a place to talk about movies and whatnot
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This film captures the events which took place in the early 1990's in the famous building between the museum and theatre. It is not easy to decide about the dissolution of the state, even if its end seems inevitable, and especially when everyone declares their fixed positions at the very beginning. The film shows the members of parliament who face an unusual task; it captures the fragile relationships, attempts to come to a consensus, shows suspicions and tactical maneuvering; negotiations as well as theatrical outbursts. All this happens not only in the parliament hall but especially in the privacy of its corridors. Although the deputies showed varying degrees of openness to the crew, the film still sets out to go beyond the facade of political speeches in order to offer a glimpse into the real workings of politics. During three months of filmmaking, the negotiations changed into a drama full of uncertainty and tension. The film gradates with each parliament session until the funeral feast for the federation at the end.
then, well, well, well, Mr. First President of the First Middle Banana Republic is doing the same!it starts like a heimatfilm.
i.e. most of the men work as lumberjacks and whenever they notice a cute decent girl (who covers her hair with hijab) they stroke their mustaches (a gesture that in a pious society substitutes jerking).
Sudetenland. Present. The grandson of a murdered factory owner is hired as a mystical guide to a wealthy old man’s fate. The curtly sketched wandering journey through a desolate landscape to the past reveals the roots of human brutality. Motives of personal morality, historical guilt for collaborating with the Nazis and redemption through revenge are unleashed in a phantasmagoric hallucinatory feria, a cruel dance of dehumanized figures driven to fulfillment by revenge, greed, and a faint vision of redemption. The historical allegory of Blood Kin, based on a real event, balances between documentary verisimilitude and expressive, surreal dramatization.
https://youtu.be/pxGghQcrspQ
a really good animation being wasted on boring two men & a lady storyline
https://youtu.be/QLZ0AODQhTQAnxiety is a gift.
collaborations of Karel Kachyňa with a writer Jan Procházka, i consider the core of KK's oeuvre → https://www.kinometer.com/?director=452 ... ear-latesthttps://letterboxd.com/ngboo/film/vertigo-1963/
A simple story of a young girl’s first crush is transmuted into a fascinating, hard-to-describe experience by virtue of purely cinematic magic which stems largely from the breathtakingly beautiful B&W imagery. The frame composition speaks in a surreal language so mellifluously poetic, that you can’t help but listen to the intoxicating music that fills the air, as its fingers strum the strings of your soul-harp...
VERTIGO is so pleasingly bleak (a harbinger of the upcoming new wave esthetics).VERTIGO, together with THE STRESS OF YOUTH and THE HIGH WALL, form a loose trilogy of films connected with the theme of coming of age and emotional outbursts of the female protagonists.
Basically, the story is just two "Dumb and Dumber" guys who do stupid things to each other out on a frozen lake somewhere.
it's too much of a primitive slapstick.
A child predator criticizes humanity -- and in turn, mankind replies: Polanski's critique of mammals is simple and shallow, revealing more about himself than his fellow man; he can't imagine people being anything other than gross, selfish manipulators. Wonder why? Sorry Roman! I don't see people like that.
Probably made audiences chuckle or howl 46 years ago.
What good is it, if it isn't entertaining?
https://youtu.be/jxPXi67-6uoAmusement quickly escalated to boredom.
This animated series, which ran for three seasons between 1970 and 1980, became massively popular and glued thousands to the screen each Sunday evening for its runtime of 22 to 25 minutes. In this essay, I argue that the series is a peculiar cultural artefact of the one-party socialist regime in Hungary and that the first season Üzenet a jövőből – A Mézga család különös kalandjai (Message from the Future – The Strange Adventures of the Mézga Family, Hungary 1970) combines the widely disseminated government propaganda with utopian tropes to create a generic hybrid that facilitates the critique of a system which famously detested criticism. Then, I address the second and third seasons (Mézga Aladár különös kalandjai (The Strange Adventures of Aladár Mézga; Hungary 1973) and Vakáción a Mézga család (The Mézga Family on Vacation; Hungary 1980)) to investigate the ways in which the discursive space opened up by the first season was gradually modified.
