Once again this is a pick that originally came to my attention from a Broken Forum post and subsequently reaffirmed when I realized that it is in the Criterion Collection. At first glance it is nothing special, just a generic Japanese gangster film with a bog standard plot out of hundreds that were produced in the 1960s. But as you watch it, it becomes increasingly obvious how this is a film that must have been far ahead of its time nearly 50 years ago.
One of my favourite comments about this film is on Broken Forum, when someone mentioned how it’s a film that he’d recommend to almost nobody but he still liked it himself. This unexpectedly turned out to be so very true for my wife and myself. I found myself completely won over by its charm and cleverness but my wife found it irritating and boring.
Once again, Wall Street is one of those films whose influence is widely felt in popular culture. Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko is considered one of the greatest movie villains of all time and even Princeton’s Algorithms class on the Coursera platform included a snippet of the famous “greed is good” speech when talking about greedy algorithms. As such, it’s pretty embarrassing to not actually have seen this movie.
As I’ve already mentioned in this blog, South Korean directors have an exceptional record with me. Given this, and that it’s by Bong Joon-ho who directed one of the best monster movies of modern times, that it’s science-fiction, and that it’s based on an unusual French graphic novel, there’s no way that I would be missing this.
Last Tango in Paris is one of the many films that my wife watched ages ago but I am only now watching for the first time because, well, I only recently started to take films seriously. Fortunately for me, my wife confessed to not really understanding it when she last watched it, so in a way, we were still discovering it together.
I have to admit to being a sucker for coming-of-age stories and I suspect that my wife is as well. Since The Kings of Summer is one such film that made it into some lists of most notable films of last year, this was sufficient reason for me to want to watch it.
As someone who studied in university in France, I am aware of the special status Algeria has to France and how traumatic its independence was to the French. As such when I followed up on a mention of this film on Broken Forum and learned that it was effectively commissioned by the newly independent Algerian government to tell their side of the story, I was instantly intrigued.