I had the occasion to do some travelling last week and so took the opportunity to watch a couple of more commercial movies that I would ordinarily have skipped during the flights. I liked the first one well enough and considered catching it in the cinema but I’d heard that it was a solid but not truly outstanding film and so ended up skipping it.
The fact that we liked both of Damien Chazelle’s previous films so much as reason enough to go to the cinema to watch this but privately I suspected that this would basically be a sequel to The Right Stuff and, ‘lo and behold, it was indeed so. Once again it stars Ryan Gosling in the leading role though Claire Foy as Neil Armstrong’s wife is a bit odd and it seems to me that her British accent comes out in one especially emotional scene.
Zhang Yang is a director who I thought is worth paying attention to ever since I’ve seen Paths of the Soul and this one in particular seems to have extra cachet in the West. It’s also a very unusual film that is difficult to judge and it purports to tell the real story of Chinese actor Jia Hongsheng while starring the actor himself as well as his real family members playing themselves.
So it turns out we’re far from done with the films of the French New Wave and this one was a specific recommendation from our cinephile friend. Though this isn’t as incomprehensible as Adieu au Langage, this is easily the craziest of the films we’ve seen yet by Jean-Luc Godard.
This marks the third film we’ve watched by director Lee Chang-dong though it’s of his earliest works. It’s a bit of a coincidence that the same Gwangju Uprising that was covered in A Taxi Driver we’ve seen only recently is also a key event here but it makes sense that such a pivotal moment in the history of modern South Korea appears frequently in the country’s creative works.
So this is the film adaptation of the famous novel made by the famous director Stanley Kubrick. I have neither read the novel nor watched any adaptation, but Lolita is very much part of the cultural background everyone is familiar with so there’s nothing very shocking or surprising here. While this is a solid film and the material itself is extraordinary, I found this to be a straightforward, uninspired adaptation that has few signs of Kubrick’s usual genius.
This was a recommendation from our cinephile friend and I only realized later that it was directed by Peter Greenaway whose wonderfully named The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is very famous and something I’ve always meant to watch. Though the title for this film is less impressive, it’s still a very odd work that is very hard to classify, skirting as it does between being a stage play that is captured on film and a film that is about a stage play being performed for an audience.