After County Attorney Dave Connors helps Julian Norman with her shiftless father, Jefferson Norman, she leaves Jericho, Kansas to college to study for a law degree.A few years later, Algeria Wedge, the new bride of Dave’s best friend, Tucker Wedge, makes overtures and plays for Dave, much to the displeasure of Dave’s hard-drinking wife Belle. Angered by Dave’s rebuffs, Algeria induces the state political boss to back Tucker for a Congress race against Dave. Meanwhile, Julia has returned to Jericho, with her law degree, and she and Dave fall in love. But when Dave announces he won’t run for Congress, she feels she is the reason and she takes a job in Kansas City. Tucker wins the election and he and Algeria go to Washington. Later, Tucker announces a run for the Senate and Dave decides to run against him. When Marjorie Ransome kills a drunk in self-defense, Julia returns to Jericho to work with Dave, now in private practice,on Marjorie’s defense. The still-resentful Algeria moves to kill Dave’s senate bid when Tucker’s newspaper announces that Dave is being sued for divorce, with Julia named as correspondent.
Synopsis: In the small frontier mining town of Warlock, rancher Abe McQuown’s gang of cowboy cutthroats terrorize the peaceful community, humiliating the town’s legitimate deputy Sheriff and running him out of town. Helpless and in need of protection, the townsfolk hire the renowned town tamer Clay Blaisdell, as unofficial Marshal, to bring law and order to the town. Clay arrives with his good friend and backup Tom Morgan. The two men stand up to the ranch gang and quiet the town. Johnny Gannon, a former member of the ranch gang is bothered by the gang’s actions, reforms and takes on the deputy Sherrif job while his brother remains part of the gang. The addition of the official lawman to the mix further complicate matters, leading to an inevitable clash of the cowboys, the townsfolk, the gunslingers and the law.
Plot : A view of the religious tensions between Muslims and Buddhist through the portrait of the Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu, leader of anti-Muslim movement in Myanmar.
“The Venerable W.” by Barbet Schroeder is the last instalment in the director’s “Trilogy of Evil”, which began with General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974), and continued with Terror’s Advocate (Certain Regard Cannes 2007 and winner of the César for Best Documentary in 2008). This time the director goes to Burma, into the heart of everyday racism, to explore how Islamophobia and hate speech transforms itself into violence and destruction in a country that is 90 percent Buddhist – the world’s most peaceful of religions, founded on a tolerant, non-violent way of life.
Quote: This epic film represents an essential landmark within the political, intellectual and artistic entreprise of the 60’s and 70’s, following the Vietnam War. Milestones cuts back and forth between different story lines and features over fifty different characters, from Vietnam veterans to ex-convicts, parents and kids, native americans…. In 3 hours and 15 minutes, Kramer and Douglas expose the ‘tribe’ where all the alternatives of this generation are experimented. The film questions these experimentations’s success and failures, as well as the directing methods of Newsreel cinema. In 1976, Serge Toubiana wrote in Les Cahiers du Cinema: “If in Milestones one deals with new relationships between human beings and with a new way of life which also integrates the vegetal world as well as the biological world, one also deals primarly with cinema, with a new form of cinema, as if Hollywood would not exist. Kramer and Douglas don’t make Milestones against Hollywood, they shoot as if Hollywood doesn’t exist.”
Synopsis: Sound engineer Sang-woo meets local DJ Eun-soo on a recording trip in the quest for nature’s voice. They succeed in capturing various sensual sounds as well as each other’s tenderness. Their love flourishes as spring comes along, but Sang-woo’s ever intensifying passion often reminds Eun-soo of her tragic past. She knows only too well how passion can vanish like a sound, and how love always surrenders to its end.
