I hesitated a long time over whether or not to watch American Sniper. On the one hand, its cultural significance in the US cannot be overstated. On the other, I knew even without watching it that I would hate it. I only made up my mind when Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution called it the most important American film of 2014 though I still can’t decide if he was trolling when he called it one of the best anti-war films he’d ever seen.
With The Devil’s Backbone off the list, I find that I have now watched every single feature film directed by Guillermo del Toro, with the exception of last year’s Crimson Peak which I skipped over due to its middling reviews. I don’t even consider him to be one of my favorite directors but he does have a talent for making films that can do well commercially and yet possess considerable artistic merit. The Devil’s Backbone makes for a good example of this: it’s a pretty standard ghost story without so much as an interesting twist in its favor, yet in del Toro’s hands it is elevated to the status of a classic due to the craftsmanship shown here and the director’s knack for visual storytelling.
Zootopia was a film that came out of the left field for me. It wasn’t on my radar at all. Both my wife and myself were pretty big fans of the last two Kung Fu Panda films so we’d been looking forward to watching it. Unfortunately that one seems to have gotten only middling reviews but while looking at showtimes I couldn’t help but notice that this Disney release just happened to be in cinemas at around the same time but got stellar reviews. In fact even my cinephile friend and the members over on Broken Forum gave it a thumbs-up, making this a must watch for my wife.
Given Fox’s poor track record with the X-Men films, whether or not I should watch this wasn’t exactly a sure bet. It was released while I was distracted by family stuff during the Chinese New Year and seems to have been very well received while I wasn’t paying much attention. That explains why I’ve also just now gone to the cinema to check it out.
So I was just randomly browsing Broken Forum one day when I read a comment about how everyone who loved Portal should play this. My first reaction was naturally: wait? There’s a Portal game that I somehow missed? How could this be possible! This turned out to be a fan-made mod, albeit one that is so well made that it’s even featured as a free game on Steam. It has original art assets, voice acting, a storyline, the works.
Abbas Kiarostami is an Iranian filmmaker of some reknown so it is somewhat regrettable that the first film of his that I watch is also his first film to be made entirely outside of Iran. Certified Copy is set and shot in Tuscany, Italy and its dialogue is a mix of English, French and Italian. The entire film is essentially one long conversation between its two leads over the course of an afternoon.
We’re still taking it relatively easy after our long absence and in most cases, nothing is easier to watch than an animated film. A few minutes in however, I realize that this isn’t your average animated film, which makes this not easy to watch at all. While I recognized the names of actresses like Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher, I began to doubt that this could be an American film. That’s because this turned out to be one of the creepiest animated films I’ve ever seen and I doubted that a Hollywood studio would have the courage to make such a scary children’s movie.