Crime spree films featuring a couple, usually a man and a woman, going off on a wild ride of robberies and killings until they die in a hail of bullets are common enough to constitute a genre in of themselves. Bonnie and Clyde is far from the first of these films but it’s easily the first one that comes to mind when you think about them, especially for American audiences. It’s also one of the earliest American films to show a very obvious French New Wave influence, sharing remarkable similarities in particular with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.
The films made by the Coen brothers fall into one of two categories: the serious ones and the wacky ones. Inside Llewyn Davis, for example, is definitely one of the serious ones. Fargo sort of straddles the line between the two. Given its title, it’s easy to see that Hail, Caesar! falls solidly into the wacky category. It features two of the brothers’ most frequent collaborators, Josh Brolin and George Clooney, plus a whole host of familiar Hollywood faces, past and present, in a variety of minor roles.
As astute readers might intuit, this was added to our watch on the occasion of the death of its director Abbas Kiarostami. I’ve previously covered one of his later works in this blog, but I’ve never watched any of the films that actually made his famous. Kiarostami was already a pretty big deal when he made The Wind Will Carry Us, but I believe this helped him cement his reputation at the height of his career, making it essential watching.
I’ve had this book on my wishlist for a couple of years now but only recently bought it on Google Books. This one is a collection of essays, all of which you can actually read for free on the Tor website as a series of blog posts by Jo Walton. The original idea of the column was that, as the subtitle states, she would re-read the classics of science fiction and fantasy and write about her thoughts on them. I found it more convenient to read a curated set of the best ones in the form of a book and it turns out that it’s not so much about the classics of the genre as some of Walton’s favorite books.
The synopsis of Green Room makes it sound like a generic splatter film, a genre that I have absolutely no interest in and would have passed over without a second thought. What makes this film deserve a second look is that it was directed by Jeremy Saulnier, who made waves a few years ago with the utterly fantastic and mostly Kickstarter-funded Blue Ruin. This one seems to have been made using a more conventional funding model, raising enough money to get Patrick Stewart onboard. It’s actually a bit odd too see such a famous actor slumming it up with all of the unknown ones, though those who have seen Blue Ruin will recognize Macon Blair here in a supporting role.
Farewell My Concubine is probably the single most famous film by its director Chen Kaige and one of the representative works of the so-called Fifth Generation movement of Chinese cinema. After watching Yellow Earth a few months back, it seemed natural to progress to this one as I’ve never seen it before. My wife claims to have watched it many times already but she was insistent that I gain more exposure to Chinese films.
This is once again a tiny game that was part of the Humble Narrative Bundle and that I would never have noticed otherwise. This isn’t really a game at all. It’s basically an attempt to tell a linear story using a bunch of unconventional elements. It’s told from the point of view of the game’s creator, Nina Freeman, and is apparently based on her real life. She’s a college student who feels insecure and seems prone to self-denigration. She likes playing video games and this story tells of how across a number of months spent in a fictional MMO called Valtameri, she falls in love with a boy she meets online.
