Given that pretty much every film Charlie Kaufman has been involved in gets on my list of favorites, I was always going to watch this. Plus, since this is a stop-motion animated film, it got on my wife’s list of interesting animated features to watch as well, which makes it a double-win. She did comment afterwards that it feels so small in scale and so modest in ambition, especially compared with a sprawling epic like Synecdoche, New York. That’s because it was adapted from a play by Kaufman himself and it stars the same three, and only three, performers who did the play: David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tom Noonan.
Over the course of the past few months, we’ve been slowly working our way through a good number of old Stephen Chow films. The main reason is that my wife feels like writing something that draws inspiration from his films and so needed to do the research but it’s also interesting to revisit them after having gained more experience with what the best of cinema all around the world has to offer. I’ve refrained from writing about them so far because while some of them are good and some are merely decent, they’re all solidly commercial films rooted in the mores of the era and there’s not much to say about them.
So we’ve watched quite a few of Hitchcock’s films now over the past couple of years. This one is not one that I would have chosen to watch on my own as I don’t believe it is particularly notable. My cinephile friend however suggested this as a film that somewhat different from the usual Hitchcock formula. In fact while it does star Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, who make for a very standard Hitchcock couple, it’s not much of a thriller at all.
As with so many of my picks, this relatively recent Russian film made to the top of many lists of most remarkable works and it’s even considered to be science-fiction. I did note that whenever it’s mentioned critics always took care to state that it’s an incredibly dense and almost incomprehensible film that runs to more than three hours long. Even my cinephile friend said that he loved the cinematography but had a hard time finishing it. Considering the kind of films that he liked, this is a seriously intimidating statement.
Courtroom dramas seem to be a dead genre these days, especially in the United States. My guess is that the really interesting and precedent-setting cases are just too complex to be put on film while simpler cases about street crime has to contend with the cynicism of modern audiences that the justice system actually works. In any case, 12 Angry Men is widely considered one of the best exemplars of this genre and so it was put on my list.
Sometimes it’s easy to overlook just how fast social change in the United States can be. For me it was astonishing to see not just how quickly transgender rights entered the mainstream but how all kinds of new words entered the vocabulary of everyday use. Even as a very liberal person I have to admit to finding all that change off-putting as society now has to come up with all sorts new rules to govern all manner of interactions. Tangerine is far from being the first film with transgender leads but as far as I know it is the first American film in which its producer campaigned for its performers to be nominated for the Best Actress category for the Academy Awards. Even if this bid ultimately failed, it seems that this will only be a matter of time.
Despite having already watched this multiple times while studying in China my wife asked to watch it again after having gained more experience of cinema from all around the world. I suppose that as one of the most important films of China it’s about time that I watched it as well. It was the directorial debut of Chen Kaige and it was photographed by Zhang Yimou, arguably the two doyens of Chinese cinema.
