List Price: $29.95 Our Price: $23.96YOU SAVE $5.99!
Buy it
DVD Nobody Knows
Nobody Knows, an extraordinary film from Japanese director Kore-Eda Hirokazu, is a heartbreaking and touching story about how selfish a single mother can be to her four children, and how resilient children can be. Kicked out of several apartments for her large brood, Keiko (Japanese pop star You) sneaks them in to a new one (two inside the suitcases) and goes over the house rules: No loud noises. They must stay hidden inside the apartment all day, every day. Only Akira, the oldest, leaves to do grocery shopping while she works. He also makes dinner while Keiko goes out on dates (implying to her children that she's looking for a rich husband so that they can all live in a big house together).
One day, Keiko (not a villain, but an unsympathetic, helium-voiced child herself) announces she's going away for a few weeks to work. She soon emerges every few months, only to drop off money before taking off again, at one point, for good. Akira forgoes any normal 12-year-old's upbringing (even school) to play mother, father, even Santa Claus to his siblings. There's a trapped feeling in Nobody Knows. For the younger kids, it's the inability to escape to the outside world. For Akira, it's seeing the outside world and knowing he has too many responsibilities to participate in it--when he tries, the results are disastrous. As the children grow up and resources become more scarce, the film's tenacity to show every painful detail of their existence slows the pace to almost a standstill. Still, it's a lovely, haunting tale beset with unforced performances from its young actors, particularly Yagira, who won the best actor prize at Cannes. -- Ellen A. Kim
By now, all readers should have a good idea of what this movie is all about, an observation of how four siblings (same mother but different fathers) carried on living when they were all but forgotten by their mother. Whilst some viewers might think that the mother was self-centred and callous, thinking of her own pursuit of happiness, this movie pointed straight to the social issues that Japan is facing right now. True, Japan is an industrialised nation and it has a high standard of living. Nonetheless, it doesn't imply that the Japanese's quality of life is moving on-par with the standard. Rather, people are slaving away and minding their own business or that people are verging towards extremism. It's ultimately survival of the fittest and everyone is there fending for themselves. Viewers shall see for themselves the superficial politeness that Japanese is known for in this movie. One would think that the neighbours of those siblings would have noticed of their unkempt appearances and them hanging around when they should be attending schools but they were pretty much left to their own devices. Then, there's the character of Saki, a senior high school student that befriended the four siblings. She's been regarded as an 'outsider' by her peers and as a result, she's hanging around in the park to kill time and giving her parents the impression that she's still going to school. Shouldn't the parents play their part in knowing their own children intimately and caring for their emotional well-being instead of simply catering for their physical well-being? Thus, many cases of 'hikikomori' situation in Japan where children tend to lose themselves in their own room for years...On top of that, there's Saki again dating older business man to make money for the four siblings. Remember, everything we saw in this movie was based upon true events! Overall, this is an unforced movie that slowly unfolds itself and gradually, we get to empathise with the siblings and the plight that they were in. The theme song in the end really striked it to the core of the matter, that there wasn't really a light at the end of the tunnel and people like those children were really the lost souls or abandoned souls of Japan. Could those four children and Saki, and even their mother (played by You, a J-Pop singer) represent the fate of the delinquent and rebellious youngsters of modern-day Japan and is there a future for them under the new Koizumi government? Thus, the movie ending with an open-ended format. Lest Japan forget...Unforgettable experience and outstanding performances from all cast. Highly recommended and not to be missed. Not much extra in DVD but simply subtitle.
Great movie
As I live in Australia, I had a problem at first, we are region 4 and the DVD being American is region 1. So I could not watch the movie on my home DVD player. However my son came to the rescue, he can change regions on his laptop. So I had to watch the movie on a small screen, but it was still great. Such a moving story, and as I am a student studying Japanese it was a good learning tool, not too difficult to understand. I recommend it to any student of Japanese.
Harrowing tale, but ought to be 20 - 30 minutes shorter
"Nobody Knows" shows the slow descent of four shockingly abandoned children into an urban savagery of sorts. It's a harrowing tale, all the more so because it's based on real events. The script is subtle and well-played by the actors. You learn, for example, that Mom's brood comes from four different fathers, none Nobel Prize winners. In one telling sequence of scenes, the two candidates (a Pachinko gallery worker and taxi driver) who potentially sired the littlest daughter both try to distance themselves from any sense of responsibility.
