I like to give Indian cinema a fair shake but more often than not we’ve been disappointed by them. By and large, their insistence on song and dance numbers, no matter how incongruent, their simplistic storylines and above all their excessive lengths often make them quite a chore to watch, as my wife is wont to complain. It just seems stupidly difficult to identify serious Indian drama to watch. Though Udta Punjab also shares the trait of being somewhat long, it’s mostly an exception as I’m happy to report. It was a recommendation that I read about from The Economist, though as an article about the drug problem in Punjab rather than a film review.
Crime spree films featuring a couple, usually a man and a woman, going off on a wild ride of robberies and killings until they die in a hail of bullets are common enough to constitute a genre in of themselves. Bonnie and Clyde is far from the first of these films but it’s easily the first one that comes to mind when you think about them, especially for American audiences. It’s also one of the earliest American films to show a very obvious French New Wave influence, sharing remarkable similarities in particular with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.
The films made by the Coen brothers fall into one of two categories: the serious ones and the wacky ones. Inside Llewyn Davis, for example, is definitely one of the serious ones. Fargo sort of straddles the line between the two. Given its title, it’s easy to see that Hail, Caesar! falls solidly into the wacky category. It features two of the brothers’ most frequent collaborators, Josh Brolin and George Clooney, plus a whole host of familiar Hollywood faces, past and present, in a variety of minor roles.
As astute readers might intuit, this was added to our watch on the occasion of the death of its director Abbas Kiarostami. I’ve previously covered one of his later works in this blog, but I’ve never watched any of the films that actually made his famous. Kiarostami was already a pretty big deal when he made The Wind Will Carry Us, but I believe this helped him cement his reputation at the height of his career, making it essential watching.
The synopsis of Green Room makes it sound like a generic splatter film, a genre that I have absolutely no interest in and would have passed over without a second thought. What makes this film deserve a second look is that it was directed by Jeremy Saulnier, who made waves a few years ago with the utterly fantastic and mostly Kickstarter-funded Blue Ruin. This one seems to have been made using a more conventional funding model, raising enough money to get Patrick Stewart onboard. It’s actually a bit odd too see such a famous actor slumming it up with all of the unknown ones, though those who have seen Blue Ruin will recognize Macon Blair here in a supporting role.
Farewell My Concubine is probably the single most famous film by its director Chen Kaige and one of the representative works of the so-called Fifth Generation movement of Chinese cinema. After watching Yellow Earth a few months back, it seemed natural to progress to this one as I’ve never seen it before. My wife claims to have watched it many times already but she was insistent that I gain more exposure to Chinese films.
This film needs no introduction. If nothing else, everyone knows about its famous orgasm scene. It also launched the career of Meg Ryan who would unfortunately then be forever typecast as the love interest in many similar rom-com movies. I’ve never watched it however as I was only thirteen years old when it was released and I suspect that most guys would watch it only if it were with a girlfriend. So when my wife wanted to add this to our list I was okay with watching it. After all, no one can deny the cultural influence it has had.
