We’ve watched a fair few of director Alfonson Cuarón, most obviously Gravity and Children of Men. We’ve even watched his Mexican work, such as Y Tu Mamá También. I don’t believe I’ve ever disliked one of his films. This one is the very first film that he made in the US and was a box office failure. For this reason, I expect that very few people have actually watched it.
I don’t believe I’ve ever watched an Ethiopian film before so it’s good at least to try something new. Though it prominently features Angelina Jolie’s name, her role is that of executive producer only which I take to mean that she helped to fund and perhaps the market the film. Most of the cast and crew including the director Zeresenay Berhane Mehari seems to be Ethiopian.
I can’t recall the last time I went to the cinema for a horror film and this certainly counts as a film that would never be on my usual radar. It got my attention due to the superlative reviews it received on Broken Forum and of course it helps that it has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 99%.
Nearly two years after first starting the series, we now come to the final book of the trilogy by Greg Egan. This brings to an end the journey of the Peerless and its inhabitants across many generations as they look forward to reuniting with the homeworld. I believe that this volume has the least mathematics and physics of the three but makes up for it with a conception of free will that is philosophically very mind-bending.
Yes, this is intriguingly enough a French film by director Paul Verhoeven, the same director who is best known for Robocop, Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Verhoeven apparently first tried to make this film in the US but could not find a well known American actress willing to accept this risqué role. He then decided that an American film would be too conventional a thriller anyway and so made it in France, going to the extent of learning French to do so. Impressive dedication for a man in his mid-70s!
Updates on this blog have been a bit slow lately both due to me being sick and my Internet being down for a few days. I thought I’d get back into the groove with a lighter watch, a documentary about renowned food critic Jonathan Gold and the food scene in Los Angeles.
This was an interesting recommendation from, among other places, Vox. Vox is one of the leading sites nowadays that best represent liberal America so it’s very much pro-feminism. That’s interesting because this film has plenty of nudity, both male and female to be fair, but it’s easy to see that it draws viewers mostly through the sexy antics of its female lead Samantha Robinson. Still it contains a remarkably sophisticated discussion of how sexuality empowers women and its very studied throwback to the 1960s makes it impossible to dismiss it as crass commercial fare.