| Flicker | 09-02-21 09:46 PM |
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Among my favorites of that decade, the least likely to have been super obviously already seen by everyone here are (I think) :
The Mystery of the Yellow Room (2003) and The Perfume of the Lady in Black (2005)
Gaston Leroux and his detective Rouletabille are a big deal in France, a bit like Conan Doyle's Holmes, Agatha Christie's Poirot, or Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin. They are old sleuth stories (seminal "closed room" ones, in fact), ridiculously complicated and melodramatic. And very old fashioned, in fact very outdated. But the Podalydès brothers (the director, and the actor) pulled a very clever trick. They kept the outdated melodramatic tone, and filmed it in a very tongue-in-cheek manner, which makes it both self-derogatory and respectful. The dialogues keep their very stilted literary style, but the delivery makes it look charming and naive. For instance, a dramatic fight would be filmed in a slapstic manner, but the narration and the music would stay terribly serious. It creates a very strange tone, a delicious distance that is a tad reminiscent of Polanski's Bal des Vampires in a way, but in a different, lighter genre. What I'm saying is that these movies' styles are quite unique. Or maybe Wes Anderson gets a bit close to that. Anyway, they are really worth checking out. Also it's got an incredible casting.
All About My Dog (2005)
It's an incredible little sketch movies, unrelated mini-stories about dogs and out relations to them. Some are extremely funny. Some are extremely not. If you don't watch the whole movie, maybe at least check out the "say, marimo" sequence. It's just one of these unrelated chaters, it's on youtube, and it will mess you up :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22fSspZCA-c
Poetical Refugee (2000)
It's just a nice little epic about being an asylum seeker in Paris. Wonderfully acted, touching, cynical, and upsetting. Elodie Bouchez, Sami Bouajila, Aure Atika and Bruno Lochet are incredible in it.
Fish Story (2009)
This movie is so insane. I don't want to spoil it (even the trailer spoils hilarious surprises). In particular, I don't want to spoil how clever it is, how much it makes sense. The premise sound completely random. An asteroid is about to impact Earth, cities are deserted, the planet is more or less doomed. A few very different people find themselves chatting in a music shop, discussing a fabled album's track, a rock song that is said to be able to save the world, and which features ten seconds of silence for unknown reasons. Everyone has their theory on that. The film is a series of episodes about the fabrication of the reception of that song, which are such a delight by themselves that you soon cease wondering where the film is going with that. It goes places. One of my favorite movies ever.
The Eclipse (2009)
I consider it the best film ever about ghosts, about what a ghost means, psychically. But that's not the main subject. The main subject is how to overcome mourning and live again. It's about a literature festival on an island, an encounter between a writer and one of the organizers, and, well, not much else. But it's so immensely delicate and touching that it also immediately became one of my top movies ever. And Ciaran Hinds is fantastic.
Mad Detective (2007)
This detective is either crazy, or capable of visualizing people's different personalities as separate persons. It's a cop movie, an action thriller. It's also a fantastic reflection on identity and people's different facets. It's a classic, and it's a must see. Must as in : must.
The Ax (2005)
Costa Gavras. Nuff said ? If not, it's the story of an unemployed chemist seeking a job in our ridiculously competitive society, and his decision to eliminate his competition physically, by luring them with a fake add. The atmosphere of modern economic despair in that movie is fantastically rendered, one very efficient detail being the omnipresence of big advertisement posters with no brands, only the flashy figures of beauty and success that are meant to promote them. It adds the city an eerie symbolic violence and pressure, with just that silent background. Costa Gavras is a big one.
The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
A very beautiful french animated film (that's rare), about a mother investigating the disappearance of her professional cyclist son. It's an almost entirely mute movie, with a style of its own, a thick melancholy and a very humane form of humor, reminiscent of Jacques Tati (Sylvain Chomet, the author, would later adapt an unfilmed Tati script as his next animation, The Illusionist).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAwi8baochk
Saint-Jacques La Mecque (2005)
Is another french movie, by Coline Serreau (the lady who filmed Three Men and a Cradle), about a band of people who do the Saint Jacques de Compostelle pilgrimage together for very diverse reasons. So, it's a film about differences, about knowing each others, and it's full of little nothings. But it's classy and touching, it just works, like few films of this french trend do. Except when they're scripted by Jaoui and Bacri, but that's precisely the next suggestions...
Look at me (2004) and The taste of others (2000)
Two movies by Agnès Jaoui, with Jean-Pierre Bacri. They're their own brand (also check Un air de famille (1996),Cuisine et dépendance (1993) or the lighter Same Old Song (1997), they're perfect movies). Terribly dark, cynical and accurate humor, ruthless and tender satires of society and everyday pettiness. Cruel deconstructions of our dreams, interactions, relationships and tunnel visions. They never leave us intact, and they just obliterate all our excuses for being us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiMh4_bnzns
Kitchen Stories (2003)
A kitchen designer working for a big company installs a tall chair in a poor household's kitchen to study their movements and ameliorate the ergonomics of his company's products. And of course, the most important rule is to not interact with the inhabitants in order to not distort the experiment. Indirectly, maybe accidentally, it's a lovely satire of old school colonial ethnography. Anyway it's a very funny film about haughty dehumanization and rehumanization. And it's a film that doesn't resemble any other, which is always precious by itself.
