NoYank. Remove All American Media And Culture From Your Life

Really really good, best film I've seen in years.

Won the 2023 Palme D'Or.

It's a French courtroom drama I suppose you could call it, though it doesn't follow some genre formula.

The brilliance of it is that the questions aren't answered, the core of the plot is a mystery rather than a stated fact. My main gripe about American culture is there is only one interpretation of the text.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUXawkH-ONM

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_a_Fall

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17009710/

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/1119180

We were dismayed to see no Australians on the New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century – so, with the help of 50 experts, we created our own, all-Australian list. You can have your say, too!

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16556837

Kneecap is so confident and single-minded in its telling of the semi-fictionalised origins of its titular west Belfast hip-hop trio, that it may make anyone who’s never heard of them feel like a bit of a loser. It’s a film that not only signals a major musical arrival, but ends up feeling a lot bigger than the conventional (and often confining) boundaries of the “music biopic”. Kneecap is the story of Belfast and of the “ceasefire generation” – the ones who were told that all is well, that they live in “the moment after the moment”, even when their nation’s traumas are still writ into their bones. It’s a story, too, crucially, about language deployed as an act of liberation and defiance.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19382242

https://steamdb.info/charts/?sort=peak

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16376448

Hollywood blockbusters have dominated international box offices for decades, but in recent years, they have lost luster in the largest movie market outside the U.S. — China.

Walt Disney Co.'s latest film, "Deadpool & Wolverine," has taken the world by storm since its release on July 22, becoming the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. But it has failed to replicate that success among Chinese moviegoers.

While the Marvel superhero sequel made a respectable $57 million in its first 20 days in China, a locally produced comedy-drama, "Successor," made six times as much in the time period, according to data from maoyan.com.

Released on July 16, "Successor" continues to thrive in Chinese theaters. As of Monday, it had grossed over $439 million to cement itself as China's third most-watched movie of the year. "Deadpool & Wolverine" languishes at number 15.

A hit Hollywood franchise screened in China, especially one under Marvel, would be almost certain to rank higher in the box office prior to 2020. For instance, Avengers: End Game was China's third most popular movie in 2019.

...

"China learned all they could from Hollywood. Now they make their own big-budget blockbuster films with good special effects, and even good animated films ... They don't need Hollywood anymore," Rosen, who specializes in Chinese politics, society, and film, told CNBC.

Meanwhile, Chinese films like "Successor" have a major home-field advantage.

"The Chinese audience, mostly young people, want stories they can resonate with ... films that relate to things happening in China in one way or another," said Rosen.

Successor matches that description, with the film touching upon themes of child-raising, education and upward mobility, tailored specifically for the domestic market, according to Emilie Yeh, Dean of Arts at Hong Kong's Lingnan University.

...

Aside from films that are culturally relevant and relatable to the Chinese market, nationalistic and patriotic movies have also become increasingly popular.

China's top-grossing movie of all time is 2021's "The Battle at Lake Changjin," which depicts a battle between the North Korea-allied Chinese People's Volunteer Army and U.S. forces during the Korean War. It's followed by "Wolf Warrior 2," a 2017 film about a patriotic Chinese action hero battling corrupt forces overseas.

This patriotic streak has gone hand in hand with increased Sino-U.S. tensions and the 'decoupling' of the world's two largest economies.

...

The Chinese Communist Party takes an active role in developing and overseeing the local film market, as well as deciding how many foreign movies are screened in the country's theaters.

In 2012, then-vice President Xi Jinping and Joe Biden signed an agreement to increase Hollywood's access to China. This eventually led to a 34-title quota for U.S. movies to be distributed by a Chinese state enterprise under a revenue share model. Approved movies also had to pass through China's strict censorship policies.

When Xi became president, he put the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party in charge of regulating and overseeing films.

As per local media reports, China Film Co. had a role in producing "Successor." The company was started by China Film Group Corporation — linked to Beijing's propaganda department — and other entities.

According to Lingnan University's Yeh, while "Successor" is a great movie with a good script, it still benefits massively from distribution, promotion, and "blessings" from the state.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16244881

Korean film maestro Park Chan-wook is keeping in motion. The internationally acclaimed auteur, 60, will begin production on Saturday on his 12th feature, an adaptation of American novelist Donald Westlake’s 1996 novel The Ax. The movie, which is currently going by the working title I Can’t Help It, will star Korean screen royalty Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin, with financing and distribution coming from local studio heavyweight CJ ENM.

