Every single person on the Internet has watched that one scene from this film that provided the material for thousands of parody videos. Comparatively few people have watched the film itself in its entirety. Yet it really is a highly regarded work. It was nominated for the Oscars in the Best Foreign Film category in 2005 and is included in many lists of best films, such as various versions of the famous 1000 Films to See Before You Die checklist.
In line with our new interest in cinema, we’ve signed up for another Coursera course called Marriage and the Movies: A History. I suspect that with its focus on marriage it will be more of a sociology class than a movie class but nonetheless we’ll try sticking with it. This means a whole new round of really old movies to watch, starting with this selection from the silent era.
Being a film directed by David Fincher, not to mention one of the most prominent releases of 2014, Gone Girl was always a film that I knew I had to watch. But what really piqued my curiosity was how Broken Forum members reported it as being one of the most misogynistic films they’d ever seen. Last year was a pretty eventful one for gender issues in the United States. It was the year in which Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded fourteen others in a women-hating killing spree. It was the year that Gamergate got started. It was the year that rape on university campuses entered the national spotlight, culminating in the Rolling Stone debacle on the matter. For all of these reasons, releasing Gone Girl in 2014 seems like very poor timing.
Man Facing Southeast is a film that I would never have heard about in the ordinary course of things. It’s an Argentine movie by Eliseo Subiela with some science-fiction overtones that was one of the recommendations from a Broken Forum member when I asked about interesting South American films.
Vertigo is the first Alfred Hitchcock film to be covered in this blog since I’ve started seriously writing about movies. In general, I’ve watched embarrassingly few of his films. Like everyone else, I’ve watched Psycho ages ago but don’t have a clear memory of it. I’ve also watched The Birds a few years back and that’s it. That means I have a lot of catching up to do.
The Rover got mentioned a couple of times on Broken Forum. It doesn’t have terribly good reviews but Guy Pearce appearing in it plus it being a post-apocalypse movie was enough to get me interested. The opening text states that it is set 10 years after the collapse of civilization in Australia but doesn’t explain the nature of the event. Online summaries claim that it’s an economic collapse, but that doesn’t seem to explain the low population that is evident. That’s just one of the many things about its world-building and writing that feels clunky.
Over the years I’ve watched and enjoyed many of the most popular parody comedies including the Naked Gun series and the Hot Shots movies but I’ve never watched Airplane!. What these shows have in common is the creative team of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker. Airplane! was the first and, judging by how it often pops up near the top of lists of the best comedies of all time, the best of these parodies.