so, it seems that (strictly speaking) THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF ALADÁR MÉZGA is 1973 entry (i.e. i might vote for it during the 1973 poll).The second season was produced in 1972 and aired between January and April 1973, three years after the sweeping success of the first. Its protagonist is Aladár, the youngest member of the family, together with his dog, who can now speak. Aladár builds an inflatable rubber spaceship called Gulliverkli 5, a wordplay referring to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver and the fact that the spaceship can fit into a violin case (‘verkli’ meaning ‘barrel organ’ in Hungarian). Like the first, the second season is also an anthology: in every episode, there is some kind of conflict between Aladár and his parents or his environment, so he travels to a distant planet and returns after his adventures. Even though the humour and linguistic inventiveness of the series is unchanged, the planets Aladár visits are clearly different from MZ/X’s world. As the ship’s name suggests, the season resembles the plot structure of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, as well as the satirical tone of the eighteenth-century novel. The planets are utopian satires, which, to use Sargent’s definition, ‘the author [intends] a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of that contemporary society’.
Due to the social satire present, the sequels "The Flat Planet" and "The Topsy-turvy Planet" were excluded [banned] from the TV broadcast in communist [neo-stalinist] Czechoslovakia. From the other sequels, some specific scenes were cut off [censored].
tho, not even this local 1972 flick can be considered completely devoid of subliminal programming (viz "turns himself red", "repaints all the other animals", etc., etc. — i am sniffing some acid-communism vibes). however (as opposed to the two despicable sequels from THE POPPY DOLL AND EMANUEL THE BUTTERFLY) it is rather pro-tropical (so, what was the aim of the local 1970s comrades who were writing storylines of these bedtime stories knows probably only the moon).Mole discovers a lot of paint cans on the glade. He mistakenly turns himself red and when he frightens the evil fox, gradually repaints all the other animals and finally the whole forest, which turns into an exotic foreign country until the bright colors wash away the rain.
Here’s a strange one. First, a song on a blackboard: a Polish translation of “I love my little rooster” by American folk writer Almeda Riddle. Then, two men roll around trash bins and lift them to the garbage truck. They do it several times. A woman shouts in the distance. At the end, the picture stops, and the woman sings the song.
(song singing 5:43 ↓ i.e. a harbinger of Gummo ↓↓)
https://youtu.be/WqxrCQpqDjM
1972 poll No8
lbox wisdom ↓
...and folks, it's bad. Or at least, I'm pretty sure it's bad. There are no subtitles in the copy on Youtube, and I don't speak Polish. But from what I can glean, it's about two hippie student types in a field, messing around. They change into some business clothes, and explore a rural area and an abandoned building. Then they change back into their hippie clothes and run around acting like a couple of goofballs, set to blaring circus music. Again, there's dialogue I don't understand, but I can't imagine that it elevates this material into something that could be considered compelling. Maybe there were drugs involved.
https://youtu.be/0A8f5NYIYrk
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3618624/
A film ad of the forever unhappy man with a fixed idea that "something is about to happen", always waiting for the moment to start to live, upholding his plain loner's existence with a belief that the destiny will, at last, make his dream of an ideal woman true, based on the biological right of love.
https://vimeo.com/271088022
https://dafilms.com/film/8079-cooking-history
A documentary about army cooks and how the everyday needs of thousands of armed stomachs affect the victories and defeats of statesmen. The field kitchen functions as a model of a world where food preparation becomes a fight strategy; a fight for great ideals standing on strong legs of the kitchen table. The film is based on eleven meals based on recipes from the Second World War till the war in Chechnya; from France through the Balkans to Russia.
https://www.taskovskifilms.com/film/cooking-history/
Who would have imagined that wars could also be fought with pots, pans, and pepper shakers? In contrast with classic documantations recalling war memories with Talking Heads, the Slovakian film director focuses on a particular aspect: the sensual element of war. Military chefs have a unique, and until now, unshared influence on the battlefield. “A hungry soldier doesn’t feel safe,” explains a sausage-wielding army cook. Feeding troops is a tactical strategy used to truly astounding results in major European conflicts of the 20th century. A Russian woman’s meat blintzes provide 11 million soldiers the necessary courage to conquer in the Second World War. A Jewish prison camp breadmaker executes a plan against his Nazi captors with the only tools at his disposal. Tito’s personal chef shares the state dinner menus whose warring national cuisines foretell the Balkan War itself. By turns wry and rousing, the personal stories of history’s forgotten witnesses quietly humanize war’s unrecorded battles and their costs. Six wars, 10 recipes, and 60,361,024 dead – Cooking History is a fascinating retelling of the past.
