If you look past the fact that this is a French film that is set in France, Les Diaboliques feels eerily reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock film. In fact, the story goes that Hitchcock was interested in buying the rights to the novel that this eventual film was based on but director Henri-Georges Clouzot managed to get to the French authors a few hours earlier. The rest is history as it went on to be regarded as one of the best thrillers ever made.
Though I don’t really read that much original science-fiction any longer, I still go out of my way to put the most quirky and interesting science-fiction films to my watch list. This ultra low-budget film that has often been compared to Primer, perhaps the most convoluted science-fiction film ever made, certainly qualifies. It was apparently shot in director James Ward Byrkit’s own house over the course of five nights with no script and no crew. It went to win a number of awards and plenty of praise from critics, not bad for a directorial debut that was made with almost no money.
After spending a couple of months on Dark Souls 2, I felt like playing something completely different and what could be more different than this minimalist puzzle game. This one was strongly recommended by a couple of people on Broken Forum so I bought despite feeling that I’m no longer quite smart enough to play puzzle games nowadays. It also helped that completing it would probably take less than ten hours.
My wife insisted on adding this one, along with many others, in an Chinese television show introducing a bunch of lesser known animated films from Europe. I dislike those shows as they have no qualms about thoroughly spoiling the films they talk about but I guess they can be useful for getting to know about works that one would never otherwise get to hear about. This one is from Spain, by a director named Ignacio Ferreras who is so new that he doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page yet.
I got this pick from Marginal Revolution and subsequently saw it as a notable film in a couple of other places. Tyler Cowen rated it very highly but after starting to watch this, I realized that I should have taken into account that Cowen is probably more of a fan of sports than I am. Anyway this is a documentary about the intensive, possibly torturous, ice hockey program that the Soviet Union ran as part of its propaganda machine during the Cold War.
This is obviously the second half of the huge history course that I wrote about a couple of months ago. This second part is, if anything, even larger, comprising as many weeks and with videos that add up to a significantly longer duration. Naturally it’s also the part that will be most familiar and perhaps most exciting for people, including as it does in its scope the two World Wars, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and even everything up to the 9/11 attacks.
Continue reading The Modern World: Global History since 1910
I didn’t plan for this as I had no idea what this film was about, but the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests turned out to be an appropriate time to watch Summer Palace. Director Lou Ye had impressed us with his recent Blind Massage and I believe I added this to our list as it is his most well known film. As to be expected for such a film, it was hugely controversial at the time, not only for its depiction of the protests and also for its sex scenes and its use of full frontal nudity for both male and female actors.