“The Hole,” directed by Ming-liang Tsai, examines the life of two lonely strangers who form an odd relationship.
An epidemic hits Taiwan and residents are forced to leave their quarantined homes. A man (Kang-sheng Lee) and a woman (Kuei-Mei Yang) stay behind. As rain pours down relentlessly, the man finds a hole in his apartment floor. The man lives above the woman and from time to time peers in on her through the hole. The woman lip-synchs songs from 1950s Hong Kong musicals.
Wow! Oh my goodness! I thought this would be a great film. I was wrong. Dead wrong. That's right, I nearly slipped into a coma after I viewed this film.
“Zaman: The Man from the Reeds” is an Iraqi and French film set in the marshlands near the Tigris river in Iraq in 2003. Amer Alwan directed the film and created the finished movie despite Saddam Hussein's government taking five reels of the productions film.
A man named Zaman (Sami Kaftan) and his wife (Shadi Salim) created a home out of reeds and lived there for years. Zaman's peaceful and simple life is intruded when he is forced to go into the city to look for medication for his ill wife. Zaman encounters hardship on the way and is in and out of pharmacies with no luck finding the medication his wife needs while the threat of war looms.
The movie is very simple, yet beautiful. The lush greens and bright blues are captured very well in the film seen through panning and stills.
I can't say if I enjoyed it or not, the movie kept me mildly entertained. It is not that it's a bad film; it just feels like it was missing some element. I want to say that it was missing some action, but this is a drama. So, I would have to say it was missing some dramatic action.
“Good Bye, Lenin!” takes place in East Germany in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin wall. Wolfgang Becker directs.
Alex (Daniel Brühl), a disillusioned young man, joins a march against the state and protests against the regime only to be arrested. Alex's mother (Katherin Sass), an activist of social progress, witnesses the brutal arrest, suffers a heart attack and slips into a coma.
The mother awakes from her coma after eight months, having no idea of the reunification of the East and West. The doctor tells Alex that any slight excitement may be fatal to his mother, so Alex is forced to go to great lengths to conceal the new world they live in, transforming the family apartment into what it was like in the past.
Hiding the invasion of capitalism in his mother's much-loved country won't be an easy task. This little white lie soon goes of control in this intelligent and humorous film. I highly recommend this film. |
