Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Bacon Time, and Pirate’s Cove for the Rule Five links!

Mrs. Animal and I enjoy movies, but a lot of what Hollywood has produced in the last couple of decades has been, well, crap.  We find a lot of foreign flicks to be more entertaining.  Not the artsy-fartsy crap you find at Cannes, but stuff that’s a little more down to earth.  Here are three you might want to check out.

Men in Hope (Czech Republic, 2011) This film might be called, loosely, a romantic comedy, centering on a restaurant owner having an extramarital affair with the delectable Vika Kerekes.  But it’s a lot more than that.  The down side is that I’ve never been able to find it on DVD or Blu-Ray.  My digital copy was downloaded from a now-gone torrent site that my son-in-law helped me find, and we had to figure out how to add in a separate file for the English subtitles.  Worth it.  Here’s a sample:

Jeon Woochi (South Korea, 2009) While the trailer makes this look like a serious magic/martial arts film, it’s not.  It has plenty of those aspects, but the main character, an undisciplined, skirt-chasing Tao master five hundred years out of his own time, brings plenty of comedy to the fray, too.  My favorite line:  “Let’s show them some tricks!”  This one you can get on DVD, subtitles and all.  Here’s the English subtitled trailer:

And finally, a new favorite, Cleo (Germany, 2019).  This stars the beautiful German actress Marleen Lohse as the title character, an amateur archeologist searching Berlin for a magic clock that might allow her to undo the untimely deaths of her parents.  It’s a fun movie, with just the right blend of romance, silliness and fascinating cinematic effects without resorting to the now-near-ubiquitous CGI.  The trailer:

Hollywood is growing pretty stale these days.  Fortunately for those of us who enjoy movies, there are lots of other alternatives.