Obscure films you've seen recently

I thought I would make a thread about those films that were seen by too few people to make for a viable thread but are still worth a mention. And if one turns out to be pretty well known, well, someone can make a thread afterwards. Of course, how "obscure" a film is is relative, but you get the point.

I'll just mention three films for now:

Raw by Julia Ducournau, about a vegetarian girl who becomes carnivorous… and then some. Probably the best film I'll never watch again. The themes and the tone are just off-putting on so many levels, and yet I admittedly took a morbid pleasure in watching it. There's actually relatively little gore, but it's still a film better watched on an empty stomach.

Train to Busan by Yeon Sang-ho, your good ol' Zombie Apocalypse with running zombies, and set (mostly) in narrow train corridors. Okay, maybe this one is not exactly obscure, but boy what a ride. It's a film that just doesn't let you (or its protagonists) catch a breath, and the ending admittedly made me shed a little tear.

Sayonara by Fukuda Kouji. Set in Japan, after a super-Fukushima disaster forced the entire population to be evacuated to the continent. The protagonist is a South-African born refugee who doesn't seem to be high on the priority list for evacuation, along with her android companion ("played" by an actual remote-controlled robot). This is a sllllooooooooow movie − and like half of the soundtrack is just the sound of wind − but a fascinatingly beautiful one.

edited 28th Aug '17 2:27:26 AM by Lyendith

A month ago or so, I finished the film version of Two Women.

edited 28th Aug '17 3:28:58 AM by HallowHawk

Y'all should know that we have a "Calling all Classic Film Lovers" thread which we use to discuss pretty much anything and everything made before 1967 and Bonnie and Clyde.

That would be a good place to discuss, for example, Two Women, which is great. I think I speak for all of the people who post in that thread that we'd love it if more folks joined us.

As far as other obscure films go, I just watched a 1972 Russian film off of You Tube, The Dawns Here Are Quiet. It's about an Amazon Brigade in World War II, and their male sergeant leader, on the Eastern Front. Switches from light comedy in the first half to some tense drama in the second half as the women and the sergeant have to go off into the woods to hunt German paratroopers.

I've found a surprising number of foreign films on You Tube, actually.

…I actually wonder, how does the copyright apply to old Soviet films like the one you mentioned? Are they in the public domain?

No clue. Have to admit that I have no moral qualms at all about watching a film off of You Tube or what have you.

How's this for obscure?

Order No. 027, a kung-fu action movie made in...North Korea. Saw that on You Tube as well.

edited 28th Aug '17 8:09:23 PM by jamespolk

I just recently watched Raw as well. And to stay with strange French movies, two weeks ago I saw Reality, from the director of Rubber. An interesting, though very mind-screwy watch.

…I really need to get into Quentin Dupieux's filmography one day. A sentient murderous car tire… how much more awesome can you get?

Watched it out of curiosity. Political point-of-view aside it's… actually pretty decent? It's sometimes a bit hard to keep track of who's on which side, the similar uniforms and sloppy editting not helping, though you can at least know that the Filthy Capitalists are the ones getting their ass handed to them. The action scenes are actually surprisingly brutal despite the Bloodless Carnage. It also has a train fight (and we know trains make every fight better) and an Action Girl, so what's not to like. Speaking of which, I swear the main fight music (…the only fight music?) sounds like something from DBZ. I also found it funny that one of the soldiers is named "Yong Gun"… Wonder if it was deliberate…

Still, for a film supposed to glorify the soldiers of the Party... they're shown as pretty damn ruthless. Shooting down unarmed soldiers who are running away isn't exactly honorable. >.>

edited 29th Aug '17 3:49:28 PM by Lyendith

Rubber is fun, and really the murderous tyre is the least strange part of the movie. The rest of Mr Oizo's filmography is the same; funny, full of interesting aspects but completely weird. I'm still not sure if I liked Weird Cops or not.

Yeah, I enjoyed it. It's basically just like a mindless American action war movie but with the North Koreans as the good guys.

