With this, we finally close out Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, having first started it more than two years ago. It’s truly been an epic journey and Ray is undeniably a grandmaster that brings life in early 20th century India to life on the silver screen. Pretty every frame of it is so perfectly composed. That said, it’s disheartening how Apu’s life is a seemingly endless litany of miseries. After having lost everyone in his family, Apu finds happiness here only have it snatched away again. I get it, it’s a testament about the fragility of the lives of the poor but give the guy a break already!
I was pleased to see that this made it to Netflix. It’s a Malaysian-Singaporean film that challenged some boundaries, yet never caught serious flack for it. It bothered me that so many of the recent local films we’ve caught were directed and written by ethnic Chinese even when they featured Malay characters. So here’s a film written and directed by M. Raihan Halim and directly addresses the issue of sexual repression in a very conservative Malay village. Honestly this is a rather standard film and anyone will have already seen variations of the format from other countries. But this one is Malaysian and that’s enough to make it fascinating to me.
A new high-concept science-fiction series is always something that I have to watch even if I feared it might be more of a thriller or a drama. The central conceit is original enough but really grabbed my attention is that this is kind of an office dystopia setting in the vein of The Stanley Parable. The series even cites the game as an influence! Despite some clever ideas, the plot develops in a very predictable direction and slows down in the middle of the first season. Fortunately the last two episodes drastically ramp up the tension, all but guaranteeing that we’ll be there for the next season.
This is only the second film by Mikio Naruse and it goes all the way back to the silent era. It’s probably unnecessary unless you’re being a completionist but I was curious about Japan’s silent film era and this does feature imagery from a very distant in the past Tokyo. I don’t particularly like the story or the characters but I was surprised by how strong the female characters shown here are and how much agency they have. As to be expected from Naruse, the outcome is bittersweet at best and the characters face numerous crises, yet they never break down nor turn against one another. Quite remarkable for a work from that era.
There’s a lot going on in this film, a large cast of characters, a popular online game that connects many of them, a webcomic inspired by the game, a seemingly random shooting spree in a night market. I bewildered at first as what it is trying to achieve. If it’s just about frustrated youth boiling over and killing people, the large cast seems superfluous. Then the film switches modes and makes it obvious that its real theme is that anyone can flip and go crazy under the right circumstances. I admit that this is kind of clever but it took too long to make its point and it’s not a terribly well made film anyway.
This is an absolutely insane wild ride of a high school comedy that went far further than I expected. The thing is, it’s a totally formulaic and predictable story about two buddies who want to get laid and so do something outrageous to become popular. The twist is that the two buddies here are lesbian girls and indeed the entire film is framed through a sort of gay-tinted lenses perspective. I’m not certain I really liked it that much but it’s creative and it left me with so many questions like do high schoolers in the US talk like that these days and are attitudes like this mainstream?
Most people have probably never heard of Barbara Loden and this is certainly the only film of note she ever made. Still, it’s an important enough film to be included in the US National Film Registry and most people will have heard of her husband, Elia Kazan. Mostly I am impressed that Loden would write, direct and then cast herself in the lead role of an extremely stupid character. She states that this is partly autobiographical and that too feels profoundly honest. Many films have tried to deglamorize classic Hollywood tropes but this succeeds more than most simply because the characters are such unsympathetic losers that there’s nothing cool about them at all.
