見つめあいながら 月城まゆ

　　胡家庄年味渐淡，寒暑异常，舞狮少年罗川跳脱飞扬，异想天开，梦想把舞狮技艺发扬光大，却常常弄巧成拙，所到之处鸡飞狗跳，被村民视为“扫把星”，是村长胡长礼眼中的“危险分子”。年兽小五意外降临人间，大闹村庄，勾走了传家宝——狮头。罗川为找回狮头，和下凡捉年兽的鼠仙阿细相识，两人逐渐发现年兽并不可怕，可以和人类做朋友，但胡长礼爱村心切，被噬灵妖蛊惑，遁入疯魔，制造了一场针对年兽的阴谋，最终罗川和阿细联合村民，打败了噬灵妖，唤醒了胡长礼，胡家庄重归热闹，众人欢欢喜喜迎接春节到来。

　　Locked in her flat for several years, a reclusive young woman stumbles upon a mysterious web community. According to an urban myth, the Suicide Club grants death to those wishing for it. Unless these "cyber suicides" are actually murders.

　　Set in an underground dungeon inhabited by bundled, ragged human beings, after the nuclear holocaust. The story follows the wanderings of a hero through the situations of survival. People wait for the Ark to arrive and rescue them while their habitat falls apart.　　Delving deep into the dusty and long abandonded vaults of b-cinema in search of lost gems always leaves me with a bittersweet taste. On one hand the discovery of unexpected gems where no one would think them possible is a rewarding experience. On the other hand though it makes one wonder how many of these remarkable low-budget oddities, personal love affairs of directors never quite famous and now all but forgotten, have almost forever slipped from memory?　　n any case what we have here is a little post-apocalyptic gem from Poland that is really better than it has any right to. The dystopian near future of O-BI, O-BA finds a group of survivors of the nuclear war that ravaged the Earth inhabiting an underworld concrete bunker and biding their time as they wait for the mysterious Ark, an air ship of some kind that will come and save them. The Ark proves to be an elaborate hoax, carefully designed to give hope to the malnourished and desperate denizens of the bunker, while in the meantime the dome that separates their miserable existence from the nuclear winter outside is slowly caving in.　　What first striked me about the movie is the design of the bunker and the depiction of the survivors. The survivors are gaunt, filthy and terrible-looking penitents, dressed in rags and aimlessly wandering the neon-lit halls of the bunker like automatons. The bunker is a rundown, seedy place, with bright neon lights peering from all sides like the eyes of malignant beasts.　　On one hand it is a slightly 80's depiction of the dystopian future but the movie never stoops down to MAD MAX cheese. Instead it combines biting political satire with the bleak outlook of a world with no future, black comedy with barbs on apathy, religion and power. The survivors, for example, are fed some kind of flour dropping from a tube that hovers in the air - later on we discover the food supervisor uses books and the Bible itself as filler for this meagre meal. There are many such short symbolic touches, perhaps not life-changing or faith-restoring, yet playful, clever and inspired.　　One thing is for sure; O-BI, O-BA is not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi schlock. It overcomes its modest budget with creativity and has genuine artistic aspirations both from a writing and directing perspective. My opinion is that it should have been filmed in black and white instead of colour though. The director uses atmospheric light and shadow to great effect and it would have registered even better in stark black and white. The blue-green neon on the other hand outstays its welcome after a while. Just a minor gripe in an otherwise solid b-movie with its heart set in all the right places.　　Imagine a less bleak THE ROAD (Cormac McCarthy) being injected with the satire and humour of DR.STRANGELOVE and you're getting there. See it if you can find it.

Paris, 1963. The youngest of a family of six, Roland, is a boy like no other. According to the doctors, he'll never walk, but his stubborn mother, Esther, simply refuses to accept this.