Just because I thought very highly of Brazil and heard that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is both a cult hit and quite a unique visual experience, I was rather looking forward to watching it. As it turned out, this was certainly unique and not quite in the way I expected. It also really isn’t all that good, which probably explains why its Rotten Tomatoes rating hovers around the low 50s.
This is easily the most anticipated release of the year and, as the follow-up to the incredibly successful first film which I couldn’t stop gushing about, expectations for it were very high. The media blitz prior to its release was so relentless that it sometimes felt as if you’ve already watched most of the movie spread across the various teasers. Unfortunately while I’ve always suspected that this would have a hard time matching up to the first one, even those lowered expectations were largely dashed.
This pick for the Marriage in the Movies course is the longest one to date. At a full three hours long, it apparently qualifies as an epic and indeed includes both an overture and an intermission with orchestral scores! It’s also clearly an American propaganda film, made to bolster morale on the homefront while the Second World War was still raging. In most cases, that’s a recipe for a bad film yet Since You Went Away manages to be surprisingly effective and affecting.
As the biggest winner of last year’s Oscars, Birdman is a film that should automatically on any film aficionado’s must-watch list. But even apart from that I knew I wanted to watch it because it’s basically Michael Keaton playing a version of himself as a washed-up actor famous only for playing a superhero more than twenty years ago. Now that I’ve watched it, I’m glad to report that this is one of the rare occasions when the Academy pick for Best Film is absolutely the correct one.
Out of all of the all selections for the Marriage and the Movies course, this was the one that I looked forward to watching the most. Just imagine the thought of Alfred Hitchcock directing a marriage movie! As you might expect of the director and a film bearing the title Suspicion, it’s more about the shadow of murder hanging over a couple than a love story. I predict that the course’s professor will have interesting things to say about it!
Small in scope and modestly budgeted, In Bloom nevertheless earned major plaudits both at home and abroad. Critics, rather grandiloquently in my opinion, have been heralding it as the first in a New Wave of Georgian cinema. That’s certainly enough to get my attention but I confess that I was rather more attracted by its exoticism, since I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Georgian film before.
A couple of months ago, I met up with the cinephile friend I occasionally mention here over the Chinese New Year holidays. He asked to see the list of to-watch movies that I’d compiled and this was the entry that puzzled him the most. Is this that ’80s action movie starring Sylvester Stallone, he asked, why would you ever want to watch this? Indeed it is, and indeed it is a film that has a terrible reputation and deservedly so. But it’s also a film that exemplifies the excesses of the era like no other and that’s why this is an interesting film to watch.