A movie that makes you want to travel*

“Arigatō! [Thank you!]”

– Mr Thank You to everyone – poultry included – he passes on his bus

Friendly and helpful, Arigatō-san (Ken Uehara) is there for his passengers and non-bus travellers alike. A sweet roadmovie from a Japan now lost to time.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for November is, again, not date-based, but follows a sloppy schmaltzy all-American Thanksgiving-y narrative. Trying to make it work my way.

A movie with gorgeous sweater fashion*

“She's a strange breed.”

– Jim

Throwing in a little Movember for good measure.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for November is, again, not date-based, but follows a sloppy schmaltzy all-American Thanksgiving-y narrative. Trying to make it work my way.

 

Starting over*

“A man with no country, will have no grave in the Earth, I forbid you to leave.”

– opening quote (via)

A few years after the start of the Nakba, three generations hope to make a new life for themselves. In the steel belly of a water truck, the men travel Palestine into Iraq, then crossing the desert towards the promised land, Kuwait.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for November is, again, not date-based, but follows a sloppy schmaltzy all-American Thanksgiving-y narrative. Trying to make it work my way.

Until November 3.

“No pleasure, no pain… no emotion, no heart. Our superior in every way.”

– Dr. Arthur Carrington

[A] favourite horror movie overall*

”'M. Valdemar,' I said, 'are you asleep?' He made no answer, but I perceived a tremor about the lips, and was thus induced to repeat the question, again and again. At its third repetition, his whole frame was agitated by a very slight shivering; the eye-lids unclosed themselves so far as to display a white line of the{n} ball; the lips moved sluggishly, and from between them, in a barely audible whisper, issued the words:

'Yes; — asleep now. Do not wake me! — let me die so!'”

– Edgar Allan Poe, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) (via)

A man agrees on being hypnotised while in the state of dying. This particularly haunting and efficiently gory film – the first in the genre – is the result.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

[A favourite] horror remake*

“I never thought I could be friends with a German again. But here I am… Werner is somehow like Murnau brought back to life.”

– Lotte Eisner visiting the set of Herzog's Nosferatu (via)

Coming back to Murnau's expressionist masterpiece was Herzog's bridge between the films made by the grandfathers of German cinema and his era. Herzog, born in 1942 Munich, noted this void created by that philistine regime and felt that, by picking up the thread cut a quarter of a century earlier, German culture could see a restoration to its (non-nationalistic) greatness. Thus a menagerie of rats and actors was released in a reluctant, bourgeois Dutch town.

 

But that's a story for another generation to draw upon.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

A favourite horror film adapted from a book or short story*

“Everything in this masterpiece contributes to its unity: the absolute mastery of editing and rhythm; slow motion, superimpositions, tracking shots, the mobile camera all play their roles and never gratuitously. The photographic quality, worthy of the most learned German operators, the lighting of the sets which envelops them in mystery, the sets themselves, neither realistic nor stylized, but as if sketched; the acting neither realistic nor expressionist, and yet adapted to the fantastic, to the violence; to the pauses; to the blur.”

– Henri Langlois, via

A groundbreaking expressionist interpretation of Poe's inner horrors. Many of the tropes so common in later horror films, are fully fledged and present here.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

 

A [favourite] silent horror film*

 

Incomplete and, despite the generally accepted popular Occidental opinion, not a horror film. Oh, to have seen this narrated by Musei Tokugawa…

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.