ABCs at the Movies: The Doubles Round!

[southendmd]

AKA We Are Getting Married.  Norwegian.

IMDb:  Petter and Kari meet, fall in love, and get married. But it is not easy for a young couple of limited means to find a place to live. Moving in with Petter's parents proves impossible, Kari can't endure her mother-in-law's constant interference. Trying to build a house of their own is halted by so much red tape, and affordable rentals is hard to come by. When Kari gets pregnant things doesn't get any easier.

Keyword:  creating a home

[Sophia]

W as in Waterworld (1995)




(Wikipedia) An antihero, known only as "the Mariner" (Kevin Costner), is a drifter who sails the Earth in his trimaran. He comes into an atoll seeking to trade his dirt, which is now a precious commodity. There, it is revealed that he is a mutant with webbed feet and gills, a new step in evolution to accommodate the changes in climate. The atollers, fearful of him, vote to "recycle" him by drowning him in a yellow sludge-like brine pool. At this moment, pirates known as "Smokers" arrive in a raid on the atoll, as they have been tipped off by a Smoker spy posing as a trader (Gerard Murphy), known as "the Nord."

Helping people to find a true home.

[memento]

IMDB: Melanie Carmichael, an up and rising fashion designer in New York, has gotten almost everything she wished for since she was little. She has a great career and the JFK-like husband of New York City. But when he proposes to her, she doesn't forget about her family back down South - and, more importantly, her husband back there, who refuses to divorce her ever since she sent divorce paper for almost five years. To settle matters straight, she decides to go to the south quick and make him sign the papers. But when things don't turn out the way she planned them out, she realizes that what she had before in the south was far more perfect than the life she had in New York City.

[Fran]

Also known as:  Evening of Roses
                       Night Rose

Plot keywords include:  Love | Landlord | Home

From Wikipedia:   A man named Ke Zhi Hong (Wallace Chung) moves into a new apartment. His initially thorny landlord, whose Chinese name sounds similar to the words for "Evening Rose," Xia Mei Gui (Ruby Lin), lets him rent one room of the apartment because her dog likes him. She reminds him of his dream girl from his university years, who was his senior by one year and taught him to dance the Jewish dance "Evening Rose."

He gradually falls in love with his landlord, but he continues to dwell on his memories of the past "Evening Rose." In the end, he realizes that he remembers the past "Evening Rose" because the name "Evening Rose" reminds him of the feeling of love, and he falls into the arms of the present "Evening Rose."

[southendmd]

A black-and-white silent from the very early days.

IMDb:  Taken in a country chicken yard. A little child is feeding the chickens, when a tramp approaches and attempts to steal one. He is driven away by the farmer. Very realistic.

[Fran]

Please post an unplayed film that
can be associated with the word "snow."

[memento]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3DLEvMPCyo[/youtube]

From IMDB: When I think of this now, 12 years after I saw this movie for the first time, I can probably compare it somehow with "Fargo". The same gloomy colors, the same snow everywhere, the same slow motion of people dozing in winter like bears. The same sad realism in all the scenes, including the car chases, the same end. And also -- and this is the most amazing of it all, in my opinion -- the same feeling of light you experience at the end, despite the end which can hardly be called happy.

This film also has a winning mixture of criminal plot and love triangle. (Remember "Heat"?). A young girl is waiting for her lover in the snowy Yalta, and he comes one night too late because of the storm -- and in this one night she meets a young musician who offers her to spend the night in his apartment. (Mind you, this is a Soviet film -- there are no sex scenes at all in the movie, but the simplest gestures become erotic as they are real, as we all have been in those situations of late teens who just discover each other). Her lover is an underworld tycoon who manages to plan some more of his dark affairs, to mislead the KGB trail and to entertain the girl -- he saw for everything but the musician. Clever, rich, attractive, charming when needed (although extremely cruel when needed as well), brilliantly educated erudite -- he can do nothing against a young boy who has nothing but a pure heart and a love this heart can generate. And as usual in the love triangles, it does not end well for the involved sides -- for some lethally, for some with awful soul scars...

=aside= Fran
Cool theme.

[Fran]

From IMDb:  BARAN centers around 17-year-old Latif (Hossein Abedini), the cook and gofer at a Teheran construction site. He's initially angered when he is replaced by Rahman (Zahra Bahrami), the son of an injured Afghani co-worker, until he discovers that his colleague's son is actually his daughter in disguise. Most of the workers at the site are illegal immigrants from Afghanistan (Afghan refugees are legally blocked from entering the Iranian job market), and are in continual jeopardy of losing their jobs in the event of a sudden illness or a sudden visit from government building inspectors. Latif has discovered Rahman's true identity by the time the inevitable moment of crisis arrives and surrenders to an unrequited crush on Baran, propelling him towards a selflessness which at first seems surprising, as Latif is seen as hot-tempered and a bit selfish at the beginning of BARAN.

Latif's eye-opening introduction to the desperate conditions in which she lives definitely makes this transformation more plausible. The ever-present subtext -- the state of life in Taliban-era Afghanistan, the exodus of the Afghan work force from the country, and the plight of Afghan refugees abroad -- gives the romantic side of the story urgency, and perhaps makes the rather unreal Latif seem considerably more realistic or even politically daring. The camerawork throughout BARAN is also exceptional -- the construction site is captured in great detail through the graceful and uncluttered cinematography (by Mohammad Davudi), the harshness of Teheran's environment (this film features some of the most effective use of rain, snow and fog this side of a Kurosawa epic) is casually ever-present, and serves to underscore the intensity of the story, and the scenes set in the Afghan refugee settlement are uncomplicated in their minimal beauty, and are consistently devastating in their emotional power. In any case, BARAN is an excellent hour and a half that qualifies as one of the finest of the recent wave of Iranian dramas.

=reply= Sandy
Thanks.

And I love the way you highlighted the word "snow."  It's perfect!

[southendmd]

IMDb:  This mostly unrelated sequel to Cat People (1942) has Amy, the young daughter of Oliver and Alice Reed. Amy is a very imaginative child who has trouble differentiating fantasy from reality, and has no friends her own age as a result. She makes an imaginary friend though, her father's dead first wife Irena. At about the same time, she befriends Julia Farren, an aging reclusive actress who is alienated from her own daughter Barbara.   


Key word:  tire snow chain.

[memento]

From IMDB: This is the film you have to stay with, let it pull you in, listen to what and how the guests at the party say, how they communicate. Pay attention to the body languages, to the looks at their faces when they drift away from the light, laugh, and music of the present to the long gone but never in fact left most precious memories where the Dead of the title are not dead but forever young and so alive. If you do, you will be awarded with the final scene of such emotional power and impact that it will always stay with you. It will break your heart to pieces, pull them together and put it back transfixed. The film as well as Joyce's story centers on Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann as James Joyce's alter ego gave a very moving understated performance) as one of the party guests who arrives with his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston). Gabriel is still in love, feels close connection to and fascinated with her. It is after the party, he discovers that even after many years of closeness, he does not know all about her past, her pains, her regrets, and the unforgettable emotions and loss she had lived through as a young girl, and he is no part of. For the first time, he looks at her and thinks of her not as the indelible part of his existence but as another human being with her own inner world, her own loneliness and sadness, and for the first time, "a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul." It is he who narrates the final most powerful and profound lines of the story: "Snow is general all over Ireland. . . falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."