The last time we watched a Marx Brothers movie was for the film class and neither of us really liked it. Still, Monkey Business isn’t generally considered the best film by the Marxes. This one is, plus the brothers are such a big deal in the history of comedy in cinema that I thought this should be obligatory viewing. Interestingly, while it is thought of as a masterpiece today and it was one of the least successful of the brothers’ movies when it was released and had a lukewarm welcome even from critics.
Seven Beauties is one of two films that my wife asked to add to our list by Italian director Lina Wertmüller. It is apparently quite a prominent film and represented the first time that a female director was nominated for the Best Director Award at the Oscars even though it didn’t go on to win. Unfortunately both my wife and myself had so much trouble relating to it that it’s hard to say we like it, though we do acknowledge that it’s a unique and highly distinctive film.
Whiplash is a film about music and as I have neither knowledge of nor much interest in music, it’s no surprise that this one is one of my wife’s picks. Still, it was one of the big winners for last year’s Academy Awards so it’s not like it’s a low-profile film. It’s also a film with a clear auteur, as Damien Chazelle both wrote and directed it based on his own experiences in a studio band.
As the post title indicates, this one is the 2012 RPG by Cyanide, not the 2014 adventure game by Telltale. I’d bought this because it was cheap and I’d heard that its story was surprisingly decent, as in people are used to Cyanide making shitty games and media tie-in games being crappy, but this turned out not to be the case. After finishing this, I have to say that I agree with this assessment. This doesn’t mean that it’s actually good, just that it’s better than it has any right being.
It’s a Wonderful Life is apparently one of America’s favorite films to watch during the Christmas season. That should give you a fairly good idea of what kind of movie this is. It also stars James Stewart, who together with Jack Lemmon, is becoming one of my favorite actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Out of his nearly a hundred or so roles, Steward seems to consider this one his favorite. At slightly over two hours long, it’s a fairly hefty film but at least one can be certain that it’s easy to watch.
I admit that when I first heard of this movie, my first thought was of the boardgame. Of course, this has nothing to do with that though both refer to the French port city bearing the name. It’s worth noting that while this is a French language film, it was directed by Finnish Aki Kaurismäki, which I think accounts for some of its strangeness.
As I’ve mentioned many times, I still consider Greg Egan to be my favorite science-fiction author though his best work was published in the 1990s and some of the latest novels can be quite boring (I’m looking at you Incandescence and Zendegi.) Still, I’m likely to read everything Egan writes eventually and so here we are at The Clockwork Rocket, the first book of the Orthogonal trilogy that was first published in 2011.
