As with many of the animated films we watch, this one was added to our watch list by my wife. It’s a French-Scottish production directed by Slyvain Chomet who is best known for Les Triplettes de Belleville. It’s also worth noting from the onset it’s based on a script by French comedian and film maker Jacques Tati from the 1950s about his relationship with his daughter, but it was never actually made into a film.
As you might expect, this one was included as the next entry in the list for the upcoming Marriage and the Movies course. The leads are Carole Lombard, who was a huge star in the late 1930s but this is I believe I’ve seen a movie of hers, and interestingly a much younger James Stewart, who was so impressive in Vertigo. In fact, I didn’t realize that it was the same actor but did have niggling feeling that I should know him from somewhere.
I knew going in that despite its title this film had nothing to do with Brazil and that it was a science-fiction movie with a good dose of director Terry Gilliam’s unique brand of fantasy. What I didn’t know was that it is basically a re-imagining of 1984. You can’t fail to notice what’s going on when the perfect on-screen version of jack booted thugs, down to the square jaws and British accents, show up, and that’s when I started to really have fun with this movie.
It is said that sometimes a new idea takes Hollywood by storm and so you see a whole bunch of movies sharing similar themes being released at around the same time. Enemy isn’t a Hollywood film since it’s a Canadian-Spanish production. But it is still hard to otherwise explain why The Double and Enemy, two very similar films, were both released in 2013.
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.