This came to my attention due to a post on Broken Forum but even the poster refrained from calling it a good film. I was further intrigued by it being an adaptation of a well-known novel by J.G. Ballard. Ballard is these days best known for his novel Empire of the Sun due to it being made into a film by Steven Spielberg but most of his literary output is actually dystopian science-fiction, a genre that High-Rise perfectly falls into.
Due to my wife’s insistence, we’ve actually watched pretty much all of Makoto Shinkai’s films and I can’t say that I’ve liked any of them. Your Name, his newest film, was a huge hit in Japan and seems to have been quite successful in China. Since we discovered that it is actually showing at a cinema here in Seremban, my wife decided to wanted to see it and it does seem like a somewhat novel experience as I don’t believe we’ve ever watched a Japanese anime on the big screen before.
These days a large proportion of the backlogged films on our shared watch list are Chinese ones due to my needing to catch up on so many well known exemplars of Chinese cinema. Devils on the Doorstep is one such entry that my wife asked to watch. We’ve seen veteran actor Jiang Wen plenty of times, most recently in Red Sorghum for example, but I believe that this is one of the only times we’ve seen him in a film in which he is also the director.
The last work we saw of director Philip Kaufman was his 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This one is an adaptation of a novel about street gangs in the 1960s, which means that preposterous as things can get in this film, at least some parts of it are based on real life events. It also stars Ken Wahl, who some people from my generation may recognize from the television series Wiseguy but I’ve never seen him anywhere else.
This one is a highly acclaimed documentary shot by two journalists, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, while they were embedded with a US Army unit over the course of a 15-month deployment in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008. Unless you’re familiar with the events in question, the meaning of the title must be deliberate bit of mystery that is revealed later in the film itself.
This is an older Brazilian film by Walter Salles and I’ve written about his work before. He directed one of the segments in Paris, je t’aime, one of my favorite ones actually about an immigrant needing to travel far from home to get to work in Paris. He also directed the acclaimed Motorcycle Diaries which my wife watched but which I missed because I wasn’t much interested in films back then. On the other hand, I’ve also watched his Hollywood remake of Dark Water, which is as awful as these adaptations of Japanese horror films generally are. That’s quite a leap in terms of style and quality!
This is lighter weight fare added to our list by my wife. I’ve never watched this before but even the original 1940 Fantasia doesn’t hold much prominence in my mind. It was just too far before my time and the only thing I remember of it is the one that everyone knows: the Sorceror’s Apprentice segment. Fantasia never did make much money for Disney but it was apparently very important for many people in the company as an early showcase of what animation can achieve. Fantasia 2000 was therefore a sequel that was in germination for a very long time and this time, as is appropriate, it brings computer generated graphics to the table.