Sergei Bodrov:

Mongol

This is excellent.

this year is the centenary of Akira Kurosawa's birth...everybody knows Rashomon, The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo...

but, what about the minor classics? One of my favorites is Ikiru, the story of a minor bureaucrat that discovers that he has cancer and then reevaluates his life...with Takashi Shimura as the initially defeated civil servant who was previously the supremely vital lead samurai in The Seven Samurai...

then there is The Hidden Fortress that George Lucas used as the story for the first of the Star Wars movies...just like John Sturges used The Seven Samurai for The Magnificent Seven (Kurosawa was heavily influenced by John Ford; his John Wayne was Toshihiro Mifune)

Doe'des'ka den...Dersu Uzala...and the list goes on and on...

double post

what about Werner Herzog? anybody see Aguirre: the wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo?...the man is a brilliant lunatic and it comes thru in every frame...

with Fitzcarraldo he drags a ship over a ridge to reach an amazon tributary that he cannot otherwise reach (part of the story)...in an interview during shooting when engineers said the proposal was dangerous and that people could be killed he said 'how many, do you think?'

madman...

anybody ever seen anything by Rainer Werner Fassbinder? my favorites are Ali: fear eats the soul, The Bitter tears of Petra von Kant and Fox and his friends...

deliberately slow paced and melodramatic but really a feast when compared to contemporary popular films of the time...

the german 'new wave' in the 70s was phenomenal...Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Schlondorff, et al...

" It never got weird enough for me.."

" Where the Buffalo Roam "

Bill Murray 1980

then there is The Hidden Fortress that George Lucas used as the story for the first of the Star Wars movies..

Thanks!!

Just watched it on your recommendation!

Brilliant!

Very funny & well ...just great!

Of course everyone has seen that Japanese movie... cant remember the name... like Arnie's Running Man

just finished watchin' 'The night they raided Minsky's' (1968) with Jason Robards, Britt Ekland and NORMAN WISDOM (fer all you brits) with the 7 y.o. niece...the little girl seems to appreciate american crazyness...

if one can place one seed of film appreciation then Heaven shall be the reward...

The original Dutch version of "The Vanishing", Directed by George Sluizer.

Adapted by Sluizer and Tim Krabbé from Krabbé's novel The Golden Egg and set in brightly bland every day locations like a highway rest stop and a country home, the story of a woman's sudden disappearance becomes a creepily deliberate examination of both the psychologically crippling impact of her vanishing on her lover, and the criminal's unfathomable motives.

yeah...this one was done again by a US film maker with Kiefer Sutherland...a truly creepy story...the last bit is right outta Edgar Allen Poe...

sorry...the remake was directed by the same dutch guy, George Sluizer...

one of the most creepy stories ever put into film...the scale of the depravity is unfathomable...

an article on the BBC today...Psycho is hardly an unknown film but it's influence on cinema is without question.

check out the discussion...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8593508.stm

sorry...the remake was directed by the same dutch guy, George Sluizer...

one of the most creepy stories ever put into film...the scale of the depravity is unfathomable...

There is also a French remake. Excellent as well. I believe that Jeff Bridges played the lead in the American remake, correct?

yeah...it was Bridges in the remake...I always considered him to be a 'good time' actor without serious dramatic merit but he was a scary MF in the remake...Kiefer Sutherland also did well as the obsessed husband...

always looked at gas stations on highways differently after watching 'The Vanishing'...

btw...just watched King Kong, Invaders from Mars and The Thing from Another World (1952 with James Arness) with the fascinated 7 y.o. niece today...lots to be said for having your own video collection...

and no...we didn't get into the anti-communist implications of the last two films...

just finished watchin' 'The night they raided Minsky's' (1968) with Jason Robards, Britt Ekland and NORMAN WISDOM (fer all you brits) with the 7 y.o. niece...the little girl seems to appreciate american crazyness...

if one can place one seed of film appreciation then Heaven shall be the reward...

Not all Brits. Couldn't stand him or Peter Sellers.

but, his performance did indicate that he could handle burlesque/music hall material OK...?

Peter Sellers, well it was the Clouseau movies and Blake Edwards but I thought that he did a nice job in Being There...maybe affected by my passion for Shirley MacLaine...after watching her in Irma La Douce as a teenaged boy there was no other woman fer me...I wanted a nasty woman with green stockings to fulfill my longings...so did Jack Lemmon...

Faye Dunaway did the trick for me as a spotty teenager...

in "Little Big Man"

yeah...ol' Faye is hard to beat in that one...

later, in my early 20s I fell in love with Liv Ullman and glued a picture of her onto my guitar from the scene outta Cries and Whispers where the doctor (Erland Josephson) forces her to look at herself in the mirror...but that was a more mature obsession...her little sarcastic smile was almost too much to bear...

Just watched "Shake Hands with The Devil" about the Rwandan genocide...

Just watched "Shake Hands with The Devil" about the Rwandan genocide...

Thank you I will watch this in.. oh.. about an hour! Thanks for the idea.

That reminds me of a film I really enjoyed years ago:

but not as good as: City of God!

'City of God' led on to a TV mini-series on Brazilian TV (later released worldwide on DVD) called 'City of Men' (Cidade dos Homens).