I accidentally let a couple of foreign films expire from my DVR

I've mentioned several times recently that I've got a ton of foreign-language films in my queue of films to watch. However, as I have YouTube TV, their "DVR", or library, is one that only keeps things on the cloud for nine months before they expire. There have been a couple of films that I watched and meant to blog about but never got around to doing, and one that I had to interrupt part of the way through and never got around to finishing. So each of them will get a paragraph here, and if I ever get around to tracking them down and watching them in full again, I might do a full-length review. (Frankly, I need to get a Chromebook or laptop so that I can take notes/do the skeleton of a post as I'm actually watching a movie. Perhaps then I wouldn't have such a backlog.)

First up is the Japanese silent I Was Born, But This tells the story of two kids who seem to have moved to a new town a they're starting off in a new school. The film deals with their experiences at the new school, as well as discovering that their father isn't quite as heroic as they might have thought he was. The thing that struck me watching this is how Hollywood conventional the movie was. The other limited number of Japanese silents I've seen have been stuff designed to have a benshi provide ongoing commentary/narration, which this doesn't do at all.

Another Japanese movie was Conflagration. This movie is based on a true story of a monk who inexplicably burned down a temple in the years following World War II. Radical author Yukio Mishima wrote a book about the incident positing one set of theories as to why, while this movie takes the book and comes up with its own theories as to what would drive a monk to do such a thing. I have to admit this wasn't a favorite.

And then there was the French pre-war film The Rules of the Game. A pilot who just did a daring transatlantic flight steps into a love triangle, or really something more than a triangle, as there are multiple couples stepping out on each other. And then everybody ends up together out in the country. When it comes to "best films of all time", this is one of those movies that always seems to make the critics' lists. But I found myself thinking of Au hasard Balthasar while watching it. That's another French film that critics love to put on their lists but that I, while finding it a good movie, isn't something I'd think of as an all time great.

I also recorded some foreign films during 31 Days of Oscar, and we're getting up to nine months since that began, so I've got several more foreign films I need to watch soon. But there are also two more foreign films coming up as part of the Two for One series that I intend to blog about.