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.
Sex and Lucia has a bit of a lurid reputation on the Internet due to the copious nudity in it but I understand that it’s a favorite of many international cinephiles and other artsy folk. It has also won enough awards to be worth taking seriously.
I was never a particularly ardent fan of the original film, probably because I had first watched it when I was too young to really appreciate its themes. I admired its esthetics but the idea of bioengineered humans being slaves wasn’t novel enough to impress me. So going to the cinema to watch this sequel is less about Blade Runner and more about having confidence in director Denis Villeneuve due to his fantastic work on Arrival.
As you can easily notice on this blog, we’ve worked through so much of the most notable works of classical Hollywood that I’m beginning to run out. This one is considered one of classic film noirs but it’s not exactly at the top of the heap and I’m not sure that it’s good enough to be worth watching these days. Once again it stars Humphrey Bogart though here he isn’t yet another private investigator.