Together with The Salesman, this was one of the two front runners for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award earlier this year. My wife recently commented that we seem to watch disproportionately fewer German films and this is indeed the case. One reason might be that German film traditions feel odd even to those used to other European films given their links to German expressionism. I will certainly try to add more films to our watch list but in the meantime Toni Erdmann makes for a decent reminder how German films can be excellent and yet feel very strange to our sensibilities.
One benefit of being a subscriber to The Economist and frequenting economics blogs is that I get film recommendations like this which I doubt appear on the radar of most critics. This documentary follows the efforts of Geng Yanbo who was the mayor of Datong, a small Chinese city in Shanxi province, to transform it into a cultural and tourism center. It doesn’t seem to be very well known as it wasn’t distributed widely.
This is the second film we’ve watched by Polish director Andrzej Wajda, the last one he made before he died in fact, and to no one’s surprise, it isn’t any less darker than Katyń. This one is a biography of Władysław Strzemiński, apparently a Polish artist of some renown beginning in the 1920s.
Today Lindsay Lohan is perhaps the poster girl for the teen idol whose career and life crashes and burns hard but there was indeed a time when she was Hollywood’s it-girl and Mean Girls is probably her best and most memorable role. I didn’t watch it back in the day and always hesitated about putting it on the watch list because it’s isn’t exactly acknowledged as a great film. I eventually caved in when some Broken Forum members named it as one of the best comedies of the new millennium. Plus we’ve watched so many films over the past couple of years that we’ve really been running down the list.
This film made the lists of some critics’ most notable films a couple of years ago but I had a very difficult time tracking it down. I think this is at least partially because while it was certainly notable, it wasn’t particularly successful. It’s a Portuguese film by Pedro Costa and one of the main reasons it was notable that it is almost completely indecipherable, being close to an experimental film with hardly any plot.
I remember watching the trailer for this in the cinemas and coming away with the impression that this was fairly generic Disney fare transposed on top of Polynesian mythology. It didn’t help that Dwayne Johnson appeared to be playing a character identical to his real-life persona and I find him annoying. But then months after its release, I noticed a stream of posts on Broken Forum praising it. As it turned out, Johnson does indeed sort of play himself, but the film is smart enough to mock his persona, which makes all the difference.
If you’re anything like me, this film’s title is a subject of some confusion. After all, today when we think of the word ‘network’, we think in terms of computer and communications networks. The last thing that would come to mind is a television network. Yet this is indeed what it’s about and it turns out to be an impressively prescient film by Sidney Lumet who once again blows me away with his acute sense of insightful social commentary.
