>>2422
>Cinema+ that eventually showed me Battle Royal, Triplettes of Belleville, and a ton of other arthouse or independent films
My case was the argentinian channel Europa Europa, same guys i think that also administered other stuff like Gourmet.com and i think early Infinito. Saw tons of good movies and mini-series there but also art house poison.
That one schedule was bonkers even for them, i remember it very well, it was Divorcing Jack (irish zany comedy about a bomb maker/defuser) pretty decent for what it was.
Then Woman is the Future of Man (slow burning perv south korean art shithousery with cuckold undertones) i didn't like it back then but made me discover another director to my list of possible money launderers/festival rats.
I got bored and changed channels, then i returned i guess or went to another place and saw that softcore flick at the middle but recognized some faces or so i thought (Monique Parent in nurse clothing, Sebastien Guy lookalike, a british/mid-atlantic narrator) one of the best, most entertaining softcore movies i've seen but that's not saying much, still such thing would make it more easy to find but it isn't. IIRC was about a dude who kept being confused or downright persecuted by some mafioso who wanted debt money and so this fella bangs his way into avoiding danger or finding old lady friends, some scene involve his pal banging Monique Parent (or some fiery redhead in nurse clothing) and the narrator making comments on his luck.
And then it was No Man's Land (french movie about illegal cross borders/smugglers) which i suppose was only broadcasted as an insomnia remedy because nothing happened in that thing other than some gril guard fingering one of the mystery-meat gril co-protagonists, said girl also banging some dude in a decent set condition and the ending with the protag with heavy PTSD stumbling around a farm and pretending to be a rooster to scare his roosters away to their fence line.
All 4 movies felt like a fever dream in one of the worst fevers i've had, but thing is i did found them except the softcore one.
>hosted by some guy and semi-naked girl, advertising local models and their services
That sounds like primetime entertainment for a teenager, back then some TV channels did pull crazy antics to win over viewers, especially low-budget competitors with lots of originality/lack of moral qualms.
>the days I could turn on the TV and find insane things I'd never seen before in the most unexpected places
Cable TV is somewhat dead but some channels, particularly the ones broadcast by university signals and/or education purposes, do show interesting stuff once in a while and especially late at night. Not long ago i saw some juvenile but highly interestingly edited jap series called Time Taxi, it uses tons of speech/idea bubbles or inner window close-up inside the scenes which is a staple of asian narrative jokes in the 90's and early 00's although said series is relatively newer. I thought it was a well-known series but after reading about it i guess it is obscure even for them, who knows what kind of freaks are in that school to pull such media out of their ass but i thank them, it wasn't propagandistic nor subversive and nourished my mind.
>softcore porn, mostly American,
Did you know a good chunk of the softcore comedies screened in most channels were made by the same 3 or 4 dudes?
John Quinn, Ed Holzmann and i forgot the other one. They made 25+ skin flix and most of them can be recognized by people aged 25-40 who had cable; the art direction, lightning and camera work in most of those movies was also very specific, you know someone is going to get banged by seeing the camera position, art direction on set and conditions of natural & artificial light alone even if a character is fully clothed and eating cereal in the morning on a seemingly normal kitchen.
>Tinto Brass
Been stalling on him a lot, one day, one day...
>>2423
>the protagonist sitting in a cafe (a CGI simulation cafe) with a suitcase in the table with him, he’s nervously waiting for someone because that was the instruction given to him.
Goddamn, it sounds pretty familiar but my memory has it being a cool-toned grainy look with objects here and there having these saturated bright primary colors, like a phone booth in bright yellow or a table in deep red. Very 90's, maybe i am confusing it with a spaniard romance comedy i remember seeing a lot back then, had a scene with some dude waiting on a table for his lawyer i think with a grid around the place that made everything look CGI, kinda like an advanced form of the ReBoot kid series early forms.
>these type of shorts usually get bundled or released in groups
If you don't recall where were you sitting or which channel it was then might as well been a dream, that kind of content very rarely gets broadcast again. To boot you are in actual Euro land where that kind of thing seems to be more normal in certain channels while in this continent such content was an oddity and many remember them as events, i recall some movie schedules being hyped a week before in school, i am still from the era where we would talk about waiting to see that one movie on Saturday, we didn't even attempt to go out and play just to wait for certain movies. I recall several cases with Cartoon Network as they seldomly showed anime movies back in the very early Toonami days or a bit prior to it.