https://youtu.be/iO42wQ0Qr5U
https://letterboxd.com/film/walking-too-fast/
The psyche of a ruthless secret agent in Cold War Czechoslovakia begins to unravel when he obsesses over the girlfriend of a suspected subversive he is tracking. This taut political thriller is a bleak and potent rendering of the emotional destruction wreaked by totalitarianism.
The story revolves around Antonín Rusnák who is an StB agent. He feels rage towards the world. He feels sick and bored from his family and work. His psychological issues cause him breathing problems and his doctor advises him to breathe into a bag if he gets a fit.
'Pouta' (Walking Too Fast) movie review: one of the best modern Czech films
https://www.praguereporter.com/home/201 ... zech-films
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In Pouta, our protagonist is a frightening Travis Bickle-like sociopath.
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Pouta is also about Rusnák's epic descent into madness.
main song of the OST of the film (with the film footage)...https://cineuropa.org/en/video/rdid/94402/
Czechoslovakia, 1982. The totalitarian regime seems interminable and imperishable. Antonín, a member of the secret police, uneasy, tyrannical, perhaps even psychopathic, is percolating with unvoiced anger and desperation. Bored with everything, he aims his demons at a seemingly clear but in fact unattainable target - a young woman named Klára. It is not love, not passion but a burning desire for the illusion of escape from the clutches of drabness and boredom. Antonín's absurd attempt to win Klára over pits him against not only the regime's traditional enemies but also his own people and the system itself. When he breaks the rules of the organization he serves, it is neither a civic gesture nor a political one. It is rebellion, purely personal and wholly savage.
https://dafilms.com/film/10480-the-ferr ... en-version
After Late Night Talks with Mother and Landscape of My Heart, Jan Němec has come up with another film that hovers on the edge of experimental documentary and film essay. The Ferrari Dino Girl describes the circumstances surrounding Němec filming of the Soviet invasion on the streets of Prague on 21 August 1968. Out of this comes four reels of invaluable footage, that had to be shown to the rest of the world. Together with two friends, the director travelled with the priceless material, containing sixteen minutes of unedited film, across the Iron Curtain to Austria. Jan Němec examines the reality of his life in relation to Czech history, where intimate chronicles are inseparably linked with major historical events. He incorporates new film roles (in which he is played by Karel Roden) into the original footage which flew round the world over forty years ago and boasted ‘bigger audiences than Steven Spielberg’.
https://letterboxd.com/film/the-ferrari-dino-girl/
It’s nighttime in Prague, 21 August 1968. Soviet troops and tanks are occupying the city - random attacks, soldiers shooting, bodies lying dead on the sidewalk. With an impromptu crew, the director (Karel Roden) captures some unique evidence - material which is, however, worthless in occupied Prague; it has to be shown to the rest of the world. So, while the Soviets are concocting false reports of heartfelt receptions without military resistance for propaganda purposes, the director sets off on a risky trip across the closed Czech-Austrian border to Vienna.
the screening was preceded by a little gig by the Havels couple (Irena & Vojtěch) who composed the music not only for this film ("Saving One Who Was Dead") but also for the previous ("Little Crusader") by Václav Kadrnka.After a serious stroke, the Father goes into a coma. The Mother (Zuzana Mauréry) and the Son (Vojtěch Dyk) are suddenly confronted with a motionless body; the doctors do not give them much hope. The person they love is somewhere far away and their words can’t reach him. If living has any boundary, they are determined not to let the Father cross it. The quiet corridors of the hospital are gradually transformed into a labyrinth of the spirit, where voices are whispers; expression is deep within. Or everyone is silent. Because it’s so difficult to talk about certain things… Four years on from Karlovy Vary’s graceful ride Little Crusader, Václav Kadrnka invites us on a spiritual journey to places man is seldom permitted to enter since, here, life huddles up tightly to death and only the resurrected can return.
https://youtu.be/CirCshYZo88
