exploration of the search for meaning in a world where God is silent. So silent is he in this film that he is barely mentioned. A church is mentioned in passing as a cool place where Anna had sex with the waiter; the church in The Silence is a wholly corporeal place, devoid of grace, offering only bodily comfort. And like in Winter Light, the spectre of war hangs over The Silence: outside the train on their way to the city, they see lines and lines of tanks outside the window. [...]
Tags: 1960s, Drama, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingmar Bergman, Ingrid Thulin, Jörgen Lindström, The Silence, Trilogy of Faith
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Thomas (Gunnar Björnstrand) and Märta (Ingrid Thulin).
A widowed priest, Thomas (Gunnar Björnstrand), has lost his faith in God. After a sermon, a fisherman, Jonas (Max von Sydow), comes to see him, troubled by his own lack of faith and anxious about the state of the world — he saw a news story saying the Chinese are brought up to hate us, and that they’ll soon have the bomb. Thomas speaks to Jonas and thinks he was able to help, but Jonas shoots himself soon after their conversation. Meanwhile, the local schoolteacher, Märta (Ingrid Thulin), is in love with Thomas, who either is unable to love her back or is at least unable to admit to himself that he loves her. [...]
Tags: 1960s, Drama, Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingmar Bergman, Ingrid Thulin, Max von Sydow, Trilogy of Faith, Winter Light
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Karin (Harriet Andersson) finds God.
A second-rate author, David (Gunnar Björnstrand), his son and daughter, Minus (Lars Passgård) and Karin (Harriet Andersson), and the daughter’s husband, Martin (Max von Sydow), are staying on an island. Karin is a latent schizophrenic who has just gotten back from hospital, while David has just returned from Switzerland, where he fled to write when Karin fell ill. On the island, Karin’s condition worsens; she wakes in the night and goes up to the attic, where she hears voices talking from behind the frayed wallpaper. They tell her to read her father’s diary, where she learns that her condition is incurable and that her father is disgusted to find himself studying her as a subject for his writing. Meanwhile, Minus tries and fails to connect with his father, and Martin grows ever more desperate at his inability to help Karin. [...]
Tags: 1960s, Drama, Gunnar Björnstrand, Harriet Andersson, Ingmar Bergman, Lars Passgård, Max von Sydow, Through a Glass Darkly, Trilogy of Faith
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“At the same time, the chasm between what you are to others and what you are to yourself — the feeling of vertigo and the constant desire to finally be exposed, to be seen through, cut down, perhaps even annihilated.”
A projector lamp. Film running through spools. A penis. A nail driven through a hand. A spider. Footage from a silent film. Bodies in the morgue. A boy watches Bibi Anderson’s and Liv Ullman’s faces on a screen. No, that isn’t an excerpt from a Coleman Francis film’s narration, but a list of some of the images which open Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. [...]
Tags: 1960s, Bibi Andersson, Drama, Hyper-Real, Identity, Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullman, Margareta Krook, Persona, Surreal, Sven Nykvist
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I'm not only a writer, I'm also a spokesperson for the NRA.
In 1974, Meir Zarchi and his eight-year-old daughter were driving to a park when they saw a woman crawl naked out of the bushes. The woman had been raped by two men and Zarchi helped her to the police, where they had the misfortune of running into a singularly unhelpful police officer. It was this episode that inspired Zarchi to write and direct Day of the Woman. While the very fact that Zarchi chose to make a B-movie about rape is exploitative, in its first release, Day of the Woman wasn’t marketed as exploitation and didn’t create much controversy, but went mostly unnoticed. However, the film was re-released in 1980 as I Spit on Your Grave and sold on its, not insubstantial, exploitation trappings. [...]
Tags: 1970s, Anthony Nichols, Camille Keaton, Day of the Woman, Drama, Eron Tabor, Exploitation, Gunter Kleemann, I Spit on Your Grave, Meir Zarchi, Rape, Revenge, Richard Pace, Thriller, Vengeance
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This is a story that happened yesterday. But I know it’s tomorrow.
Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) relaxes at home.
Shot on the cheap on digital video, Inland Empire was filmed without a complete script, and Lynch instead mostly made it up as they went along. Amazingly, this somehow works — fragmented, but still with a general, thematic cohesion. It stars Laura Dern as Nikki Grace, an actress who has just gotten the role of her life. The film they’re shooting, On High In Blue Tomorrows, starts bleeding into reality, and the nature of reality and fiction become even more confused when it turns out the On High is a remake of an old Polish play, 47, rumoured to be cursed. [...]
Tags: 2000s, David Lynch, Drama, Hyper-Real, Identity, Inland Empire, Laura Dern, Surreal, Thriller
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Canady girls start training for a life of piracy at an early age.
May Dove Canady (Angela Bettis) had an isolated childhood with only one real friend: Suzy, a doll in glass case. As her mother told her, “If you can’t find a friend, make one.” She works in a veterinary hospital with Polly (Anna Faris), who seems attracted to May but makes fun of her weirdness. Then one day she meets Adam (Jeremy Sisto), a mechanic who claims to “like weird.”
All May really wants is to fit in, to connect to someone, but the more she tries, the more put off people are by her; it’s ironic that she’s most conventionally attractive once she stops pretending to be “normal” and just turns all the crazy dials to eleven (the oddly anachronistic slang is a touch of genius, by the way). [...]
Tags: 2000s, Angela Bettis, Anna Faris, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Jeremy Sisto, LGBT, Lucky McKee, May
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Do like my eye shadow? It's modelled on an SAS balaclava.
Lady Vengeance is the third and final instalment in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy. I haven’t seen the previous parts — Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Oldboy (2003) — so I will be reviewing this as if it stood alone.
After a gorgeous credits sequence, featuring Vivaldi’s “Ah ch’infelice sempre” — oh, how I love a good harpsichord —, we are introduced to Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young Ae), who has spent the last thirteen years in prison after being forced to confess to the murder of a young boy. The real murderer, Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik), kidnapped Geum-ja’s daughter to make her confess, and now she wants revenge. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Choi Min-sik, Drama, Jeong Seo-kyeong, Lee Young Ae, Park Chan-wook, Revenge, Vengeance
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