Used to.

It is still weird seeing anime screening in mainstream cinemas, this wasn’t the case 20 years ago. Very cool that it happened.

A few obscure national film makers, but you probably need to understand the language to really get their movies, so that makes sense.

Also, feel free to come to !moviesandtv@lemm.ee to come talk about movies!

I have a soft spot for Jee-woon Kim, a Korean filmmaker probably best know for The Good, the Bad, and the Weird or I Saw the Devil. He’s gotten some big recognition, and even made an American debut with a regrettably forgettable post-gubernatorial Arnold Schwarzenegger movie (The Last Stand).

But in the 2000s, he made a string of really phenomenal genre flicks (the two mentioned above, as well as A Bittersweet Life and A Tale of Two Sisters) that got me into Korean cinema even moreso than Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho, who I was also paying close attention to at the start.

His career has been less consistent though. The Arnold movie and his adaptation of Illang we’re both misfires. He does get good performances from his actors, and he can elevate a good script to it’s maximum potential, but he doesn’t do the same for bad scripts. I think his greatest strength though is his visual flair, and that just doesn’t generate as much attention as his contemporaries.

I really like Jim Jarmusch. He did Coffee and Cigarettes, Ghost Dog, and Dead Man (among other things).

I know most people have heard of him but I like his stuff.

Maybe I’m not old enough to have been part of the discussions about Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movies, but one of my all-time favorites which I’ve never heard spoken except by my aunt who showed it to me is Joe vs the Volcano.

It’s very heavy-handed in its symbolism and story-telling, but damn is it effective.

Man working dead-end job in a no-window office building with shitty fluorescent light bulbs gets told by a doctor on a billionaire’s payroll that he’s going to die because of a fake disease. Said billionaire suddenly shows up and offers to pay “dying” man in a few weeks of luxury the likes of which “dying” man has never seen in exchange for convincing a small relatively uncontacted tribe on a remote island to allow billionaire to mine for computer manufacturing resources on their island. All along the way, “dying” man meets different versions of the same woman whose joyfulness is inversely proportional to how tied to the Things of Man she is.

It’s fuckin great.

Oh, yeah, and that movie Disney would prefer to pretend they never funded: A Bug’s Life.

Pen-ek Ratanaruang. He is a Thai director, and he has made some excellent films. His most recent few are a bit too ‘artsy’ for me, but “Monrak Transistor”, " Talok 69", and “Last Life in the Universe” are some of my favorite movies.