Let's have a thread in which we share lesser known movie we've enjoyed...

Let's have a thread in which we share lesser known movie we've enjoyed, maybe with a picture and a short description/review.

>Black Mountain Side
>Right between The Thing and, in a way, The Blair Witch Project, shot with a beautiful photography and with a very good camera sense. The plot develops with the kind of dream logic you'd expect from a movie on arctic isolation and terror, the lack of violent and hectic scenes makes it all feel like a series of after-images after you've waken up from a nightmare. Recc'd, let's say 6.5-7/10

bump for interest

Another rec of mine

>Evil Dead Trap
>From the tail-end of the gore golden age of Japanese horror, a weird, cheap supernatural film inspired by the Italian Giallos, especially Argento's. You can see it in the camerawork, in the soundtrack, even in the choice of mutilation. Recc'd, 5.5-6/10

Come on guys, I know you can share interesting stuff

Bump

Just now turning on my PC to check my seen-movies list
In the meanwhile bump

Well here goes
>Trash(2014)
>Brazilian comedy-drama about trashpicker kids finding proof of corrupt politician's activities and stuck between trying to expose it and staying alive
Really enjoyed it and it doesn't drag on so i'd give it a 7.5-8
Gotta find more South-American kino

If you're up for older stuff, check out this

>Antonio Das Mortes
>Brazilian movies from the sixties about the struggle between bands of poor farmers and rejects, led by warrior-saint figures, and mercenary troops hired by a local landowner. Very metaphysical, it reminded me a lot of Herzog's Aguirre and Parajanov's movies: weird scenes, skits almost, coupled with folk music and silent, still tableaus of the actors in pose. It's not a chore, though. Very fluid experience. I'd say, 8/10

Thanks, will check

Spic shit is fucking trash

B8 but it's ok since it bumps the thread

Not even trying, I feel annoyed at how low intensity this is

>Custodes Bestiae
>Italian horror movie, never been translated. One of the best movies with "classical" horror format of enquiring progressively too deep until the end revelation, I believe the budget was sub 2k (if even that) but it doesn't show. Rec'd, if only for the fact that it is a wonderful lesson in achieving much with very little. 6.5/10

Bad Boy Bubby
Australian, dark, funny, touching

wow, another indie shitter with static camera? sign me the fuck up!

A famous Japanese movie, not known that fairly well outside

>Japanese government sends a 9 grade class to a remote island and students have to kill each other off to be the last survivor.
>stars takeshi kitano
>dark, gripping and enjoyable

battle royale is a well known masterpiece, you're shitting this thread up and it's not worth bumping for.

>Electric Dragon 80.000v
>Noise punk musical about two lightning-powered "super" humans fighting for their way of life in the middle of urban Tokyo. The kind of fun, hyperkinetic action that hasn't been around for too long. Great visuals, one of the best punk-ish soundtracks ever produced. It's a personal favourite, so let's say 9.25/10

Happier now?

I watched Black Mountain Side after a recc from Sup Forums, ended up hating it. The acting was absolutely abysmal, which I think was my biggest problem. No one felt natural, everyone felt like actors, if that makes sense. I felt like I was watching an early rehearsal rather than a film. It was awkward and stilted and not in any kind of 'dreamy quality'. The deer god looked awful, too. I get what they were going for, but if you're physical prop looks that poor, keep in shadow because otherwise, that's all it'll look like - a physical prop.

The one thing I liked was that one line the deer god speaks near the end, about the stars 'Do you want to know how I see them?' was legitimately creepy and hit the right vein of cosmic horror I feel the movie was going for. Even in an overall bad story, there's one nugget of goodness. I wouldn't call it worth the price of admission, but that was cool and I feel like I should give the movie something.

Tarantino listed this as his #1 movie of the last 20 years or something. It's pretty known, especially since everyone got all upset yelling about how Hunger Games ripped it off.

This really should be essential viewing for every weeb who thinks japan is a magical place and not a completely fucked up backwards society.

Red Road

This is a little drama movie about a chick, but it's a little dark, and it's slightly mysterious from what I can remember. It's about a woman who stalks this guy because he killed her kid in a drunk driving accident, and some other shit goes down. It's okay, 3/5 if you're into drama stuff. It's also a British movie

Hunter / Prey

Zero budget SF which turns out to be surprisingly good. Watch it without spoilers to enjoy the twist(s)

This film takes place in the same universe as Jin roh: the wolf brigade

It is VERY fucking weird though. Be warned.

eh it's not like i'll ever watch these japanese extravaganzaz, shinya tsukamoto is as far as i go without getting terminally bored.

Downloaded it a while ago after a rec in a similar thread, I'll watch it soon. Shame I think I've spoiled myself the big twist(s)

Well, it's not as weird as Tetsuo but still the second best thing Japanese cyberpunk ever did. Suit yourself tho, your loss.

well japanese never did good non-anime cyberpunk. tetsuo is not really cyberpunk.

