Despite what it must sometimes look like, I don’t pick films to watch based on whether or not they’re from a country I haven’t covered yet. This one popped up on the best films of 2014 lists of multiple critics and yes, not only is it the first Ukrainian film I’ve ever watched and it’s also the first film I’ve watched that is entirely in sign language. This means that there isn’t one single line of spoken dialogue, plus as a deliberate decision by the film makers there are no subtitles or translations of any kind as well.
I got this as a recommendation from a number of different places and one of them was the videogame Max Payne 3. The game included a level that was set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Rockstar cited this film as one of the references they used. The film itself was a massive success in its native Brazil, both commercially and critically, and its sequel is the single highest grossing film in the country. Not bad as the feature film debut for its director José Padilha.
My wife was complaining the other day that it’d been a while since we’ve watched a romance movie. She’d also recently mentioned that some of the only kind of humor that she can appreciate are Woody Allen movies. Everyone Says I Love You has all that and is a musical to boot, thus killing many birds with one stone. It’s particularly known for featuring singing performances by famous actors not known for their musical talents.
It seems like we’ve been seeing actor Oscar Isaac everywhere these days, beginning in Inside Llewyn Davis last year, David Simon’s excellent miniseries Show Me a Hero recently and of course the new Star Wars. But what made me interested in this film is that it’s the third feature film by J.C. Chandor and that both of his previous works were amazing. It helps as well that it made it onto the best of the year lists of multiple critics at the end of last year.
It’s Star Wars so it has open with the trademark slow text crawl. I’m okay with that even though I’m bored of it after six movies and innumerable videogames. Next comes a long, tracking shot of the familiar wedge shape of a Star Destroyer, except from a novel angle. Homage. I’m down with that. But when we see Max von Sydow wearing clothes that make him suspiciously resemble Alec Guinness and the McGuffin being hidden in this iteration’s version of the lovable droid, I start cringing. Long before it recreates the cantina scene, to seek transportation to boot, or show the shadowy, disfigured behind-the-scenes big bad via hologram, I’ve realized this isn’t so much a continuation of the original trilogy as a beat-for-beat remake.
This is the first film by Malaysian-born but long since Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang to be covered in this blog though my wife has watched quite a few of his films. She notes that this one once again stars the director favorite actor Lee Kang-sheng and I read that the trio of actresses who appear in it are part of his usual cast.
As a claymation movie, and especially one that is about a girl in Australia who has a pet chicken being pen pals with a man in America, you wouldn’t expect it to be very dark. Mary and Max however is one of the most depressing films I’ve watched this year and is most certainly not suitable for children no matter how cute its animation is.
