Like most gamers, I have always been fascinated by the Second World War, by far the largest armed conflict in human history. Unfortunately my education on the subject was somewhat scattershot, consisting of random readings here and there and lately enlivened by Wikipedia articles and, most of all, time spent on Paradox’s Hearts of Iron game. So when I heard about this series on Broken Forum and learned that it is one of the most highly acclaimed documentaries ever made, I suggested to my wife that we watch it.
Here is yet another entry that was explicitly selected to advance my still pathetic familiarity with the history of cinema. This film was originally made in 1963. The version we watched was digitized and restored in 2013, its 50th anniversary. This was necessary because the original version used vivid and supersaturated colours which were not able to survive for long as physical film stock.
It’s been a while since I last watched a Chinese language film, so this one got put on top of the usual list. Since I watch relatively few Chinese films, I’m not a good judge of them and in particular I’m not familiar with director Jia Zhangke’s body of work even though he appears to be highly regarded by international critics.
Many of my film picks come from various Broken Forum posters. The choice of this particular one came from an offhand comment from a regular about how this film induces discomfort. Since this film also won the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1980 and was Robert Redford’s directorial debut, I decided to include it in my list as an oddball pick from the past.
This is a film that really deserves to be watched on the big screen and I regret not making an effort to watch it in the cinema. I’d paid some attention to it when its marketing campaign was going on and I knew that this would be a film with some amazing visuals, but on some level, I dismissed it as just another action film.
It wasn’t until after I’d finished watching Nebraska and looked up information on it on Wikipedia that I realized who director Alexander Payne is. This is the same person who directed Sideways, one of the most memorable road-trip films I’ve ever watched. Duh – I went. That’s because this is another road-trip film and it is once again an excellent one.
I’m someone who has only the vaguest of ideas of what the Mission: Impossible franchise entails. I’ve never watched any of the films starring Tom Cruise and was never a fan of any iteration of the television shows. In fact, when a character in the movie talks about disavowing the IMF, my first thought was to wonder how it had anything to do with the International Monetary Fund.
