I also made a [nomination] list of all my favorite foreign things of the last decade. If I had included all movies, general suspects would have applied (eg. Children of Men, Dancer in the Dark), but still remains a very ME list. I hope you like the selection, and don’t hesitate in suggesting films to watch.
Happy new year, everyone!
Sorry for the lack of posts last month. To make up for it, here are five posts so you can catch up to my 2013 and to get you going this 2014.
… voy a alegrar tu tristeza
vamos a hacer una fiesta
‘pa que’ste amor crezca mas.
In all seriousness, most snarky Peruvians would probably mock Gianmarco’s vocal abilities, but I don’t know any of those snarky ones that would mock his composition skills. I think there’s a strong 90% who would praise them. Hoy by Gloria Estefan is one of the most popular ones he’s written, and the video was shot in Cuzco to top it all.
And Hoy isn’t even the most complex of the songs he’s written. But it’s still a really good one.
Quickie literal lyrics translation after the break.
I really can’t remember exactly when I started out the Top Flicks About Chicks list on MUBI, but it must have been around the same time I wrote how Chick Flicks was a doomed genre in regards of critics. So it might be almost 4 years… and I’ve finally reached 300 titles in the list!!!
A Chick Flick should center on little girls, girls, young women and women… as students, as neighbors, as friends, as daughters, as granddaughters, as sisters, as mothers, as lovers. They are simply women. With that alone, we can tell all sort of other stories that have little to do with romantic comedies.
The purpose of the list, of course, was to encompass an array of female character — not only in the binary sense, since the list also includes men/boys who identify as women/girls… and viceversa — of various cultural, ethnic, social backgrounds. Not favoring one genre over the other, not valuing dramas over comedies… just simple stories about different women.
Though I’m sure the list could be longer, that’s 300 feature length films out of the 2896 (counting shorts) currently rated on the site- that’s roughly 10% so I suppose the list could expand to up to 500 or maybe 1000 once I reach 5000 or 10000 rated films on the site.
1. Treeless Mountain 2. Welcome to the Dollhouse 3. Juliana 4. Labyrinth 5. Fuckin’ Amal 6. Mirrormask 7. Gun Hill Road 8. Pariah 9. Bend it like Beckham 10. Swing Girls 11. The Land of the Deaf 12. Sunny 13. Whip It 14. Stoker 15. Maria Full of Grace 16. Breaking the Waves 17. My Marlon and Brando 18. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 19. Dil Bole Hadippa! 20. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 21. Kotoko 22. Violeta Went to Heaven 23. Skin 24. Raise the Red Lantern 25. Incendies
I picked 25 of the 300 films to illustrate some of the variety (I hope it’s AS varied as I intend the list to be), though I ran out of picks and couldn’t include any of the ‘older’ female characters. If I could pick 5 more, they’d be: Lemon Tree, Frozen River, Late Bloomers, Mother, For 80 Days.
Google Maps has finally activated Street View in my city — mind you, it’s still a work in progress, and I’ve already encountered places I can’t access. But as anything Google Maps goes… I’ve already visited my current home, and of course my school. But the place I was most eager to check out was my old home. I still remember how to get there!
The market and the park are still there, and livelier than I remember them being. xD
Thanks to the American way of thinking, for a while now I’ve been thinking a LOT about race. It didn’t use to be a problem, I didn’t care about race because Peru was supposed to be this mix of races of white (mostly Spaniards), Andean people, Black, Asians (mostly Chinese and Japanese).
For a while now, while completing polls and documents, people have added the race option that usually carries some of these: Caucasian, Native American, African-American, Asian, Polynesian, Latino, Other. Though, recently I’ve seen the added option of Mixed, besides the Other option.
Perhaps I didn’t notice this before as I was a minor and my parents would be filling documentation, but I remember I’ve always checked the “other” option because I can’t consider myself Asian… and I’ve stopped considering myself fully Latin American because it just doesn’t feel that way any longer. Not when I’m nudge on the street as people either say “oppar Gangnam Style” or relate my slanted eyes to either Jackie Chan or Jet Li. I’ll actually take them over Psy and the horse-dance though.
