Watch it, weekend it: A personal and downloadable film festival

By Atul Mishra

Having been hell hammered in the humdrum hullabaloo of this week, it's time to roll-coast your rides on cinematic reels. NewsGram brings to you your personal film festival to be enjoyed over the weekend.

Make this weekend a kink in your monotonous life with the magic of movies. Here's what you should download and kill the hamartia of your busy life:

Mean Streets (1973)

Director – Martin Scorsese

A strange mixture of seedy violence, frank nudity and the sort of language you'd expect to hear from gangsters in New York's Little Italy, the film is drenched in a veil of Catholic guilt (lead Harvey Keitel, as Charlie, a small-time hood who knows that he should get the hell out of the game, constantly chastises and tests himself) and seems to act as a permanent celluloid confessional for Scorsese's baser instincts.

For this alone, this gritty Lower East Side drama would be worth noting, but it's also shot through with hints of Scorsese's virtuosity (the wonderful pop-infused soundtrack and the scene where a drunk Keitel teeters through a bar in one disorienting shot), and tantalizing glimpses of his future preoccupations: gangsters, the mores of masculinity and a rich and varied partnership with one Mr. Robert De Niro.

(Citation: empireonline.com)

Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)

Director – Abdellatif Kechiche

This film centers around a 15-year-old girl named Adèle (Exarchopoulos) who is climbing to adulthood and dreams of experiencing her first love. A handsome male classmate falls for her hard, but an unsettling erotic reverie upsets the romance before it begins. Adèle imagines that the mysterious, blue-haired girl she encountered in the street slips into her bed and possesses her with an overwhelming pleasure.

That blue-haired girl is a confident older art student named Emma (Seydoux), who will soon enter Adèle's life for real, making way for an intense and complicated love story that spans a decade and is touchingly universal in its depiction. After Scorsese's mafia masturbation, this film will leave you blue and light.

When Nietzsche Wept (2007)

Director – Pinchas Perry

Set in the year 1882, director Pinchas Perry's adaptation of Irvin D. Yalom's fictional 1992 novel finds a depressed Friedrich Nietzsche seeking out the advice of pioneering psychoanalyst Josef Breuer for help in battling mental malaise. The portrayal of Nietzsche and that of the rare humanity of other characters as they confronted their obsessions and limitations will draw you into rapt attention at the next plot development.

The film is an exploration of the hypothetical conjunction of Nietzsche and Breuer's and Freud's destinies and the development of psychoanalysis, of which Nietzsche's thoughts played a significant part. The scene where Nietzsche gets angry at the chauffeur for having beaten his horse and then getting mad and enraged, or the mad girl's love making scene with Breuer and the epiphany that follows will leave you enthralled.