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.
It was only when we watched Faces, Places that I learned that we’d never watched a single film by Agnès Varda, a significant force in the French New Wave movement. Her death earlier this year only reminded me of the need again and so here is one of her most famous works. This one is certainly more approachable and less cryptic than many of the other French New Wave films we’ve seen plus it does put women in its centre in a way that those films do not.
Along with The Lion King, this is one of the Disney animated films from the 1990s that made the strongest impression on my generation, purely as a consequence of when it was released. Nostalgia is indeed a powerful thing and so even I confess to feeling a frisson of anticipation when the teaser for this opened with just the image of a rose and the opening notes of its famous main theme. Inevitably no modern remake can ever live up to childhood memories but this one at least makes no major missteps and is probably as good an effort as can be expected.
Ever since I watched One Wonderful Sunday, I felt that I liked it more than any of Akira Kurosawa’s more well known samurai films. Ikiru falls into precisely the same category, a drama film set in post-war Japan about the travails of everyday life. This one belabors its points a touch too heavily and could stand to be edited down a bit. But it is nonetheless wonderful and far more intelligent than I initially gave it credit for.
