I wanted to recommend some movies for open minded people with inquisitive minds. Minds that love and appreciate art, love humour - especially the dark kind - and are not freaked out by subtitles.
So, that means if you are into Hollywood and your brain can't handle anything but action, you want to stay far, far away from these movies, because 98% of Hollywood is pure garbage. If you would rather feed your brain than your cornea, you watch global cinema.
Oh! And by the way, I wanted to arrange them by country but since a lot of movies are collaborative efforts between multiple countries, I just threw them all on here with a shovel. Enjoy!
(this is a page in progress and more content will be added as I have time)
It just blew me away. Heavy duty art movie or "film noir" as some prefer to lable it.
It's very, very French, very, very slow and incredibly beautiful.
To me, it all about the dialog (and there's a lot of it).
Basically, it goes something the like this:
Shooting a movie in the haunting setting of post WW2 Hiroshima, a French man and a Japanese lady fall into conversation. That's it.
It's not about "how much" is done but how it's done and this one is going to wow you if you like the arts. But you can't say "Japan" and "art" without saying...
I don't even know what to say or where to begin? I have watched every single movie, ever, by Kurosawa, and there will never, ever by another director on planet Earth of his calibre. I grew up watching Akira with my Dad. "Seven Samurais", "Throne of blood", whatever it is - you name it - I've watched it...but this one is my favourite.
Needless to say, it's about your dreams. The dreams we all have and the entire movie, though comprised of multiple individual "dreams", feels like a dream.
It's haunting, it's beautiful, it's outright gorgeous...and just occasionally weird enough that "it can't really be real, is it? Am I just dreaming"? I've never had a visual experience of my dreams, brought to me like that, in that fashion. Absolutely gorgeous masterpiece.
Ok, three individual pieces named by the Hopi language and the translations are worth digging into. These masterpieces will blow your mind, and notice how I refrain from calling them movies as we traditionally understand the term. They are basically 90 minutes each, of mind-blowing visuals from real life, accompanied by spectature soundtracks, primarily by Phillip Glass.
Controversial (to some) when it was released because the main actress played a minor (age) and there was a few scenes that showed inter-racial sex (incredibly beautifully done, those scenes. No dirt or smut).
But more than anything, without revealing the plot of the movie, it's about a French girl in colonial day Vietnam, her very difficult relationship with her family and the emotional difficulties she faces when the falls for "the wrong guy" who opens up a whole new world to her.
It's slow (the movie), it's intense and the cinematography is spectacular. As a photographer, I would sell my grandmother to be able to "do light" like that. The saturated colours of the afternoon in hot and steamy Hanoi. the light coming through the open but curtained windows and the street noise as backdrop to the two sweaty bodies on the bed with the fan oscilating in the background. Absolutely everything is perfect in this movie, including the two main actors.
Sometimes what you see is obvious. Other times it doesn't become clear to you what the heck you are looking at until, say, the sand is blown away. Until it's "coming out of the sand". But the saturations and the contrasts really, really hits home with me.
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