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I remember that you used to baffle your local Turks by your quest for this stuff. Do they still point at you in the streets and whisper to their grand children that there goes a true soul mate of the Turkish people!

Nah I declared a jihad on them when they refused to provide me with subtitles for Turkish Conan, Altar. I thought this a reasonable thing to do because look at this stuff! After that the neighborhood got kind of chilly.

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Nah I declared a jihad on them when they refused to provide me with subtitles for Turkish Conan, Altar. I thought this a reasonable thing to do because look at this stuff! After that the neighborhood got kind of chilly.

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That's the spirit! Just saw Deadbeat at Dawn for the first time this week and I'm imagining your beef over the Altar having similar intensity.
 
That's the spirit! Just saw Deadbeat at Dawn for the first time this week and I'm imagining your beef over the Altar having similar intensity.

I... don't think I've even heard of Deadbeat at Dawn

You just mentoned that film to deflate my B-movie ego!
 
I... don't think I've even heard of Deadbeat at Dawn

You just mentoned that film to deflate my B-movie ego!
Hah, it's that kind of a movie. Actually I watched it with two friends and we all confessed one after another that we hadn't seen it before and everyone was a bit ashamed of that fact.
 
Hey @Rimbaud82, @chickenluver, and @moreorless87: Are you aware that HBO is remaking Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage? Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain are going to play the married couple and the dude who did the HBO show In Treatment and the Showtime show The Affair is the showrunner. Honestly, I'm not entirely sold on either Isaac's or Chastain's acting ability, so this is definitely going to be a serious test for them. But I'm intrigued at the prospect of this remake if for no other reason because it'll give me an excuse to rewatch the original.
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I like Isaac and Chastain a lot (you seen Inside Llewyn Davis?) but stepping into the roles played by Josephson and Ullmann is a major test as you say. 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. 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. Honestly if it isn't I almost feel like this remake is destined to come across as insincere wankery. Nonetheless I'm intrigued.

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.
 
Then we're introduced to him sitting between a statuette of a child with his cousin (eww).
Don't judge love bro
Watching Barry Lyndon... I've grown kind of obsessed with the idea that the narrator is lying about Barry Lyndon's own thoughts and desires.
The novel employs an unreliable narrator as well, except it's actually Barry himself narrating his own life. Despite the change into unseen, non-character narration for the film, I think your theory would still fit as Barry is attempting to come across as an upper crust European gentleman just as the narrator of the film seems to be coming from the same place.
that could be Kubricks way of transposing the literary technique to film.
I absolutely think it is
Damn, no wonder the movie is so intriguing! I haven't seen this in a long time, but my recollections are that Barry Lyndon has strong influences from Nabokov, who is known for his use of unreliable narrator, and Voltaire's Candide, that has one of the funniest, most biased narrations ever describing tragedy and miserable twists of fate.
Funny that you mention Nabokov being an influence on the film, as I was just thinking about the Barry Lyndon novel being a strong influence on Nabokov. In Barry Lyndon the novel, in addition to Barry being an unreliable narrator, the book is "edited" by another fictitious person, who will leaves various footnotes throughout pointing out times when Barry contradicts himself, or when he's just generally full of shit. I was thinking this could have been a direct influence on Nabokov's Lolita, which if I recall correctly begins and ends with notes by a fictitious person who is purported to have edited Humbert's memoirs into a readable narrative. I haven't read Nabokov's Pale Fire, but I believe that employs an expanded version of the same technique. Perhaps Kubrick was knowingly bringing that influence full circle.
I should get around to reading the novel at some stage, not really the kind of thing I normally bother with but it would be interesting to see how it reads as the author is mentioned as a satirist and liberal in some respects but quite anti irish in others
I really liked the novel, almost as much as the film in fact. Definitely my favorite of the source materials Kubrick adapted alongside Lolita (haven't read them all though)

It's much more overtly satirical and humorous. Barry also comes across as way more of an asshole than in the film. The moments that generate sympathy for him are few and far between, and he does a bunch of truly appalling shit. Much of the humor comes from his constant tooting of his own horn without realizing what an insufferable prick he's painting himself to be.

Can't really comment on Thackeray being anti-Irish specifically, but based on Barry Lyndon and Vanity Fair he comes off as borderline misanthropic to me.
 
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Watched Ravenous.