Well, it's about the radical transformation of humankind in the wake of the first true man/machine interface, as well as the consequences for social life, culture, quality of life and the environment. If that's not the transhumanist conceptual platform from which every cyberpunk film/vidja/book starts, then I don't know what cyberpunk really is.
And they did though, Death Powder, Rubber Lover and 964 Pinocchio are great.

This movie is somewhat well known, but go watch it if you haven't seen it. Seriously one of the best movies made to date.

It's about a girl and her young brother who get lost in the Australian Outback

Burst City and Halber Mensch too, I forgot. They're directed by the Electric Dragon guy and they're a fucking blast.

Was meaning to get into Roeg. That a good starting place?

Yes, other good movies to watch would be Performance, or Don't Look Now.

Walkabout is easily my favorite of the three, Walkabout feels very idiosyncratic and a lot of the cinematography is classic Roeg.

Agree with you (and, apparently, anyone who has seen the film) on the acting - I wouldn't go as far as to say it's atrocious, but that's probably because I don't care about plot and acting as much as I do cinematography, which is why I liked Black Mountain Side.
What really bugged me was the lack of humanity and emotional reactions of the characters, which I'd say it's more the script's fault than anything else.

Talking about the Deer God: unlike you I appreciated the spotty, shitty prop they used because it fits my idea of a Lovecraftian, cosmic entity much more than other iconographies. I've always thought they existed only partially in this reality, overlapping imperfectly with out set of dimension and conceptual categories and thus giving to our senses horrendous, mismatched monsters to behold - just because we approsimate very badly what we can only conceive in part, and so on. The Deer God was very representative of this, some kind of mental/cultural placeholder for a much more unfathomable figure.
The line you quoted was a bit of a letdown to me, a cop out. Not as interesting as some of the other lines in the conversation. Thinking about it later, though, it's kind of coherent if you're willing to explain the ending of the film as the Door God being somehow trapped and entombed in the structure, thus needing to manipolate those around him into blowing it open in order to be free again. A bit cheeky, but it's fun to think that he had to fake omnipotence in order to achieve what he couldn't. on his own.

A friend of mine repeatedly told me that Don't Look Now is one of his finest movies, so I'll probably get that and your rec. Much appreciated.

on the theme of Outback movies. Wake in Fright is my recommendation. Not sure how well known it is but its an excellent story of an every-man spiralling out of control in the lawless and alcohol soaked outback. Saw it a while back without any knowledge of it before hand, the poster just caught my eye. Really strange and disturbing at times.

it's funny how everyone who loves cure, bright future and pulse all have never seen this even though it's by far his best work

Geat movie I don't see mentioned a lot. About the travels of a recovering drug addict. Billy Crudup is a really underrated actor. Jack Black is great in it and Michael Shannon has a funny small part as well.

>man machine interface

interface in cyberpunk means something tangible software-wise, not simple metal fetishism. tetsuo is simply punk, crust punk, whatever. in essence it's a little fun surreal flick and i have no idea how in the hell did people start to relating it to cyberpunk in every sort of concept. if we take your premise then every time someone gets stabbed in the back he becomes a cyborg.

Come on man, don't act this dense. There's a difference between getting shot and getting infected by the machine-virus, dreaming of the world being encompassed by wires and steel, becoming a new form of "life". I'll grant you that Tsukamoto probably wouldn't agree with the label, but he said time and time again in interviews and writings that he felt his movie was making a statement on the new urban/technological/metropolitan condition of Man and its effects on the nature omf what it means to be human - that plus the imagery is enough to warrant the cyberpunk tag, even though it shouldn't be thought of as some kind fo strict qualification, rather the possibility to interpret the movie in an additional way.

>getting infected by the machine virus

i'm talking about method of presentation in tetsuo and the focus on the actual 'science' part which is around zero. i'm sure your interpretation sounds fine and dandy if you ignore actual imagery of the movie. plus the movie was made in the eighties when cyberpunk 1.0 was around and that sort of work should have had a contrast between slum/corporation, cyberspace, any sort of modification that does not boil down to the dick-drill.

i have no idea what tsukamoto is like or what does he say but i like when far greater artists than him, like lynch, simply say that they put something in the movie because it looks cool, rather than going on a tirade how it's a commentary on yada yadda.

Pic related. Fun, unknown RDJ movie from the early 2000s

Mad Love(1935)

Apparently Citizen Kane is a rip off of this movie but I think that's just Pauline Kael talking shit. Also as it own it's a decent horror film.

Peter Lorre is also pretty good in this.

Aw, come the fuck on. Tell me Necromancer was focused on science rather than the metaphysics of getting so deeply entwined with the machine (the deck) as to become an entirely new form of life, between humanity and machinedom (the hacker). The rest of the Sprawl trilogy, too, there's even talk of fucking Voodoo Loas to signify the change from human-thought based AIs to self perpetuating, alien thought protocols/life forms.

