I’ve had this on my list of potential television shows to watch for ages now as I keep hearing about how great it is. It’s four seasons in the Danish language so it’s quite an investment and I’m not sure how much my wife would appreciate a show that is all about politics. As it turned out there’s plenty of family and interpersonal drama in addition to the politics. The structure of the episodes in the first season has the main character Birgitte Nyborg needing to solve only one major crisis each episode, making it easy to follow. Most of all, it really does an excellent job of portraying how parliamentary politics works, albeit in a simplified capsule format, such that even we here in Malaysia can see the parallels. We will certainly be watching the remaining seasons.
As so often happens in cinema, this film is eerily similar to The Menu in and both were released in the same year. Unfortunately while this film feels like it has some depth in its first sequence about the two models Carl and Yaya, it goes off the rails later and eventually becomes a very crude treatise against capitalism. The worse part of it is that it doesn’t really seem to care about its characters at all, putting them on and off stage as director Ruben Östlund likes without any sense of continuity. It’s amusing enough to watch but it feels too dumb to be properly considered an arthouse film being so clumsily made and so on the nose.
We had a great time with Baahubali so it was always likely that we would this grander and better known epic in the same vein. It really is a bombastic film as we can see from the title itself which are the initials of the director S. S. Rajamoulin and the two male leads. Since it’s set in the modern era instead of far in the mythological past, the nationalism is more off-putting. I’d say it’s not too bad as throwing off British rule is a worthy cause and the action scenes are worth it. It’s ridiculously over the top in the characteristic style that India has forged for itself and the focus is on the brotherhood between the two heroes with the female leads having only a secondary role. I think I still like Baahubali more but this is a decent action epic too.
The creative team from In Bruge reunites to create this startlingly beautiful and at first very humorous film. The fictional setting of Inisherin here is an absolutely gorgeous place and of course must have been deliberately chosen to contrast against the nowhere small of Bruges. But of course just because the island is beautiful, it doesn’t mean that life there is pleasant. The plot takes what seems like a minor feud between two friends to absurd extremes and no one can deny how engaging it is. Still I don’t believe that it’s as deep as it purports to be and fails to truly dissect its characters in any insightful way.
Everyone knows about the successful and highly influential spate of Japanese horror films from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, This isn’t as well known as Ring or Ju-On: The Grudge but it’s still considered the progenitor of that wave. Unfortunately while the grainy film esthetic and general tone of the cinematography are similar, I found this one to be a not very scary and not very impressive example of the genre. After being subjected to truly horrific supernatural entities, a hypnotist no matter how implausibly skilled, just doesn’t rate that highly as a threat and worse still, the film is utterly uninterested in exploring the backstory of the villain.
Everyone knows the song ‘White Christmas’ but how many know that it comes from this musical? Between that song and the appearance of stars like Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, I thought this might make for an entertaining watch. Unfortunately ‘White Christmas’ is the only good song in here and the film itself is just mediocre. Having two male leads and no real female lead is an odd choice but what really kills it is the blackface performance later on and the inclusion of a stock ‘Mamie’ character. Between the two, it gives some bad vibes to the familiar ‘White Christmas’ song and the plot is just nonsense. Avoid.
Tony Hawk is inarguably the world’s most famous skateboarder and has a strong claim to be the world’s best ever. As a videogamer, it’s impossible to miss the innumerable games bearing his name and he’s emblematic of that whole counterculture. This film serves as a fairly comprehensive and I believe fair biography of him. There are no huge twists and it’s essentially the same kind of story we’ve seen in other top tier athletes. Still the scenes of him skating are jaw-dropping to watch and the forthrightness of Hawk’s responses to the interviewer’s questions marks this as one of the better films of the genre.
