With my interest in computer science in general and artificial intelligence in particular, I was always going to watch any biographical film about Alan Turing. As for my wife, she’d have wanted to add this to our list if only because it stars Benedict Cumberbatch. Since this is a biography of a well-known historical figure, there will be more spoilers than usual since I assume that readers are already familiar with Turing.
The Scent of Green Papaya is the very first Vietnamese film to be featured in this blog. It was the debut film for its director Trần Anh Hùng who since gone on to make other works that are also apparently considered to be quite notable. Like many of his films, it also stars the director’s wife Trần Nữ Yên Khê. What is most striking about this film however is that it perfectly immerses the audience in its setting of Vietnam in the 1950s, yet it is entirely filmed in a sound stage in France.
Hollywood made a lot of World War Two films, too many to make much of a dent in. Many of them are also very long epics, making them even of more of a chore to watch. Still, it feels like we should at least watch some of the more notable ones to be taken seriously as cinephiles, so I picked this one to start. As you can see from its extra-long poster, it has a massive cast that is practically a who’s who of the most prominent male actors.
Considering how much we liked the Three Colors trilogy as a whole, it was inevitable that we would watch this earlier film by Krzysztof Kieślowski. This is especially true since it also stars Irène Jacob who is probably our favorite of the three leading ladies from the trilogy. Less obviously, like Bleu, it also showcases music by composer Zbigniew Preisner as a major element of the plot, in this case ascribing it to a fictional Dutch composer named Van den Budenmayer.
Predestination is one of those science-fiction films that is all about one single, shocking twist. As such, anyone writing about it must decide whether or not to reveal the twist. Here, I’ve opted on a compromise of sorts. I won’t write down exactly what happens, but I’ll leave enough clues that readers should probably be able to make reasonable guesses. The first such giveaway is that it’s based on a 1958 short story by Robert Heinlein called All You Zombies. I haven’t read this story myself but those who have are certain to know what the twist I’m talking about it. But then I didn’t need to have read that story to see the twist coming a mile away anyway.
After finding that the brand of humor practiced by the Marx Brothers didn’t really work for us, I thought we might try something from the silent era. Charlie Chaplin would be the obvious choice but everyone has watched something by Chaplin. However I’ve never seen anything by Buster Keaton and he seems criminally under-known in Asia, so Keaton it is.
I must have watched the Mel Gibson Mad Max movies at some point but I have no clear recollection of them. That’s why I wasn’t planning to watch this one at all even if its trailer did impress me. But when it hit the theaters, the overwhelmingly positive consensus on places like Broken Forum was impossible to ignore. The clincher was us however is when it managed to piss off the MRA types. This meant my wife and myself just had to watch it if only to show solidarity.