This one was put on my list when Robin Williams’ death reminded me that I’d always wanted to watch The Fisher King. I’ve seen snippets of it over the years, most memorably scenes of a monstrous red knight bearing down on a terrified Williams in New York city, but have never actually watched the whole thing. Given its title, I was also curious about how the storyline ties in with the Arthurian legend.
Like most people, the first I heard about this film was the shocking news, certainly spread for publicity reasons, that it would feature big name actors and actresses having unsimulated sex. As it turned out, professional pornography performers were actually used and the faces of the familiar actors and actresses digitally composited onto the naked bodies. Combine this with the famous posters of the well known actors and actresses making orgasm faces, and it’s clear that the producers were going for maximum shock value. For this reason, I chose to watch only the first volume of the film for fear that it might turn out to be terrible.
Once again this is a pick that originally came to my attention from a Broken Forum post and subsequently reaffirmed when I realized that it is in the Criterion Collection. At first glance it is nothing special, just a generic Japanese gangster film with a bog standard plot out of hundreds that were produced in the 1960s. But as you watch it, it becomes increasingly obvious how this is a film that must have been far ahead of its time nearly 50 years ago.
One of my favourite comments about this film is on Broken Forum, when someone mentioned how it’s a film that he’d recommend to almost nobody but he still liked it himself. This unexpectedly turned out to be so very true for my wife and myself. I found myself completely won over by its charm and cleverness but my wife found it irritating and boring.
Once again, Wall Street is one of those films whose influence is widely felt in popular culture. Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko is considered one of the greatest movie villains of all time and even Princeton’s Algorithms class on the Coursera platform included a snippet of the famous “greed is good” speech when talking about greedy algorithms. As such, it’s pretty embarrassing to not actually have seen this movie.
As I’ve already mentioned in this blog, South Korean directors have an exceptional record with me. Given this, and that it’s by Bong Joon-ho who directed one of the best monster movies of modern times, that it’s science-fiction, and that it’s based on an unusual French graphic novel, there’s no way that I would be missing this.
Last Tango in Paris is one of the many films that my wife watched ages ago but I am only now watching for the first time because, well, I only recently started to take films seriously. Fortunately for me, my wife confessed to not really understanding it when she last watched it, so in a way, we were still discovering it together.