This film gained our attention when we caught one of its trailers in the cinema and of course as a serious film it went on to be nominated for several Oscars. I’m not sure we would have been interested in this ordinarily but we had a free evening in KL recently and as I knew that this was only shown in a limited number of places in Malaysia, we took the opportunity to watch it.
So Your Name was obviously the big anime hit of 2016 that everyone went to see. This lesser known film was number two in Japan. It did make the news in Malaysia in 2017 when a large cinema screen was forced to pull screenings of it due to the studio’s complaints about rampant piracy in our country. I think that was about when I added it to my watch list as well.
I never got a chance to write about it and I did watch the original Cloverfield and rather liked it. I stayed away from this one at first because horror film sequels never turn out well. But then I heard that this is a sequel in name only and actually does some pretty interesting things so I thought I’d check it out.
We currently watch so many films that occasionally we do forget that we’ve already watched something. This is one of those times. Neither my wife nor myself could remember watching this but it seemed familiar as we started watching it. Oddly enough, I do definitely remember watching the earlier and better known Lost in Beijing by the same director and also starring Fan Bingbing. Still, this must have been before I started writing about films extensively and I like to think that my ability to properly evaluate and appreciate cinema has improved since then so rewatching it was fine.
So this is another classic that I never got around to properly watching before this. As my wife noted, even if you don’t know this film you definitely will know the score by Ennio Morricone, iconic as it is. This film is officially the final part of the so-called Dollars trilogy directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood. But this is by far the most famous and successful of the three and it’s not as if continuity matters so I picked it to watch first. I definitely will get around to watching at least the first film at some point however.
Every time I feel like I’m getting a handle on world cinema I am chagrined to discover how much I have yet to learn. This was a recommendation by our cinephile friend. It’s made by Hong Sang-soo, an independent South Korean filmmaker who has been around for a while but this is the first time I’ve seen his work.
So this one made it onto the best of lists of a few critics and was even a recommendation by my cinephile friend. Heck, it was even recommended by LYN members, a popular Malaysian English-language forum, though that is a rather dubious mark of honor. I don’t recognize the name of its writer / director Taylor Sheridan but I do recognize the MCU film stars. Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen are of course obvious but it also stars Jon Bernthal who plays the Punisher on television.