For once, it isn’t entirely clear to me why this film was included in the course’s watch list. My best guess is that it’s an early example of low-budget B-movies, especially one in the horror genre. Reading through Wikipedia, I see that it was withdrawn shortly after release due to being the subject of plagiarism lawsuit and was not available again for 50 years until after its copyright expired. I wonder if that fact will be relevant in the lectures.
Yep, getting this done early again to stick with the “one post every couple of days” routine I’ve established. There is quite a bit of science stuff to cover this month too.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (January 2015)
Blue Ruin, made with a budget of less than US$500,000 with some of it raised from a Kickstarter campaign, was undeniably the indie darling of 2013. Made by a director, Jeremy Saulnier, so unknown that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page yet, it won almost universal acclaim from critics. That makes it a must-watch in my book.
The box office statistics for this South Korean historical epic are really something to behold. It sold more than 17 million movie tickets, out of a population of approximately 50 million people. Outside of its home country, it did respectable, but not spectacular, sales. Sure, it’s a nationalistic puff piece, but these numbers suggest that The Admiral might be a film worth watching if only for the novelty of a South Korean mega-blockbuster.
A few minutes into this film, both my wife and myself thought it seemed awfully familiar. It turned out that we had watched it before, probably a couple of years earlier when my wife wanted to sign up for a previous iteration of the same film course. Both of our memories must be failing for us to not have remembered it. But the movie is enjoyable enough that we had no difficulties with watching it a second time.
For the first time in a very long while, I’ve gotten ahead of the curve on writing a post for every movie that I watch. This gives me extra time to write about other miscellaneous stuff. So I thought this would be a good time to make a list of some of the fanfiction I’ve been reading and enjoyed. As always, the list is sorted in no particular order. It’s a long list because I’ve been reading a lot of the stuff over the past two years or so.
I’ve posted about this before here and it’s still ongoing. The plan is apparently to finish it this year. I still enjoy a great deal but it’s now much darker and serious than when it started. Oddly enough, it’s also gotten so caught up in its plot that it’s much less of an author tract than it was originally intended to be.
Our list of films to watch has grown so long that we can’t remember whether this one was added by my wife (because she remembers it being highly praised back when she was in high school) or myself (because it shows up often in lists of best films). Either way, this means that Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is a film that both of us really wanted to watch.