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Today I want to take a look at another very interesting film distributed by Magnolia but would like to start with a few words about the company’s origins and how to see its really fantastic collection through VOD at budget prices. It was founded in 2001 by Bill Banowsky and Eamonn Bowles with a major share of funding by Mark Cuban, the billionaire who has had a long-time commitment to art house cinema. In 2003, Cuban purchased Landmark Cinema, a string of 58 theaters specializing in foreign and independent films. One of them, the Landmark Sunshine on Houston St., was in the news recently when it fell victim to crushing N.Y. real estate realities.
After seeing and writing about Magnolia films for the past 15 years or so, I can assure you that they are at a consistently high level. Go to their website and browse through their inventory and you will see an amazing variety of first-rate films that can be seen for $2.99 on Youtube or other streaming outlets such as iTunes or Amazon, including the one discussed below that I watched last night.
“The Lovers and the Despot” documents the strange tale of two of South Korea’s film personalities who were kidnapped and spirited away in 1978 by North Korean agents in order to help realize the dreams of Kim Jong-il, the father of the current “despot” and the son of the family dynast Kim Il-sung who was still in power that year. Unlike his father, Kim Jong-il was less interested in reunifying Korea under the aging despot’s odd mixture of Confucianism and Stalinism than he was in producing films that could compete in the Cannes Film Festival and other glitzy gatherings that had hardly anything to do with the north’s austere values.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2018/01/23/the-lovers-and-the-despot/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
