I got this pick from Marginal Revolution and subsequently saw it as a notable film in a couple of other places. Tyler Cowen rated it very highly but after starting to watch this, I realized that I should have taken into account that Cowen is probably more of a fan of sports than I am. Anyway this is a documentary about the intensive, possibly torturous, ice hockey program that the Soviet Union ran as part of its propaganda machine during the Cold War.
I didn’t plan for this as I had no idea what this film was about, but the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests turned out to be an appropriate time to watch Summer Palace. Director Lou Ye had impressed us with his recent Blind Massage and I believe I added this to our list as it is his most well known film. As to be expected for such a film, it was hugely controversial at the time, not only for its depiction of the protests and also for its sex scenes and its use of full frontal nudity for both male and female actors.
If you read through accounts of the career of Woody Allen, you don’t often see mentions of Zelig. That’s why it took a recommendation from our cinephile friend for me to take note of it. Partially because this is a mockumentary, this is one of the most unusual films I’ve ever watched. It’s also a film that is very much unlike anything else Allen was made, which might explain why it doesn’t get talked about much.
Grandma is one of those tiny, indie films that popped to the top of the lists of best films of 2015. I knew next to nothing about it except that it’s women-centric and is relatively short, meaning that it would be good to slot it in between longer films. It had a budget of less than a million dollars, a pittance by today’s standards, though it managed to gather some fairly respectable star power.
Barring the Marvel franchise films, we don’t often see sequels being posted about here. A good sequel needs to be something other than just more of the same yet it also needs to capture the spirit of the original. That’s a tough balance to pull off, especially since so many sequels, heady off the success of the first film blow their greatly increased budget off in dumb ways. This is one reason why seeing the success of this sequel to Elite Squad is so gratifying. Commercially it did better than the first wildly popular film, but what is really surprising is that it may, from a critical point of view, be an even better film than its predecessor.
Most years, it feels like a big, important film arrives to sweep the field of the Academy Awards. This was not true this year, for films released in 2015 as the Oscars were mostly parceled out between The Revenant, Mad Max: Fury and Spotlight. Spotlight in particular won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay but unusually did not win Best Director. This is probably because Spotlight is important mainly because of the historical events it covers rather than for its merits a vehicle for artistic expression.
This one was added to our list on the strength of PK, a film that both of us liked immensely. It was made by the same production team, meaning it was directed by Rajkumar Hirani and stars Aamir Khan. Khan’s character here is even similar to the one he would later play in PK and 3 Idiots was also a huge commercial success. It broke box office record in its day though I’m not sure that this means much since it seems that a new record is set every year. Probably this is attributable to the fact that India’s economy is growing so quickly now and so films get bigger and bigger every year. Unfortunately while 3 Idiots is entertaining enough, it’s nowhere as good or even as polished as PK.