Obviously I’m not American, but even I heard about the shooting of Oscar Grant by the BART Police in Oakland, California in 2009. I was a regular of the Quarter to Three forum at that time and I remember forum regulars who are Bay Area residents being abuzz over the incident. The incident resulted in Grant’s death and triggered huge protests and riots due to how widely amateur videos filmed using mobile telephones and personal cameras were disseminated online.
This film made it into my “to watch” list based on a recommendation from a Broken Forum regular. Director Howard Hawks had an incredible decade in the 1940s, with the poster calling His Girl Friday one of best English-language comedies ever made, The Big Sleep inarguably the best film noir ever and Red River the best traditional western.
We caught this in the cinema due to my wife’s insistence. I quite liked the first movie. It was standard cartoon action fare but had excellent world-building and some of the best flight sequences ever put on screen. It also helped that the plot, while being yet another retelling of the hero’s journey, is tightly focused and easy to become immersed in.
Vulgaria is the first Hong Kong film to be covered in this blog since I started writing extensively about movies earlier this year, an indication of how rarely we watch them nowadays.I’m not entire unaware of director and writer Pang Ho-cheung’s body of work however, having watched various of his films including the “Love in a Puff” duology.
There were two great science-fiction films in 2013. One was Gravity. Her is the other. Of the two, Gravity is immediately spectacular and impressive, wowing audiences with visuals the likes of which we’ve never seen before. But it will be Her that sticks in your mind and that you will talk about with your friends long after the credits have stopped rolling. With some luck, it could also be a film that reshapes how AI is perceived in the public mind for decades to come.
This one was put on my watchlist for winning the Oscar for Best Documentary last year. It is also an unusual documentary in that spoilers will severely diminish the pleasure of watching it. This forces me to proceed more cautiously than usual in writing about it.
With the prevalence of cop shows on television, it takes something special to get us to watch one. This one was chosen upon the recommendation of our cinephile friend and because due to its first-class Hollywood acting talent, it’s clearly something outside of the norm. What we especially liked about it was it purported to tell a completely self-contained story in eight episodes. No need to commit to watching future seasons to find out what happened. No need to worry if quality will be maintained beyond the first season.