If you read between the lines at some of the critics' reviews ("unfolds with leisurely beauty") of "Nobody Knows," what you'll divine is that the film is overly long by about 20 - 30 minutes. It could have used a good editor. And, this is one of those movies where you watch and say to each other "okay, good rental, but I'd be perturbed if I paid $8.50 a ticket at the theater."
That aside, the acting by the four child protagonists is at a very high level, especially that Yûya Yagira, who portrays the eldest son; you can literally see the wight of responsibility eating away at this kid as the movie progresses. It's a fairly astounding acting job.
Too few films capture war from the point of view of the children who endure it--perhaps because it's awful to contemplate. But Turtles Can Fly manages to be both heartbreaking and galvanizing in its depiction of young Iraqis waiting for the U.S. Army to roll over their village on the border of Turkey. A boy called Satellite (Soran Ebrahim), so called because he knows how to hook up a satellite dish, divides his time turning himself into a big operator--he commands a small army of children who search the fields for land mines they can sell to the U.N.--and wooing a pretty but haunted girl named Agrin (Avaz Latif) whose brother has no arms but can see the future. Satellite's mixture of scheming and genuine compassion drives the movie forward; it's impossible not to become engrossed... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Soran Ebrahim - Avaz Latif Director(s): Bahman Ghobadi DVD Release Date: Released the 20 September 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $29.95 Your Price: $23.96YOU SAVE $5.99!
Buy it
The riveting subject of Downfall is nothing less than the disintegration of Adolf Hitler in mind, body, and soul. A 2005 Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, this German historical drama stars Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) as Hitler, whose psychic meltdown is depicted in sobering detail, suggesting a fallen, pathetic dictator on the verge on insanity, resorting to suicide (along with Eva Braun and Joseph and Magda Goebbels) as his Nazi empire burns amidst chaos in mid-1945. While staging most of the film in the claustrophobic bunker where Hitler spent his final days, director Oliver Hirschbiegel (Das Experiment) dares to show the gentler human side of der Fuehrer, as opposed to the pure embodiment of evil so familiar from many other Nazi-era... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Oliver Hirschbiegel DVD Release Date: Released the 02 August 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.94 Your Price: $10.49YOU SAVE $9.45!
Buy it
The brilliant writer-director Mike Leigh (Topsy-Turvy, Secrets and Lies, Naked) has crafted an utterly compelling movie about one of the most controversial of topics. An irrepressibly hopeful housecleaner in 1950s London named Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton, Antonia and Jane, Shakespeare in Love) mothers everyone around her, from her own family to helpless shut-ins and lonely men living in tiny, isolated apartments. None of these people know that Vera also helps young women get rid of unwanted pregnancies, until the police appear and tear her world apart. Vera Drake isn't just an inspired character portrait; through simple and straightforward scenes, the movie weaves a quiet but mesmerizing portrait of how people--both wealthy and poor--cope with... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Imelda Staunton - Heather Craney Director(s): Mike Leigh DVD Release Date: Released the 29 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $27.95 Your Price: $22.36YOU SAVE $5.59!
Buy it
Both epic and intimate, A Very Long Engagement reunites Audrey Tautou and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the star and director of the hugely popular Amelie. A young woman named Mathilde (Tautou, Happenstance)separated from her lover by World War I refuses to believe he's been killed and launches an investigation into his fate--an investigation that spins in all directions, creating dozens of miniature stories (including that of an Italian prostitute avenging the death of her own lover by elaborate means) that shift to and fro in time. The dazzling curlicues of narrative put brutality and tenderness back to back, shifting between crushing inevitabilities and miraculous rescues with deft storytelling skill and the lush visual style of the director of Delicatessen and The... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Audrey Tautou - Gaspard Ulliel - Jodie Foster Director(s): Jean-Pierre Jeunet DVD Release Date: Released the 12 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $29.95 Your Price: $22.46YOU SAVE $7.49!
Buy it
Movie studios, by and large, avoid controversial subjects like race the way you might avoid a hive of angry bees. So it's remarkable that Crash even got made; that it's a rich, intelligent, and moving exploration of the interlocking lives of a dozen Los Angeles residents--black, white, latino, Asian, and Persian--is downright amazing. A politically nervous district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his high-strung wife (Sandra Bullock, biting into a welcome change of pace from Miss Congeniality) get car-jacked by an oddly sociological pair of young black men (Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges); a rich black T.V. director (Terrence Howard) and his wife (Thandie Newton) get pulled over by a white racist cop (Matt Dillon) and his reluctant partner (Ryan Phillipe); a... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Paul Haggis DVD Release Date: Released the 06 September 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.98 Your Price: $13.49YOU SAVE $6.49!
Buy it
