Ex Machina was probably the most interesting science-fiction film of 2015. It even won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, not bad in a year in which it had to contend with Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It was even the debut feature of its director Alex Garland and stars Oscar Isaac, who as I’ve said before, seems to be in everything these days.
We’ve watched quite a few films by Hou Hsiao-Hsien so far but this is the first one that is abut romance and pretty much only romance. It’s actually a compilation of three separate short films, though all three star Shu Qi and Chang Chen as the leads, albeit appearing as different characters in different stories. Oddly enough, Wikipedia tells me that each of the short films were supposed to be made by a different director but the producers couldn’t afford it so Hou ended up directing all three.
No, this has nothing to do with Bernie Sanders. It was a film that I added to our list after a regular on Broken Forum commented about what a unique film it is and that it’ll make converts out of anybody who doubts that Jack Black can act. Plus it was directed by Richard Linklater who as my wife noted can be amazingly creative about finding original ways to tell stories. Boyhood and the Before series are the usual examples, but this is also the director who made really bizarre things like Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.
I’ve written about films by director Wim Wenders before in this blog but this one is a documentary. Looking through his filmography, it’s apparent that he has always been making documentaries in parallel with his feature films throughout his career and that they are all, without exception, about fellow creative types: directors, musicians, even a fashion designer. This one is about Sebastião Salgado, a Brazilian photographer of some renown. Salgado’s own son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, is named as a co-director for this documentary.
This one was added to my list after Tyler Cowen commented it to be even better than A Separation, which is easily one of my favorite films from the past few years. Made by the same director Asghar Farhadi, it actually predates A Separation by a couple of years but was not widely known about. It was the only the massive success of the later film that prompted distributors to release About Elly in the U.S. just last year.
The fact that Rio Bravo is frequently placed near the top of lists of the best Westerns ever made is reason enough to see it but I was especially intrigued by how it made by Howard Hawks and John Wayne specifically as a response to High Noon. In case you don’t know, that film was about a sheriff who has to confront a powerful criminal gang and went around the town to solicit help but everyone just made their excuses and minded their own business. This didn’t sit well with Wayne at all who called it un-American and even helped to run the screenwriter of the film, Carl Foreman, out of the country for being a Communist sympathizer.
This was one my wife’s picks that she must have read about somewhere and it turned out to be a film with only female characters, including a couple of trans women. It was a surprising coincidence given that we’d only just watched Tokyo Godfathers the day before. Unfortunately it’s also similar to that film in that many points in its plot are connected through a series of implausible events that leave you gasping in disbelief and this time I don’t think that there’s supposed to be any magic involved.