Much like South Korea, Iran’s film industry holds to a standard of quality that is all out of proportion to the country’s size or nominal cultural influence. Sadly this is the first Iranian film to be covered in this blog though hopefully it will soon be followed by many more. This one, directed by internationally acclaimed director Asghar Farhadi, has won a frankly insane number of awards, including an Oscar. Not bad for a film from an Axis of Evil country.
I was a big fan of both of the previous Shadowrun games so it’s no surprise that I backed their Kickstarter campaign for this. It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s been two years since the first one. As its title makes clear, this one takes you to Hong Kong under the premise that you’re a native of Seattle who travels to the city-state in search of your adopted father.
This anime has an unusual genesis, being directly based on an old manga that was itself inspired on the 1927 film by Fritz Lang. Yet this anime version seems to draw more heavily from the silent film than the original manga. It was directed by Rintaro who is well-known for being involved in many science-fiction anime, including the grand-daddy of them all, Astro Boy.
Franchise that I have no real interest in? Check. Hollywood reboot? Check. This is exactly the sort of summer blockbuster that you couldn’t pay me to watch. I relented in this case only because the trailers actually looked sort of good, seeming to make a case for this being an environmentalism film instead of just a monster romp, plus word of mouth on Broken Forum was reasonably positive. Unfortunately sometimes first impressions are correct and I should have stayed away from this pile of crap.
This one is only the second Federico Fellini film I’ve written about in this blog and like La Strada dates from the earliest part of the career of the great director. I was curious about what the Italian title actually meant and so tried to search for a translation. As it turned out, the title is incomprehensible even to Italians as it is either a little known street slang term that Fellini heard when he was young or a portmanteau of other words. Today it is generally agreed to refer to a certain class of parasitic and aimless youths who spend their days in idleness.
I’ve been ramping down my participation in the Coursera MOOCs of late, mainly because I’ve taken just about all of the introductory courses that I can take and because what’s left that I have any interest in is a bit too in-depth for a casual learner like me. But it’s also because as I get older I’m more set in my ways and getting lazier about truly exercising my mind and getting very involved in tricky subjects. This course, the follow-up to the Introduction of Philosophy course from the University of Edinburgh that I took earlier this year, is an unfortunate example.
When ranking the best films of Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window invariably makes the list alongside other greats like Vertigo and Psycho. It’s arguably the ur-film for an entire sub-genre of Peeping Tom movies with the traditional Hitchcockian ice blonde here being none other than the fabulous Grace Kelly while perennial favorite James Stewart is the protagonist.