I too thought that I’ve had my fill of Clint Eastwood’s Westerns yet here’s a last one. Not only was this the very first time he both acted and directed in a Western himself but it is probably his morally ambiguous role. Indeed the film is notorious for having his character rape a woman soon after he arrives in town. The rest of the film isn’t quite that shocking unfortunately and in the end I liked the concept of it more than the execution. This has a rough and ready gritty feel but I think it would better achieve what it is trying to do with a more polished look.
I’m pretty sure this is the very first film from Bhutan I’ve seen and it’s a good one too that has wowed audiences in international film festivals. It uses the country’s natural beauty to great effect as anyone would expect but more than that, it offers a salient commentary on its politics. It could be argued that this constitutes propaganda and I don’t like how negatively it characterizes democracy. Still it’s a very funny film that keeps you on the edge of your seat wondering how it will end and perhaps it’s not an unfair portrayal of the country so I’d rate it very highly.
We’ve watched Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of King Lear a couple of years back, and now here is his version of Macbeth. Not only was this made nearly 30 years earlier, it’s a much shorter and simpler film. It makes significant changes from the original and eschews the Shakespearean language in favor of Japanese themes. Yet it is arguably faithful to the intent of the play and is widely considered one of the best film adaptations. For us, even though we already know exactly what will happen at every step, Kurosawa’s lavish production and the excellence of the acting ensure that the emotional impact remains potent.
This being the first television series made by Wong Kar-Wai, I thought I should at least check out a few episodes of it. I thought for sure that it would be released for foreign markets given Wong’s fame and so waited a while for it but it never did. In the event, I had to watch the original version with the Shanghainese language and Chinese subtitles, which is a real pain for me. The first two or three episodes were downright terrible. Too fast paced, too much posing and too little of substance. It gets better when it slows down by episode four and we can finally tell who’s who and what is going on. Even so I stopped at episode five because the full thirty episodes is way too much and there’s a lot that I don’t understand. Watching it properly would be a fascinating but rather taxing project.
A valuable painting is stolen from a museum in 1985. Thirty years later it turns up in the estate of a deceased couple who are seemingly ordinary retired teachers. I don’t much care for the painting itself but the story that this documentary pieces together about the secret life of this couple is extraordinary. To supplement the interviews with the people who knew the couple and those familiar with the theft, actors reenact key scenes in a bold style that looks almost like something by Wes Anderson. I had doubts at first that it would hold my interest, but by the end I agree with the maker of this piece Allison Otto that someone should make a full feature film about this.
So much of the fun of this film is that Andy Lau plays a fictionalized version of himself here along with copious references to other Hong Kong superstars and the industry itself. The premise of a cinema superstar who deliberately does an artistic film to bait for acting awards is both on point and funny. The execution goes well at first but then it seems to lose track, turns into an uninteresting lesson about arrogance and in the end just kind of falls apart. I really wanted this to be good so it’s especially disappointing that it’s not.
