The Lobster, by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, makes it onto my watch list not because it was highly praised or because it won many awards, but because most of the people who have watched it describes it as one of the weirdest films they’ve seen. One of the most surprising things about this is that for such a small and quirky film, it has some serious star power with the most famous names being Collin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and Léa Seydoux.
It’s been over a year since I read the first book of Greg Egan’s Orthogonal trilogy and I make no apologies for that. I can enjoy pretty much every single one of this author’s book but they require significant mental work and consequent preparation to fully appreciate. Reading The Eternal Flame requires having read the first book as Egan wastes no time in explaining how the physics of this universe work or the biological details of the alien species who are the protagonists of the story. Consequently I also assume this prior knowledge in this post.
In line with our efforts to round out my film education by watching more films from China, this is the first film by Zhang Yimou to be covered in this blog. Appropriately enough this is also both Zhang’s directorial debut and the acting debut of Gong Li. I’ve never watched this before but my wife has many times, though she is happy to watch it again. I’ve simply never watched any of Zhang’s early films that made him famous.
The Revenant is way too high profile a release to miss watching. It won a slew of awards, it was directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu who deserves plenty of goodwill for Birdman and it has at least one scene that is now so iconic that its fame eclipses that of the film itself. Personally however I wasn’t too keen about the subject of the film which seemed to yet another survival in the wilderness story with an actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who doesn’t seem altogether together suited to the role.
80 Days is an amazingly innovative game by the same people who were responsible for the videogame adaptation of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! Inkle specializes in narrative game like these and if how much I liked this one is any indication, I have a feeling that I will be buying many more games from them.
Every time you see a truly old film being covered in this blog, you’d know that it must be because it’s one of the all time greats. This is especially true for Sunrise by German expressionist director F.W. Murnau which is usually considered as one of the top ten greatest films of all time. It also stars the extremely tiny Janet Gaynor who we’ve seen before in Street Angel.
This is the last of a series of recommendations of interesting European animated films from a Chinese television program that my wife caught a long while ago. This one is obviously French and unlike so many animated films we’ve seen is apparently an original creation instead of being based on another property. However as is appropriate it derives its art style from a variety of famous artists including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.