Westlake’s novel was previously adapted into French by Costa Gavras as the 2005 film Le Couperet (The Axe). Like its predecessor, Park’s adaptation follows a man — named Man-soo this time and played by Lee — who is abruptly laid off by the paper company where he worked tirelessly for many years. The man grows increasingly desperate in his hunt for new work, eventually resolving to kill his job competitors. Son will play the man’s wife, the warm-hearted Mi-ri.

...

CJ ENM has said the target release date for the film remains undecided. Park, however, is a regular at the Cannes Film Festival, held annually in May, having premiered four of his films there.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16093338

Austria in the 18th century. Forests surround villages. Killing a baby gets a woman sentenced to death. Agnes readies for married life with her beloved. But her mind and heart grow heavy. A gloomy path alone, evil thoughts arising.

IMDb

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15843547

Ten years ago, musician Usman Riaz grabbed a pencil and started to sketch.

He might have hoped, but didn't know at the time, that it would start him on a path to making history.

That initial drawing became The Glassworker - Pakistan's first ever hand-drawn animated feature film.

It follows the story of young Vincent and his father Tomas, who run a glass workshop, and a war that threatens to upend their lives.

Vincent's relationship with violinist Alliz, the daughter of a military colonel, begins to test the bond between father and son.

Usman tells BBC Asian Network the characters ultimately come to learn "that life is beautiful but fragile, like glass”.

He describes The Glassworker as an "anti-war film" set in an ambiguous and fantastical world that takes inspiration from his home country.

...

The country doesn't have the thriving film industry of neighbouring India and there is no government support or incentive for budding creatives like Usman.

So The Glassworker was a passion project, he says.

“These 10 years for me have just been purely driven with passion and obsession.

“Since I was a child, I have loved hand-drawn animation and there's something so magical about it.

"The beauty of the lines drawn and painted by the human hand always resonated with me.”

Usman says he travelled the world looking for mentors and his search took him to Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli.

...

Usman says the industry veterans at Ghibli were also the ones who encouraged him to start the production himself.

After raising $116,000 through a 2016 crowdfunding campaign he founded his own studio, Mano Animations.

From there it's been a painstaking process, especially since full production started in 2019.

“What you are watching is essentially a moving painting,” says Usman.

“Every single frame you see, whether it's a background or the character moving, it's all drawn by hand.”

Usman says that, so far, he hasn't made any money from the project and has been unable to pay his wife Maryam and cousin Khizer, who he recruited to help him.

But there's hope that the labour of love could be the start of something bigger.

These archived versions might give you an idea.

• Archive.org - German
• Archive.org - Russian
• Archive.org - French
• Archive.org - Italian

To be honest, I don't know about the PDF versions you can find in Anna's Archive or similar archives/libraries. These methods had apparently been optimized for printed, pocket-sized books.

I consider these methods among those things that have not been necessarily superseded "just because" we have more advanced technology. They were very sophisticated for their time, marketed like many courses of this type to the busy working person, and at the same time were effective and entertaining.

We always had a couple of those books lying around the house (German and French). The annotations and explanations for native English speakers are superb, and the overall presentation of the volumes was of very high quality with minimal typos and errors. I only have found a couple omissions over some three hunded pages or sth which is virtually excellent.

With a good command of the English language that many possess, these books are accessible and effective in language learning, and if I don't omit some books, then you can teach yourself German, French, Italian, and Russian, using these methods. Let me add, they have accompanying cassette tapes (yes! Tapes!) which you can also find ripped in some online libraries.

The texts are tastefully chosen, they involve funny stories, anecdotes, proverbs. The culture and gender roles depicted in these books are dated of course, but it is like traveling back in time to simpler times, where you have to call the music teacher on their landline to tell them they forgot their umbrella, but you don't find him at home, so you have to leave a message to the housemaid, whatever. I look at these stories with a time traveler's curiosity. I do find this kind of thing enjoyable, but this might be a matter of taste.

There is no need to say that the grammar progression is gradual. and there is some opinionated, sublime structure you can vaguely discern, but well perhaps ...you shouldn't? The books make you feel you are in the good hands of some wiser people who have in store for you more and more tips on the language you are trying to learn, which is comforting and takes a load of your head. At some point you do have to pull up a notebook for some grammar stuff, but unless you are serious about learning the language you can as well skip this part and consult the self-contained appendices all the same.

