These days a large proportion of the backlogged films on our shared watch list are Chinese ones due to my needing to catch up on so many well known exemplars of Chinese cinema. Devils on the Doorstep is one such entry that my wife asked to watch. We’ve seen veteran actor Jiang Wen plenty of times, most recently in Red Sorghum for example, but I believe that this is one of the only times we’ve seen him in a film in which he is also the director.
I’ve been playing a lot of these small independently produced games lately. I guess I should move back to AAA-games soon. This one ticks a lot of boxes for me: exploration theme, turn-based battles, text-based adventures and a deep upgrade system. It’s no wonder that this one was a hit on Broken Forum as well.
The last work we saw of director Philip Kaufman was his 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This one is an adaptation of a novel about street gangs in the 1960s, which means that preposterous as things can get in this film, at least some parts of it are based on real life events. It also stars Ken Wahl, who some people from my generation may recognize from the television series Wiseguy but I’ve never seen him anywhere else.
This one is a highly acclaimed documentary shot by two journalists, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, while they were embedded with a US Army unit over the course of a 15-month deployment in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008. Unless you’re familiar with the events in question, the meaning of the title must be deliberate bit of mystery that is revealed later in the film itself.
This is an older Brazilian film by Walter Salles and I’ve written about his work before. He directed one of the segments in Paris, je t’aime, one of my favorite ones actually about an immigrant needing to travel far from home to get to work in Paris. He also directed the acclaimed Motorcycle Diaries which my wife watched but which I missed because I wasn’t much interested in films back then. On the other hand, I’ve also watched his Hollywood remake of Dark Water, which is as awful as these adaptations of Japanese horror films generally are. That’s quite a leap in terms of style and quality!
This one was hot stuff on Broken Forum for a while and I thought that the idea of combining substances in a factory to make pharmaceutical products was pretty novel. It’s really just a matter of running the inputs through the correct sequences of machines and it plays out on a two-dimensional factory floor, so it’s not anything too complicated. With all of the conveyor belts going everywhere and the strange shapes of the machinery, there’s even a Rube Goldberg quality to the art style.
This is lighter weight fare added to our list by my wife. I’ve never watched this before but even the original 1940 Fantasia doesn’t hold much prominence in my mind. It was just too far before my time and the only thing I remember of it is the one that everyone knows: the Sorceror’s Apprentice segment. Fantasia never did make much money for Disney but it was apparently very important for many people in the company as an early showcase of what animation can achieve. Fantasia 2000 was therefore a sequel that was in germination for a very long time and this time, as is appropriate, it brings computer generated graphics to the table.