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 This film was originally made in 1963.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.
Continue reading Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
In between films of more obvious artistic merit, I like to throw into the mix some movies that are selected just for the fun factor. Think of it as a palette cleanser. Hollywood action movies are obvious choices for this role for many people. But I also have a soft spot for ultra-nerdy movies and This is the End is a great example of that.