Actors (2000)
Okay, this movie won't really speak to the non-french public, unless they're really ravenous cinephiles. It's a surreal love letter to the history of french cinema and french actors. All actors play their own roles, in strange dreamlike situations meant to caricature or distort and subvert their images. It's hilarious when know know them and their careers, and it features some very serious comments about their lives and acting decisions. I adore that film, but, again, it may be terribly boring or confusing without some background knowledge on the phenomenal list of classic actors who agreed to participate in it.
Plato's Academy (2009)
A great little Greek film about immigration and national identity. A racist and struggling shopkeeper is infuriated to see some Chinese family open shop on his street, but then, some doubts are suddenly cast on his own possibly Albanian origins, which dangerously threatens his ethnicist arguments, his relationship to his like-minded pals, and his whole thought categories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyLIUw1tirQ
Pulse (2000)
I expected a horror movie, some japanese ghost story. It's got bits of that, and efficient bits at that. But it felt more like a movie about depression, about social alienation in the age of internet. It's more bleak than frightening, and that confused me at first. But with time, its imagery stayed with me, as well as their evocative power : this movie captures something real that would have been hard to describe in a rational tale. And to me, that's the real point of horror fantasy.
Apart from these, I think my favorite movies from the decade are too familiar to the people here to require any introduction. Stuff like Goodbye Lenin, The Station Agent, Lost in Translation, Broken Flowers, [REC], OSS 117, Agora, Burn After Reading, Atonement, Darkness, The Others, Mulholland Drive, The Devil's Backbone, Cowboy Bebop, Master and Commander, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, The Machinist, Mystic River, The Bourne Identity, Spirited Away, City of God, Enemy at the Gates, Hot Fuzz, Pan's Labyrinth, The Lives of Others, The Last King of Scotland, Munich, Kung Fu Hustle, Million Dollar Baby, Shaun of the Dead, Moon, Waltz with Bashir, In Bruges, The Mist... and I expect Memories of Murder and The Pianist to join the list pretty soon.
Edit : And now for the unavoidable woah-didn't-know-they-were-from-that-decade. Already adding Atanajuat, The secret in their eyes and Lost and Delirious. :rolleyes:
The Mystery of the Yellow Room (2003) and The Perfume of the Lady in Black (2005)
Gaston Leroux and his detective Rouletabille are a big deal in France, a bit like Conan Doyle's Holmes, Agatha Christie's Poirot, or Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin. They are old sleuth stories (seminal "closed room" ones, in fact), ridiculously complicated and melodramatic. And very old fashioned, in fact very outdated. But the Podalydès brothers (the director, and the actor) pulled a very clever trick. They kept the outdated melodramatic tone, and filmed it in a very tongue-in-cheek manner, which makes it both self-derogatory and respectful. The dialogues keep their very stilted literary style, but the delivery makes it look charming and naive. For instance, a dramatic fight would be filmed in a slapstic manner, but the narration and the music would stay terribly serious. It creates a very strange tone, a delicious distance that is a tad reminiscent of Polanski's Bal des Vampires in a way, but in a different, lighter genre. What I'm saying is that these movies' styles are quite unique. Or maybe Wes Anderson gets a bit close to that. Anyway, they are really worth checking out. Also it's got an incredible casting.
All About My Dog (2005)
It's an incredible little sketch movies, unrelated mini-stories about dogs and out relations to them. Some are extremely funny. Some are extremely not. If you don't watch the whole movie, maybe at least check out the "say, marimo" sequence. It's just one of these unrelated chaters, it's on youtube, and it will mess you up :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22fSspZCA-c
Poetical Refugee (2000)
It's just a nice little epic about being an asylum seeker in Paris. Wonderfully acted, touching, cynical, and upsetting. Elodie Bouchez, Sami Bouajila, Aure Atika and Bruno Lochet are incredible in it.
Fish Story (2009)
This movie is so insane. I don't want to spoil it (even the trailer spoils hilarious surprises). In particular, I don't want to spoil how clever it is, how much it makes sense. The premise sound completely random. An asteroid is about to impact Earth, cities are deserted, the planet is more or less doomed. A few very different people find themselves chatting in a music shop, discussing a fabled album's track, a rock song that is said to be able to save the world, and which features ten seconds of silence for unknown reasons. Everyone has their theory on that. The film is a series of episodes about the fabrication of the reception of that song, which are such a delight by themselves that you soon cease wondering where the film is going with that. It goes places. One of my favorite movies ever.
