This is Spinal Tap must be one of the strangest successes in cinematic history. It’s a mockumentary about a fictional band that has met with so much success that it has effectively become a real band. It is widely lauded as one of the best comedies ever made and unquestionably one of the greatest rock music movies. It was even the source of the “these go to 11” meme before the Internet was invented.
Wes Anderson’s films have always essentially been cartoons for adults but it has never been clearer for me than here in The Grand Budapest Hotel. It is gorgeous, with lush colours from Anderson’s usual palette. The sumptuously appointed yet endearingly retro hotel of the title is as important a character as any played by its star-studded cast. The overt use of miniatures reinforce its child-like playfulness. Most of all, while it holds both grief and death, it is undeniably first and foremost a fairy tale.
The trailer for Edge of Tomorrow popped up during one of our irregular cinema outings. I mentally dismissed it as a generic sci-fi Hollywood movie starring generic sci-fi action star Tom Cruise and thought nothing more of it. But months after its release, I started hearing about how this is way better than it has any reason to be, even from cinephile friends whose tastes I trust. Since this is sci-fi after all and I am a fan of time loops as a plot device, as in Groundhog Day and to a lesser extent Source Code and even Next, this meant I just had to put it onto my watch queue.
Continuing with our tour of the great classics of cinema is Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion. We’d previously watched his La Règle du Jeu which I found to be a complex and wickedly funny dissection of the European upper classes and their social structures. So I was really looking forward to this film that is set during the First World War.
It often feels like mentally disturbed people are a recurring trope in Korean dramas. It may not be seem front-and-center in Secret Sunshine but Jeon Do-yeon’s Lee Shin-ae does spend most of the film in a fugue state that leads her to make an escalating series of questionable decisions.
I’m always looking for interesting shows to watch and this anime series came to my attention on Broken Forum when someone called it practically the inspiration for Gravity. Combined with how it’s a self-contained, close-ended story and how long it has been since we’ve watched an anime, I put this on our “to watch” list.
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.