Now there are several things that I think are quite special about this series.

Page numbers are transcribed in a simplified pronunciation system. Lessons are numbered too. Under the text you can find a phonetic transcription, which is not IPA but a custom system, that somehow makes sense to a speaker of English, for instance u with umlaut in German sounds like the last syllable of "view". This is not a novelty of course, but it is very well thought out how discretely it is placed on the page, that you can seamlessly ignore it for pages and pages over, without ever looking at it, but when you actually need it, it is consistently there.

Then, there are some footnotes, as well as some proper notes that are part of the subject matter. These are very thoughtful. Every time you wonder "what now?" about either a grammatical or a cultural thing, you will find the explanation right in the notes.

Everything is made to fit in pairs of pages (English on the left, Target language on the right), so you can look up translations both ways. Everything is discretely numbered so you can cross-reference everything: sentences, notes, lessons, appendices. (See note 7 in lesson 24). After the various stories and episodes that form the main lesson, there is one exercise (also numbered and phonetically transcribed) that delves deeper in grammar stuff and is more bland/repetitive, but usually relates to the main story. The hidden treat here is the comic. Yes, there is a comic strip next to the boring exercise always , so you are tempted to go right through the exercise to get the joke. Every now and then there are some revision chapters that are blocks of English text breaking down different grammar phenomena.

That is enough said about the design. Everything is designed and placed on the page with taste and sophistication that not all modern apps provide. The whole book fits in a pocket and is dense with compressed, promptly retrievable, information for a language learner.

Design issues aside there is the actual method. At first you just read the texts and the exercises. When you start to get better at it, you have to be able to translate the whole lesson and the exercise. At some point they ask you to get back to first lessons and try to reverse translate from target language to English. Later on they ask you to stop memorizing the main text, but you have to keep on memorizing the exercise and continue the reverse translating. Each lesson can take you up to 20 minutes tops.

Anyway, I don't know if this works for everybody or if it is demonstrably any better than other methods or apps, but I think it is very advanced for its era because every little thing seems to be very well thought out, and it is very smartly designed, so it has set some standards for me personally as to what a good piece of work should look like, be it on paper or on screen. The stories are enjoyable to me, and I reach out to these books as a pastime quite often, and I have picked up some German and French on the way. Now I have found the whole series in Anna's Archive and I am tempted to look into Russian and Italian too, but let me tell you, these books really shine in the printed book format for which they are designed. I tried to use them with a PDF viewer and they are not as easy to handle as the printed book. So if you happen across any of them in a thrift store or something give them a chance, they might become treasured items of your collection, especially if you are into languages.

Still bugs me how this level of detailed organization and proof-reading was even possible before computers, but it is really impressive!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18182906

Source
Linux currently 29.1%

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15581017

Near the start of “Only the River Flows,” police officers set up an office in a closing movie theater. That backdrop suits this Chinese noir, the third feature from the director Wei Shujun, which, at times, feels like it unfolds in a universe of other films.

Tangled, unresolved procedurals like Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and David Fincher’s “Zodiac” loom large. Much of the score, on the other hand, is taken, strangely, from David Cronenberg’s “Crash” — not a murder mystery, but perhaps a clue to the kind of mind-body disconnect and existential stakes that Wei’s film means to ponder.

...

But “Only the River Flows,” based on a work by the author Yu Hua, is not the pure pulp a summary suggests. (An opening quotation from Albert Camus is fair warning.) As Ma Zhe’s personal life and the investigation begin to merge in his mind, Wei’s film increasingly blurs the line between the real and the imagined. The filmmaker has a gift for disorientation — a chilling cut connects a scene of a pregnancy ultrasound to Ma Zhe flipping through slides of murder evidence — that partly compensates for the muddiness of the plot.

Trailer

IMDb

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15487624

Sam Quah’s Chinese remake of his own Malaysian thriller from 2022 is a film literally dripping in sin. It’s set in 2006 during the clean-up after the tsunami, with the ceiling at the local high school leaking due to the incessant rain. After the pupils punt origami boats out on the college lake, mute loner Tong (Shengdi Wang) is smeared in glue and tortured by the resident girl gang. So if liquid-sloshing Quah hasn’t seen Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water, by the time a mackintosh-sporting psycho is dicing up the bullies it’s clear he must be a fan of I Know What You Did Last Summer.

