I liked tenet too but didn't really care for irreversible. You should make them watch memento too, that was great
Ha, funny you should say this. In one of my classes, I had them watch
Memento as the screening after a lecture on film noir and then several weeks later I had them watch
Irréversible as the screening after a lecture on editing
If we include Turkey in the ME category i'd highly recommend Nori Bilghe Ceylan's Wild Pear Tree.It even fits the coming-of-age category.
Didn't come across this one but I appreciate the recommendation.
Once upon a Time in Anatolia is another great one by Ceylan.
Did come across this one but didn't have time to watch it ahead of composing the lecture. But I'm filing this one away, too.
Also Mustang by Deniz Gamze Ergüven.
Didn't come across this one, either.
I loved pretty much anything i've seen from Ashgar Farhadi.Fireworks Wednesday,A Separation,The Salesman
I don't
love him, but I do like what I've seen and I did talk about him briefly in the lecture.
Ziad Doueiri's The Insult (Lebanon) was great too.
That sounds like a cool movie. The only Lebanese films I watched as potential screenings were from female directors since I had that week earmarked for a female director screening. I watched Randa Chahal Sabag's
The Kite (interesting but nothing special) and Nadine Labaki's
Caramel (liked this one a lot more but not screening-worthy).
Sadly you will be unable to do so once realizing that 75% of that spent time wasn't actually lecturing and teaching but the age-old: "Your image froze," or "You let the microphone off" or "User disconnected from your channel"<45>
You know what the worst has been? Three times during this pandemic I've sat in front of my computer recording Zoom lectures (that I then have to edit along with film clips to then upload for my students in asynchronous classes) and when I've ended the meeting for the recording to convert...nothing happened. Nothing was recorded, nothing was saved, nothing was converted. I went through an ENTIRE FUCKING LECTURE and had nothing to show for it and then had to sit there and do the whole thing over again.
Bullitt68 you fool! You have been approaching this subject from an entirely wrong direction! You should not be trying to watch Middle Eastern cinema! You should do what smart people (like me!) do and instead only watch trashy Middle Eastern remakes of American cinema! That way you get two cultures in one!
(There are actually two Turkish rambo remakes, one of the second and one of the first.)
From Egypt you have stuff like Fangs (Anyab 1981) , their remake of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is much better then the cult-classic original, but that isn't saying much.
Seriously though, the only one of these foreign remakes that I would heartily (as oppose to cheekily) recommend would be Turkish Star Trek. Essentially, it's the Star Trek crew accidentally picking up a Turkish hobo. 75% of the movie is him getting into nonsensical arguments with uber-logical Spock. <45>
Ahem... I fear that I have revealed to much of my true colors in this reply. Time to try and look respectable again.
The shit that you watch, dude. I mean, I'm obviously intrigued by the Rambo remakes, but to even know that these movies are out there in the world, then to track them down, then to watch them. These types of movies exist in those dark corners of the film world into which I rarely venture. And when I do show up, I'm like Batman and people like you are Bane laughing and telling me that I've merely adopted the dark while you were born in it.
As a man who loves his Lifetime and Hallmark original movies, I'm not judging. I just like knowing that there are people like you who dwell in these dark corners watching all of this weird shit
I've seen this movie and thought it pretty good but man if I remember anything about it.
I had the opposite reaction. I watched it once - while doing a World Cinema class during my PhD in 2016 - and loved it to where when I rewatched it earlier this year I remembered every major plot detail and still had a lot of the images in my memory. I'd be surprised if it didn't make my top ten list for GOAT female-directed films. The only reason it wasn't my Middle Eastern Cinema screening was because I'm super OCD about having a chronological progression week to week and I needed a film made between 1995 and 2002
Never seen
White Balloon only the
Mirror and
Taxi from Panahi. The Mirror you might be interested in since... the tiny girls are apparently different actresses but lord to they look alike. Based on those two films, Panahi seems like one of those directors who is constantly trying to make "film and reality blend with one another". Honestly I consider this approach not that profound and its message kind of... obvious? Like, trying to blur the lines between cinema and reality in the audiences mind isn't going to make the thematic impact hit any stronger or weaker.
The Mirror is very good. And yes, Panahi works from the playbook of his mentor Kiarostami and they're both into playing with the fiction/reality boundary. Like you, I'm not really into that, but when it works it can be pretty cool.
I think my favorite Middle Eastern movie that I can think of would be
Paradise Now, dealing with two suicide bombers.
I remember watching this around the time it came out but it's very fuzzy now. I could definitely do with a rewatch.
Boy of the Terraces is a Tunisian film I remember really liking. It's more of an "ethnographic" type film in that it deals with the difference between the world of men and the world of women, good if you want to get a look into that sort of dynamic. Spoilers: All men want to do is punch each other and all women want to do is have sex.
Under the Bombs is another movie that I remembered liking. Though memory of exactly why has kind of faded from memory.
Never even heard of these.
I like Isaac and Chastain a lot (you seen Inside Llewyn Davis?)
I did see
Inside Llewyn Davis. One of the Coen Brothers duds in my book and I didn't particularly care for him. Looking up his IMDb, I noticed that he's worked with Chastain before in
A Most Violent Year, which I watched and remember nothing about. And I've seen a bunch of films that he's been in and don't even remember him in them. I can't put my finger on it but there's something about him that's forgettable if not even unlikable. He just doesn't do anything for me. So while Chastain has been impressing me in recent years, particularly in stuff like
Molly's Game and
Ava in which she's really coming into her own as a pretty strong screen presence (versus earlier shit like
Zero Dark Thirty where she was unremarkable to say the least), he's the one who really worries me.
I haven't seen In Treatment or The Affair, but heard good things about both, and at least this creator seems to have experience making series that are heavily focused on writing, acting and intimate character drama.
In Treatment is just an amazing concept. The series itself didn't live up to the premise, but it was still captivating and it's a good launchpad for something like this. I didn't see
The Affair, though, but again it's great training ground, so to speak, just like you mentioned.
Considering how personal and semi-autobiographical Bergman's series is, I'm curious to see if the character writing and narrative is changed significantly to reflect this creator's own experience.
Good point. This defintiely warrants a
europe-patented BJ Penn head nod.
For the Bergman buffs here, y'all seen the full length multi-part cut, the feature film length version or both? I only watched the series, maybe I'll give the shorter cut a watch before this remake is released.
I'm like you: I've only ever seen the full-length miniseries, never the shorter film version. And I'm never going to be able to watch the shorter version. I could've gone from the shorter to the longer, but I can't go in the opposite direction. Similarly, I can read a book and then watch the movie, but once I've seen the movie it's rare that I'll then go back and read the book. In fact, other than Kubrick adaptations and
The Fountainhead, I don't know that I've ever read a book after I saw the movie.
Harriet Andersson gets naked in this so 10/10
When it comes to Bergman's leading ladies, I'm Team Maj-Britt Nilsson all the way. Before
Summer Interlude, I never thought I'd be cool with armpit hair on a woman. Then I saw Maj-Britt Nilsson and you know what?