The Eclipse (2009)
I consider it the best film ever about ghosts, about what a ghost means, psychically. But that's not the main subject. The main subject is how to overcome mourning and live again. It's about a literature festival on an island, an encounter between a writer and one of the organizers, and, well, not much else. But it's so immensely delicate and touching that it also immediately became one of my top movies ever. And Ciaran Hinds is fantastic.
Mad Detective (2007)
This detective is either crazy, or capable of visualizing people's different personalities as separate persons. It's a cop movie, an action thriller. It's also a fantastic reflection on identity and people's different facets. It's a classic, and it's a must see. Must as in : must.
The Ax (2005)
Costa Gavras. Nuff said ? If not, it's the story of an unemployed chemist seeking a job in our ridiculously competitive society, and his decision to eliminate his competition physically, by luring them with a fake add. The atmosphere of modern economic despair in that movie is fantastically rendered, one very efficient detail being the omnipresence of big advertisement posters with no brands, only the flashy figures of beauty and success that are meant to promote them. It adds the city an eerie symbolic violence and pressure, with just that silent background. Costa Gavras is a big one.
The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
A very beautiful french animated film (that's rare), about a mother investigating the disappearance of her professional cyclist son. It's an almost entirely mute movie, with a style of its own, a thick melancholy and a very humane form of humor, reminiscent of Jacques Tati (Sylvain Chomet, the author, would later adapt an unfilmed Tati script as his next animation, The Illusionist).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAwi8baochk
Saint-Jacques La Mecque (2005)
Is another french movie, by Coline Serreau (the lady who filmed Three Men and a Cradle), about a band of people who do the Saint Jacques de Compostelle pilgrimage together for very diverse reasons. So, it's a film about differences, about knowing each others, and it's full of little nothings. But it's classy and touching, it just works, like few films of this french trend do. Except when they're scripted by Jaoui and Bacri, but that's precisely the next suggestions...
Look at me (2004) and The taste of others (2000)
Two movies by Agnès Jaoui, with Jean-Pierre Bacri. They're their own brand (also check Un air de famille (1996),Cuisine et dépendance (1993) or the lighter Same Old Song (1997), they're perfect movies). Terribly dark, cynical and accurate humor, ruthless and tender satires of society and everyday pettiness. Cruel deconstructions of our dreams, interactions, relationships and tunnel visions. They never leave us intact, and they just obliterate all our excuses for being us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiMh4_bnzns
Kitchen Stories (2003)
A kitchen designer working for a big company installs a tall chair in a poor household's kitchen to study their movements and ameliorate the ergonomics of his company's products. And of course, the most important rule is to not interact with the inhabitants in order to not distort the experiment. Indirectly, maybe accidentally, it's a lovely satire of old school colonial ethnography. Anyway it's a very funny film about haughty dehumanization and rehumanization. And it's a film that doesn't resemble any other, which is always precious by itself.
Actors (2000)
Okay, this movie won't really speak to the non-french public, unless they're really ravenous cinephiles. It's a surreal love letter to the history of french cinema and french actors. All actors play their own roles, in strange dreamlike situations meant to caricature or distort and subvert their images. It's hilarious when know know them and their careers, and it features some very serious comments about their lives and acting decisions. I adore that film, but, again, it may be terribly boring or confusing without some background knowledge on the phenomenal list of classic actors who agreed to participate in it.
Plato's Academy (2009)
A great little Greek film about immigration and national identity. A racist and struggling shopkeeper is infuriated to see some Chinese family open shop on his street, but then, some doubts are suddenly cast on his own possibly Albanian origins, which dangerously threatens his ethnicist arguments, his relationship to his like-minded pals, and his whole thought categories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyLIUw1tirQ
Pulse (2000)
I expected a horror movie, some japanese ghost story. It's got bits of that, and efficient bits at that. But it felt more like a movie about depression, about social alienation in the age of internet. It's more bleak than frightening, and that confused me at first. But with time, its imagery stayed with me, as well as their evocative power : this movie captures something real that would have been hard to describe in a rational tale. And to me, that's the real point of horror fantasy.
Apart from these, I think my favorite movies from the decade are too familiar to the people here to require any introduction. Stuff like Goodbye Lenin, The Station Agent, Lost in Translation, Broken Flowers, [REC], OSS 117, Agora, Burn After Reading, Atonement, Darkness, The Others, Mulholland Drive, The Devil's Backbone, Cowboy Bebop, Master and Commander, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, The Machinist, Mystic River, The Bourne Identity, Spirited Away, City of God, Enemy at the Gates, Hot Fuzz, Pan's Labyrinth, The Lives of Others, The Last King of Scotland, Munich, Kung Fu Hustle, Million Dollar Baby, Shaun of the Dead, Moon, Waltz with Bashir, In Bruges, The Mist... and I expect Memories of Murder and The Pianist to join the list pretty soon.
Edit : And now for the unavoidable woah-didn't-know-they-were-from-that-decade. Already adding Atanajuat, The secret in their eyes and Lost and Delirious. :rolleyes: