This is yet another quintessentially Japanese film that was a recommendation from our cinephile friend. Given its title and its premise, I expected it to be light fare. Indeed, though it touches on some heavy themes, it’s ultimately a very sentimental film if a very well-made one.
So this got bumped up the list a whole lot sooner than I expected. I have watched this one before and had a high regard for it back then. As with Summer Snow, finding a copy of it anywhere proved to be impossible and we resorted to watching a YouTube version. July Rhapsody is also notable as being the last film appearance by Anita Mui before her death in 2003.
So the whole reason why I put this onto my list was because I heard about it on Broken Forum and I found the idea of an environmentalist documentary that argues in the opposite direction to be very appealing. It’s about the practice of seal hunting by the Inuit peoples and while we are familiar with campaigns against it, this documentary argues in favor of it.
This film has been sitting in my list for a while now but reading up news on the recent Oscar season led me to some lists ranking the most deserved winners of the award and I was surprised to note how highly it is usually regarded. Indeed this film has an absurdly high rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is considered a highly significant American film.
I suppose this counts as the next entry in the series of films about aging and mental deterioration. This was a critically acclaimed film in its time by Hong Kong director Ann Hui but I’ve never seen it. I’ve never quite understood why she doesn’t seem to be more recognized in the west, especially now that they’re emphasizing female directors so heavily. I’ve also found that despite this being quite a famous film, it is impossible to find it, legally or not, anywhere other than on YouTube. Unless a film is added to an online library or released as part of the Criterion Collection or something, it will probably just disappear.
So I added this to our list entirely because my wife is a huge fan of Downton Abbey and has been antsy about waiting for its movie. Gosford Park was written Julian Fellowes, the showrunner of the hit television series. It has a similar setting as the show and you can even recognize a couple of familiar faces in its cast. It also has a lot of other famous names to round out its cast.
As a famously hand-painted film about Vincent van Gogh, there was no way we wouldn’t be watching this one. Oddly enough this is a Polish production due to the fact that it was conceived by a Polish woman Dorota Kobiela who is credited as a co-director. It was also partially funded through a Kickstarter campaign.