So this is the third film we’ve watched by Polish director Andrzej Wajda and this one dates from 1981, before the fall of Communism in Poland. I was aware this is the second of a duology of two films but my wife and I have limited patience for films that require deep knowledge of a country’s history and Man of Iron is the more well known work of the two so I chose to watch only this one. This did lead to some confusion about who’s who but overall it didn’t work out too badly.
Last week The 18th European Union Film Festival took place in Malaysia though I guess mostly only expatriate and media types noticed. My wife and I heard about it on the radio and so I looked it up. Most of the films scheduled looked uninteresting to me as they are either too new or too obscure to have been reviewed much. We had already watched Fire at Sea. This is only thing that I found that has very high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes so I picked this to watch, if only as a show of support for such events.
I like to think I’m pretty on top of the most notable releases every year at this point but this is a film that would never have even appeared on my personal radar if it hadn’t been recommended to me by my cinephile friend. This is the first feature film made by its director Bi Gan and it’s so obscure that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page.
Pretty much everything that I watch has been readied for weeks or even months in advance just waiting for me to get to it. Since we usually only watch something like two to three films a week, it can be a while before I get to a title. All this is to say that I had been planning to watch this title way before the Las Vegas shooting early this month but doing so in its wake like this does give the experience some added weight and relevance.
Takeshi Kitano is a Japanese filmmaker of some renown but I believe this is one of his more obscure works. I would never have chosen to watch if it had not been a personal recommendation from our cinephile friend. I understand that it’s quite a break from a director who is famous for his gangster films and even looks the part. It’s certainly a rather unique film and I’m not quite sure what to make of it.
This franchise earned my attention when its sequel became the highest grossing Indian film of all time, though I understand it has since been topped by Dangal. What was especially interesting to me was that it achieved success at the box office internationally while also managing to obtain a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I knew I had to watch it but to do that I surely had to watch the first film first and so here I am.
As usual this got added to my watch list due to the numerous awards it won and the attention it got from critics but I immediately realized that this wouldn’t be easy to watch. I’ve never heard of director Guy Maddin but reading up on him, he seems to be as much an artist as a director. This explains the highly experimental nature of this work with its lack of any coherent plot, weird esthetics and my inability to parse any kind of sense from it.