Synopsis: A Puerto Rican youth is on trial for murder, accused of knifing his father to death. The twelve jurors retire to the jury room, having been admonished that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Eleven of the jurors vote for conviction, each for reasons of his own. The sole holdout is Juror #8, played by Henry Fonda. As Fonda persuades the weary jurors to re-examine the evidence, we learn the backstory of each man. Juror #3 (Lee J. Cobb), a bullying self-made man, has estranged himself from his own son. Juror #7 (Jack Warden) has an ingrained mistrust of foreigners; so, to a lesser extent, does Juror #6 (Edward Binns). Jurors #10 (Ed Begley) and #11 (George Voskovec), so certain of the infallibility of the Law, assume that if the boy was arrested, he must be guilty. Juror #4 (E.G. Marshall) is an advocate of dispassionate deductive reasoning. Juror #5 (Jack Klugman), like the defendant a product of “the streets,” hopes that his guilty vote will distance himself from his past. Juror #12 (Robert Webber), an advertising man, doesn’t understand anything that he can’t package and market. And Jurors #1 (Martin Balsam), #2 (John Fiedler) and #9 (Joseph Sweeney), anxious not to make waves, “go with the flow.” The excruciatingly hot day drags into an even hotter night; still, Fonda chips away at the guilty verdict, insisting that his fellow jurors bear in mind those words “reasonable doubt.” A pet project of Henry Fonda’s, Twelve Angry Men was his only foray into film production; the actor’s partner in this venture was Reginald Rose, who wrote the 1954 television play on which the film was based. Carried over from the TV version was director Sidney Lumet, here making his feature-film debut. A flop when it first came out (surprisingly, since it cost almost nothing to make), Twelve Angry Men holds up beautifully when seen today. It was remade for television in 1997 by director William Friedkin with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott. — Hal Erickson (All Movie Guide)
Synopsis: J.J. Hunsecker, the most powerful newspaper columnist in New York, is determined to prevent his sister from marrying Steve Dallas, a jazz musician. He therefore covertly employs Sidney Falco, a sleazy and unscrupulous press agent, to break up the affair by any means possible.
Quote: Yuzo (Nao Okabe) and Mitsuki (Anne Ogawa) live together in Yuzo’s small apartment, their constant companionship tender and indifferent in turn. Then Yuzo receives a call from Satsuki (Hyunri), a documentarian resolved to make a film about a now-distant family tragedy, and the three meet, to search for some way to account for their relationship to one another, the memories they share and those they’ve kept to themselves.
Synopsis of the film from MUBI: In 1906, a poor farmer in the backwoods of Finland struggles to make a living for his wife and four children. He hears about a new law that will allow equal voting rights to all citizens. He attends a Socialist meeting and starts believing that everything will get better after the upcoming election.
Nomi, a young drifter, arrives in Vegas to become a dancer. She gets a job stripping at one of the lesser joints on the strip, but soon catches the eye of talent scouts who hire the performers for a casino. She works her way into the cast, and eventually sets her sights on taking the starring role.
Bittersweet comedy about two unemployed Dubliners who open a mobile fish and chip shop. The film is set in a working class suburb of the Irish capital against the backdrop of the 1990 World Cup, when Jackie’s army made it into the quarter finals.
The story is as much about the friendship between the two central characters, Larry (Colm Meaney in fine form) and Bimbo, as it is about football, fish and chips and other cornerstones of working class culture. It is the third book from Roddy Doyle’s gritty and hilarious “Barrytown Trilogy” to be made into a film. The others are Alan Parker’s The Commitments and The Snapper.
Although deeply in love with her boyfriend – and indeed sleeping in the same bed with him – a schoolteacher cannot handle the almost complete lack of intimacy he will allow. Increasingly frustrated, she gradually finds her sexual appetites leading her into ever more risky situations…
Senses of Cinema wrote:
“But it was with the release of Romance in 1999 that Breillat would face censorship internationally, when the film was either banned altogether in some countries, or given an X rating. It was a situation Breillat spoke out about when she declared that, “censorship was a male preoccupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome.” Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.
Romance, and the world-wide discourse about pornography that erupted in the wake of its release, best typifies the challenge and the interest of her work. Romance is about a woman, Marie, whose boyfriend refuses to have sex with her. Her frustration leads her to a series of affairs in an effort to not only find pleasure, but seemingly to arrive at some better understanding of her own desire. The film is sexually explicit, and features, as do many of Breillat’s films, acts of unsimulated sex, hence the many accusations leveled against Breillat that she is a pornographer. Indeed, Breillat willfully courted such accusations by casting Rocco Siffredi, a famous Italian porn star, as one of Marie’s lovers. Moreover, Marie’s sexual encounters are marked by a sense of sadomasochism. Indeed, after having her baby she winds up with a man who is also the principal of the school where she teaches, having blown up her apartment and her boyfriend (who is also, presumably, the father of her child) on the way to the hospital.
