Category: Film

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Patricio’s Last Recommendations…

Sadly I am graduating, so this will be my last blog post 🙁 Before I leave, I wanted to give everyone some media recommendations as well as some advice on things to do with the time you have left at Reed.

Go to the language conversations groups! If you have not gone to them yet, you really should. I met some of my best friends at both Pause Café and Sobremesa (which fun fact was previously called Picadita). These groups are such a unique resource that you will likely not find after Reed. Think about it, it’s a chance to meet new people by immersing yourself in the language you’re learning while eating free food! Which is usually delicious as the language scholars are amazing. Seriously, if you haven’t met them yet you should. And new ones come each year, so you get a clean slate next semester!

Don’t worry about what you’ll do with your major afterwards. Many people don’t study languages because of feelings of uncertainty on what jobs they’ll bring in the future. I was scrolling though the Reed alumni page and found lawyers that studied French and artists that studied physics. Your major does not trap you to certain fields as much as you think it does, and it’s ok to figure it out later and study what you’re passionate about now. You’ll be surprised by how little your undergraduate major matters in the future, and how valued being multilingual is.

Study abroad!! If you feel suffocated at Reed or like you need a break, I cannot recommend studying abroad enough. Reed makes it fairly accessible for all majors, arrange a meeting with Alberto del Río Malo and he will help you figure it out. I personally was on the verge of leaving Reed after my sophomore year, but I decided to study abroad for a semester instead of transferring. When I came back I felt like I had a newfound perspective on Reed and started really enjoyed my time here, and many of my friends who studied abroad felt the same way. Four years in this tiny campus is a lot, sometimes you just need a break.

I could go on and on with my advice, but I don’t need to, there’s other LangLabbies that are here to support you with their wonderful personalities and insight. Actually, my last piece of advice would be to talk to Nina, Leilani and Sara. They are incredibly talented and intelligent Reedies, so you should go visit them at the Language Lab! Lastly, here’s a French song I haven’t been able to get out of my head and a French movie that made me cry. Have a wonderful summer!

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Atrapados (Caught) – Patricio’s Recommendation of the Week!

I just finished watching this show and I thought it was pretty good. It’s your classic Netflix original murder mystery show that has all the classic tropes: A troubled main character with a traumatic past, a million plot twists that sometimes make no sense, and a chilling classical music soundtrack. The show takes place in a beautiful city in Argentina named San Carlos de Bariloche. I would recommend watching it if you want to practice your learning comprehension in Spanish, specifically for accents that are harder to understand and not often taught in school. Things to remember about Argentinian Spanish:

  • The double l’s are pronounced like a ‘sh’ sound. Ex: ‘llamar’ is pronounced sha-mar.
  • The ‘s’ is sometimes aspired, such that it’s pronounced like an ‘h’. Mesa, as in table, is pronounced Meh-ha.
  • Tú and tí becomes vos, and the verb ser (to be) changes in the second person. Tú eres genial becomes vos sos genial.
  • Verb conjugation changes a lot for the second person. Verbs like “tú tienes” and “tú quieres” become “Vos tenés” and “Vos querés”.
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Drops of God: Patricio’s Recommendation of the week!

I recently watched this show and I absolutely loved it. Drops of God is a multilingual show, which means many languages are spoken throughout the course of the episodes. Depending on which character is speaking, the show switches from English, French and Japanese. Something I found particularly interesting is how the characters’ personalities shift when speaking different languages, which is a common phenomenon in bilingual people. This show will give you a new (and kind of pretentious) perspective of wine, and will probably make you want to swirl and smell any beverage you drink, whether it’s wine or apple juice. Is that a hint of… apple I smell? With… hmmm…. limestone?

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Amores Perros: Patricio’s recommendation of the week!

