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.
When my cinephile friend saw this one on my list of films to watch, he was surprised. “You mean you haven’t seen this already?” he asked. I guess that’s as good an indication as any of how much this is considered required watching for any fans of cinema. Martin Scorcese and Robert De Niro had previously collaborated on Mean Streets in 1973, the film that put both of them on the map. De Niro had also landed the pivotal role of a young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II in 1974. But it was Taxi Driver that would come to be regarded as one of the greatest American films of all time and solidify Scorcese’s reputation as a great auteur.
When Marnie Was There is supposedly Studio Ghibli’s final film, or at least it is until such time as Hayao Miyazaki decides to un-retire again or someone else decides to resurrect the studio. This one was actually directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, perhaps best known for The Secret World of Arrietty. Like Arrietty, it’s also based on a children’s book by a British author, in this case one originally published in 1967. I don’t know about you but I always feel that it’s kind of sad when authors don’t live long enough to see their work reach a far wider audience than they’d ever imagined.
Working through the list of Oscar nominees for last year, we come to this modest documentary about the final days of the Vietnam War. Specifically, it focuses on the evacuation of Americans and the Vietnamese who aided the Americans and feared reprisals from the Communists just prior to the Fall of Saigon in 1975. To be fair, this is of course the Western name for that day and Vietnam as it exists today understandably prefers to call it Reunification Day.
We might be done with the lists for the two Coursera film courses, but that’s no reason to stop watching movies from the classic era of Hollywood. In particular, we realized that we’ve never watched anything starring Marilyn Monroe, surely an omission that must be corrected. I chose Some Like It Hot both because it was one of her best commercial and critical successes and because it was made by the same creative team behind The Apartment, one of my favorite comedies from that era.
