watch and review 43 foreign movies

I actually watched this movie a few months ago but forgot to write about it here. The basic plot is as follows: a group of Japanese school kids (seniors) have put together a rock band to perform at the end-of-the-year festival. Due to the usual type of teenage drama, one of the girls quits, and the band must find a new member and revamp their repertoire. They end up recruiting a Korean exchange student with somewhat limited Japanese language skills.

This movie is totally charming…a bit slow in the pacing at times, but charming. The acting is darned good – and I love how the relationships among the characters (and the reasons for the first girl quitting the band) are not spelled out immediately, but slowly teased out over the course of the film. I found it interesting to watch a movie about a type of experience I’m intimately familiar with (high school), and how it plays out in another culture. The details are very different, but the essential relationships and conflicts are SO similar.

Neat film – I recommend it. And the title song is still stuck in my head!

Rating: ◙ ◙ ◙ ◙ (4/5)

I am a fan of more realistic French films, but I’d never seen a French science fiction or fantasy film, so I had to pick this one up. Supposedly this film had more special effects in it than any other French film to date.

The plot is pretty simple: a simple strongman and a little urchin girl band together to save the strongman’s small adopted brother from a dream-stealing bad-guy mad scientist. The film was derivative in places (the bad guys really remind me of the Borg, the street urchins make me think of Fagin’s gang in Oliver Twist, the whole idea of stealing dreams very Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.), but it looks FANTASTIC and was really enjoyable on the whole. Kind of a slower pace than I am used to, but in my experience most French films do move slower than American films, lingering over each image.

Some of my favorite details: the evil Siamese twin sisters. The pet flea trained to bite its victim and release a tiny amount of poison at the sound of the hurdy-gurdy. Some lovely Rube Goldberg-esque action sequences.

It’s not a perfect film by any means, but it’s well worth seeing. If you enjoy Terry Gilliam movies, this one is worth a look.

Rating: ♦ ♦ ♦ (3/5)

Well, I do love foreign films, and could stand to watch more of them. They are very often much more interesting than Hollywood offerings – even the very commercial foreign films are interesting because of what they have to teach me about the culture that made them. Not that these movies are always accurate representations of life elsewhere, anymore than Hollywood movies are accurate representations of life in the US. But you can learn a heck of a lot about what’s important and what’s common knowledge in a culture by watching the choices that actors, writers, and directors make in film.

I could also stand to reflect more on the movies I watch, rather than just taking them in. So, without further ado, here’s the movie I just watched today.

1. Gwoemul (The Host)

The Host is a Korean monster movie, but it’s much more than that. There are some really hilarious bits (some GREAT scenes of innocent bystanders gawking at the monster before realizing it’s dangerous), as well as a lot more pathos than I expected (the deaths that occur are violent, but mostly sad). There’s a fair amount of satire, too – both the Korean and US governments come off looking pretty evil and/or incompetent. It’s a smart and very well-shot movie – while the monster is not the most perfect CGI creation, it’s well-done. They could’ve made it much larger, but the scale of it is almost believable – it’s not so big that you can’t imagine some fish or other river creature growing to that size.

I love that there a lot of heroes in this movie, and that it’s really about a family of flawed individuals pulling together to try to rescue one of their own. There’s a really great scene where the family takes a pit stop at their food stand to regroup and eat, while the missing member is elsewhere, imprisoned by the monster, cold and hungry. The family members slurp their noodles in silence, and then the missing child appears among them for a few moments, as if she were really there. The family members offer choice bits, putting them into her mouth. Such a perfect, wordless expression of their care and affection for her. It’s a scene that would never appear in an American movie (actions that would be surreal if performed by American characters), but even though it’s very Korean, it made complete emotional sense to me.

Rating: ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ (4/5)