Continuing with our ongoing efforts to make a dent in our list of backlogged Chinese films, here is another entry from back when Zhang Yimou made films that mattered. Once again this one stars Gong Li plus a smattering of other familiar faces from that era. What marks a difference from the previous two films I’ve covered so far is that this one is actually critical of Communism, though the criticism is less severe than I’d expected.
We’re not completely out of all-time-great films yet. This one was included in the US National Film Registry which officially makes it a great American film and it’s also an adaptation of a great American novel. I understand that the novel is required reading for most US students. This adaptation was directed by John Ford, another great American director who is best known for westerns.
Since we’ve started watching films in earnest we’ve actually been making quite a bit of headway against our list. This is why the films being covered here have been trending towards newer releases. This is a French-Polish production that was released only this year but has become noteworthy enough among critics to earn a place in my lists.
It wasn’t a given that I would watch this. I dislike the idea of Disney releasing a Star Wars film every year like clockwork and having Gareth Edwards direct it is not a mark in its favor. I thought his Godzilla was one of the worst films I’ve watched last year. But word of mouth on Broken Forum and other places eventually led me to realize that this was unexpectedly good and so I duly trooped to the cinema and added my bit to Disney’s ridiculously growing coffers.
The last film that we watched by director Pedro Almodóvar was All About My Mother, a film that I found remarkable for having only female characters. Though the poster for this film features two women, both of them spend most of the time in a coma and so the film is really about the relationship of two different men with these two women while they are hospitalized.
This came to my attention due to a post on Broken Forum but even the poster refrained from calling it a good film. I was further intrigued by it being an adaptation of a well-known novel by J.G. Ballard. Ballard is these days best known for his novel Empire of the Sun due to it being made into a film by Steven Spielberg but most of his literary output is actually dystopian science-fiction, a genre that High-Rise perfectly falls into.
Due to my wife’s insistence, we’ve actually watched pretty much all of Makoto Shinkai’s films and I can’t say that I’ve liked any of them. Your Name, his newest film, was a huge hit in Japan and seems to have been quite successful in China. Since we discovered that it is actually showing at a cinema here in Seremban, my wife decided to wanted to see it and it does seem like a somewhat novel experience as I don’t believe we’ve ever watched a Japanese anime on the big screen before.