FOUR OBSCURE FILMS YOU'LL NEVER SEE

I took a look at the list of films this weekend and immediately deleted The Conjuring (cheap horror probably in black and white with a shaky camera), Turbo (animated) and Despicable Me 2 (animated).  So I picked four truly obscure movies:

• Only God Forgives ($315,000):  Bangkok gore with Ryan Gosling
• although Rotten Tomatoes reviewers only gave it a 35% rating, I rather enjoyed it
• probably because in all my visits to Thailand, I would not dare enter this dark venue

• Fill the Void ($83,900):  Israeli film about the marriage of Orthodox Jews
• Rotten Tomatoes reviewers:  85%
• a truly educational movie about the family life of Orthodox Jews
• the men sing at Sabbath meals--women don't
• not from film, but most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were Orthodox, and about a quarter of Israelis are Orthodox, while in America, 15%

• Secretly and Greatly (?):  North Korean spies who all die  in a South Korean village
• action comedy released last month, breaking all Korean box office records, mostly teenage girls because...
• ...the three featured NK special forces intruders, flower boy stars from TV soaps, reared as monsters, all end up with heart
• reasonably well attended, but everyone in the theater was of Asian descent

• Untold Story (?):  subheading of "Internment of Japanese Americans in Hawaii"
• being only 57 minutes long, not a real movie, although the re-enactments were excellent
• there were only three people in the audience
• Actually, there is a 1964 book by Kazuo Miyamoto, entitled, Hawaii:  End of the Rainbow, that provides a lot of details about this theme.  I identified with this publication because the author went to Stanford, but perhaps two generations before me.  I noticed that the current Amazon.com cover is totally different from mine, which looks like this:

Turns out that The Conjuring was well attended this weekend, ranking #1, pulling in $41.5 million.  Not black and white, but in color.  Vera Farmiga is a heck of an actress.

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