This semester I started using Letterboxd and Goodreads a lot more to procrastinate working on my thesis. While probably not the most productive, it did motivate me to start consuming more media in Spanish, French, and German, so I thought I’d start sharing a weekly recommendation! Amores Perros is a movie by Alejandro González Iñarritu, a Mexican filmmaker that has released some great films such as The Revenant and Biutiful. Amores Perros is a devastating movie about different stories that crash together during an accident (figuratively and literally speaking). This movie is such a brutal portrayal of the social problems in Mexico. As the title suggests, dogs play a big part in the story! I’m wondering how they got these dogs to act so well. Are there animal Oscars? If so, it’s a close call between these gnarly dogs and the one from Anatomy of a Fall. That dog can act.

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Resource for A1 German Students!

Do you want to practice your German over break but are tired of Duolingo? Do you also get the feeling that every movie in German sounds like a long, incomprehensible sentence? But more importantly… do you like to watch really bad movies that make you scream at the screen?

Nicos Weg is a movie made for learning German that has all the vocabulary you need for A1 level. You can find it on YouTube, but I added the link at the end of the post! The characters talk slow, but not too slow to the point where it’s annoying, and the storyline is (kind of) great! It’s an entertaining movie, that’s for sure. While most characters are really likable, the main character Nico will make you want to pull your hair out. I was watching this movie with a friend who doesn’t speak any German and we were both incredibly entertained, mostly because of how ANNOYING the main character is! We kept complaining about the plot holes of the movie and next thing you know we watched an hour and a half of it. Time flew by and I actually learned so many new words. Did you know that elevator is Aufzug in German? It makes no sense but it’s true! It’s such a great resource for hearing all the A1 words in a movie that moves at a pace that beginner students can follow, and I highly recommend it even if the general cinematography isn’t the best. I would describe it as the German version of Twilight. Tschüss und schöne Pause!

Link: https://youtu.be/4-eDoThe6qo?si=n_rx3opBqr2mPXvV

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Pain and Growth and Growing Pains in La vita bugiardi degli adulti

Lately I listen almost exclusively to Massive Attack. This is partly because they’re a great band and I love their music, but I’d be lying if it wasn’t also largely out of a burning desire to embody some of the coolness radiated by Giovanna, also known as Giovà or Giannina, the brooding and complex heroine of La vita bugiardi degli adulti (The Lying Lives of Adults), a recent Netflix interpretation of Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name.

Giordana Marengo as Giovanna in La vita bugiardi degli adulti on Netflix
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The Blue Caftan: A Moving Arabic Film

The Blue Caftan premiered at the 2022 Cannes Festival.

Last month, I saw one of the most moving films. I went into it completely blind—my friends had asked if I wanted to come along to a film festival and I said yes, knowing nothing about what film we’d be watching. Before the show started, commentators talked a bit about Morocco, and the history of the film festival we were at, The Cascade Festival of African Films.

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Six Spanish Shorts to Watch Over Winter Break

Headed into the break but still want to practice your Spanish? Check out these six Spanish short films for quick and easy immersion! Each film is directed and filmed for and by native Spanish speakers, and they come from a wide range of countries. Many of the shorts are also favorites at film festivals around the world! Make sure to check out Uno by Javier Marco. For more Spanish shorts, check out Short of the Week, and sort by country to find more foreign language short films.

Detrás Del Espejo (Behind the Mirrors) by Julio O. Ramos

Best for: Beginners
Genre: Action
Location: Peru
Watch for: an exciting short with a dramatic end
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Film Recommendation: Зеркало (Mirror)

Andrei Tarkovsky is one of, if not the most famous Russian film director of all time. One of his most beloved films by Russian people, Зеркало (1975) is a semi-autobiographical sequence of clips playing with memory, war, and daily life in Moscow.

The film features stunning creative techniques, such as Tarkovsky’s famous long shots. The one above is considered not only one of his best shots, but one of the best in film history. Other techniques include color schemes and themes such as the mirror, time, and poetry, which is read by different characters and narrators throughout the film.

The plot is kind of tricky to explain. A dying poet is the narrator (something that isn’t revealed until the end), but the story is far from linear or clear. The scenes switch between different time periods, and it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with which one you’re actually in.

I’m no film buff, but this is definitely one of Tarkovsky’s most important works. He’s a hard director to understand no matter what, so you might as well start here! The Russian is fairly hard to understand, and I did need the help of subtitles to understand what was going on.