Ten Years won the Best Film award at this year’s Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony. Due to this, the Chinese government banned the ceremony from being broadcast on television as the film is fiercely critical of China’s rule of the territory. That makes this a big deal even if it’s just a low budget project conceived by a recent university graduate, Ng Ka-Leung, with no track record and with volunteers doing most of the work. It consists of a series of five short films, each made by a different director and cast.
Both of us liked Uncle Boonmee quite a bit so when director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film appeared on the lists of the most notable works of 2015, I made it a top priority. It shares the same lead actress, Jenjira Pongpas, as the previous film and even covers some of the same themes. Unfortunately despite trying hard to find something to like about it, I have to say that this one’s a dud.
Over the years we’ve watched many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films and I believe this marks the last of his most important ones. It’s also the only Hitchcock film I think that is an outright action movie. Partway through it I thought to myself, “Wow, this is Hitchcock’s attempt at a Bond film!” Except that it actually predates the first James Bond film, Dr. No, by three years.
All Quiet on the Western Front was the film about the First World War that was recommended by professor Philip Zelikow of the history course I took on Coursera recently. Of course, with its wonderfully evocative title, this film is famous enough that it shouldn’t need an introduction. As Zelikow noted in his lectures, this film benefited from being made only a short time after the war and so could enlist large numbers of real veterans to act as extras and advisers, giving it a unique touch of authenticity.
Embarrassingly, I’ve never read the novel despite having studied in France. In my defense, I simply never felt much of a need for it since I’d already absorbed so much of it through cultural osmosis. It is pretty odd that despite it being one of the bestselling books ever in history, this is the first feature film adaptation of the material. Though it was made with the support of French studios, this also feels very much like an American production as an English-language film with familiar Hollywood names providing most of the voices.
This is a rare example of a film which was independently added to our joint watch list both by myself and by my wife from different sources. It took a while for me to realize this as its English title sometimes appears as Keeper of Promises and sometimes as The Given Word. You could take this as a sign that it’s an exceptionally good film and you wouldn’t be wrong even though I’ve never heard of its director Anselmo Duarte before this.
Brooklyn is a film that was added to my watch list as one of the notable releases of last year but I honestly wasn’t expecting too much from it. One Broken Forum poster called it pleasant but somewhat pointless. Director John Crowley appears to be known more for theater work than for his films and though Saoirse Ronan has been in a few high profile releases, she’s not an acting heavyweight. In the event, my initial impressions were largely proven correct and my biggest surprise is how much my wife liked it.
