My DVDs are rather loosely organised alphabetically by major attribute/genre. So a couple of shelves are my ‘foreign film section’. By ‘foreign film’ I don’t mean something like Lord Of The Rings or 2001: A Space Odyssey, which were filmed outside of the U.S. Here’s a list of films I have in my ‘foreign section’:
A Real Young Girl (Total crap, BTW.) Bad News Tour (possibly the inspiration for This Is Spinal Tap) Betty Blue
Breathless
Butterfly Kiss
The City Of Lost Children
Daimajin
Das Boot
Delicatessen
Eat The Rich
Fitzcarrldo
It Happened Here
The Italian Job
Johnny Stecchino
The Kingdom (Riget)
The Kingdom II (Riget II)
Leningrad Cowboys Go America
La Femme Nikita
Léon: The Professional
Meet The Feebles
Nekromantik
Nekromantik 2
No Man’s Land
Quadrophenia
Ran
Run Lola Run
Seven Samurai
Sex And Lucia
If I Should Fall From Grace With God: The Shane MacGowan Story
Vagabond
The Vanishing
Walkabout
Yojimbo
Next shelf…
Monty Python’s Flying Circus Boxed Set
The Young Ones (1980s British Comedy) The Young Ones (Cliff Richard) Summer Holiday
Wonderful Life
Blackadder: The Complete Collection
Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (BBC production) Red Dwarf (I-VI)
Coupling (I-III)
Father Ted Series I
Kon-Tiki
Triumph Of The Will
Stingray! Boxed Set
Thunderbirds Boxed Set
Oh – I have the BBC production of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, with Barbara Kellerman as ‘The White Witch’. Decent BBC production except for the lame cartoon animation of the animals. With the new film coming out, I should probably watch this one again. It’s been a long time.
My DVDs are everywhere, but off the top of my head…
Baxter
Delicatessan
The Professional
La Femme Nikita
Coupling
MI-5
The Agronomist
Cal
Some Mother’s Son
If I Should Fall from Grace with God
City of God
Layer Cake
Gah. There are dozens more…
Hmmm, I tend to think that “foreign film” refers to films in a foreign language. Including movies from the UK/Ireland, Canada and Australia/NZ seems like an artificial division somehow, especially as many of these films use American financing. At any rate:
The 400 Blows Stolen Kisses Bed and Board Love on the Run [all from Criterion’s Adventures of Antoine Doinel box set, btw] The Commitments Four Weddings and a Funeral A Hard Day’s Night Withnail and I
And the complete Office (series 1 and 2, and the Christmas special)
Let’s see if I can remember…
The 400 Blows
The Red Balloon
Das Boot
Cinema Paradiso
My Life as a Dog
The Lady Vanishes (does that count?)
Ran
Seven Samurai
The Hidden Fortress
Spirited Away (I do watch it in english though)
Fist of Legend + 3 other Jet Li movies that I can’t remember the names of at the moment (Box set that I bought because it had FoL in it). Tonari no Totoro Mononoke Hime Samurai Fiction
All of my DVDs are in alphabetical order, including concerts and TV shows. The foreign ones are:
The 400 Blows (not a porno)
Akira
Battle Royale
Brother of Sleep
The Cement Garden
Central Station
The Child I Never Was
The Devil’s Backbone
El Mariachi
Funny Games
Ghost in the Shell
Grave of the Fireflies
Kolya
L’Effrontée
Léolo
León: The Professional
Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition Box Set … hey, technically New Zealand is foreign right?
Man Bites Dog
My Life as a Dog
Pelle the Conqueror
Run Lola Run
Spirited Away
The Tin Drum (don’t let Oklahoma know)
Toto le Heros (recorded from Showtime)
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Not included on the shelf is my homemade Iron Chef DVD-R collection…ten discs and growing fast.
Most of the films in our shelves are foreign - Black Adder, Charlie Chaplin, Gone with the Wind, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Shrek, lots and lots of Disney… The only non-foreign films in the house are “Flåklypa Grand Prix” and “Pettersen and Findus”. A shame, really.
(Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m always tickled to see “foreign” = “not from US”. )
Although this film is usually in the foreign section and it’s all in Spanish, I’ve never considered it a foreign film. The writer/director/cinematographer/editor/producer is American. Except for the actual filming, he did everything in Texas.
OTOH he intended it for Mexican television. So if an American filmmaker makes a film intended for another country, is it a foreign film here?
There have been a couple of comments about including British films/shows as ‘foreign’. I’ll agree that it gets a little fuzzy. Stanley Kubric made 2001 in England – but he used money from Hollywood. Star Wars was shot from Tunisia to London, but again it was an American production. LOTR was made in New Zealand by a Kiwi director. I assume much of the financing was from the U.S., and it was a major U.S. (and worldwide) release.
But BBC productions are made in England (usually) with English money and are intended for English audiences. Cliff Richard is virtually unknown in the U.S. Is Quadrophenia an English film? It was produced by an English band, was shot in England, and was a period piece about events in England. But I don’t remember where the money came from, and it was certainly a worldwide release. Maybe it doesn’t belong. But for my personal purposes, it’s foreign. How do I reconcile Quadrophenia being foreign and El Mariachi not? Just the way I see it. Others may disagree.
I’ve thought of other foreign films I have:
M
Metropolis
Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) Nosferatu (Werner Herzog, 1979)
Hmmm – although I like foreign films, I don’t really have many in my collection. Excluding british films, I think the only foriegn ones I have on DVD are:
**Breaker Morant
Fantasic Planet
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Lotta Godzilla Flicks(Including uncut Japanese original)
Kagemusha
Battleship Potemkin
Seventh Seal
The Sword and the Dragon (I grew up on this one, pre-MST3K)
**
Millenium Actress
Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Castle of Cagliostro
Castle in the Sky
Princess Mononoke
Spirited Away
Appleseed (2005)
Akira
Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams
A Better Tomorrow
The City of Lost Children
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
The Fifth Element
Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell 2
Hard Boiled
Jackie Chan’s Who Am I?
The Killer
Léon: The Professional
Rashomon
Royal Spaceforce: The Wings of Honneamise
I have this one as well. Even under my nebulous definition of ‘foreign film’ I didn’t think of it as such. But I guess it counts.
As everyone knows, I lived in the extreme western edge of the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles. At the time I had a '48 Willys CJ2A jeep. I remember driving round in the Spring in the early-'80s, when the grass (or grass-like plants anyway) was green and clouds scutted across the sky. It reminded me of the African Veldt and some of the scenes of Breaker Morant. That movie is the reason why, years later, I bought a .303 SMLE. (Haven’t ever gotten round to firing it though. I should take it to the range next time I go.)
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