not an April Fools' post

An FFA friend posted a link to this today: In Celebration of Old-School Livejournal

I had stayed off of f-list and tumblr dash the past two weeks to make time to watch movies for a "Best of 2010-2014" poll for YAM-Magazine. The vote actually ends in fifteen more days, but I want my life back! So I'm slowly returning back to social media and all the TV and other things I had put off during that period.

I also had a really nasty sore throat; last week during an overnight shift I had to keep running back to the water fountain whenever I got violent, suffocating coughs that required lots of water to help me recover. (I made sure to cough into my elbow instead of the clothes I was fixing at the store, though.) Today, I'm still coughing a little, but recovery's going well.

Ranking some of the movies I've seen recently for the poll, from excellent down to pretty good:

• The Boy and the World (O menino e o mundo), 2013: a dialogueless Brazilian animated movie that I first couldn't get into when I was tired, but when I woke up and sped up the movie a little (I thought the poll deadline was that midnight) it was perfect. Doesn't matter that the message is blunt- it's relevant to Brazil and done really well.


• The Missing Picture (L’image manquante), 2013: The director, Rithy Panh, made clay figures to illustrate his life in Cambodia before and during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Some commenters said it was slow but I thought the pacing had good speed. This is the only movie I actually paid to watch, since I streamed it with Amazon gift credit, and I was so captivated I had finish the film at wayyy too early in the morning.


• The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Kaguya-hime no monogatari), 2013: It's great, but I have minor quibbles about things that stand out after reading the Yasunari Kawabata prose version of the tale.


• Whiplash, 2014: Definitely my tempo.


• Grey Matter (Matière Grise), 2011. It starts out a little meta, following a young director in Rwanda trying to put together a movie. Then you see the movie he had in mind. Some early parts seem really iffy but pay off at the end. Only wish for a little more to the final full circle scene, but otherwise a great debut that has me anticipating more from Kivu Ruhorahoza.


• The Selfish Giant, 2013. Really plunges you into the lives (and accents) of two kids who try and make a little money from selling scrap metal.There are a couple of moments that made me gasp, and the last third of the film is so intense.


• The Prize (El premio), 2011. Very good with performances and atmosphere. Though made in Mexico, it's based on the director's childhood under Argentina's dictatorship.Good interview in Spanish here.


• Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz), 2010. Chilean documentary that makes a brilliant connection between astronomy, archaelogy, and the experience and aftermath of life under dictatorship.


• The Dark Horse, 2014. An outstanding entry from New Zealand in the usually middling "troubled coach helps troubled kids through training in a competitive activity" genre.


• Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (Jigoku de naze warui), 2013. A Sion Sono hyperexplosion of blood and color about yakuza wars and filmmaking.

I saw other good movies, but these are the ones I felt most compelled to write about at this time. Okay, special mention to the macabre Canadian comedy Eddie: The Sleepwallking Cannibal (Thure Lindhardt should really get to do more comedy!) and trippy Russian movie Generation P. The animation style in Le tableau is so gorgeous and the meta concept so innovative that I wish the script was better for the first third of the movie. Oslo 31 August really messed me up, and I was able to recognize quite a few of the performers in the end montage of Bombay Talkies.
Made some other discoveries, like: Tom Hardy does a really good Welsh accent and I can easily identify Andrew Scott's voice (Locke), and Matthias Schoenaerts in Bullhead/Runskop really looks like Tom Hardy. Looking forward to future significant roles for Amrita Acharia (Jeg er din), Saleh and Adam Bakri (Salvo, Lamma shoftak, Omar), Aniello Arena (Reality), Karidja Touré (Bande de filles), and so many of the actors in Starred Up. Also glad to see quality features from female directors such as Paula Markovitch (El premio), Clio Barnard (The Selfish Giant moreso than The Arbor), July Jung (Dohee-ya), Annemarie Jacir (Lamma shoftak), Tanya Hamilton (Night Catches Us), Alice Rohrwacher (Le meraviglie and Corpo Celeste), Iram Haq (Jeg er din). Amma Asante (Belle), and more.

Finally, the reason for which I actually intended to make this post:( TV episodes watched between January 1 and today. )