It’s Star Wars so it has open with the trademark slow text crawl. I’m okay with that even though I’m bored of it after six movies and innumerable videogames. Next comes a long, tracking shot of the familiar wedge shape of a Star Destroyer, except from a novel angle. Homage. I’m down with that. But when we see Max von Sydow wearing clothes that make him suspiciously resemble Alec Guinness and the McGuffin being hidden in this iteration’s version of the lovable droid, I start cringing. Long before it recreates the cantina scene, to seek transportation to boot, or show the shadowy, disfigured behind-the-scenes big bad via hologram, I’ve realized this isn’t so much a continuation of the original trilogy as a beat-for-beat remake.
This is the first film by Malaysian-born but long since Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang to be covered in this blog though my wife has watched quite a few of his films. She notes that this one once again stars the director favorite actor Lee Kang-sheng and I read that the trio of actresses who appear in it are part of his usual cast.
As a claymation movie, and especially one that is about a girl in Australia who has a pet chicken being pen pals with a man in America, you wouldn’t expect it to be very dark. Mary and Max however is one of the most depressing films I’ve watched this year and is most certainly not suitable for children no matter how cute its animation is.
These days Justin Lin is best known for the Fast and Furious movies though he is also slated to take over the next iteration of the rebooted Star Trek franchise. But like everyone else, he had to start somewhere and Better Luck Tomorrow was his feature film debut. This one only has middling ratings on Rotten Tomatoes but Roger Ebert saw fit to award it four out of four stars and commented that it’s extremely rare to see a film focused on the experiences of Asian-Americans. That’s pretty much why I was interested in this film myself.
We’d previously watched Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. and ended up being surprised by how funny and creative it is. It stands to reason that we had pretty high expectations for The General. Keaton himself considered it his best film and is ranked among the greatest American films ever made. Unfortunately those expectations were largely dashed. It turns out that while Sherlock, Jr. is indisputably a comedy, The General isn’t. Instead, it’s an action-adventure film with some comedic elements and that makes all the difference.
Here we have the first film from Thailand to be covered in this blog and it is by a director whose name I must confess that I will never be able to remember Apichatpong Weerasethakul. There is little doubt that this is a worthy film, it managed the impressive feat of being included in the Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films ever made. But it’s also an incredibly contentious film with many people who complain about it being impossibly boring and pointless. Just read the user comments on IMDB.
This one was originally launched as a KickStarter project. I didn’t back it but I did read up on it since many commented that it’s like playing a character in an episode of Star Trek. It’s billed as a sci-fi RPG set entirely within the confines of a ship but really since there is no character development system and the combat is so bad you should really avoid it as much as possible, I like to think of it as more of an adventure game.
