We’ve watched nearly the entire filmography of director Park Chan-Wook so I was only too happy to add his latest, much talked about, feature to our list. This one is an erotic thriller with steamy sex scenes and was brilliantly adapted from an English novel, its original Victorian England setting transposed to Korea under Japanese rule.
While I appreciated that the first Guardians of the Galaxy was trying to do something new, I didn’t particularly like it and therefore watching this sequel wasn’t a high priority for us. Still, as a good Marvel fanboy I duly trooped to the cinema and the result was pretty much in line with my expectations: passable comedic entertainment that isn’t awful but really anything notable either.
So this is a major animated feature made by US studios that has zero chance of ever making it to our shores. It has a decent enough budget to look comparable to other CGI cartoons in terms of quality and it even has a long list of famous names providing voices including James Franco, Edward Norton and Salma Hayek. But this is an American cartoon very much made for adults and is certain to cause offence almost everywhere so it was released only in Western countries.
We’ve been on a bit of roll lately in watching period British productions, starting with the famous 1995 BBC production of Pride & Prejudice and now moving onto Downton Abbey. Due to how much my wife turned out to love them, I thought that this recent adaptation of yet another Jane Austen work would slot right in. Note that this is actually an adaptation of the novel Lady Susan and not Love & Freindship.
I believe that this is the first Chinese documentary to be featured in this blog and I’m pleased that it’s very much a modern one, as much about China’s coming of age as that of the young man that is its subject. It’s directed by Du Haibin who has already made several such documentaries.
This film was added to our list last year when its director Andrzej Wajda passed away and eulogies of him appeared in a bunch of places. He is considered one of Poland’s premier directors and this is apparently one of the more notable of his works though he has directed many films across a long and fruitful career.
Lead actress Charlotte Rampling has had an illustrious career but I doubt most audience members would know her. My wife managed to recognize her from Swimming Pool, a film we watched more than 10 years ago but I couldn’t place her. Just odd how memory works sometimes. Here she appears in a small, unassuming British film that appeared at the top of some of the year’s best lists a year ago.