It has a pretty original score by Damon Albarn & Michael Nyman
Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz, and Michael Nyman, the minimalist composer known for his scores for Peter Greenaway films made a soundtrack together? Colour me intrigued
 
Funny that you mention Nabokov being an influence on the film, as I was just thinking about the Barry Lyndon novel being a strong influence on Nabokov. In Barry Lyndon the novel, in addition to Barry being an unreliable narrator, the book is "edited" by another fictitious person, who will leaves various footnotes throughout pointing out times when Barry contradicts himself, or when he's just generally full of shit. I was thinking this could have been a direct influence on Nabokov's Lolita, which if I recall correctly begins and ends with notes by a fictitious person who is purported to have edited Humbert's memoirs into a readable narrative. I haven't read Nabokov's Pale Fire, but I believe that employs an expanded version of the same technique. Perhaps Kubrick was knowingly bringing that influence full circle.
I had forgotten BL is based on a book. Got halfway through Pale Fire last Christmas, but the attention span I have these days didn't give in to finishing it. Of all the Nabokov books I've read, Pale Fire is the one that most seemed like it was merely very clever, but I haven't finished his other literature fuelled books (Sebastian Knight and Gift) either.
 
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.

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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!

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(There are actually two Turkish rambo remakes, one of the second and one of the first.)

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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.

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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>

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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 :D

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 :oops:

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.

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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.

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I remember watching this around the time it came out but it's very fuzzy now. I could definitely do with a rewatch.

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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.

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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.

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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?



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I liked tenet too but didn't really care for irreversible. You should make them watch memento too, that was great

Irreversible was tough to watch at some points but I thought it was pretty much a masterpiece.
 
Here's a really old video of Nolan describing the structure of MEMENTO and it's crazy how similar it is to TENET.
 
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.

Seeing as you brought up that Batman reference... I now feel compelled to inform you that this stuff happens in Turkish Batman.

(Also. Yes. Turkish Batman is 100% a thing that exists)

 
I've now arrived at going through Akira Kurosawa's Filmography:

The Bad Sleep Well

Honestly, i found this every bit as great as "High and Low".This Film deals with Corporate and political corruption while also being an Adaptation of "Hamlet".

Kurosawa does an amazing job at navigating the viewer through the many important main and side characters.Any even halfway relevant character was properly fleshed out.
Toshiro Mifune plays the complete opposite of his fiery Samurai characters with the very stoic and calculating Nishi who spend multiple years plotting his great revenge.

The Ending is wonderfully nihilistic, invoking later Films like "Chinatown" as it is revealed that the big Puppetmaster Iwabuchi is also just an underling of a more powerful Man and that might still not be the top of the Food chain.Inthat sense it is practically Kafka-esque.
 
Haven’t been as regular with my review keeping (been writing some other stuff, so there’s a few films good and bad I have missed out). Finally got back to the cinema again after months of lockdown which was wonderful. Few beer and a film sure you couldn’t bate it.

Saw two class films recently which has put me in the notion to drop a few short reviews again. Need to get back in the habit.

First film back in the cinema a few weeks back was actually a documentary -

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021)
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Saw it as part of the Sheffield film festival (from Belfast obviously), think general release will be sometime in July. It’s a documentary from Questlove about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Absolutely nuts, I’d never even heard of it. Basically the same summer as woodstock this massive black cultural festival took place in Harlem, celebrating all kinds of culture and music. Security was provided by the Black Panthers. The whole festival was all filmed, but afterwards they were - baffingly - unable to secure any kind of widespread release and so the footage was simply stuck in a basement somewhere and never seen again..until now.

This is the first time that these performances have been seen and wow! What a line-up. The film has footage of Stevie Wonder, BB King, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Max Roach, Hugh Masekela, Mahalia Jackson, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Staple Singers and so on and so on. Some class performances, so it’s just fantastic from the perspective of watching all this unseen footage. But the documentary also does a great job of placing the festival within the wider zeitgeist, the context of the 1960s black pride movement and the radical political culture of Harlem at that time. Really interesting, very much recommended if you get the chance.

Then yesterday I went to see -

Mandabi (1968)
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A 4K restoration of this film from Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, his first in Wolof rather than French and actually an adaptation of his own novel The Money-Order. In fact the first film in a native African language I believe. I really really liked it. Haven’t seen a whole lot of African cinema, before this only Touki Bouki (1973) off the top of my head, but I was a fan of this. They did a fantastic job on the restored print itself too, it looked great.