Romance was banned in Australia upon its release in January 2000. In his review of the Office of Film and Literature’s (OFLC) report on the film, Adrian Martin describes the reason for the ban. And in so doing, Martin arrives at precisely the thing that makes Breillat’s films so difficult, and so interesting. Martin surveys the censors’ objection to the scene where Marie is solicited by a man in the hallway of her building. In this scene, a man offers Marie twenty-dollars to perform cunnilingus on her, to which she assents without saying a word. Of course, more occurs, as Marie is turned over (or turns over) as her perpetrator then enters her from behind. As he continues, Marie seems to sob, and when he leaves, she shouts that she is not ashamed. Martin notes that in describing the scene, the writer of the OFLC report says that “he orders Marie to turn over,” and that she tries to “scuffle away.” Martin replies, “…I did not see Marie try to ‘scuffle away’ during the scene, or be forced to turn over.” Martin’s point is that this writer’s language reveals his own moral response to an image, as opposed to what is actually present in the image: “One of the most interesting things about Romance is the way in which it inscribes in its own material ambiguous designation of obscenity.” In other words, neither Breillat nor Caroline Ducey (Marie) give us any concrete signs of her own response to what is happening. We cannot walk away confident of Marie’s outrage, only our own, at best. Indeed, the whole scene begins with a voice-over where Marie proclaims that it is, in fact, her fantasy to be taken this way. Yet, the act itself is inscribed into the realist space of the plot, thus blurring the line between fantasy and reality that is signaled by Marie’s voice-over.
As such, when we watch this act on screen, and many others like it, we are left only with what we think of what we see. Moreover, we project our own values back on to the screen, as Martin further notes when he cites a review of the film that describes the scene between Marie and Rocco Siffredi as a “humiliating affair.” Of course, there is, to my eyes, no signs of humiliation in that scene. If anything, it is a frank and very physical depiction of a sexual encounter. Siffredi asks Marie if he can have anal sex with her, an act that stands as the possible source of said humiliation. However, this possibility is complicated by the fact that she very calmly consents, on the condition that he first continue to make love to her. Moreover, the scene begins with Marie telling Siffredi, while holding a soiled condom, how men like to keep things hidden – how easily they are disgusted. The only sign of shame in the sequence comes when she admits to Siffredi, in the middle of sex, that she only sleeps with men that she doesn’t like. If there is shame here, it is the viewer’s.
(imdb) A failed Russian Revolution succeeded magnificently on screen., 3 June 1999 Author: Theodore J. van Houten from Haamstede, 4328 ZG 1 Netherlands
S.V.D. was released in August 1927. A beautiful costume drama, it is on the other hand a somewhat expressionistic, poetical fantasy. Its photography and images are more important than its desired political contents. The script, written by the inspiring historian Yuri Tinyanov (director Leonid Trauberg [1901-1990]could speak about Tinyanov for hours) supplied a failed love story, a political intrigue involving two czars, and a traveling circus background. The picture glorifies the 1825 ‘Decembrists’ uprisal: officers in the imperial Russian army are fed up with the new czar’s autocracy. The main character is a traitor, the Scotsman Maddocks (Medoks). He has won a ring gambling. It carries the initials S.V.D. – the secret union of the ‘Big Deed’ (overthrowing the czar). Maddocks expects the ring to protect him. He is desparate to enter the circles of political power in St. Petersburg hoping a former lover (Sofia Magaril) will introduce him there. A wounded revolutionary officer is on the run, finding refuge in a circus. This setting enabled cinematographer Andrei Moskvin to film a sequence on a galloping horse ‘holding only the camera’. One of the most imaginative scenes takes place on the skating rink. The picture suddenly turns into an ice crystal created by using mirrors. The skater now waltzes his rounds all over the picture. S.V.D. introduces several pessimistic symbols: night clouds, a turtle suggesting how slowly the wounded revolutionary can move, etc. It is an extremely beautiful film, its narrative less important than its image qualities. An un-Russian revolution that failed but turned out a success on screen. It is clear that Kozintsev & Trauberg were ready for their next costume drama THE NEW BABYLON, now considered their great masterpiece. S.V.D. was restored by the German TV-station ZDF ca. 1980. For this version German composer Hamel wrote a new electronic music score, not very fitting apart from the skating rink waltz.
