Not so long ago I was griping about how the Chinese films by the so-called Fifth Generation of directors all exhibit the same kind of fatalism about the misery that the country has suffered over the course of the twentieth century. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that in The Road Home, Zhang Yimou has made an entirely different kind of film instead. Most of it takes place during approximately the same time period as the earlier films and political events like Anti-Rightist Movement hangs like a specter in the background but the focus here is completely different.
I seem to have developed a real liking for these small American independent films. Since their budgets are tiny, they’re pushed to do more with what they have and are usually daring enough to try some new things. At the same time, they’re still mainstream enough that watching them isn’t too mentally taxing as few people are up for watching truly groundbreaking films all the time. This one was directed by Karyn Kusama who has actually made expensive big budget films before.
I picked this to watch as an easy way to ease back into our regular routine of watching films and writing about them after returning from holiday. Animated features are usually good for this as they aren’t too demanding and please my wife but my wife ended up not liking it, probably due to a combination of not getting the humor and not really liking Westerns much.
This one was added to our list due to rave reviews about it on Broken Forum but I somehow missed noticing it back when it won a bunch of awards. It certainly counts as a low budget film with a tiny cast and as its title promises, about half of it takes place in a single room. Yet it is in every way a remarkable and highly impactful work.
A while back my wife dumped a whole bunch of South American films onto our shared watch list. This one, a Brazilian film by director Breno Silveira, should be the last of them. To be truthful, I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about watching this after a string of films that focused on the poverty of the peasants in South America. They may be great, but it gets a bit much sometimes. As it turned out I needn’t have worried for while this film has its share of misery, its really all about the music.
This is another famous classic that we had yet to watch and naturally we were reminded of its existence by La La Land. It’s another case in which many of the individual elements are familiar, such as James Dean’s iconic look, the knife duel and the car chickie run, yet have never added up to a coherent whole. As it turned out, this is indeed an eminently watchable film but I’m not certain that it would have become the huge cultural icon that it is if Dean had not died one month before its release.
After American Sniper, I really wasn’t sure if I was going to watch this, especially as it’s a film about a relatively inconsequential event. This one does have something like 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Tyler Cowen named it as one of the year’s best films, not just an important one. Combined with the fact that it’s likely an undemanding watch, I decided to throw it into the rotation.
