Yu Jane, a high school teacher and Xiang Guo-Chen, a successful industrialist, are secretly having an affair outside of his marriage. Xiang is on his way to a political career. His campaign advisor wants him to break off his relationship with Yu so to present himself as a candidate with an untarnished image.
BEAUTIFUL FUNERALS is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes AND 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-crossed by black "brushstrokes" and hard-edge straight black and white lines.
In this contemporary take on William Shakespeare's classic tragedy, the Montagues and Capulets have moved their ongoing feud to the sweltering suburb of Verona Beach, where Romeo and Juliet fall in love and secretly wed.
Director Mohsen Makhmalbaf claims to have never seen a movie before making his first film. Doubtful as it sounds, this boast matches perfectly with the controversial artist's personae.
When Ashtray moves to South Central L.A. to live with his father (who appears to be the same age he is) and grandmother (who likes to talk tough and smoke reefer), he falls in with his gang-banging cousin Loc Dog, who along with the requisite pistols and Uzi carries a thermo-nuclear warhead for self-defense.
After kidnapping a father and his two kids, the Gecko brothers head south to a seedy Mexican bar to hide out in safety, unaware of its notorious clientele.
A middle-aged couple has a drifter enter their lives. The fish-store owners find that the mysterious young man awakens the couple in ways they didn't expect.