If we're talking about imagery, there's no more stripped down way to represent the start of the cyberpunk singularity than the opening scene with the Metal Fetishist: the techno-worshipper ascending to a new stagte by merging with the sacred object, cutting himself open and pushing it withi himself.
Let's also talk about the scene where he gets anally pump-raped by the ginoid, or the scene where metal literally envelops the world, or the final scene, where they say something along the lines of "our love will rust the entire fucking world".
Cyberpunk is about humans becoming machines, the shift from anthropocene to technocene: the slums, the whole Cyberpunk 2020 package, Gibson and Stephenson - that's all the accidental dressings of how they imagined the world would culturally (and economically, socially...) react to this paradigm shift. Tsukamoto is no different, only constitutively different in the aesthetics he used.

An honestly, an "artist's" (obscene word) idea of what is cool is much more complicated and nuanced than what the word seems to imply, being informed by their idea of what they want to make, the cultural milieu they're immersed in, the subconscious memories left by other movies and books. That's a disingenous argument.

neuromancer, and other gibson's pre-postcyberpunk works are noir capers coated in pretty creative use of adjectives.

if you want, tetsuo is much closer to biopunk. all those things about vooodoo gibson mentions come AFTER mainstays of cyberpunk 1.0 get established and are just additional coating.

the aesthetics you mention is my point as well and the reason why i do not consider tetsuo cyberpunk, other works of that era pay attention to how these aesthetics come about and most importantly - cyberpunk of that era is not surrealistic in any way, abstract cyberspace landscapes were never meant to evoke any sort of surrealism, on the contrary, they were attempting to bring to life a language of code but without any sort of poetic baggage tsukamoto carries.

You may have a point in your last paragraph, though it appears to me the discussion may boil down to the question of what is cyberpunk - and I'll admit my idea is much more of a category in retrospective than the idea most of the Western creators of cyberpunk shared and you exposed. You know more about the chrnology than I do.
Still, I don't think difformity with what cyberpunk meant around that era is enough of a reason to not apply the contemporary category of cyberpunk (which, I guess, is how I define what I've written above, though I may be full of shit) to any cultural work - it's not historical, of course, but neither was the aim of the classification when I threw it out. If we want to talk about it like that, you're probably in the right.

I'm not the kind of guy to say shit like "let's agree to disagree", but it's pretty clear there's not much room for persuasion on either side. For what's worth, I enjoyed the conversation. Mind dropping a few titles of books you feel are the works that founded Cyberpunk as you think about it?

foundation - only gibson is important, maybe snow crash as an addendum, very few people read bethke. so basically sprawl trilogy + snow crash

post cyberpunk is boring stuff, like pattern recognition etc but nowadays there are good writers like bacigalupi - windup girl (biopunk) and i'd especially reccommend lifecycle of software objects by chiang as the best sci fi of the last x number of years

i think george martin described neuromancer as just another caper novel until you actually take a look at the prose which is basically aesthetics and aesthetics in cyberpunk is derived through process of fetishization which weirdly enough i don't think tetsuo has enough to be considered cyberpunk - it's not methodical enough in its appliance but in that chaos it's far more artistic than every author i've mentioned - as writers, as good literature, they're, to simply put it - hacks. but sometimes they coat their tech-noir with just enough pop-sci ideas to make it interesting.

>being chased by a fictional character
This movie is fucking crazy

Only books I haven't read on your list are Bacigalupi's and Chiang's tho I've been meaning to get into the former for while.
I'd say your interpretation of what cyberpunk prose (and by extension, every cyberpunk writer) is mainly on point. Didn't think about Tetsuo and its relationship to the aesthetics of the genre in those terms.
Have you read Dreams of Amputation by Shipley and Blindisght by Watts?

i did read blindsight, watts is okay when doing environmental descriptions, can depict quite alien landscapes but his characterization is nonexistent, he has this novel (forgot the name) set underwater that spectacularly falls apart in the end because he can't craft characters at all.

i think when it comes to genre fiction, epic fantasy has far better writers than sci-fi.

I'll check it out. Always on the lookout for more snowcore.

...

>Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016)

Iraq war drama about a soldier named billy who comes back home with his unit so that they could be paraded around the country to bump up support for the war. Really underrated and it was my personal best for 2016. Worth a watch. Has a very Flags of our Fathers feel to it.

Police question a man they believe is connected to a murder.

I really enjoyed this. It's a war drama about two English and three German soldiers who shoot each other's planes down over the Norwegian mountains during WWII and have to survive together in a cabin.

That'd be Starfish. Didn't get to the end for the same reason, that really isn't his strong suit. The reflective section at the end of Blindsight was alright though, a decent piece on the fragility of the barrier between the concept of "human" and "alien".

>i think when it comes to genre fiction, epic fantasy has far better writers than sci-fi.

Not exactly a tall order, if you take Wolfe away from science fiction.

you're right, wolfe (probably my favourite writer) does write sci fi. try glen cook, first book of black company, i love it for its subdued prose, it gradually falls apart in later books.