After how much she liked Nebraska, this was a film that my wife was keen to watch. Alexander Payne made this in between Sideways in 2004 and Nebraska in 2013. After watching Nebraska, I decided that I liked Sideways more. After watching The Descendants, I decided that I like both of the other two more.
When you think of racing films, you think of The Fast and the Furious and its innumerable sequels. Action-packed, thrilling and maybe entertaining, but ultimately rather shallow. So when a racing film made it into the top ten lists of various film critics last year, I sat up and paid attention.
This is a fan-made film available for viewing on YouTube. It was originally released as a series of 12 episodes, but with a total running time of just over 100 minutes, I think it makes more sense to consider it as a film.
Obviously I’m not American, but even I heard about the shooting of Oscar Grant by the BART Police in Oakland, California in 2009. I was a regular of the Quarter to Three forum at that time and I remember forum regulars who are Bay Area residents being abuzz over the incident. The incident resulted in Grant’s death and triggered huge protests and riots due to how widely amateur videos filmed using mobile telephones and personal cameras were disseminated online.
This film made it into my “to watch” list based on a recommendation from a Broken Forum regular. Director Howard Hawks had an incredible decade in the 1940s, with the poster calling His Girl Friday one of best English-language comedies ever made, The Big Sleep inarguably the best film noir ever and Red River the best traditional western.
This is a course I’ve been meaning to take for a while now but the timing was just never right for me before now. The reason obviously is that this course is taught by Martin Odersky of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. After all, how often can you attend a course for a programming language taught by the designer of the language?
We caught this in the cinema due to my wife’s insistence. I quite liked the first movie. It was standard cartoon action fare but had excellent world-building and some of the best flight sequences ever put on screen. It also helped that the plot, while being yet another retelling of the hero’s journey, is tightly focused and easy to become immersed in.