The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami doesn’t have a great track record with me. While I can appreciate the complexity of thought that goes into his work, most of it is either so subtle or draws so heavily from other artistic works I’m not familiar with that I find it utterly mystifying. It’s therefore quite a bit of pleasure to discover that Taste of Cherry is mostly accessible and comprehensible to me.
This one is a lesser known film that isn’t very notable but I thought it would make for good light entertainment. I’m pretty sure I read about it on Broken Forum. It’s a collection of five short films by different directors but which are all connected and share a theme of horror on the highway. It’s a low budget film starring unknowns but I thought it didn’t acquit too badly for itself.
This film made it onto the lists of many critics’ best films of 2016 though it actually made its debut at a film festival in early 2015. It has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and boasts of being the only film ever made in the Kaqchikel language, apparently a branch of the Mayan family of languages that is spoken in Guatemala. Needless to say I watched this with a fair bit of anticipation.
After having watched the original twice and being occasionally reminded of the existence of this version by a poster in a local restaurant here in Seremban 2, I thought it was high time that I got around to watching this. A major impediment to this endeavor is that its running time is nearly three hours, requiring some scheduling to achieve.
When I first added this to my list, I thought this was a movie. I only learned on the day I watched it, from a blog post by economist Scott Sumner, that it’s a documentary by Russian director Alexander Sokurov. Upon watching it, I found it utterly unlike any other documentary I’ve ever seen and has decidedly movie-like qualities.
I’m pretty sure that this one was added to our list simply because my wife has to watch every last Studio Ghibli film, especially one that was directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki himself. Upon watching however, I found that it’s probably one of his least notable films and is completely missable.
This isn’t an especially notable documentary but it is extra relevant considering how prominent American politics are this year. Anthony Weiner isn’t an especially prominent politician on a global basis but he was considered a popular and up and coming Democrat until his career was derailed by a sexting scandal. This documentary covers his attempt to revive his career by running for mayor of New York City in 2013.