IMDb:

• A Place Called Silence (2024)
• A Place Called Silence (2022)

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15395312

When we first glimpse schoolteacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), he’s little more than a sooty smudge in the wide, white snowscape of a bitter Anatolian winter. Spilled out of a minibus after a holiday, he registers displeasure with every heavy step through the blizzard as he returns to a place he describes repeatedly as a hellhole. Thick snowfall blurs the edges of his advancing figure, which takes an unexpectedly long time to take on a solid, three-dimensional form. Such unhurried pacing prevails for nearly three-and-a-half hours in this Turkish-language arthouse epic, the latest from festival heavyweight and 2014 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It’s an approach familiar from his previous pictures, such as Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, as a portrait of Samet is built by increments, slowly revealing his complexities and calculations. And what a thoroughly reprehensible individual he turns out to be.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15255690

The latest film from Swedish director Levan Akin (And Then We Danced), Crossing is terrific: a rich and rewarding tapestry of characters and cultures flung together and flourishing.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15226040

A group of friends gets together for a weekend in the country to celebrate one of their forthcoming nuptials.

It's a bucks party in the bush with booze, drugs and a blow-up doll — what could go wrong?

Well, plenty, as shown in the new Australian horror flick, Birdeater.

It's the debut feature film from Sydney-based friends Jack Clark and Jim Weir, who told ABC RN's The Screen Show that many of the film's details were inspired by real life.

Clark, who attended a Sydney private school, says: "There are definitely parts of it that are … fragments of stories or often moments of parties that we wanted to re-create. There were never whole images of people, but we definitely stole wholesale from people in our social circles."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15134323

Salvadoran-Mexican director Tatiana Huezo is a documentary film-maker who received great acclaim for her non-fiction work before pivoting triumphantly to drama in 2021 with Prayers for the Stolen – a heart-wrenching film, with something docu-realist in its gentleness and urgency, about children caught up in Mexican cartel violence. Now Huezo has returned to documentary with a film set in the remote village of El Eco in the central Mexican highlands. While Prayers for the Stolen was fiction with the texture of documentary, this – fascinatingly – is documentary with the look of fiction.

After a shooting period of a year and a half, Huezo and co-editor Lucrecia Gutierrez have shaped a family story so that it looks like exactly like realist drama, perhaps even drama adapted from a novel. In fact, if I didn’t know that it was a documentary, I would assume that it was a drama, devised through improvisation.

https://invidious.materialio.us/watch?v=0WY3tuOZsGc&listen=1 / https://invidious.perennialte.ch/watch?v=0WY3tuOZsGc&listen=1 / https://invidious.flokinet.to/watch?v=0WY3tuOZsGc&listen=1

https://telefis.bandcamp.com/

http://www.telefis.ie/

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15112797

While many American directors drew inspiration from Kurosawa’s vision of cinematic poetry as well as his unique choreography of action, the Japanese director was himself influenced by American cinema when he was starting out in the industry. On multiple occasions, Kurosawa cited John Ford as a source of constant amazement, alongside some of Ford’s compatriots.

It was Ford who helped Kurosawa properly understand the concept of the cinematic image, learning from the way in which the Stagecoach director composed his signature panoramas. Unfortunately, Kurosawa did not hold the same opinion when it came to Ford’s successors who tried to fit into a different mould as times changed along with the sensibilities of modern audiences.

During a conversation from the 1990s with Maani Petgar that was published on Cinephilia & Beyond, Kurosawa revealed the heavy disappointment he felt when he watched contemporary American movies that failed to do anything meaningful with the genre frameworks of action and sci-fi.

Kurosawa explained: “Regarding American cinema, I could say that much better films were made in the past. Today’s American cinema provides the wrong service to the audience. Violence and car crashes are often seen. What pleasure is there in watching such scenes? Old American films expressed human problems quite well, but these days, the American cinema has problems.”

Drawing a comparison with Hollywood classics that had a different approach, he added: “There is no doubt that a film like Jurassic Park is interesting, but there used to be more impressive films in the past. In contrast, films like those of [Abbas] Kiarostami touch the heart and are very beautiful. These new sci-fi, action films, are good but they are not cinema.”