This is another unlooked for small budget independent film that I knew about only due to being recommended by our cinephile friend. Director Trey Edward Shults is still so new at it that he has to boast about working for Terrence Malick on his Wikipedia page. No big names among the cast either though a couple of faces may be familiar.
So we’ve watched Indian versions of popular genres like comedies and action movies, but I do believe that this is the first time we’ve seen an Indian thriller. This one even distinguishes itself by having a female protagonist and takes itself so seriously that there are no song and dance routines.
This film gained our attention when we caught one of its trailers in the cinema and of course as a serious film it went on to be nominated for several Oscars. I’m not sure we would have been interested in this ordinarily but we had a free evening in KL recently and as I knew that this was only shown in a limited number of places in Malaysia, we took the opportunity to watch it.
So this was an entry in What Makes This Book So Great though as Jo Walton noted, it isn’t usually regarded as a genre book. It is however world famous as the novel that launched the career of Salman Rushdie. The novel is hugely popular, especially in the UK, and won the Best of the Bookers twice. I’d argue however that while it does have ‘genre’ elements, it doesn’t read like one and shouldn’t be properly considered as science-fiction or fantasy.
So Your Name was obviously the big anime hit of 2016 that everyone went to see. This lesser known film was number two in Japan. It did make the news in Malaysia in 2017 when a large cinema screen was forced to pull screenings of it due to the studio’s complaints about rampant piracy in our country. I think that was about when I added it to my watch list as well.
I never got a chance to write about it and I did watch the original Cloverfield and rather liked it. I stayed away from this one at first because horror film sequels never turn out well. But then I heard that this is a sequel in name only and actually does some pretty interesting things so I thought I’d check it out.
We currently watch so many films that occasionally we do forget that we’ve already watched something. This is one of those times. Neither my wife nor myself could remember watching this but it seemed familiar as we started watching it. Oddly enough, I do definitely remember watching the earlier and better known Lost in Beijing by the same director and also starring Fan Bingbing. Still, this must have been before I started writing about films extensively and I like to think that my ability to properly evaluate and appreciate cinema has improved since then so rewatching it was fine.