WFC Central African Republic: Song from the Forest

This is a documentary (I think… or is it!?) filmed in the Central African Republic, but it’s really more a US/German film than anything else.

Most of the dialogue is in English, but the DVD is subtitled in German only. So when the people who are speaking the language people in Ködörösêse tî Bêafrîka use, I have to read and understand the German subtitles.

“- Versager! Arschloch! Schwanz!” I understand German! Wow!

It’s a fascinating and strange film. Beautifully shot.

Song from the Forest. Michael Obert. 2013. Central African Republic.

Wasp

  • 1 part voka
  • 1 part banana liqueur
  • 2 parts ginger ale

Stir with ice and top off with the ginger ale.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.

WFC Cabo Verde: O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno

I guess Cabo Verde is too small to show up on the map there… Google! Be better!

We’re getting to smaller countries now in this blog series (size-wise or film industry wise (we’re nearly half way)), so the question “is this really a film from ?” is getting slightly more iffy.

IMDB lists this one as a coproduction between “Portugal | Brazil | Cape Verde | France | Belgium”, which makes it like “er”. The director here is from Portugal, but it’s filmed in Cape Verde with plenty of Cape Verdean (is that a word?) actors and stuff, so…

Anyway, this is a very silly film. I didn’t quite get that at the start and thought all the actors were just over-acting like crazy. But it’s an old-fashioned farce and doesn’t really aim at realism. Sort of. It turns all serious towards the end.

It’s amusing. And the structure it has (two timelines connected by a listening to tapes) makes it more interesting.

And I really enjoy listening to Portuguese.

But, still, it’s kinda… off.

Napomuceno’s Will. Francisco Manso. 1997. Cabo Verde.

Coco Punch

  • 3 parts brandy
  • 1 part sweetened condensed milk
  • 4 parts coconut milk
  • some grated coconut

Shake with ice and pour, unstrained, into a glass.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.

Blackest Night

Previously: I bought an HDMI OLED screen and determined that its black pixels emitted light.

This made me start wondering: Do all OLED screens emit light from “black” pixels?

So I did the simplest thing possible to test this: I made a little app that displays a black screen. It’s on Google Play and everything. It’s called “Blacker Than Black” if you just want to search for it on your phone.

So I loaded it up on my Blackberry Priv AMOLED (that’s short for “armored led”, I think), and went into the unmentionable room, and took a picture:

OK, that’s kinda… black… let me twiddle the camera settings… er… f2.8… ISO6400… two second exposure…

That’s still very black! Although now the camera can see my fingers in the very, very dim room. Very dim.

OK, let’s test another phone. That’s a Samsung Galaxy S6…  (Which is also AMMO LED.) Very black indeed.

OK, I’m convinced. That SmallHD AC7 OLED screen sucks, but other black OLED screens are blacker than very black.

For kicks, I loaded the app onto my Sony Xperia z4 tablet, which has an IPS screen. And dialed the exposure settings waaaay down.

Yeah. It’s not very black.

Galaxy S6 in front to compare.

So there you have it: The OLED blackness myth… IS CONFIRMED!

Shocking. But that just means that I have to find a different 7″ OLED screen from somebody that makes a better screen, and things will be perfect!

Unfortunately, after googling for an hour or two, that doesn’t seem to exist. There are other OLED screens, and a couple of them even have HDMI, but they’re all really, really ugly, and isn’t really something that I want in my bedroom.

Oh, well. I’ll have to wait a few more years for perfection…

WFC Cameroon: Aristotle’s Plot

Wow. Such a fresh film. I can see some Godard influences, perhaps, but it’s quite unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s like… Michel Gondry ten years before Michel Gondry.

Very meta and quite funny.

I found their dialect sometimes hard to follow, though. *concentrate* I switched on the French subtitles to help understanding, and I don’t even understand French.

Love the guy who played the “Keystone Cop”.

I do have one slight criticism to make, though: The voice-over at the end was a bit too on the nose.

Le complot d’Aristote. Jean-Pierre Bekolo. 1996. Cameroon.

Tamarind & Gin

  • Tamarind drink
  • Gin

To make the tamarind drink, remove the seends from a bunch of tamarinds, boil some water, and let the tamarind flesh steep in the cooling water for a few hours.

This isn’t really a Cameroon cocktail, but the tamarind part it. I dumped some gin into this traditional soft drink.

I tried googling! Cameroonian bartenders: You should get on the web.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.