This marks the last of the great films by David Lean that we’ve watched and with more than three hours of running time it is certainly qualifies as an epic. I’m not sure how it is in the original novel but this film itself is framed as a romance that takes place amidst the tumult of the Russian Revolution. I don’t really care for the romance aspect but the film is effective at showing the massive changes that took place in Russia and how families are torn apart and people change in unpredictable ways during all this.
Made by director Andrew Ahn, I believe that this counts among the recent crop of films made by Asian American filmmakers. This one doesn’t lean into the Asian identity of its characters, which I suppose is another way of moving past the barrier. It is a very modest film about personal connections and I think as it was released online during the pandemic instead of in theatres, it resonated especially to people starved of ordinary social contact.
It’s pretty crazy how many films Robert De Niro has appeared in over the decades. This one was a comedic role that he himself pursued back in the day, apparently just in order to change things up from his usual gangster roles. It was a major success back in the day but its reputation has also improved over time. As my wife observes, it evokes a sense of nostalgia for the style of humor of the 1980s but I also note that it isn’t a retrospectively offensive film in the way so many other films of the period are and that’s another reason why it holds up so well today.
Having visited and loved the city of Istanbul, I naturally drawn to this documentary about Ara Güler, the celebrated photographer. He was nicknamed the Eye of Istanbul for his photographs that captured the city across decades beginning from the 1950s and much other work besides. Unfortunately while the man and his work are worthy subjects, this documentary itself is unremarkable, amounting to being little more than a straightforward hagiography that feels almost like a commercial for his legacy orchestrated by Güler himself.
This first came to my attention when it was featured in an episode of The Americans but of course we’ve already Night and the City before this. This one is now known as one of the greatest heist films of all time, featuring a heist scene so detailed and realistic that it was copied by real criminals to perform real crimes. I also didn’t realize until afterwards that director Jules Dassin was in this as the Italian safecracker. Unfortunately while the heist scene is indeed amazing, the extended denouement afterwards is nothing special.
Charlie Kaufman has a well-earned reputation for incredibly hard to understand films. This one is actually not as difficult to understand as I had feared but it still has its surreal and abstract moments. Unfortunately it is largely a retread of Kaufman’s usual themes, which as one Broken Forum poster puts it is about a self-loathing old man with a girl who wishes she were elsewhere. This plays even worse nowadays and comes across essentially as an incel’s lament.
Even without deliberately setting out to do so, I’m slowly making a bit of a dent in director Billy Wilder’s filmography. This one isn’t one of his major works but it’s still brimming with energy and feels topical in its critique of the media creating its own news. I was surprised however to learn that it’s partially based on real rescue events that turned into giant media circuses, one of them dating back to the 1920s. I was inclined to be skeptical of the huge crowds shown in the film but apparently that was all too real too.