Quote: Tower of the Lilies is the true story of a group of high school girls on the island of Okinawa, who were mobilized into military service as nurses in the closing months of World War II.
The girls, around 200 in all, were thrust into the Battle of Okinawa, one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles in the Pacific. Known as the Himeyuri Corps, they were ordered to join the medical units in large bunker caves where injured soldiers received treatment.
As American forces gained a foothold in the southern part of Okinawa and pressed further inland, and with casualties mounting ever higher, the medical units were forced to relocate to a series of caves. After three months of intense fighting, once the Americans finally broke through the last lines of defense, the Japanese military disbanded the Himeyuri Corps. The girls were left to fend for themselves in the face of enemy tanks and the hail of artillery, called the Typhoon of Steel.
The film was an enormous success. Japanese audiences strongly identified with the shared sacrifice and perseverance of civilians during the war. The film spawned no less than four remakes, including one by the original director himself, Tadashi Imai. Filmed shortly after the end of the Allied Occupation, it was one of the first films produced in Japan to cast the Japanese military in a negative light, though critic Donald Ritchie says, “If it is ‘anti’ anything, the film is anti-war.”
The large cast includes such stars as, Kyoko Kagawa, Keiko Tsushima, Eiji Okada, and Susumu Fujita.
After the death of her mother, 17-year-old Prudence finds herself living alone in her Paris apartment. Then she meets Maryline, a rebel of her own age, who introduces her to the thrills of motorcycle racing on the biker circuit at Rungis. Prudence’s newfound lease of freedom becomes complicated when she falls for a boy Franck who wastes no time in taking advantage of her naivety…
In a small convent school in rural Quebec, Mother Augustine provides a musical education to young women no matter their socio-economic background. However, with the looming changes brought by Vatican II and Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, the school’s future is at peril.
Directed by Japanese underground legend Yoshihiko Matsui, most famous for his epic film Noisy Requiem and his early work with maverik Japanese director Sogo Ishii (Gojoe, Crazy Thunder Road), Pig Chicken Suicide is a veritable assault on the senses, mixing violent images of animal slaughter, racial strife and surrealism to tell the story of two Koreans living in Japan who’s love is destroyed due to overwhelming racial discrimination.
About the film A sweeping meditation on global commerce, labor and geography in the 21st century which chronicles the birth, life and death of a merchant ship.
“The sublime is no more strongly felt than in Peter Hutton’s magisterial At Sea. Put simply, the film tells the story (“the birth, life and death”—in the director’s words) of a container ship—but there are no words to adequately describe the film’s awesome visual expedition. Hutton knows the sea. His experiences as a former merchant seaman have informed his filmmaking practice, known for its rigor and epic beauty. At Sea begins in South Korea with diminutive workers shipbuilding. The colossal vessel is revealed in de Chirico-worthy proportions, its magnitude surreal to the human eye. Off to sea, the splendor and intensity of the water—set against the vibrant colors of the containers—causes us to see the world anew. The film concludes in Bangladesh amidst ship breakers as enthralled by Hutton’s camera as we are by his images.”—Andrea Picard
After being threatened by his girlfriend’s brother, Ko (Riki Takeuchi) goes on a trip on his Kawasaki to contemplate his options. He meets Miiyo (Kiwako Harada) by chance, and the two stay in touch. He later receives an invitation to her island, where he begins to teach her how to ride, and quickly falls for her. Miiyo is an extremely quick study, and the two are a well-matched pair. However, her obsession with motorbikes seems to be leading her down a dangerous path.