It really did cry out for some evil Americans, though. You'd think they could have imported some Russians to play the white people.

Peking Opera Blues....not exactly obscure if you are into Chinese productions and/or martial arts movie, but I think it counts as obscure for the mainstream. It's actually one of my favourite movies. Weirdly the movie is on the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" list, but doesn't have its own page yet.

edited 30th Aug '17 9:04:26 AM by Swanpride

Well cripes, then you need to make one.

Can't. The Markup help doesn't open for me and I have in general a hard time with the formatting. I can add stuff to an existing page, because then I can just copy the formatting which is already there, but creating a new one is too much of a challenge for me.

Well, I could make a skeleton page for you. Write an intro and I guess tropes from whatever I can find in Wikipedia.

That would be great...though I would most likely need some time to actually fill the page with the appropriate tropes...but I guess I could do at least two or three a day to cover at least the basics.

Peking Opera Blues

There you go. Properly indexed, with two tropes I was able to pretty much guess from reading about the movie, and a third I was lucky enough to find already linked from an example page. You can do the rest.

Thanks you...now I have a good reason to watch the movie again.

I've recently watched a number of movies that may or may not be considered obscure, depending on metric.

• Victoria—one of this year's additions to 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die—a movie that's mostly notable for being filmed as a single continuous shot. That's not as much of a Dancing Bear as it was in Russian Ark, and I think it adds to the tension and improves this movie instead of detracting from it.
• Under the Shadow—another of this year's additions to 1001 Movies...—a horror movie set in Tehran during the Iran–Iraq War. I think it's really suspenseful. It reminded me a lot of The Babadook, but not quite as good.
• Ruben Östlund's The Square—this year's Palme d'Or winner—about a museum director who gets his phone and wallet stolen and hatches a plan to get it back, all the while trying to figure out how to market the museum's newest exhibit. It sort of reminds me of The Big Lebowski, except it has nothing to do with it.

Brigsby Bear — I just saw this tonight, and highly recommend it.

I saw a brazilian film called "O Lobo Atrás da Porta" not long ago (I even made a page for it, though I've been too lazy to index it).

I don't watch a lot of national cinema (well, it's national for me anyways) and this was pretty good. It's so refreshing to see something made here that isn't an embarrassingly trite melodrama, with actually good dialogue and performances and a well-executed story. The only thing is...well, the film's REALLY dark and bitter, and the ending...well, I can't really talk about it, but it's one of the most infamous things about the film for a reason. If you can stomach that it's worth a look.

edited 2nd Sep '17 10:04:16 PM by Draghinazzo

Oh yeah, Under the Shadow was really good.

We actually have a surprisingly good underground cinema. Check out Kleber Mendonça's and Cláudio Assis's work, some day of those. Or, for that matter, Glauber Rocha's entire filmography.

I quite like Wolf at the Door. Solid drama.

edited 3rd Sep '17 9:34:45 AM by Gaon

Finished a Japanese movie named Senso no Hitori no Onna (A Woman and War), set in the last days of World War II for Imperial Japan. The story has two separate plots:

1. A barmaid who doubles as a prostitute ends up living with a writer. Neither feel pleasure having sex with each other.

2. A soldier named Yoshio Ohira has just come back from being stationed in China, albeit with a missing arm, to his wife and son Makoto. Despite that, he's the very opposite of being at ease. After witnessing and failing to stop a woman from getting gang-raped, he ends up raping women to hammer it home that the woman he failed to save brought back bad memories of his tour in China, which adds that him raping fellow Japanese women is him reliving the atrocities he witnessed, and did, in China.

edited 3rd Sep '17 10:24:20 AM by HallowHawk

Most obscure film I've seen recently, in fact I've not long finished watching it, is Psychomania - a film starring Nicky Henson, about a bunch of outlaw British bikers who come back from the dead and terrorize people. Got the same kind of reaction from contemporary film critics as Michael Bay's stuff does, for far less reason if you ask me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomania

Yeelen, a film from Mali, I watched a while back. Kyle Kallgren had good video on it a few years ago.