As a claymation movie, and especially one that is about a girl in Australia who has a pet chicken being pen pals with a man in America, you wouldn’t expect it to be very dark. Mary and Max however is one of the most depressing films I’ve watched this year and is most certainly not suitable for children no matter how cute its animation is.
These days Justin Lin is best known for the Fast and Furious movies though he is also slated to take over the next iteration of the rebooted Star Trek franchise. But like everyone else, he had to start somewhere and Better Luck Tomorrow was his feature film debut. This one only has middling ratings on Rotten Tomatoes but Roger Ebert saw fit to award it four out of four stars and commented that it’s extremely rare to see a film focused on the experiences of Asian-Americans. That’s pretty much why I was interested in this film myself.
We’d previously watched Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. and ended up being surprised by how funny and creative it is. It stands to reason that we had pretty high expectations for The General. Keaton himself considered it his best film and is ranked among the greatest American films ever made. Unfortunately those expectations were largely dashed. It turns out that while Sherlock, Jr. is indisputably a comedy, The General isn’t. Instead, it’s an action-adventure film with some comedic elements and that makes all the difference.
Here we have the first film from Thailand to be covered in this blog and it is by a director whose name I must confess that I will never be able to remember Apichatpong Weerasethakul. There is little doubt that this is a worthy film, it managed the impressive feat of being included in the Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films ever made. But it’s also an incredibly contentious film with many people who complain about it being impossibly boring and pointless. Just read the user comments on IMDB.
Continue reading Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
I currently seem to have a disproportionately large number of Chinese-language films sitting in my watch-list. Part of this is due to just making up for lost time but I like to think that it’s also due to China’s growing prominence in the international arena and its greater ability to score successes in the global culture wars. In any case I think Dearest is an example of a film that a is a near ideal confluence of being topical as it’s about modern China, being good enough that it deserves to be taken seriously and yet remains accessible enough to achieve commercial success.
So it’s been a while since we last watched a horror movie. This one was added to our usual list because it got some decent comments on Broken Forum and a quick check confirmed that it has a rating of over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’d never watched anything by director Adam Wingard but he appears to have a decent body of work. So it can’t be that bad, right?
Adieu au Langage is the latest film by renowned French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. Even the fact that he’s still making films at the age of 85 is impressive. We’d watched his first and most famous film, Breathless, a while back and liked it but nothing else. This one however is a whole other level of obscurity and it’s hard to say what we got out of it.