Due to some disturbances in our usual schedule, I had to skip a day of posting recently. I thought we’d get back into the groove with an easy to watch film. This is a Brazilian animated film that’s only about 80 minutes long. It turned out to be fairly heavy and depressing watch with no dialogue at all. The film does list voice actors but the only sounds they make are indecipherable mumbles and exclamations.
Like pretty much everyone who has read Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, I greeted the news of it being adapted into a film with incredulity. I loved the story and I’ve considered Chiang to be one of favorite science-fiction authors ever since I read Understand, but it seemed unfilmable to me. Having Denis Villeneuve as the director didn’t fill me with confidence either. He’s clearly talented and is very cerebral and my reaction to his films has always been mixed. Still, this was one film I absolutely must watch and was duly frustrated that while it was released in November in the US I needed to wait until January this year for it to come to Malaysia. Note that this post will be full of spoilers, so consider yourself warned.
Continuing with our ongoing efforts to make a dent in our list of backlogged Chinese films, here is another entry from back when Zhang Yimou made films that mattered. Once again this one stars Gong Li plus a smattering of other familiar faces from that era. What marks a difference from the previous two films I’ve covered so far is that this one is actually critical of Communism, though the criticism is less severe than I’d expected.
We’re not completely out of all-time-great films yet. This one was included in the US National Film Registry which officially makes it a great American film and it’s also an adaptation of a great American novel. I understand that the novel is required reading for most US students. This adaptation was directed by John Ford, another great American director who is best known for westerns.
Since we’ve started watching films in earnest we’ve actually been making quite a bit of headway against our list. This is why the films being covered here have been trending towards newer releases. This is a French-Polish production that was released only this year but has become noteworthy enough among critics to earn a place in my lists.
It wasn’t a given that I would watch this. I dislike the idea of Disney releasing a Star Wars film every year like clockwork and having Gareth Edwards direct it is not a mark in its favor. I thought his Godzilla was one of the worst films I’ve watched last year. But word of mouth on Broken Forum and other places eventually led me to realize that this was unexpectedly good and so I duly trooped to the cinema and added my bit to Disney’s ridiculously growing coffers.
The last film that we watched by director Pedro Almodóvar was All About My Mother, a film that I found remarkable for having only female characters. Though the poster for this film features two women, both of them spend most of the time in a coma and so the film is really about the relationship of two different men with these two women while they are hospitalized.