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Comments: If You Want to be Understood...Listen

Summary: 4 interlocking stories all connected by a single gun all converge at the end and reveal a complex and tragic story of the lives of humanity around the world and how we truly aren't all that different. In Morocco, a troubled married couple are on vacation trying to work out their differences. Meanwhile, a Moroccan herder buys a rifle for his sons so they can keep the jackals away from his herd. A girl in Japan dealing with rejection, the death of her mother, the emotional distance of her father, her own self-consciousness, and a disability among many other issues, deals with modern life in the enormous metropolis of Tokyo, Japan. Then, on the opposite side of the world the married couple's Mexican nanny takes the couple's 2 children with her to her son's wedding in Mexico, only to come into trouble on the return trip. Combined, it provides a powerful story and an equally powerful looking glass into the lives of seemingly random people around the world and it shows just how connected we really are.

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Comments: Could you kill your best friend?

Summary: Forty-two delinquent students, three days, one deserted Island: welcome to Battle Royale. A group of delinquent students from a Japanese high school have been forced by legislation to compete in a new forum of reality television.The students are each given a bag with a randomly selected weapon and a few rations of food and water and sent off to kill each other in a no-holds-barred (with a few minor rules) game to the death, which means that the students have three days to kill each other until one survives--or they all die. The movie focus on a few of the students and how they cope. Some decide to play the game like the psychotic Kiriyama or the sexual Mistuko, while others like the heroes of the movie--Shuya, Noriko, and Kawada--are trying to find a way to get off the Island without violence. However, as the numbers dwell down lower and lower on an hourly basis, is there any way for Shuya and classmates to survive?

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Comments: After having dinner with Jose's family Nina asks, "Is it always like that? Did you grow up with that?" "With what?" asks Jose.

"Joy? Love?"

That joy and love was palpable through every minute of this sad and touching story, written and played very well.

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Summary: An international soccer star is on his way to sign a multi-million dollar contract when a series of events unfold that bring his career to an abrupt end. A beautiful waitress, struggling to make it in New York City, discovers something about herself that she's unprepared for. In one irreversible moment, their lives are turned upside down... until a simple gesture of kindness brings them both together, turning an ordinary day to an unforgettable experience.

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Comments: They figured he was a lazy time wasting slacker. They were right.

Summary: When "The Dude" Lebowski is mistaken for a millionaire Lebowski, two thugs urinate on his rug to coerce him into paying a debt he knows nothing about. While attempting to gain recompense for the ruined rug from his wealthy counterpart, he accepts a one-time job with high pay-off. He enlists the help of his bowling buddy, Walter, a gun-toting Jewish-convert with anger issues. Deception leads to more trouble, and it soon seems that everyone from porn empire tycoons to nihilists want something from The Dude.

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Comments: Bai Xuemei, recently graduated from college, is unwittingly sold, not by her family but by her friends, to a villager deep in the bowels of mountainous rural China ... in the 1990s! This is not a documentary. It's more a typical horror film pacing through the suffocating psychological terror of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre without any blood, only psychological and physical abuse, including rape—father and mother hold her down while her purchaser rapes her. Ouch!

China is a vast expanse and this film's cinematography captures that space wonderfully. Bai Xuemei is so far up in the mountains it is simply too far to run to safety.

Lu Huang who plays Bai Xuemei is the only professional actor in the film. The rest of the cast, from the shopkeeper to the Village Chief, are actual villagers. When the police arrive to make a rescue and the whole village gangs up on them demanding the girl repay the 7,000 they paid for her if she is to return home, it rings with a frightening authenticity. I watched this film feeling that with 5 minutes left to go she would be rescued despite everything suggesting otherwise.

It's not that kind of film. Blind Mountain is an essay on the collision of traditional and contemporary culture. It's not pedantic, nor is it belittling to the realities of the culture at its source, but it's hard not to see it that way, especially through twentieth-century, western eyes. The film does a remarkable job of showing that it's not a matter of simply enforcing contemporary law. It's much deeper and difficult than that.

