Tag: Foreign

Watch out everyone! This film is secretly a foreign film!

I heard the Canadian barbarian tribes paint themselves before every ice fishing tournament.

Yep. A Canadian movie. That technically means foreign. The High Cost of Living is a pretty weird foreign indie film. The only notable star in it is of course Zach Braff, as he loves this kind of shit. This time instead he plays a drug dealing american in Ontario or Quebec. I think the latter. Because the other main star is a French Canadian lady. Who is many weeks pregnant!

Unfortunately, thanks to drugs, going down the wrong way of a street, and sudden contractions, Braff ends up hitting the woman in the middle of the night. He freaks out. Has drugs in the car, so flees and calls an ambulance. The woman loses her child from the accident. These aren’t spoilers, just the beginning.

What happens then is watching the woman feel super distant from her husband, who she thinks doesn’t care. Braff cares about what happened, so he tries underhanded means to get to know her and find out information, eventually becoming her friend.

Twisted, I know. As any movie with a secret like that, of course the truth will eventually come out near the climax, and you have to watch how they all deal with it.

The film counts as foreign, because at least 1/3 of it is probably subtitled for French Dialogue. Damn you sneaky subtitle movies!

The ending, while kind of predictable was neat. It teaches us that crime never pays.

This film is also known as Olhos Azuis, in case you want to be able to IMDB it. But why would you do that when I just provided a link? I had no idea it was another language for the title either until I looked up an actor and found it under the (Spanish? Portuguese?) title of Olhos Azuis. Anyways, this is definitely a Brazilian and more based film, half of which is in English, the other half in…not English.

This is not the cover of the film, but it should be.

Story tells of an Immigration officer at some airport on his last day before forced retirement. He definitely gets drunk during the party, but then continues throughout his day. The story tells two tales back and forth, his last day at work, and him traveling in Brazil much later. At the airport, he harasses a group of people, including becoming violent with one individual, and against all belief, hounding another. Each individuals storyline is told through these interrogations and with their conversations in the waiting room. Shit. Goes. Down. You just watch in disbelief at how horrible he is acting. And it sucks. It does.

The actual movie is done on a low budget. I could see how grainy it was on my TV, was distracting at the beginning but I got used to it. The story while not being true, is apparently based off a few different stories. I can’t confirm that, just what the director said. It will make you mad, but that is good, because it makes you feel. Normally I also talk about who is in it, but for reals, I know like no one. All unknown actors.

Not to be confused with actors who starred in Unknown.

3 out of 4.

You may remember this as the movie that won Best Foreign Language film, of which finally came out last week on the DVDs and the Blurays. It is in Swedish/Danish/American, with the English parts actually taking place in a Sudan refugee camp. Go figure. This movie deals with a lot of troubling issues, on both parents, and on their kids.

Okay, so far it pretty much sounds like every American drama. Kids and parents having troubling issues? Oh, please DO go on.

For the main two kids, one has just lost his mother to cancer and moved to Denmark with his dad from London, and the other is a Swedish born family in Denmark whose parents are separated. In case you couldn’t tell, this takes place in Denmark. Thankfully, London kid befriends the Ratface kid, and stands up for him, but he ends up being a bad influence too.

Bullies, Sudan warlords, divorce, cancer, bombs, suicide, near death experiences, and conflicts are all hugely part of this movie. Some of those are pretty different than normal American dramas.

I guess morally it questions what is the right thing to do. Is it good to do bad things to bad people? Great movie though. But you knew that, it won things after all. The Swedish dad who was also a doctor in the movie is going to be in the Hobbit movies too, if you wanted to see how he was at acting. Damn it, just saying Hobbit “movies” sounds wrong.

There Can Be Only One!

3 out of 4.