One of the cool things about keeping myself up to date about the world of cinema is that we’ve actually watched the films that established the career of director Taika Waititi before he hit the big time with this latest installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Having watched both What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, it was possible to recognize the director’s voice role in here but also cameos from his usual cast and numerous influences from his native New Zealand.
Another subject that Khan Academy has a lot of videos on is Finance and Capital Markets. None of this is particularly new to me but I thought I’d listen to them while mostly doing something else as a refresher. Looking over this list of topics, I was particularly intrigued in that he covers the more exotic parts of the financial work such as various types of derivatives and collateralized debt obligations which you don’t usually see in beginner level finance courses. There are also videos on more contemporary topics such as the housing crisis and the ongoing issue of Brexit.
So this is the third film we’ve watched by Polish director Andrzej Wajda and this one dates from 1981, before the fall of Communism in Poland. I was aware this is the second of a duology of two films but my wife and I have limited patience for films that require deep knowledge of a country’s history and Man of Iron is the more well known work of the two so I chose to watch only this one. This did lead to some confusion about who’s who but overall it didn’t work out too badly.
Last week The 18th European Union Film Festival took place in Malaysia though I guess mostly only expatriate and media types noticed. My wife and I heard about it on the radio and so I looked it up. Most of the films scheduled looked uninteresting to me as they are either too new or too obscure to have been reviewed much. We had already watched Fire at Sea. This is only thing that I found that has very high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes so I picked this to watch, if only as a show of support for such events.
I like to think I’m pretty on top of the most notable releases every year at this point but this is a film that would never have even appeared on my personal radar if it hadn’t been recommended to me by my cinephile friend. This is the first feature film made by its director Bi Gan and it’s so obscure that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page.
With the Nobel Prizes being awarded earlier this month, there seems to be a bit of a lull in other science-related news.
Pretty much everything that I watch has been readied for weeks or even months in advance just waiting for me to get to it. Since we usually only watch something like two to three films a week, it can be a while before I get to a title. All this is to say that I had been planning to watch this title way before the Las Vegas shooting early this month but doing so in its wake like this does give the experience some added weight and relevance.