So I understand your pain, guys, for either being told they don’t fit within the black or latino communities, or being told to act a certain way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT7_oQzDYMw
Also, don’t forget Alexis Bledel speaks perfect Spanish unlike America Ferrera — come on, her Spanish is competent, but not in the level for the roles she usually gets — so not having Bledel speaking Spanish in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was a total missed opportunity since no one freaking expects Alexis Bledel to speak Spanish.
And yes, Hollywood expects his latinas to look like Sophia Loren.
I need to be a casting director and throw the whole casting process on its head.
Okay, I gotta admit South Korea- I’m jealous.
Some of you may complain about the political implications of choosing Park Geun-hye’s party, but you’re getting the cake. This is coming from someone less privileged than you in terms of political options. I don’t want to talk about my current president, but since President Park Geun-hye just made a splash on my TV speaking Mandarin at a speech she delivered just this week at Tsinghua University during her visit to Beijing [1], which apparently is self-taught [1][2] (that’s even way more accomplished!), I want to give a good mention to my Ex-Pres.
A couple of years back, when (now Ex-) President Hu Jintao was visiting the country when Alan Garcia was still president — and he gave us THIS SUPER AWKWARD photo of himself trying to hug/kiss Hu — Alan had the BRILLIANT idea of giving HIS own speech in Mandarin, even though he knows a lick of any Asian language (I doubt he knows anything about Asian culture outside what to eat at a Chifa [1], explaining why he tried to hug/kiss Hu, LOL).
The end result is, of course, madly hilarious if you speak Spanish.
Besides trying to sound out Mandarin, which you know it’s nearly impossible, he sounded out some “words” that sounded similar to other words in Spanish, included the now political-satire-classic “Soy chanchin,” which is a cute modification to the word “chancho,” meaning “pig.” So basically it sounded like he said “I’m a little fat.” Hilarious history in the making right there.
Surprisingly, Hu had the biggest poker face EVER. He didn’t blink, snorted, NOTHING. He’s either the best politician in the whole wide world, or his team warned him about this Garcia Mandarin stunt and he turned off any of his hearing aid, if he used any.
I still haven’t been able to locate a photo of me as a child in my family’s house garden waving the yellow and lime green plastic Sword of Omens I had as a child. However, these guys are designing weapons or designing pretty awesome real props, and have made my dorky childhood dreams come true.
Its amazingness is beyond words.
And YES. Even though Thundercats aired in the mid-80s, I saw them in the early 90s in their dub version, and it was still pretty goddamn awesome.
Who grew up watching the Street Fighter II series?
I used to tape this every afternoon because I was never on time from school, they used to show it after Gargoyles on Frecuencia Latina, and then after we got cable for the first time- actually a few years after that, I think — Cartoon Network Latin America got all big on showing anime series, and among the Inuyasha or Rurouni Kenshin episodes they used to broadcast, they also had some of this.
I remember they also used to show Sakura Card Captor and Corrector Yui [1, with latino audio].
Around that time, it was when I was trying to google this song online but back then it was nearly impossible to find song information if you had very little info, especially if you didn’t speak the language. I did eventually find that this song was called Kaze Fuiteru (aka. The Wind Blows, 風吹いてる – by Yuki Kuroda), and that my friend had a CD with songs that were anime themes that contained the track.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pOqYuKIGZo
Of course, the Spanish version they did [1] is not as good as the original. But I’m glad that they at least kept the original music, instead of changing it to something “hard rock” like in the American broadcast.
I wanted to make a personal post for this year’s LGBT Blogathon, so I tried to think about the first time I had ever seen a prominent LGBT character. Growing up in Peru, I don’t think it was ever an issue that crossed my mind- representation, I mean. It was sort of there, hovering in my subconscious, and if I had seen LGBT related content or entertainers, it was something that wasn’t broadly discussed. Now that I think back on it, it was like the Liberace example. He was flamboyant, but people that weren’t “in the know” didn’t know or wanted to accept that Liberace was gay.
