This is the first film by Roman Polanski to be featured on this blog and only the second one I’ve ever watched, after Rosemary’s Baby some years ago. While Polanski can be fairly said to be among the great directors, I’ve been reticent about adding his films to my watch list due to his awful personal reputation. I have no doubt that his films are no good but it’s easy to keep putting off watching them if every mention of his name reminds you that he is still a fugitive from justice. Still, Chinatown is considered one of the best noirs ever made so I know I’d have to get around to watching it eventually.
When I told my wife that this next one is a New Zealand horror movie, her reaction was “What? Again?” While two films does not a trend make, there are plenty of other examples to suggest that the tiny country is indeed carving a unique niche for itself in the world of cinema. Unlike Housebound, this one is pretty much a pure comedy with horror only as its theme. Its silliness is cemented by how it purports to be a documentary about vampires living in Wellington.
This marks the second film by director Tsai Ming-Liang to be featured on this blog and it’s especially poignant here as it is set in Malaysia. Though he is known as a Taiwanese director and now resides there, he was actually born and raised in Kuching, Sarawak. This one is set in Kuala Lumpur and though it stars his regulars Lee Kang-Sheng and Chen Shiang-Chyi, it also includes a Malaysian amateur, Norman Atun, who had no prior acting experience before this and was apparently spotted by Tsai while working as a food vendor.
This one marks the last of Satoshi Kon’s feature films that we’ve slowly watched over the last couple of years. Both of us have actually seen this years ago but that was probably before I could appreciate it properly. This time around, while this isn’t the most sophisticated of the late director’s films (I think Perfect Blue deserves this honor), it’s easily the most likable and touching for me.
Having watched neither this nor the Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will, I often found myself confusing the two. I guess that some part of me must have internalized that the racist overtones of this film without really being conscious of it. No self-respecting cinephile can get around watching The Birth of a Nation. It’s the first real American feature film, arguably the first film blockbuster anywhere in the world and my cinephile friend recommended it to us as a film that’s actually good for its time, though now that I recall it, he did warn us about how racist it is.
This film was put on my watch list based on the strength of how much we liked the other works by director Alexander Payne that we’ve seen. It’s true that his best is probably still the one that we first watched, Sideways, but all of them have been solid dramas about human relationships. So it’s by pure coincidence that this film turned out to be especially relevant in a year in which Hillary Clinton has just been nominated as the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Presidential elections.
The last time we tried to watch a film by Jean-Luc Goddard, it didn’t go over so well. This one was made at the peak of the New Wave director’s career and even stars Jean-Paul Belmondo, who Goddard of course immortalized in Breathless. In the event, while this one at least had more of a plot that we could follow, it was still pretty tough to glean any sort of meaning out of it.
