In Six O’Clock News, Ross McElwee pursues murder, mayhem and catastrophe the same way he pursued southern women in Sherman’s March. Made after McElwee becomes a father and finds himself at home watching a lot more TV, he becomes obsessed with the nightly tales of calamity reported on by the local news. This fascination soon turns into another cross country journey to unearth the full stories of those affected. As McElwee pursues this project he also finds himself in Hollywood preparing to direct a feature based on a fictional character much like himself.
Tag: 1990s
A man who has just embezzled money from his company is driving through the Nevada desert. He picks up a pretty girl and her seemingly goofy boyfriend. The girl is a Las Vegas showgirl and the boyfriend turns out to be a professional killer, and he has no intention of letting the motorist finish the trip.
A group of aimless Taipei residents deal with their personal problems in this Taiwanese drama that does feature brief flashes of black humor. Much of the story centers upon lonely Mrs. Chen who has trouble coping with her philandering husband, and nearly senile mother-in-law.
David takes his autistic child to a new therapy center and meets Dr. Rachel Lindsey. Their chemistry results in an affair that doesn’t help her already-shaky marriage.
Set in Antwerp, Belgium in the early 70s, Left Luggage tells the story of Chaja, an impetuous, liberal-minded philosophy student. She has a complex relationship with her parents, who both survived the Nazi concentration camps. She needs money so she gets a job as a nanny for a Hassidic Jewish family whose world is completely alien to her liberated lifestyle. She becomes close to their son and through this relationship learns about the lives of her own parents.
Chantel Mitchell, a hip, articulate, black high-school girl in Brooklyn, is determined not to become “just another girl on the IRT” (the IRT is one of NYC’s subway lines). She dreams of medical school, a family, and an escape from the generational poverty and street-corner life her friends seem to have accepted as their lot. But personal and sexual challenges confront Chantel on her way to fulfilling these dreams.
Comedy shot without a script on Super-8mm as a silent film, with intertitles later inserted between scenes. What unfolds is a familiar Achternbusch tale in which the protagonist (here his alter-ego, Hick) is driven by a mad longing and becomes irretrievably lost. Unable to meet the demands of the workaday world, Hick wanders alone through the city and, as in many of Achternbusch’s films, enters an intermediate realm in which the dead interact with the living: he encounters and falls in love with a mummy, searches for an Egyptian queen, and stalks the inner regions of the hereafter, which lie in the middle of Munich.
Set during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, it tells the story of María Fabiani, a 18 year-old teacher and political activist who works in adult literacy in the poor areas of Buenos Aires. His father has died and to support the family house, his mother sublets rooms. One day a military commando group dressed as civilians breaks into the house and kidnaps the young woman and take her to a clandestine detention camp. There she meets Felix, a tenant of his mother that is in love with her and that turns out to be one in charge of torturing her.