A few foreign films from the library.

Solaris, Offside, The Lives of Others, Aberdeen, and Walkabout

Recently I have mostly been watching TV series' on DVD from the library that I missed over the years like Firefly and Dark Angel, so I haven't kept up with my usual movie watching. I realized that the handful of films I have watched lately have all been foreign films of some note and were all quite good in defferent ways.

Offside is an example of how less is so often more. The film was basically the director bringing in real people and giving them a scenario and then filing it in one day. In Iran. There is an honesty to this film that is very, very special, even if obvious. I cannot rave enough about this film. Soccer in Asia is huge. The stadium in Tehran is one of the world's largest and they managed to film a feature while a World Cup Qualifier was actually being played in the stadium. A remarkable work.


The Lives of Others is interesting in that our main characters basically don't spend the movie in each others presence, yet are totally connected by circumstance. I joke about how driving through Lynnwood is like being in East Germany and sort of mean it. The criticism of this film is that it turns our villain into a hero and that no one could be as naive as our hero, but I disagree. Our villain makes a simple error that pulls him down a path that requires him to help our main character in order to save himself as much as the hero. Our hero is naive to the point of exasperation because he believes his friendships make him bullet proof. Long story short is that the motives of these characters are never clearly black and white. It is a subtle and slow film that really kept me rapt because I was uncertain where it was going.


Aberdeen is a film with the estranged parent and independent grown up child motif that has been beaten to death in films. Very good films like Big Fish have explored this territory. What saves this otherwise pedestrian film are the performances. Anything with Stellan Skarsgard is worth watching in general, and his performance in this film is yet another example. Where many actors would make his drunken behavior likable, Skarsgard does not bother and it really pushed my interest in the film. I had overheard a few teachers talking about this one and got it from the library and it was worth the time.

Solaris is a movie I do not entirely understand or understand exactly why I liked it. I could just call it a Soviet attempt at 2001, but that would not do it justice. It is an extremely long and subtle film. After watching I took the time to read up on it in order to get some of the plot points and that has helped me understand what exactly happened, but the real issue for me was why I liked it. I still don't know why. I just know that I am not going to bother with the remake and let it be that I must have been touched on some level by it. There is no need to always understand why I like something.

Walkabout came on rec from my friend Jorge. After a brief snafu at the library I finally get to see it tonight. Oh, and when I looked it up online it turns out that it is not about a group of teenage church group kids lost in California. That is another film by the same name and I am glad I did more digging or I would have wondered why the #*(% Jorge would have recommended that to me.