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.
The last time I wrote about a Wes Anderson film was for The Grand Budapest Hotel when I said that his films are essentially cartoons for adults. This is doubly true for Isle of Dogs. It features Anderson’s usual regulars plus one or two new names like Bryan Cranston all in service of a film that is well made and delightful but amounts to nothing more than pure entertainment.
Once again we’re going at this from the opposite direction, having first seen and liked Frances Ha and only now going back to the film that first made director Noah Baumbach famous. Baumbach’s frequent collaborator Greta Gerwig is absent for this one but there are plenty of other recognizable faces even if you might not be able to name some of them.
This is an older Taiwanese anthology film from our usual cinephile friend. As a collection of four short films, each made by a different director and cast of performers, it would be pretty unremarkable, except that one of the directors is Edward Yang and a couple of the stories feature highly recognizable stars, a very young Sylvia Chang and child actress Shi An Ni.
We’ve watched a few films by director Wim Wenders but this one is arguably his most celebrated work so it’s about time we got around to it. This film has a loudly American, specifically Texan, look with its shots of the desert landscapes, rolling highways and dusty towns but its essence feels very European. Indeed it was by French and German companies and apparently Wenders has an entire series of road trip films made in this manner.