Dear friend Swasti has generously contributed to my humble blog. Please feel freaked out. 

“Kung-fu meets Emmanuelle- sex and zen”

“To be a member of the Godfather’s disco squad, you have to get down. And funky” 

“The ultimate barbarian/ufo/dinosaur/scifi B-movie, loaded with cheese”

“Good artists copy, great artists steal”

“Puts the ‘ho’ into horror. Enough said.”

Paranoid Park

Saw this one recently. Written and directed by Gus Van Sant. Most of the actors are non professional. the narrative gets a little slow sometimes, but really cool camera work and the characterization is very good. The feel and dialogues are very realistic.

This morning I woke up and was humming the tunes from a film. As I tried recalling the movie name, a string of films came by. You might like them for different reasons, there is no thread here, really. 

1) Everything is illuminated (sunflowers, music and souvenirs) (Liev Schreiber)

2) The beat that my heart skipped (Criminal turned pianist)(Jacques Audiard)

3) Caramel (Ooh starting sequence!) (Nadine Labaki)

4) Drive (Gosling love) (Nicolas Refn)

5) Cashback (ogle potential) (Sean Ellis)

6) Away we go (Sam Mendes) OR L’auberge espanol (Romain Duris <3) (Cedric Klapisch)

Winter is the time to open the closets and rummage through. With some effort to the memory, long forgotten favorites have been found and listed here. These offer intense moments. 

Synecdoche, New York (Philip Seymour Hoffman love will happen) (Charlie Kaufman) 

Valerie and her week of wonders (czech surrealism) (Jaromil Jires)

Sanatorium Pod Klepsydra (Wojciech Has)

10 minutes older: trumpet and cello (compilations of short films by Masters)

Coffee and cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch)

Buffalo 66 (Vincent Gallo)

These are films I’ve seen in clips and parts, some in whole. These are for those of you who dig historical re-telling and want to see non-mainstream. 

Shoah (duration: 9 hours. Yes) (Claude Lanzmann)

The boy in the striped Pajamas (Mark Herman)

Sophie’s choice (Meryl Streep bonus) (Alan Pakula) 

Night and fog (Alain Resnais)

The eternal jew (Propaganda film) (Fritz Hippler)

Warning: A few of these show real uncut gory stuff. And, some are boring too. But, this is really for those who want to get a hang of Auschwitz and co. without watching documentaries. 

This might be a weekly affair, or a daily thing. I thought this is a better place to archive all the film recommendations. It doesn’t matter what you watch, why. If you want to recommend a film, just add the name with the reason in one line. Preferably a torrent link too if the film is rare :) 

My picks over accumulated summers and winters:

1) The Fall (Tarsem Singh) 

2) Santa Sangre (Alejandro Jodorowsky)

3) Diving Bell and the butterfly (Julian Schnabel) 

4) Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy)

5) Carancho (Pablo Trapero)

6) Umbartha (Jabbar Patel)