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Summary: Blind Mountain follows young woman, Bai Xuemei, in the early 1990s who recently graduated from college and attempts to find work to help pay for her brother's education. In the process, she is drugged, kidnapped and sold as a bride to a villager in the Qinling Mountains of China's Shaanxi province. Trapped in the fiercely traditional town, the young woman finds that her avenues of escape are all blocked. As she searches for allies, including a young boy, a school teacher and a mailman, she suffers from being raped by her "husband" and continued beatings at the hands of the villagers, her husband, and her husbands' parents.

Like Li's previous film, Blind Shaft, which dealt with the notoriously dangerous mining industry, Blind Mountain turns a sharply critical eye towards another one of China's continuing social problems, this time the illegal sex slave trade.

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Comments: Dreamy, Romantic, Tender. OK We're been given those on the poster. They are not the words I would use. Instead I'd go with: Adorable, Sweet, Sensitive, Well-acted, Well-directed, Well-written. It was a JOY to watch this film.

It took me a few minutes to warm up to the characters, but only a few. We meet the two girls first, a girly-girl who seems to be in control, and a brooding follower. Not much to go on with that. Girly girl spots sensitive boy and wants him, but insists that brooding girl act as the go-between.

The film focuses on the friendship that develops between brooding girl and sensitive boy after that. Brooding girl becomes razor-sharp, adorably mixed up commando teen when paired up with sensitive boy who has fallen in love with her.

This film did a remarkable job of capturing teens as they are: insecure and passionate; as easily hurt as they are to fall in love. They provoke each other without knowing why. One of the many highlights of this film is when the boy and girl, when they've run out of verbal ammunition, begin a shoving match. It goes on for some time and then the director simply cuts to a scene of the two of them straightening up their surroundings together. The director makes many decisions like that to keep us focused on the big picture: (stuff) happens, and then something else happens. There's no stopping it.

I have to point out that watching this Taiwanese film with English subtitles added quite a bit to the adorableness of it. For example, after brooding girl sets up sensitive boy with girly-girl, who knows he likes brooding girl, (you have to see the film to see how that happens), sensitive boy walks girly-girl home. After an uncomfortably done good-bye, girly-girl calls out after sensitive boy as he's about to mount his bicycle and says: "Zhang Shihao, (pause) can you date with me?" I don't know exactly what was said in Taiwanese, but that odd translation seemed to capture the moment perfectly.

I smiled from ear to ear while watching this movie from the time sensitive boy was introduced until the very end. This is an exceptionally well done film.

Summary: An is-she-or-isn't-she gay comedy focused on a Taiwanese teen, the boy she might like, and the girl she may love.
Plot Synopsis:

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Comments: Everyone has one special thing

Summary: Even if the notorious 1970s porn-filmmaking milieu doesn't exactly turn you on, don't let it turn you off to this movie's extraordinary virtues, either. Boogie Nights is one of the key movies of the 1990s, and among the most ambitious and exuberantly alive American movies in years. It's also the breakthrough for an amazing new director, whose dazzling kaleidoscopic style here recalls the Robert Altman of Nashville and the Martin Scorsese of GoodFellas. Although loosely based on the sleazy life and times of real-life porn legend John Holmes, at heart it's a classic Hollywood rise-and-fall fable: a naive, good-looking young busboy is discovered in a San Fernando Valley disco by a famous motion picture producer, becomes a hotshot movie star, lives the high life, and then loses everything when he gets too big for his britches, succumbs to insobriety, and is left behind by new times and new technology. Of course, it ain't exactly A Star Is Born or Singin' in the Rain. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (in only his second feature!) puts his own affectionately sardonic twist on the old showbiz biopic formula: the ambitious upstart changes his name and achieves stardom in porno films as "Dirk Diggler." Instead of drinking to excess, he snorts cocaine (the classic drug of '70s hedonism); and it's the coming of home video (rather than talkies) that helps to dash his big-screen dreams. As for the britches ... well, the controversial "money shot" explains everything. And the cast is one of the great ensembles of the '90s, including Oscar nominees Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore, Mark Wahlberg (who really can act--from the waist up, too!), Heather Graham (as Rollergirl), William H. Macy, John C. Reilly, and Ricky Jay. --Jim Emerson

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