This is the first online course I’ve taken on history and it’s a huge one, covering the entire world for the period stated over the course of seven weeks. Roughly speaking, its focus is on the transition between the ancient world and the modern one. Offered by the University of Virginia, it is taught by Philip Zelikow, a fairly prominent diplomat and foreign policy expert in the U.S. government, notably serving as the executive director of the 9/11 Commissioner. He’s probably more of a public policy expert than an academic scholar of history but it still means that he a major heavyweight.
The fact that Rio Bravo is frequently placed near the top of lists of the best Westerns ever made is reason enough to see it but I was especially intrigued by how it made by Howard Hawks and John Wayne specifically as a response to High Noon. In case you don’t know, that film was about a sheriff who has to confront a powerful criminal gang and went around the town to solicit help but everyone just made their excuses and minded their own business. This didn’t sit well with Wayne at all who called it un-American and even helped to run the screenwriter of the film, Carl Foreman, out of the country for being a Communist sympathizer.
This was one my wife’s picks that she must have read about somewhere and it turned out to be a film with only female characters, including a couple of trans women. It was a surprising coincidence given that we’d only just watched Tokyo Godfathers the day before. Unfortunately it’s also similar to that film in that many points in its plot are connected through a series of implausible events that leave you gasping in disbelief and this time I don’t think that there’s supposed to be any magic involved.
This marks the fourth film that I’ve watched by director Satoshi Kon though it’s been so long since we watched Millennium Actress that I barely remember any of it. I do recall quite well the ones that we watched more recently, Perfect Blue and Paprika, both of which heavily feature scenes that skirt the boundary between reality and the imagination. Tokyo Godfathers for the most part has no such scenes, making it a much more approachable and straightforward film, albeit also a lighter one.
Each and every one of us has probably watched dozens of films about the Second World War but how many of them were from the Soviet point of view, by a predominantly Soviet cast and crew? Come and See is billed as a propaganda film because it was explicitly made to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Soviet victory and to tell the world of the horrors inflicted in Belarus by German forces, a tragedy that the Soviets thought the world had ignored. Unlike so many such efforts however, under the direction of Elem Klimov, it was not only a commercial success but went on to be acknowledged as one of the best war films ever made.
Though I didn’t really like Star Wars: The Old Republicand felt that the story for the Jedi Knight class was lacklustre, I still went back to it for quite a while. Obviously I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment and there’s something about standard MMO gameplay that makes it low-hanging fruit. It’s just so easy and convenient to boot it up for just one more session of mindless playing. But it’s also because I looked what most people consider to be the best class story in the game and it’s pretty much unanimously the Imperial Agent. I decided that I needed to check it out for myself.
This one must have been added to our watch list after taking the Marriage and the Movies course last year but I can’t recall why exactly I did that. It was mentioned but wasn’t required watching in the course. I am aware that it’s a classic of the romantic comedy genre, being perhaps the grand-daddy of all stories in which the couple meets while travelling together. That alone may be a good reason to seek out this very old film.
