These days a large proportion of the backlogged films on our shared watch list are Chinese ones due to my needing to catch up on so many well known exemplars of Chinese cinema. Devils on the Doorstep is one such entry that my wife asked to watch. We’ve seen veteran actor Jiang Wen plenty of times, most recently in Red Sorghum for example, but I believe that this is one of the only times we’ve seen him in a film in which he is also the director.
The last work we saw of director Philip Kaufman was his 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This one is an adaptation of a novel about street gangs in the 1960s, which means that preposterous as things can get in this film, at least some parts of it are based on real life events. It also stars Ken Wahl, who some people from my generation may recognize from the television series Wiseguy but I’ve never seen him anywhere else.
This one is a highly acclaimed documentary shot by two journalists, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, while they were embedded with a US Army unit over the course of a 15-month deployment in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008. Unless you’re familiar with the events in question, the meaning of the title must be deliberate bit of mystery that is revealed later in the film itself.
This is an older Brazilian film by Walter Salles and I’ve written about his work before. He directed one of the segments in Paris, je t’aime, one of my favorite ones actually about an immigrant needing to travel far from home to get to work in Paris. He also directed the acclaimed Motorcycle Diaries which my wife watched but which I missed because I wasn’t much interested in films back then. On the other hand, I’ve also watched his Hollywood remake of Dark Water, which is as awful as these adaptations of Japanese horror films generally are. That’s quite a leap in terms of style and quality!
This is lighter weight fare added to our list by my wife. I’ve never watched this before but even the original 1940 Fantasia doesn’t hold much prominence in my mind. It was just too far before my time and the only thing I remember of it is the one that everyone knows: the Sorceror’s Apprentice segment. Fantasia never did make much money for Disney but it was apparently very important for many people in the company as an early showcase of what animation can achieve. Fantasia 2000 was therefore a sequel that was in germination for a very long time and this time, as is appropriate, it brings computer generated graphics to the table.
I like to give Indian cinema a fair shake but more often than not we’ve been disappointed by them. By and large, their insistence on song and dance numbers, no matter how incongruent, their simplistic storylines and above all their excessive lengths often make them quite a chore to watch, as my wife is wont to complain. It just seems stupidly difficult to identify serious Indian drama to watch. Though Udta Punjab also shares the trait of being somewhat long, it’s mostly an exception as I’m happy to report. It was a recommendation that I read about from The Economist, though as an article about the drug problem in Punjab rather than a film review.
Crime spree films featuring a couple, usually a man and a woman, going off on a wild ride of robberies and killings until they die in a hail of bullets are common enough to constitute a genre in of themselves. Bonnie and Clyde is far from the first of these films but it’s easily the first one that comes to mind when you think about them, especially for American audiences. It’s also one of the earliest American films to show a very obvious French New Wave influence, sharing remarkable similarities in particular with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.