Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel is, I think, best known for his surrealist works as exemplified by his famous collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou. As such Los Olvidados, being a more realistic and grounded story is probably not representative of his body of work, though it does feature a dream sequence that gives you a taste of that style.
Sita Sings the Blues is as indie a film as you can imagine, being made largely by a single person, Nina Paley, with crowdfunded money. Apparently she created almost the entire thing on her own home computer with popular commercial software like Adobe Flash. The film also makes heavy use of jazz songs by Annette Hanshaw from the 1920s. This caused copyright problems which made it difficult for this film to be distributed normally. That’s why the creator has encouraged fans to freely distribute it in any way they like including using BitTorrent.
This is a relatively obscure film that showed up on my radar both because it is frequently cited on Broken Forums as an old favorite and because a videogame adaptation of it was made not too long ago, decades after the release of the original film. Apparently this film proved to be quite controversial during its time, as there were fears of gang violence and vandalism associated with it, and it was critically panned upon release. But its reputation improved as time passed and it has since been recognized as a cult film.
Since this five-week course by Jeanine Basinger of Wesleyan University officially ended this week, I guess I should write a few words on it as I usually do. I’m more reticent than usual about this because it turned out to be a rather bland course about a very narrow subject: how Hollywood depicts the institution of marriage in its films and whether this has changed over time and if so, how.
Considering how much I liked both Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, I was really looking forward to watching Persona. It is apparently considered to be Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made. My wife says she has watched this many times already but was willing to watch it again with me. In the event, I can’t say that I like it very much. On an intellectual level, I have to admire how brilliant it is, but it’s just not a film that speaks to me.
With my interest in computer science in general and artificial intelligence in particular, I was always going to watch any biographical film about Alan Turing. As for my wife, she’d have wanted to add this to our list if only because it stars Benedict Cumberbatch. Since this is a biography of a well-known historical figure, there will be more spoilers than usual since I assume that readers are already familiar with Turing.
The Scent of Green Papaya is the very first Vietnamese film to be featured in this blog. It was the debut film for its director Trần Anh Hùng who since gone on to make other works that are also apparently considered to be quite notable. Like many of his films, it also stars the director’s wife Trần Nữ Yên Khê. What is most striking about this film however is that it perfectly immerses the audience in its setting of Vietnam in the 1950s, yet it is entirely filmed in a sound stage in France.