Blind - (2007.Belgium)

Blind (Tamar van den Dop, 2007)

An albino woman and a blind man develop an indiscriminate love for one another. When the man gets his sight back, will love still be blind?

http://www.blinddefilm.nl/

Quid Pro Quo (2008)

Isaac Knott (Nick Stahl) is a Public Radio reporter in New York City. When he was eight, his mother and father died in an automobile accident that left him in a wheelchair.

On air, Isaac recounts how he recently received an anonymous tip from someone identified only as "Ancient Chinese Girl." She tells him a perfectly able-bodied man walked into an emergency ward downtown, and attempted to bribe a doctor into amputating his leg.

As Isaac investigates the eerie tip, he encounters Fiona (Vera Farmiga) who, through her own quandary, leads Isaac to a netherworld of people afflicted with a perverse desire to be disabled. Like a contemporary noir detective film, QUID PRO QUO follows Issac as he embarks on a dream-like journey to pull back the layers of what makes people feel whole.

http://www.quidproquofilm.com

500 Days of Summer (2009)

Director: Marc Webb
Writer: Scott Neustadter
Cast: Zooey Deschanel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Clark Gregg

Release: July 24, 2009




Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't.

This post modern love story is never what we expect it to be -- It's thorny yet exhilarating, funny and sad, a twisted journey of highs and lows that doesn't quite go where we think it will. When Tom, a hapless greeting card copywriter and hopeless romantic, is blindsided after his girlfriend summer dumps him, he shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days "together" to try to figure out where things went wrong. His reflections ultimately lead him to finally rediscover his true passions in life.

Die Welle (2008) - dir. Dennis Gansel

Film: The Wave (2008)

Director/Writers: Dennis Gansel

Cast: Jürgen Vogel, Frederick Lau, Max Riemelt

Plot Outline: When Rainer Wegner, a popular high school teacher, finds himself relegated to teaching autocracy as part of the school’s project week, he’s less than enthusiastic. So are his students, who greet the prospect of studying fascism yet again with apathetic grumbling: “The Nazis sucked. We get it.” Struck by the teenagers’ complacency and unwitting arrogance, Rainer devises an unorthodox experiment. But his hastily conceived lesson in social orders and the power of unity soon grows a life of its own.

Genre(s): Drama / Thriller

Certification: Germany:12 | UK:15 | Ireland:16 | Argentina:16

based on the book by Morton Rhue.

Dogura Magura (1988) - dir. Toshio Matsumoto

"A man is confined to a mental institution after trying to murder his fiancee. Two doctors relate his problem to an Asian philosophy that states that mental defects are transmitted from generation to generation. He learns that one of his distant ancestors murdered his wife as a way of demonstrating a point to his lord about the importance of love over the emptiness of lust and to drive home the point further, created a series of illustrations of the dead woman decaying which in turn trigger the memories of his distant descendent. But is the whole thing merely a game concocted by the two doctors, who may even have driven themselves mad?" (imdb)




Based on a classic Japanese underground novel by Kyusaku Yumeno.

Interview with Toshio Matsumoto

Some reviews:
@ depauw.edu
@ forum.dead-donkey.com


Japanese band Dir en grey make a reference to Dogra Magra in their song Vinushka, from their 2008 album Uroboros.



Dir en grey - Vinushka

I exchange thoughts with the clouds
I hold my breath
Ahh, it's just hard shell you can't see
Is that where the bottom is? The shadow burns me
Ahh, I just want to keep forgetting
Slip your desires into the ants' nest
Come now, all you have to do now is be reborn again

Let tomorrow sleep and peacefulness will turn to you
Free yourself and go with your razor sharp emotions
Even the twisted flow is the proof that you're alive
I invite the tearfully-indulging sorrow

The inculated Dogra Magra
The pain of the mark and the one and only personality
And those colorful eyes all decorated I don't want them anymore
Is hypocrisy going to come and take it all away?
The lonely red stage at night
I dedicate the following to the aspiring leading actor
That's where the truth is

The small corner of my un-cheatable heart says "I still want to be here"
Who can't we forgive?
I let them hear my cold voice
And I swear

I will live with my work I scream with this body of flesh that separates heaven and hell
I carve the sins What will be the proof of my existence if it disappears with the wind?

"I've stared at the strong shining moon long enough to be bored
Can't even turn myself into a werewolf
But just enough to become crazy by the darkness
I want to suck the neck
The emptiness of the remains
I won't let you sleep
At the age where you just want attention... tonight, I might go crazy for you"

Everyone wants to reach out their hand and grab happiness
But they just end up becoming the monster that lies deep in darkness
The end has already come to life
It will take form at zero and will crawl back into the uterus and rot
Every time this happens, your faces crumble

No one wants to talk about the truth that hurts the ear
The suppressed minds

Compensate the sins and let life be gone

The emptiness of the antithesis
Becomes the choking and crying land
Bury the bones in the common land immersed in thesis
Be burdened by depression
The gritty tsunami takes me away and I smile with bitter tears
Couldn't understand the value of things
The hanging of the necks at the 13 stairs
Seeing people becoming friendly while clapping hands
That mixes in with sissy thoughts and hurts others
Seeing you like this, it's just too sad

Splash of blood
Squashing basic instincts
Talk about death

I will live with my work I scream with this body of flesh that separates heaven and hell
I carve the sins What will be the proof of my existence if it disappears with the wind?

No one wants to talk about the truth that hurts the ear
The suppressed minds

Compensate the sins, and let life be gone

Is it a sin for me to live because I am evil?

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Theater director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis, is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. Somewhere in Berlin, his daughter is growing up under the questionable guidance of Adele's friend, Maria. His lingering attachments to both Adele and Hazel are causing him to helplessly drive his new marriage to actress Claire into the ground. Sammy and Tammy, the actors hired to play Caden and Hazel, are making it difficult for the real Caden to revive his relationship with the real Hazel. The textured tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line between the world of the play and that of Caden's own deteriorating reality. The years rapidly fold into each other, and Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece. As he pushes the limits of his relationships, both personally and professionally, a change in creative direction arrives in Millicent Weems, a celebrated theater actress who may offer Caden the break he needs.