[272] 18 Foreign Language Films You Really Should See

Den of Geek ran another of their irregular collaborative list articles this week, the brief was 'recommend a foreign film'. I wrestled with the idea for some time, and eventually settled on Man Bites Dog. A film I can watch and rewatch, and be affected by with equal power each time. Weirdly, despite the very casual nature of the whole article, many commenters have criticised the writers for not picking films that 'should' be there - such as Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai), or Park's Oldboy.

I got quite riled, really - these are recommendations, and what is the point of choosing a film that people have probably seen? The point of going for 'recommendations' over 'The ## Best Foreign Films' means you can be a bit more idiosyncratic, and enlightening. Striving for objectivity, or using personal taste as some benchmark for objective quality, is a much trickier business. And one I don't like at all. Tough, as we're getting towards the end of the year, and the end of the decade. So I'm going to have to suffer.

In the meantime, check out what I wrote on Man Bites Dog. It's A Good One; You Should See It.




Just one? Cripes. Where to start? This is almost carte blanche to go art-house, to strike a pose and declare 'This Is The Canon'. Something by Jean Renoir? Tarkovsky? How about À bout de souffle? La jetée? 8 1/2? I'll go against all inner urges to whip out the beret and condescend, and instead highlight - for your esteemed consideration - the 1992 Belgian flick Man Bites Dog.

Exhibited at the same Cannes Film Festival as Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Man Bites Dog shares more than just a canine-derived title, offering a similarly comic look at violence and society, with tricks and quirks borrowed from low-budget indie filmmaking. Man Bites Dog is a black and white mockumentary, in which a group of shoe-string filmmakers follow around a hardened serial killer, Benoît (Benoît Poelvoorde). The film mixes up scenes of Ben's day-to-day criminal activities ('I usually start the month with a postman'), and more biographical sequences with his family and friends.

Poelvoorde's gives a powerhouse performance, carrying the film while creating a uniquely bizarre character. Benoît is a gentleman crook, a charismatic drinking buddy, and an effete pseudo-philosopher quick to wax lyrical on architecture and art. He is also arrogant, bigoted and aggressively self-centered. He plays up to the camera, and before long, the film crew find themselves complicit in his cycle of murders and - most chillingly - a brutal rape. It is a deftly-handled shift from dark comedy to a wholly unsettling commentary on the media's two-way relationship with the horrors of society.

It's a startling piece of work, tinged with a sense of unfulfilled promise, as the three-headed directing-writing-acting team - Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel - have yet to match this early peak in their careers, which, with Belvaux's death in 2006, seems unlikely to ever happen. In Man Bites Dog, however, they produced a film that was cut from the same cloth as Tarantino, offering a quotable, gripping, stylized crime drama, yet did so with an intelligent, polemical edge that their American counterpart has yet to attain.


Read the full article here.

[271] Solipsistic Pop #1

I met a girl recently who, after suffering through a good dozen or so minutes of me gesticulating and effusing all over the place, furrowed her brow slightly and mused '...comics? You mean, they still make them?'. I had to restrain myself from showering her with over-compensatory enthusiasm - judging by the situation, I assumed she wasn't the type to appreciate residual zeal-juice dripping off the ceiling onto her shoes. So I closed up the conversation hastily and a bit defensively, before we embarked on a wholly more suitable ensuing topic (East German Cinema, or something like that).

Let's just say that Solipsistic Pop would have been incredibly handy in that conversation. It is the kind of anthology that should be issued to those that respond to comics talk with a vacant 'Quoi?' expression. It starts with a declaration ('It is time for a new paradigm. A new wave of comics') and ends with a rousing battle cry of 'DO EVERYTHING', and is infused with a sense of enthusiasm and pride that can't help but be infectious.

Edited by How to Date a Girl in Ten Days creator Tom Humberstone, Solipsistic Pop brings together new works from some of the best creators around at the moment - some part of the small press 'scene', some from elsewhere. Most importantly, from an immediate point of view, the book looks, feels, smells wonderful. One of the unfortunate roadblocks for small press creators when courting non-fanatics is the (often necessarily, often consciously) cheap production values of their work. Solipsistic Pop has a great weight and presence to it; Philippa Johnson's intricate, understated cover illustrations and the interior's lush, colour pages certainly make an impression.

