Some Recent Additions -- Part 1

The following are some recent additions to the My Favourite Pictures list. Nanga Fakir exhorts his friends and readers of this blog to put them on their playlists, for needless to say, he thinks each of them (without exception) is a veritable masterpiece.

This post also highlights his growing fascination with movies coming out of places like Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong and the new movement of extreme cinema.

He also wants those interested to note that the such movies are not for all people's taste and that some could find them positively repulsive and distasteful. He politely asks such people to jump out of the window and take a dip in the manhole.

Visitor Q (Japanese): Made by Takashi Miike, the Japanese director who has been described by Quentin Tarantino as the one of the greatest living film directors of our times, this film is a perverted, bizarre take on creating harmony in a remarkably mega-super-ultra-dysfunctional Japanese family. The theme is the same as that used in the comedy movie Bawarchi by the awesome Hrishikesh Mukherjee. But when processed through the psychotically crazy brain of Takashi Miike, this becomes a grotesquely brilliant black comedy. Definitely one of the most crazy mindfucking experience Nanga Fakir's had. Ever.



Vengeance Trilogy (Korean): As a standalone movie, Oldboy was crazily brilliant. But actually, it is second in what is referred to as the Vengeance Trilogy -- three absolutely brilliant cinematic pieces by the great Park Chan Wook (Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). These movies are stylistically immaculate, suffused with aesthetic violence and a subtle, dark humour that runs underneath the gory and surgically precise surface. If you want to see revenge elevated to the status of poetry, you know what to do.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (Korean): Kim ki Duk is another bête noire who is considered demented and deranged by even those among the 'elite' arthouse crowd. People routinely vomit, faint, walk out in protest etc from his movies. His movies contain minimal dialogue and scenes of breathtaking cinematographical beauty and routine animal cruelty. But for all his perceived misogynism and fascination with violence, Kim ki Duk is, above all, a supreme genius.

Spring Summer... is a break from his previous violent movies in that it is a deeply philosophical and mostly silent account of the lives of two generation of Buddhist monks in a crazily beautiful floating monastery. Exceptionally brilliant.

Happiness (English): This film does all that is thought taboo. It jokes about rape, pedophilia, death and depravity in such a way that it is impossible not to laugh out aloud. And yet, it is not a comedy but more of a dark satire, perhaps angry and amused in an equal measure. The casting is brilliant and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Dylan Baker, along with the rest of the starcast, give dazzling performances. Todd Solondz is a supremely talented Director you want to watch out for. This movie is easily one of the most brilliant I have watched ever.

Gozu (Japanese): Takashi Miike dazzles again. This movie is totally crazy, darkly comic, bizarrely outlandish and more surreal and totally out of syllabus than the works of David Lynch. Coupled with the usual outrageousness and over the top humour that Miike suffuses his films with, this would be a strange, roller coaster of a mind bending experience should you decide to see it.