I’m sure that most people on the Internet came across images of the famous 1,650-foot ladder of burning gunpowder climbing towards the sky when it made the rounds a couple of years ago. This is a documentary about the life and career of the Chinese artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, behind that project. When I first saw those images I was impressed but thought that it must be the work of some enterprising fireworks technician. As this film shows however, Cai truly is an artist whose output spans multiple media.
My wife is especially concerned about mental ailments and added a whole bunch of films on the subject after following a course on it. This is the first entry to be knocked off the list and I probably wouldn’t have come across it in the ordinary course of events. It was notable enough when it was released, being nominated for and winning multiple awards, but it’s clearly not a film that will be remembered as a classic.
My wife usually doesn’t like horror films but I find them to be useful entries to add to our list because they tend not to be very long. As much as I enjoy serious films, it does get tiring if all that we watch are epics. Of course I do require that they are well reviewed and this one earns its place due to its high Rotten Tomatoes rating and its 17th century New England setting.
This one was added to my list because of how much I liked just about every film directed by Philip Kaufman that we’ve watched so far. I think this is not very well known today and was a commercial failure but it swept the Oscars at the time. I suppose it should also be considered a historically important film as today almost no one remembers the Mercury Seven or even the program itself though everyone knows about the Apollo program.
I picked this up from the usual lists of notable films since it was aired at some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals and thought it was fairly serious Japanese family drama. However it turned out to be a very light watch, being an adaptation of a manga. In fact, despite being a live-action film that it feel so much like a Japanese anime that I suspected this was the case.
It feels like it’s been ages since the last time I watched a proper, mainstream Hong Kong film while at the same I’ve had plenty of posts on this blog about Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese films. That is of course a reflection of the territory’s fading prominence. Just as China is becoming an economic center of the world so too is it slowly becoming a cultural center as well just as other superpowers before it have done. So it’s very apropos that this is precisely the theme of Trivisa, a film that was produced by Johnnie To but directed by a trio of first-time directors Frank Hui, Jevons Au and Vicky Wong.
So we’re now so on top of current releases that we’re watching a prominent 2017 release. It’s so new in fact that it doesn’t even have a proper Wikipedia page yet. This is a documentary by Jeff Orlowski who became known a few years back for Chasing Ice. We didn’t watch that one but we might go back for it in a bit though if this title is anything to go by, it must be a horribly depressing experience.