But what's colour and lushness without content? What's inside is sweet confection for the eyes. As if M&Ms were made into coloured candy eyedrops. There's a real smattering of talent in Solipsistic Pop, including a few names I've mentioned before. Julia Scheele leads the pack with 'My Year as a Christian', an autobiographical piece that tells of a period of her life lived in Honduras, and her attendance at an evangelical Christian school in Tegucigalpa. Most of Scheele's work (at times in collaboration with Matthew Sheret) that I have seen before has been made up of short subjects, or longer pieces that are more evocative than narrative-driven. Here, her distinctive art and bold approach to page layout are married to a touching little story of growing up, and the role of often painful and awkward experience in forming someone's personality.

Just as impressive is a two-page piece by Howard Hardiman, called 'Bondage'. I've said this before, but it is a joy to see Hardiman's work progress and develop, from Badger and Polaroids From Other Lives onwards. 'Bondage' is more like Polaroids than Badger, with external, poetic narration linked with quite observational, snapshot-style artwork. It is a musing on pain and loss, well-evoked and drawn with grace.

Across the board, Solipsistic Pop is an artists' book, and it is quite staggering in this capacity. Moving from Scheele and Hardiman, there is a great diversity, including the welcoming colour-crayon style of 'Spiderwings' by Rachael Reichert, the pink-blue-green minimalism of Robbie Wilkinson's 'Meanwhile...', and reaching a particularly heady explosion of mad expressionism in the nightmarish 'I Never Knew Her', from Andrew Blundell and writer Mike Rimmer.

Of course, Solipsistic Pop isn't the first (or only) anthology with this underground focus (with a recent, similar example being B.A.S.T.A.R.D.S.) but it stands out thanks to some great design ideas. There is a sly nod to the project's small press roots with twominicomics glued in the inside covers, with both (Anna Saunders' Through the Square Window, and Sarah Gordon's Noses) being sterling examples of how to use the form well.

This is a nice addition, but Solipsistic Pop's real coup comes when you hit the centre spread, and find a pull-out section. Folding out to what approaches magazine-size, this supplement features a handful of pieces that really earn the right to a larger page size. Chief among these is the gob-smacking work from Stephen Collins, a veteran newspaper illustration contributor, with his comics 'Sunday Columnist Adventure Stories' and 'Vague Scientist' best displaying his tight design work and gleefully twisted sense of humour. Likewise, the pull-out features Humberstone's own 'The Adventures of... Chicken With Its Head Cut Off' (a contribution to the How Fucking Romantic project), and Mark Oliver's 'Jailbyrd Jim and the Kurse of the Kapital Kode', which bares its Underground Comix influences with pride.

Worthy of a special mention, however, is 'Ninja Bunny and the Broken World', from Philip Spence; usually working in a square, minicomic medium, Spence's work here dazzles, as the story is writ large, in a style that evokes the vertical, colourful ukiyo-e paintings of Hiroshige's Upright Tokaido series.

Gosh, it's all painfully impressive. It's not without its minor hiccups, however, with some little editing mistakes and errors (that only nitpickers and copywriters would notice, to be fair). But this is mighty product, and the fact that it is the first in a potential series of volumes is tantalising. As it is, it is a triumph and a call to arms that is worthy of support. It bears the gift of comics: the joy of words and artwork collided together to make wonders, dreams and nightmares.


Read more about Solipsistic Pop at their website. The book is available online, or from London's Orbital Comics - where there is also an exhibition of (stunning) original artwork, displayed until the end of the month - as well as at the upcoming Lost Treasures of the Black Heart event in Camden, curated by Josie Long. You can listen to an interview with Humberstone, Scheele, Sheret, and Collins at Panel Borders here.

[270] A Serious Man (dirs. Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009) Review

More words from me spilled about a film I enjoyed. This time, the new effort from the Coen Brothers.




Initially, I thought it seemed like lazy promotional shorthand that A Serious Man, the new film from the Coen Brothers, had been referred to as their 'Jewish film'. However, after watching it, there are few better descriptions that come to mind, as the brothers conjure up another dark, quirky comedy that manages to be both character-driven and oddly metaphorical. A film that is just as much about the Jewish-American experience, as it is about faith, religion and ideology in the face of the bleakness of modern life.

It is all-encompassing in its Jewishness (there are four credited as 'language and liturgy' advisers, and two 'Yiddish translators'), yet still proves to be as humorous, daring and barmy as their best work, with its closest siblings, no doubt, being The Big Lebowski or Barton Fink.


Read the full article here.

[269] Devi / Goddess (dir. Satyajit Ray, 1960) DVD Review

Here's another DVD review from Screenjabber, this time of Satiyajit Ray's Devi (Goddess).




