I was vaguely aware of this film when it played in the cinemas but it only really got my attention when lots of people on Broken Forum started talking about it. In particular, more than a few people chimed in to say how it’s a genuinely scary film that doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares. It was also very well received by critics, with a crazy high Rotten Tomatoes rating and comparisons with The Exorcist.
Coming fresh off the heels of a film about youths in Mexico in the 1950s, here’s a film about teenagers in America in the 1980s. Most Malaysians will probably know director John Hughes best for his Home Alone movies of the 1990s but he is more significant for a slew of highly influential films about high-schoolers and their problems a decade earlier. Of these, The Breakfast Club is probably the most highly regarded and caused the young actors who appeared in it to be lumped together as the Brat Pack.
Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel is, I think, best known for his surrealist works as exemplified by his famous collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou. As such Los Olvidados, being a more realistic and grounded story is probably not representative of his body of work, though it does feature a dream sequence that gives you a taste of that style.
Sita Sings the Blues is as indie a film as you can imagine, being made largely by a single person, Nina Paley, with crowdfunded money. Apparently she created almost the entire thing on her own home computer with popular commercial software like Adobe Flash. The film also makes heavy use of jazz songs by Annette Hanshaw from the 1920s. This caused copyright problems which made it difficult for this film to be distributed normally. That’s why the creator has encouraged fans to freely distribute it in any way they like including using BitTorrent.
This is a relatively obscure film that showed up on my radar both because it is frequently cited on Broken Forums as an old favorite and because a videogame adaptation of it was made not too long ago, decades after the release of the original film. Apparently this film proved to be quite controversial during its time, as there were fears of gang violence and vandalism associated with it, and it was critically panned upon release. But its reputation improved as time passed and it has since been recognized as a cult film.
Since this five-week course by Jeanine Basinger of Wesleyan University officially ended this week, I guess I should write a few words on it as I usually do. I’m more reticent than usual about this because it turned out to be a rather bland course about a very narrow subject: how Hollywood depicts the institution of marriage in its films and whether this has changed over time and if so, how.
Considering how much I liked both Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, I was really looking forward to watching Persona. It is apparently considered to be Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made. My wife says she has watched this many times already but was willing to watch it again with me. In the event, I can’t say that I like it very much. On an intellectual level, I have to admire how brilliant it is, but it’s just not a film that speaks to me.