Last Ten Films I've Seen

Here are the last ten films I've seen, films I've seen before these viewings are marked with an asteriks (*) and films I saw in a movie theatre are marked with an exclamation point (!):

1) "Les Bonnes Femmes" (1960. France. dir-Claude Chabrol)

2) "The Baader Meinhof Complex" (2008. Germany. dir-Uli Edel)

3) "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" (2009. Sweden. dir-Daniel Alfredson)

4)*! "Time Bandits" (1981. dir-Terry Gilliam)

5) "A Psycho Love Story" (2008. Turkey. dir-Biray Dalkiran)

6) ! "Beginners" (2010. dir-Mike Mills)

7) * "Marie Antoinette" (2006. dir-Sofia Coppola)

8) "Sounds Like Teen Spirit" (2008. doc. dir-Jamie Jay Johnson)

9) "The Big Uneasy" (2010. doc. dir-Harry Shearer)

10) "A Tale of Springtime" (1990. France. dir-Eric Rohmer)

Notes on films on this list:

1) This early French New Wave film about attractive young Parisian women has a very surreal ending which has become a discussion board topic on the IMDB, and after seeing the film I certainly understand why.

2) Perhaps, the most interesting film on the list. The German film, which was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is about the radical left-wing terrorist group RFA, which started in then West Berlin in 1970. The group was responsible for political assasinations, kidnapping and an airplane hijacking that went across three continents, so this story is quite epic in tone and in my view, the film delivers. Interestingly enough, surviing RFA member Horst Mahler has now gone to the far-right, so much so that he was imprisoned (again) in Germany for being a Holocaust denier.

3) The Swedish film based on the last of the Millenium triology novels by Stieg Larsson seems quite timely given the heinous actions of the far-right, radical Christian terrorist suspect in Norway on Friday. Larsson researched far-right groups in Sweden and other Scandanavian countries before his own untimely death in 2004, and that is reflected in the novels he wrote as well as their filmed versions.

4) I forgot how dark the ending of this 'children's film' from Terry Gilliam was. I saw it at the Salem Valley-4 (now Salem Valley-8 back when the film was first released when I was a child).

5) Yes, as one might expect from the film's title (it was actually called "Heaven" in Turkey), it is a very strange movie, but the director's earlier effort "The Abortion" is even more over-the-top than this film.

6) Christopher Plummer will hopefully win an Oscar for his great performance in this film.

7) This Sofia Coppola film seems slightly better with the second viewing.

8) This doc follows teens in Cyprus, Georgia, Bulgaria and Belgium as they try to be the next European teen idol.

9) An interesting environmental doc from Harry Shearer, best-known for voicing Simpsons characters like Principal Seymour Skinner.

10) This is a typical Rohmer film, which means those of us who generally like his films will like it, everyone else might opt to watch infommercials, pro wrestling or radical televangelists praying for a new hot tub.