I was vaguely aware of this film when it played in the cinemas but it only really got my attention when lots of people on Broken Forum started talking about it. In particular, more than a few people chimed in to say how it’s a genuinely scary film that doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares. It was also very well received by critics, with a crazy high Rotten Tomatoes rating and comparisons with The Exorcist.
Coming fresh off the heels of a film about youths in Mexico in the 1950s, here’s a film about teenagers in America in the 1980s. Most Malaysians will probably know director John Hughes best for his Home Alone movies of the 1990s but he is more significant for a slew of highly influential films about high-schoolers and their problems a decade earlier. Of these, The Breakfast Club is probably the most highly regarded and caused the young actors who appeared in it to be lumped together as the Brat Pack.
It’s been a particularly rich month for science with some really cool articles. Here goes:
Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel is, I think, best known for his surrealist works as exemplified by his famous collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou. As such Los Olvidados, being a more realistic and grounded story is probably not representative of his body of work, though it does feature a dream sequence that gives you a taste of that style.
Sita Sings the Blues is as indie a film as you can imagine, being made largely by a single person, Nina Paley, with crowdfunded money. Apparently she created almost the entire thing on her own home computer with popular commercial software like Adobe Flash. The film also makes heavy use of jazz songs by Annette Hanshaw from the 1920s. This caused copyright problems which made it difficult for this film to be distributed normally. That’s why the creator has encouraged fans to freely distribute it in any way they like including using BitTorrent.
Despite hearing lots of praise for it, I’d skipped out on Bastion, thinking that it looked too lightweight. Supergiant’s follow-up, Transistor, was an even bigger success. It has a cool female protagonist, an awesome, nigh infinitely-configurable weapon and an original science-fiction world.
This is a relatively obscure film that showed up on my radar both because it is frequently cited on Broken Forums as an old favorite and because a videogame adaptation of it was made not too long ago, decades after the release of the original film. Apparently this film proved to be quite controversial during its time, as there were fears of gang violence and vandalism associated with it, and it was critically panned upon release. But its reputation improved as time passed and it has since been recognized as a cult film.