Category: Movies

Any real film lover knows of Metropolis, and much like other Lost films, sighs whenever that film is mentioned. I’m happy that they found the footage and that the film might see its way to my DVD collection (fingers crossed). I am not going to hold my breath for a theatrical release here. Now, if only we could say the say for a lot of GREAT Filipino movies slowly degrading and are probably going to be lost forever.

The Lost Cut of Metropolis To Play at the Berlinale
Posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 by Brendon Connelly
metropolis_scenes
Finally, after over a year of me holding my breath and wishing big chunks of my life away, the restoration has been completed and the full, original cut of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is nearing it’s re-premiere. Of course, I won’t be there to see it, and chances are you won’t be either, but at least we know that widespread distribution is approaching fast.
The re-premiere is to take place during the 2010 Berlinale. The gala screening on February 12 next year is to take place at the Friedrichstadtspalast while a parallel event will see the film screened at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, both with live performances of the original score.
via The Lost Cut of Metropolis To Play at the Berlinale | /Film.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a student in UP , if you are a film lover probably the best school in an exposure perspective here in the Philippines. We had a Japanese/French/Korean/Spanish festival sponsored by their embassy and other festivals sponsored by student orgs and ngo. Probably 4 to 5 years ago the theme of the Japanese Film Festival was films by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and I’d have to say his films are dark and edgy, with some witty but still introspective moments. I remember the scenes and most of the scenes I remember are disturbing at best. I am excited to watch this.

Tokyo Sonata
In theaters: March 13, 2009 Copyright © 2009 Regent Releasing
Tokyo Sonata Poster
Set in contemporary Tokyo, TOKYO SONATA is a story of an ordinary Japanese family of four. The father, Ryuhei Sasaki, like any other Japanese businessman, is faithfully devoted to his work. His wife Megumi manages the house and struggles to retain a bond with Takashi, her oldest son who is in college, and the youngest, Kenji, a sensitive boy in elementary school. The quiet unraveling of the family begins when Ryuhei unexpectedly loses his job. Facing completely unfamiliar circumstances, he decides not to tell his family and begins his lonely sojourn into the world of the secretly unemployed. Along with many other businessmen that save face by concealing their shameful reality from family and friends, Ryuhei pretends to go to work each day, when, in fact, he kills time in libraries and parks. His lies and torment go unnoticed by Takashi, who becomes increasingly despondent and alienated from his family, and Megumi, who can no longer summon the will to keep her family together. Meanwhile, Kenji’s journey begins to mirror his father’s solitary plight. Although his father vehemently refuses to allow Kenji to play the piano, the boy uses his school lunch money to pay for clandestine lessons. What began as lies created as means to survive, gradually leads the family into unforeseeable destruction. In the hands of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, renowned for his suspenseful films, this story probes the dark side of human nature and the social problems that confront contemporary Japan. Kurosawa’s portrayal of the breakdown and redemption of Japan’s “ordinary family” is every bit as gripping as his previous works.
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* Genre:Foreign, Drama
* Director:Kiyoshi Kurosawa
* Cast:Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Yu Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki, Haruka Igawa
Apple – Movie Trailers – Tokyo Sonata.

here

I wanna watch this!

Hollywood for ugly people: awards season in Washington
Mon, 01/12/2009 – 6:46pm
The big winner at last night’s Golden Globes, Slumdog Millionaire, succeeds at levels that almost certainly never entered into the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s calculus when they voted awards for the film, its director, its screenplay and its score. They were almost certainly most focused on the extraordinarily compelling stories of its main characters, the quality of the film-making, the deft structure, acting, directing, the usual stuff of movie-making. But the film captures the life and the spirit of Mumbai and of much of India, depicts a world alien to most in America who will see it, and at the same time both captures and, through its own success worldwide, illustrates the transformation not just of its of its leading character, Jamal, but of his ever-present co-star, modern India itself.
Juxtaposing the brutal poverty of Mumbai’s slums with the glitter and promise of a global television phenomenon like “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”, the film offers a kind of energizing fugal counterpoint that is full of hope and at the same time condemnation of the gaps that divide the poorest from the globalizing world. Jamal, like all picaresque heroes, becomes our guide, introducing us first to the crushing poverty of the world into which he was born and then to the steps he takes up the path he and his brother follow in search first of survival and later of more rewarding lives. It is almost inevitable that such an evocation of contemporary India must lead him through a job in a call center…just as his ultimate deliverance through his performance on the game show places him in the most global setting possible because it is also the most culturally denuded setting possible. The world is never flatter (which is to say more two dimensional) than it is on an international game-show hit. His use of a cell phone as a lifeline in the game echoes the role that modern technology is playing in transforming the world of even the poorest. The scene in which he and his brother stand atop sky scrapers that overlook what once was the slum from which they came also speaks to the stunning degree of the changes sweeping their country, even as the brother’s enrichment as a cog in a gangster’s empire comments on the mixed bag that rapid prosperity brings with it. (As the recent scandal at Satyam also illustrates.)
But beyond the effectiveness of the structure in which each chapter of his life is linked to a question he faces on “Millionaire,” beyond the way the story provides a window into many of the themes central to an Indian transformation that echoes Jamal’s, what is most potent and ultimately transcendent about the movie are the scenes of Jamal, his brother Salim and Jamal’s life-long love Latika as children facing brutality and the very worst hands fate can deal us with extraordinary hope, with laughter, and with inextinguishable vitality. They should despair. But they always believe there is something more. It’s this spirit, which I have seen in every struggling corner of the planet and which I feel in particular animates all of India that is so indelible and telling. That anyone should ever suffer as so many children do — and roughly 40,000 die every day of preventable causes worldwide — is inexcusable but that it does not crush them and still these great countries are finding a path to elevate themselves is the story and the great hope of the 21st century. (And their fate is our greatest responsibility.)
Hollywood for ugly people: awards season in Washington | David Rothkopf.