Lou Ye is apparently one of China’s most controversial filmmakers, having both his works and his personal career being banned on multiple occasions. This is the first time I’ve watched one of his films however and this one was made with the full blessing of the governing authorities. It mixes what I understand are professional performers from the director’s usual cast with amateurs who really are blind masseurs to depict the workings of a massage center in Nanjing.
Unless an action movie has a science-fiction flavor or features superheroes, I pretty much won’t watch it. Still, it’s good to calibrate your expectations of what Hollywood is capable of once in a while, and John Wick gained my attention through word of mouth with the general consensus that it’s better than it has any business being.
This marks the last of the selections for the Marriage and the Movies course which is due to start next week. It’s actually a relief because while the course picked movies that I never would have watched otherwise and might well have pedagogical value in the context of what the professor will be trying to teach, they aren’t exactly great movies. This one, which was directed by Danny DeVito and in which he appears as a supporting character, is another example in this vein of decent but not really outstanding films.
One of the earliest ever posts on this blog about movies is this list of some of my favorite films, written in 2007. Strangely, even after years of watching more movies and becoming more familiar with the classics of cinema, this list is still a fairly good representation of what I like. Anyway, one of the entries there was David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Over the years I’ve gone back and watched his earlier films like Lost Highway and Blue Velvet. While some of these can feel more visceral and therefore are more emotionally resonant, I’ve always felt that Mulholland Drive, due to its high production values and greater sense of coherence, represented Lynch at his peak.
With this selection, the watch-list for the Marriage and the Movies course finally enters the modern era, by which I arbitrarily take to mean movies that were made after I was actually born. The power couple here is played by Meryl Streep, who looks astonishingly young in this movie, and Jack Nicholson, who looks pretty much looks the same as he always does. If you pay attention, you’ll also spot Kevin Spacey as a minor thug in his first ever film appearance.
I have no idea how this film ended up in our to-watch list. Ordinarily this means that my wife added it to the list but she can’t recall where it came from either. Since she almost always adds romantic or animated films to the list and since this isn’t a cartoon despite its poster, I assumed that this was a romantic film.
Just because I thought very highly of Brazil and heard that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is both a cult hit and quite a unique visual experience, I was rather looking forward to watching it. As it turned out, this was certainly unique and not quite in the way I expected. It also really isn’t all that good, which probably explains why its Rotten Tomatoes rating hovers around the low 50s.