Bas Devos is a Belgian director who is new to me and his passion seems to be to showcase the city of Brussels and perhaps the people who live in it. That might not be immediately apparent in this quiet, contemplative film and indeed it’s hard to tell for a long time what it is at all. I think I do get what the director was trying for here, in showing the forest that exists as part of Brussels and in emphasizing the immediacy or thisness of small moments. But to fully achieve the intended effect would require truly sublime imagery and cinematography and I don’t think this film quite reaches those heights.
Wim Wenders has made many amazing films and I’ve covered quite a few of them here. Here’s one of his most critically planned films which I added to my list anyway because Scott Sumner had some nice things to say about it. This is strange film that will leave you in confusion much of the time yet it does have a comprehensible plot. It has a very cinematic feeling, but almost too much so until it feels like a caricature of Hollywood movies. Wenders has made excellent American films before so it’s not like he doesn’t have an excellent grasp of both the language and the setting. So it’s strange that he seems to be deliberately trying to be bad at times. It’s an interesting project but not a good film at all.
This is a made in Thailand short science-fiction anthology series that received wide release through Netflix. Similar to shows like Black Mirror, each episode is its own standalone story with a couple of them being almost films in their own right. None of the science-fiction ideas in here are particularly original and the plot seems meandering a lot of the time. But I will credit this for being a fantastic effort. It’s bold in challenging established moral values and norms, genuinely dares to imagine what Thailand might be like 20 to 30 years in the future and most of all boasts such high production values that I’m astounded. It’s doesn’t just look authentically futuristic, they have superb art direction as well.
This book seems to be something of a sleeper hit that I’d only learned about from a forum. It’s the first novel by Scott Hawkins whose day job is a technical writer of computer-related books. His success feels like it came out of nowhere but of course it’s really the result of decades of hard work and innumerable failures. Many others have described this book to the work of Neil Gaiman but I also detect some similarities with Susanna Clarke. The genre is ostensibly horror or fantasy, yet this is such a strange book that it eventually morphs to something like science-fiction.
I would never have thought to add this to my list except that whenever people discussed their favorite comedies online, it invariably pops up. Indeed the film’s reputation has grown over time. My initial impression of it were bad. It seemed like the usual story of graduating high school kids wanting to lose their virginity. In the end, I still can’t see the greatness in it. But I concede that the duo of Jonah Hill and Michael Cera works and they manage to soften the raunchiness with the cuteness of the characters so the comedy is never mean-spirited.
The films of Robert Bresson haven’t disappointed me so far but I must confess that this one is tough to swallow. As it is literally showing snippets from the diary of a priest, the scenes are very episodic, not allowing us to dwell in the moment. Then there is the cultural and religious gulf and indeed the film probably has little meaning for those who have no religious faith at all. I’m pretty sure I’ve more or less understood what it wants to say but that’s not at all the same as being moved by it. I can see how ahead of its time it is and how it must speak to those who are religious but it’s not for me.
Kelly Reichardt teams up with Michelle Williams again in another delightfully understated film. Once again it’s set in Portland, Oregon and being centered around the Oregon College of Art and Craft (OCAC), just about everyone in it is an artist of some stripe. But as this film shows, not all artists get to be famous or rich or successful. As usual, Reichardt’s work is so subtle that it might not seem like it has much of a point. But the soft rivalry between Lizzy and Jo, highlighting how the latter is just ever so slightly closer to the artist that the former aspires to be, is good enough for me.