The film’s story is very simple. Ibrahima Dieng, an unemployed Senegalese Muslim, receives a money order from Paris worth 25,000 francs. With a hape of debt, two wives and several children to provide for you can imagine that this is fantastic news for Dieng. However, almost immediately he is beset with difficulties. His wives buy some rice on credit alerting the entire neighbourhood to the money order. Almost immediately every beggar in the village is round to ask for some money, along with the local Imam and the vaguest of relations.

In fact most of the money is not even Dieng’s to begin with. It has been sent from his industrious nephew Abdou who has been living and working as a street sweeper in Paris. 20,000 is to be for Abdou when he eventually returns home; 3,000 is for his mother and 2,000 is for Dieng himself (as Abdou knows he is unemployed). This doesn’t stop the rumours of Dieng’s newfangled wealth growing throughout the neighbourhood though.

Aside from all this Abdou has even bigger problems. An old fashioned man without much in the way of literacy he is totally incapable of wrangling with the neocolonialist bureaucracy. Without ID and other papers he isn’t even able to cash in his money order. He tries to rely on the younger, more ‘sophisticated’ generation but quickly learns that their intentions aren’t as pleasant as they first appear…

Just a good film and a good drama. Delivers a wonderfully grounded and naturalistic depiction of 1960s Senegal, bursting with life and authenticity. It deals with colonialist/post-colonial themes in an engaging way; very subtly, without being overly ‘on the nose’ so to speak. Sembène provides a scathing critique on the poverty, greed and corruption inherent in his Senegal.
 
Just finished

Walker (1987)
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"No matter how much you fight, no matter what you think...we'll be back, time and time again"

If you consider subtlety to be a virtue then this is absolutely not the film for you. It is easily the least accurate historical film I have seen. Very much by design. The message is so overwhelmingly in your face that threatens to drown the film from the get-go. The film deals with the story of American filibuster William Walker and his invasion of Nicaragua in the mid-nineteenth century. With civil war in the country threatening American shipping interests, military intervention was obviously required. Between July 1856 and May 1, 1857 Walker took it upon himself to seize to control of Nicaragua, declaring himself President and re-instituting slavery. Nicaragua was in dire need of some Freedom.

These events actually happened, but the film isn't really about the actual William Walker or the real political events. It might be interesting to see a more grounded depiction of William Walker. This isn't that. Instead it is a totally crazed satire on the nature of American imperialism in Latin America and their interventions Nicaragua in particular. Filmed on location in Nicaragua during the US-backed Contra War the contemporary parallels are obviously incredibly acute. It is this feeling of cyclical violence and imperialist intervention that the film tries to capture. It does this through an absolutely manic tone and through the use of bizarre anachronisms - Zippo lighters, a pack of Marlboro reds, Coke, Time and Newsweek magazines, even an attack helicopter. Well it doesn't take a genius to figure out the theme here.

Walker provides an incredibly blunt attack on the imperialist fantasies of Manifest Destiny and the hollow justifications provided for war - civilisation and liberty. The deliberate anachronisms very obviously connect this to modern American interventions in Vietnam, Nicaragua and so on. Some rather dated Napoleonic-era military uniforms also connect things to European interventions in previous centuries. It's certainly not unjustified in these themes, although equally good politics don't necessarily make a good film. The tone of the film is not entirely seriously though, in spite of it's grand notions. It could be pretty damn funny, in a surrealist sort of way.

All the obvious comparisons come to mind: the colonialist megalomania of Aguirre (1972) and the crazed surrealism of Apocalypse Now (1979). Perhaps Pontecorvo's Burn! (1969) was an influence, with it's depiction of the cyclical tragedies of western imperialism. It had more than a touch of Peckinpah's westerns as well. It certainly doesn't approach anywhere near the heights of those films, but interesting in it's own way. Ultimately it's not entirely successful with what it sets out to do, but I appreciated it for trying all the same.

I don't think it was as bad as the likes of Roger Ebert (who gave it zero stars) and other critics at the time claimed. I also don't think it's as good as a few modern re-appraisals have suggested either; it can come across as a bit half-baked and muddled and fails to seriously hold your interest the whole way through. But it certainly did have it's moments and is probably worth a watch if you are a fan of some of the films mentioned above.
 
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