I suppose it must be documentary week as here is another back to back. I don’t really know of Yayoi Kusama but like everyone else I’ve seen her distinctive polka dot art before without realizing who made them. This is a biography of her life and career by first-time director Heather Lenz and quite clearly was made in cooperation with Kusama herself. It’s a well-made and comprehensive account but considering how flamboyant a personality Kusama herself is, this documentary feels oddly straightforward and conventional.

We watch a pretty healthy mix of documentaries amidst feature films in our cinematic diet but it occurs to me that almost all of them are English language ones. This one is a Taiwanese documentary by first time director Hsieh Chin-lin and its subject is the New Taiwan cinema of the 1980s itself. We’re a long way from watching everything from that era but I think we’ve watched enough that we’re not hopelessly ignorant and can recognize enough of the clips included here to make going through this overview a worthwhile experience.

Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those actors who have a reputation for being so completely committed to their roles that anecdotes of their intensity border on being obsessive-compulsive. This is apparently his final performance as he has announced his retirement, but he’s not dead yet so who knows. It’s also his second collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson. Considering that the first one resulted in the immensely good There Will Be Blood, it adds up to many good reasons to watch this one.

This is the second film we’ve watched by director Werner Herzog and once again it stars his frequent Klaus Kinski collaborator even though neither seemed to be able to stand the other. Fitzcarraldo even parallels Aguirre, the Wrath of God in that both are about a fateful boat journey down a river through the jungle. The story here is even more incredible yet it seems to have been loosely based on a real one about an entrepreneur who hauled a steam ship over a hill, albeit in disassembled form.

This is a television series that I think not many have watched. Though it really was filmed at Versailles and co-produced by a French studio, it’s an English language series with primarily British performers. Its premise is the founding of Versailles itself by King Louis XIV. There are a total of three seasons but we’ve just watched only the second season and I’ve decided to drop it. The first season was quite solid but the second season was just too simple and silly.

This is another of those films that I’m pretty sure I watched as a child on the television but was too young to understand much of it. There’s actually not much reason to revisit it, except that it’s emblematic of a certainly genre of films about black struggle in the US that undoubtedly has noble intentions but ends up making a hash of it because of the total lack of input from any black people and fails to respect historical facts.

This one is a very niche documentary about the final, uncompleted film by Orson Welles, The Other Side of the Wind. I added this to my list thinking that it would be something like a biography of the great director, focusing on his final years. To some extent, it is but it is much more focused on the minutiae of the production process of the film itself and that turned out to be a bit too specialized for me to hold much interest in.