Hacker Cinema
Amour
2012 · Film · 127 min
Directed by Michael Haneke
Georges and Anne are in their eighties. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, who is also a musician, lives abroad with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple's bond of love is severely tested.
6 positivefrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
Agree, it is very powerful.
2 other very good movies are the Canadian "Away from Her" and the French "Amour". But the plot twist of these two is that they are a view on the ones that remain and see their loved ones fading away.
Amour was so brutal to me but it really touched me. I highly recommend this movie.
La Haine (1995)[0]: not so much that I saw it differently, more that I felt less crazy for seeing it as it was. I come from those exact areas and times, and even twenty years later there is a terrible amount of similarity in how things are unraveling.
Children of Men (2006)[1]: for the combination of cinematography and the dystopian atmosphere.
Departures / Okuribito (2008)[2]: the subtlety and elegance of the Japanese touch when brushing against Life and Death.
Persona (1966)[3]: I can and can't wrap my head around this movie. I think it left a trace on me in a way that my conscious self doesn't address but the subconscious plays with.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)[4]: there are few things that can put a person against their own mind more than the locked-in syndrome. There's a lot of confusion, humility and strength to find in such apparent helplessness and lack of control. I think of it when I encounter people with ALS or other neuro-degenerative illnesses, and I think of it when I explore my own journey throughout the depths of mental illness.
Amour (2012)[5]: when you go through certain inevitable journeys with people you love, there's so much to be found in the most essentially simple things.
I'm sure there are other impactful things out there but my memory is pretty spotty at times.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113247/
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1069238/
[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060827/
[4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/
[5] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1602620/
I disagree pretty strongly. It has felt like Netflix is deliberately pushing more foreign language content with bad dubbing and often the structure and execution is pretty amateur (eg Ares). They seem to rely on the mere fact it is foreign for it to be bought into as indie or cultural, but the shows are just bad.
It strikes me as s deliberate marketing tactic. Instead of investing in creating nice, acclaimed dramas, they put that money into relatively more garbage shows that cater to mass audiences and try to find shortcuts to repurpose that content and repackage it to “kill two birds with one stone” and cater to the indie niche with it.
But the tactic doesn’t work, and now my Netflix menus are filled with super frustrating noise of these foreign shows, often which you can’t tell are foreign until you press play. It has made the platform nearly unusable to me.
The crazy thing is that I love a lot of foreign movies and shows. Amour, You Are the Apple of my Eye, Burning are some of my favorite films. But the things Netflix is pushing on me are more like network-level crap dramas with a clear attempt to make you feel like they are fancy merely by being foreign.
Hollywood as a whole is full of assholes and I don't see what makes this one special.
Agreed! Thankfully, there are many movies being produced out of Hollywood. Just from last year, I saw great films such as Amour (French-German-Austrian), Barbara (German) and Lore (Australian-German), which were better than anything I've seen from Hollywood in years.
My favorite movies of the year:
1. Moonrise Kingdom
2. Beasts of the Southern Wild
3. Argo
4. Life of Pi
5. Amour (Only NY and LA for now)
6. Monsieur Lazhar