Being a film directed by David Fincher, not to mention one of the most prominent releases of 2014, Gone Girl was always a film that I knew I had to watch. But what really piqued my curiosity was how Broken Forum members reported it as being one of the most misogynistic films they’d ever seen. Last year was a pretty eventful one for gender issues in the United States. It was the year in which Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded fourteen others in a women-hating killing spree. It was the year that Gamergate got started. It was the year that rape on university campuses entered the national spotlight, culminating in the Rolling Stone debacle on the matter. For all of these reasons, releasing Gone Girl in 2014 seems like very poor timing.
Man Facing Southeast is a film that I would never have heard about in the ordinary course of things. It’s an Argentine movie by Eliseo Subiela with some science-fiction overtones that was one of the recommendations from a Broken Forum member when I asked about interesting South American films.
Vertigo is the first Alfred Hitchcock film to be covered in this blog since I’ve started seriously writing about movies. In general, I’ve watched embarrassingly few of his films. Like everyone else, I’ve watched Psycho ages ago but don’t have a clear memory of it. I’ve also watched The Birds a few years back and that’s it. That means I have a lot of catching up to do.
The Rover got mentioned a couple of times on Broken Forum. It doesn’t have terribly good reviews but Guy Pearce appearing in it plus it being a post-apocalypse movie was enough to get me interested. The opening text states that it is set 10 years after the collapse of civilization in Australia but doesn’t explain the nature of the event. Online summaries claim that it’s an economic collapse, but that doesn’t seem to explain the low population that is evident. That’s just one of the many things about its world-building and writing that feels clunky.
Over the years I’ve watched and enjoyed many of the most popular parody comedies including the Naked Gun series and the Hot Shots movies but I’ve never watched Airplane!. What these shows have in common is the creative team of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker. Airplane! was the first and, judging by how it often pops up near the top of lists of the best comedies of all time, the best of these parodies.
Ever since I heard about this project, I’ve been waiting for it with a great deal of anticipation. Both my wife and myself are huge fans of the Before Sunrise trilogy and filming a story of a boy growing up over a span of twelve years intuitively feels like such a natural extension of that work that Richard Linklater is sure to excel at. The ambition alone of following the same cast, including child actors, across such an extended span of time impressed me greatly.
After a few fairly heavyweight films, I thought we’d take a breather with some lighter, more recent fare. Although it’s distributed by 20th Century Fox, it was made by a newish animation studio called Reel FX and appears to be the first major feature made by its director Jorge Gutierrez.
