Much like South Korea, Iran’s film industry holds to a standard of quality that is all out of proportion to the country’s size or nominal cultural influence. Sadly this is the first Iranian film to be covered in this blog though hopefully it will soon be followed by many more. This one, directed by internationally acclaimed director Asghar Farhadi, has won a frankly insane number of awards, including an Oscar. Not bad for a film from an Axis of Evil country.
This anime has an unusual genesis, being directly based on an old manga that was itself inspired on the 1927 film by Fritz Lang. Yet this anime version seems to draw more heavily from the silent film than the original manga. It was directed by Rintaro who is well-known for being involved in many science-fiction anime, including the grand-daddy of them all, Astro Boy.
Franchise that I have no real interest in? Check. Hollywood reboot? Check. This is exactly the sort of summer blockbuster that you couldn’t pay me to watch. I relented in this case only because the trailers actually looked sort of good, seeming to make a case for this being an environmentalism film instead of just a monster romp, plus word of mouth on Broken Forum was reasonably positive. Unfortunately sometimes first impressions are correct and I should have stayed away from this pile of crap.
This one is only the second Federico Fellini film I’ve written about in this blog and like La Strada dates from the earliest part of the career of the great director. I was curious about what the Italian title actually meant and so tried to search for a translation. As it turned out, the title is incomprehensible even to Italians as it is either a little known street slang term that Fellini heard when he was young or a portmanteau of other words. Today it is generally agreed to refer to a certain class of parasitic and aimless youths who spend their days in idleness.
When ranking the best films of Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window invariably makes the list alongside other greats like Vertigo and Psycho. It’s arguably the ur-film for an entire sub-genre of Peeping Tom movies with the traditional Hitchcockian ice blonde here being none other than the fabulous Grace Kelly while perennial favorite James Stewart is the protagonist.
Despite a long and prolific directing career, Hou Hsiao-Hsien had never made a wuxia film before this one, which explains why its release was so highly anticipated in the Chinese-speaking world. Its English title makes it sound boringly generic but its more informative Chinese title indicates that it was adapted from an ancient story that is a classic of the genre.
Foxcatcher is one those films that I added to our to-watch list out of a sense of duty since it earned multiple Academy Award nominations and showed up on several critics’ lists of the best films of 2014. I’d heard that it was based on a true story and had some vague idea that it was about wrestling but since I don’t much care for sports I didn’t really think much about it and simply thought that it was just another sports biopic. Boy, was I wrong.