Paul Thomas Anderson is today considered one of America’s great directors. He was hailed as a wunderkind in the 1990s, his reputation forged by Boogie Nights and this very film. I note that through no active effort on my part, I have now watched almost all of his feature films that are released to date, which is pretty unusual for me. The only films I’m missing are his most recent one Inherent Vice and his debut film Hard Eight.
Paprika was directed and co-written by Satoshi Kon, an auteur that my wife seems to really like. Unfortunately he passed away only a few years ago at the young age of 46 and unless his uncompleted project Dreaming Machine is released, this film qualifies as as his final feature film.
21 Jump Street was indeed one of the television shows that I watched as a kid, one familiar enough to me that I can’t still hear the theme song in my head. Still, when I heard about this film, my reaction was similar to that of Richard Roeper: I didn’t think it needed to exist. It seemed like one of those slimy cash-in projects that could be instantly dismissed, especially since it looked like it had nothing to do with the original show. Flash forward a couple of years later and I learn that this was successful enough to spawn a sequel. Interesting but not terribly surprising. But then as time passed, I realize something that is surprising. Word of mouth about 22 Jump Street is that it’s fantastic and the retrospective view of this first one is that it was pretty good too. Since I like so few of the modern American comedies that are made to be as dumb as possible, this seems like a good enough reason to give this one a whirl.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien is one of the three great directors of Taiwanese cinema and The Puppetmaster is the first film of his to be featured in this blog. It is however generally considered the second part of a loose trilogy of films about the history of Taiwan. The first one was A City of Sadness, starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai. We’d watched it not too long ago and liked it, but that was before I’d started writing a lot about movies on this blog.
After our poor experience with The Imitation Game, it’s easy to be apprehensive about The Theory of Everything. Not only are both films biopics of famous scientists that were released in 2014, both were nominated for the Academy Awards in a bunch of categories, out of which they each ended up winning one. In the case of The Imitation Game, it was for Best Adapted Screenplay. For this one, it was the Best Actor award going to Eddie Redmayne for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking.
Since you’re reading this, yes, I’ve never actually watched The French Connection before this though I recall that this was one of the boring old films that often showed up on Malaysian television channels when I was growing up. Now I know that it’s a highly regarded crime thriller containing one of the best car chase scenes ever put on film, so watching it is a must.
We’d watched The Talented Mr. Ripley, the one starring Matt Damon, a couple of years back and rather liked it but I didn’t realize that this German film by director Wim Wenders is actually about the very same fictional character until quite a ways into it. Obviously I’ve also never read any of the novels by Patricia Highsmith and this one covers a later period in Ripley’s life.