Category Archives: Films & Television

The Gleaners and I (2000)

This is another one of Agnès Varda’s documentaries, or video essays really, that she made late in her life. It won me over right from the beginning with the title card of her production company Ciné-Tamaris being her cat in her own house. Since everyone likely is wondering what gleaners mean, she goes straight to explaining the word from the Dictionnaire Rousseau. The film follows Varda as she travels all over France with her handheld digital camcorder to meet the people who gather the leftover crops after the harvest from fields in the countryside or scavenge food and trash in the cities. As the French title makes clear, Varda considers herself a gleaner as well as she gathers ideas, inspiration and meaning from those she meets.

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Asteroid City (2023)

I’ve soured on the works of Wes Anderson of late but after dithering for a while, I gave in and watched this one. Once again, it’s an ensemble film featuring an insane number of Hollywood luminaries and doesn’t really mean anything at all apart from the usual pathos of its characters. Yet I ended up rather liking this one because it’s very overt in telling the audience not to worry too much about it means and to just enjoy the show. It also helps that like the other Anderson films that I’ve most liked, it has more in the way of young adult characters and of course the retro-1950s science-fiction setting is great fun.

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Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

I’ve left this, perhaps the most heartbreaking of the Studio Ghibli films, for among the last. I couldn’t help but be partially spoiled in advance as this is so well known but it turned out to be very different from what I expected. For example the famous firebombing scene takes place at the very beginning. It sets the stage for the trials of the brother and sister duo but doesn’t really play a part after that. In fact it seems to me that what causes their deaths isn’t the war at all and I found the situation that the two found themselves in to be implausibly contrived in order to maximize their suffering. Contrary to expectations, I didn’t much care for this film.

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Polite Society (2023)

I didn’t actually believe that this would really turn out to be a comedy action movie but I suppose I really should have believed in the poster and all of the clues. It’s so weird watching this after Ms. Marvel because it’s doing so many of the same things and even has the same actress playing the villain despite not having any superpowers involved. In some ways, it’s even better since having people with superpowers resort to fisticuffs in the end always looked dumb. There are some points in this film where it crosses the line over into cringe territory but I’d say it’s a decent action movie in the growing girl power genre.

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Rain Town (2024)

We’re continuing with the recent spate of Malaysian films I suppose as my wife insisted on catching this in the cinema to support local filmmakers. I admit that the idea of a Malay director, Tunku Mona Riza, directing a mostly Chinese cast in intriguing and I do like how it’s set in the town of Taiping. Unfortunately the material she has to work with is television drama level crap. It feels like something out of the 1980s with its moral conservatism and naive take on the human condition. I do want to watch something interesting set in Taiping but this isn’t it.

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The Red Shoes (1948)

This was added to my list because it’s a film by the Archers, the partnership between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I can’t say that I like it all that much even if it is known as one of the best British films of all time, but I am astounded that this really is all about a ballet production. In fact, its central feature is a performance that goes on for nearly twenty minutes and most of its cast are professional ballet dancers. There’s a delicious uncertainty for a long while as to where exactly this film is leading but it becomes more conventional once two of the main characters fall in love with one another.

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Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

I believe this is first film we’ve watched by Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the great directors of Golden Age Japanese cinema alongside the better known Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu. This one is naturally one of his best works, apparently adapted from a folk tale. It’s a real tearjerker, piling tragedy after tragedy on top of its characters yet doesn’t feel over the top because of their folkloric origins. It’s absolutely brutal in portraying how pitiless the slave-owning society in medieval Japan was like. By the midpoint, I was ready to watch the protagonist lead a slave rebellion and burn it all down. This being not only a Japanese film but one that is all about imparting a Buddhist sense of mercy, this is very much not what happens.

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