So this is another film by director Hirokazu Kore-eda and we’ve certainly watched a fair few of his works across the past several months. This is the earliest of his films yet and it’s based on a real event that took place in 1988 albeit very loosely. It’s odd now that I notice how so much of his work share a theme about parents failing their children.
Once again, I’ve barely watched any entries of the highly successful Mission Impossible franchise though I did write about the fourth one. The rave reviews for this latest entry, with some critics going so far as to call it one of the best action movies ever made, convinced me to turn up at the cinema for it. Like everyone else, I am left amazed by how hard Tom Cruise is still working at the age of 56.
So I planned to watch both this and You Were Never Really Here in the same week without realizing that the newer film starred Joaquin Phoenix, who is of course the brother of River Phoenix. I’ve had this film in my sights for a while now due to RIver’s performance in it but the fact that it was also directed by Sidney Lumet is another plus in its favor.
This one arrived on my list via the usual recommendations and I thought it was simply a new, notable work by relatively unknown people. It turned out that it was directed by Lynne Ramsay who also the excellent We Need to Talk About Kevin and of course the male lead is Joaquin Phoenix though I could not recognize him at all due to how buff he made himself for this role. It’s one of those astonishing transformations that some actors pull off from time to time that seems unhealthy to me.
Considering how much I adore both The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, I suppose it’s only a matter of time until I got to this, director Jacques Demy’s first feature length film. The preamble states that it was restored as the original negative had been destroyed and the person in charge of that was Agnès Varda. We’d just seen Varda of course in Faces, Places but somehow I never realized that they were husband and wife.
The last feature length Malaysian film covered in this blog was the execrable The Journey. Since then several other Malaysian films have been widely acclaimed but I’ve skipped them all. This one has been promoted a fair bit on the awards circuit but the real difference is that its newcomer director Tan Seng Kiat somehow managed to persuade veteran actress Sylvia Chang to appear in his film. That’s enough for me to give it a chance but unfortunately I once again found myself disappointed on every level.
Once again this film stars the ubiquitous Song Kang-ho but at least this time the director Jang Hoon is a newcomer. Though the film’s innocuous title and poster doesn’t drop any hints, this is really about a historical event, the so-called Gwangju Uprising that took place in 1980. I haven’t known about this event beforehand so learning about it was good. However a cursory reading up on it reveals that this version involves substantial artistic license.