This being the first television series made by Wong Kar-Wai, I thought I should at least check out a few episodes of it. I thought for sure that it would be released for foreign markets given Wong’s fame and so waited a while for it but it never did. In the event, I had to watch the original version with the Shanghainese language and Chinese subtitles, which is a real pain for me. The first two or three episodes were downright terrible. Too fast paced, too much posing and too little of substance. It gets better when it slows down by episode four and we can finally tell who’s who and what is going on. Even so I stopped at episode five because the full thirty episodes is way too much and there’s a lot that I don’t understand. Watching it properly would be a fascinating but rather taxing project.
A valuable painting is stolen from a museum in 1985. Thirty years later it turns up in the estate of a deceased couple who are seemingly ordinary retired teachers. I don’t much care for the painting itself but the story that this documentary pieces together about the secret life of this couple is extraordinary. To supplement the interviews with the people who knew the couple and those familiar with the theft, actors reenact key scenes in a bold style that looks almost like something by Wes Anderson. I had doubts at first that it would hold my interest, but by the end I agree with the maker of this piece Allison Otto that someone should make a full feature film about this.
So much of the fun of this film is that Andy Lau plays a fictionalized version of himself here along with copious references to other Hong Kong superstars and the industry itself. The premise of a cinema superstar who deliberately does an artistic film to bait for acting awards is both on point and funny. The execution goes well at first but then it seems to lose track, turns into an uninteresting lesson about arrogance and in the end just kind of falls apart. I really wanted this to be good so it’s especially disappointing that it’s not.
As a film directly inspired by Au Hasard Balthazar, this one is similarly about the travails of a donkey. This time the setting is modern day Poland and while it has won a slew of accolades, I believe it is by far the lesser film. While the original was largely about the suffering of life in general, this one is focused on the harm that mankind inflicts on animals. Not only is that somewhat trite but it does so by throwing EO the donkey into a series of misadventures that are more or less random and improbable. It experiments with colors and stylistic effects but overall I’m not impressed.
A Christmas film comes with a certain set of expectations but don’t confuse the French with the Americans. With its large cast of characters and multiple storylines, it threatens to be a confusing mess and is more than content to leave things unexplained. Worse still is the application of French logic as applied to morality and family dynamics, excusing or even glorifying behaviors and actions that would be shocking in the US. Yet it’s undeniable a riveting watch, absurdly funny and makes for a wonderful example of just how different the French can be at times.
This is only a middling movie so skipping it would be no big deal. But we just got done with finishing the excellent Better Call Saul so I thought we might as well close out the entire Breaking Bad universe. This one of course completes the story of Jesse Pinkman picking up from where we last saw him at the finale of the original series that started it all. I thought this would be something of a road trip film as Jesse escapes to head north to Alaska but it’s very much not so. Instead he spends the entire time still in New Mexico gathering what he needs to escape. The plot feels stilted as a result but it’s not a bad way to close out all the loose ends and show more of what Jesse went through in captivity.
An experimental Soviet-era black and white silent film with no plot and no intertitles doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, even if it’s only an hour long. But this film, now considered one of the greatest documentaries of all kind, may surprise you. It does start slow with straightforward shots of inanimate objects and you wonder what it’s trying to do. Then it grows in scope and the shots become more sophisticated as if the cameraman is slowly learning as he goes until it becomes a joyous celebration of everything a camera is capable of.