Bengali auteur Satyajit Ray followed up his ambitious, landmark Apu Trilogy in 1960 with Devi (Goddess), a relatively low-key, hemmed-in affair that exhibits a sharper edge to the filmmaker's art. Adapted from a story by Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee, which was in turn inspired by the work of Nobel Prize-awardee Rabindranath Tagore, Devi focuses on familiar themes of both Tagore and Ray's work, such as the collision between the modern and traditional worlds. However, here, the over-riding tone is darker and more caustic, as Devi more concretely plays out the conflict between religious fanaticism and rational thought.


Read the full article here.

[268] Lynch (one) DVD Review

A couple of DVD reviews I wrote for Screenjabber have finally been put online. Here is the first, a piece on a documentary about David Lynch, and the creative processes behind Inland Empire. I wrote this back in June.




David Lynch's films are often inscrutable, inspired and indulgent in nature. However, the work seems at odds with the unassuming demeanour of the director himself, who stands by his self-written, cheeky biography of 'Filmmaker. Born Missoula, MT. Eagle Scout.' Lynch (One) is an impressionistic, artful sort of documentary, directed by an anonymous band of filmmakers under the moniker blackANDwhite, which attempts to get to grips with the artist and his work.


Read the full article here.

[267] The First Day of the Rest of Your Life / Le premier jour du reste de ta vie (The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (2008) Review

Even though I didn't think this film was that good, I was completely set on fire by its cultural aspects. As I say in the review, The First Day of the Rest of Your Life is teeming with American cultural references. There are two sequences where characters quote from Hollywood films, but not in English, in French, from the dub.

I am now almost a term into my MA in History of Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck. So far, I have assumed that my research project would continue the work on translation theory that I have previously done in a literary field, but instead focusing on filmic translation - namely subtitling and dubbing. Seeing this film, especially with its display of dubbing and cultural markers, has given me quite a lot to think on - and probably a direction to pursue.




The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (Le premier jour du reste de ta vie) is an award-winning, French family comedy-drama with a twist. Attempting to defy formula, writer-director Rémi Bezançon has structured the film in a chapter-like fashion, with each segment corresponding to five different days over a twelve year period, charting the lives of the 5-strong Duval family. Running with the title concept, each chapter relates to a different integral moment in the characters lives - be it eldest son Albert's (Pio Marmaï) moving away from home, or daughter Fleur's (Déborah François) sixteenth birthday - while navigating the poles of melodrama and nostalgia that seem endemic to the genre.

While the film has a pleasant, easy charm, the whole project gives off a sense of the contrived. Moments of levity and comedy can often be sickly sweet, moments of trauma are sudden and heavy-handed, and emotions are always foregrounded, seemingly without regard for the logic of character interiority. This makes the characters feel a little schizophrenic, and their world feels squeaky clean, even a little claustrophobic - with the polished, wistful cuddliness of a Richard Curtis film. Although, the broad canvas gives Bezançon the opportunity to bring up plenty of key family moments, that are picked and presented for maximum sentimentalism - with the death of a family dog being the starting point for a collective lifetime of loves, deaths and relationships.


Read the full article here.

[266] Laura Howell: Comic Pie / Tales from the Crust

I'm still rummaging through the pile of comics that I've picked up over the last couple of months. I'm hoping to eventually highlight a few, and post comments on them. Bear with me.

I met Laura Howell at the MCM Expo, and was immediately taken with her two minicomics Comic Pie and Tales from The Crust. Not that I tend to judge books by their covers, but, well, that's exactly what I did. They're awesome, humorous evocations of both EC Tales from the Crypt and Action Comics style cover images. Check them out!

Dodgy former photo, I know, but wow. The two books cherry-pick pieces from Howell's two Strip-A-Day Spectacular projects, from January 2007 and earlier this year respectively. Something immediately noticeable as you flick through the books is how versatile she is as an artist and storyteller. She easily slips from style-to-style, bringing intelligence and an often twisted sense of humour to a lot of the strips. Most are short, one-page pieces, but there are a couple of longer stories, such as the tale of a rat who discovers the meaning of life, or an autobiographical reminiscence about video shops and horror films.

Both books are chock-full of bonkers, brilliant stuff. It was only afterwards that I found out that Howell is a full-time contributor to The Beano, and created The Mighty M, about an aspiring rock band, that was my favourite strip in The (now defunct) DFC. Wholly impressive stuff! I can't wait to see more from her.

To find out more about Laura Howell, visit her site here, or read her webcomic about The Bizarre Adventures of Gilbert and Sullivan here.