I like to watch even very old films because I’m a completionist but I have to admit that sometimes it’s necessary to put up with poor quality black-and-white images and lack of sound. This isn’t the case for Grass, one of the very earliest ethnographic documentaries ever made. As a silent film, it relies on music and intertitles to convey what is going on and the way it tints the film to match different situations can be crude. Nonetheless, its depiction of the migration of a nomadic Persian tribe, along with all the hardships they must endure, is truly incredible. The intertitles can be annoying in the heavy use of Americanisms and play up the exoticism of the Bakhtiari tribe. Nonetheless the result is fascinating, dramatic and at times even humorous. It’s very much worth watching on its merits even today.
This film adaptation to the immensely successful stage musical was a cultural phenomenon in of itself. Given that I will likely never get to see the musical itself in this lifetime, I decided to watch this despite being doubtful that I’d like it. Indeed, I found this to be an overly long, boring and mostly vapid spectacle. Sure, it’s colorful, visually imaginative and is basically wall-to-wall music. But the singing to plot ratio is way off and too much of the time, the teenage popularity plot matters more than the saving Oz plot. I liked the flying at the end and that’s about it.
Spider-Man or not, watching this in the cinemas wasn’t a sure thing for me as I’m just too burned out by the superhero genre. Brand New Day being the critical and commercial success that it has with fans raving about it being possibly the best Spider-Man film ever, makes it hard to ignore. Like everyone says, its action set-pieces are great and I’m especially ticked that it borrows visuals from the game that I’ve played through just recently. It’s good too that it focuses more on Peter Parker’s personal life but the story beats feel like retreads of earlier iterations of the character. In the end it’s still a thoroughly conventional superhero movie.
Like no doubt many others, I never even heard of this novel until the film adaptation of it was heavily promoted earlier this year. This still wouldn’t be a book I’d ordinarily read but I heard good things about it on Broken Forum and I am trying to read more outside of genre fiction so here I am. One huge difference is that while the trailers for the film make it out like some sort of cute children’s movie, this book is not that at all. The sheep are intelligent but they are also often wrong because they don’t understand humans at all. It’s funny but it’s also genuinely dark and not at all a book that is suitable for children.
This looks like another film from the strange imagination of Yorgos Lanthimos but it’s actually a remake of a South Korean one. The original director was even slated to direct this but bowed out due to health issues. The premise about two conspiracy-minded nobodies who kidnap a corporate CEO believing that she is an alien is out there but it’s nothing too crazy. Watching it feels underwhelming as it’s just three people in a remote house. I was going to write it off as being merely mediocre but then the twist drops and I’m left asking what the heck was the point of all that?
A Canadian film by a director I’ve never heard of and starring no one of note comes with no great expectations. Yet it is one of the most intense crime thrillers I’ve watched in years and is far and away the most realistic depiction of how a real-life hacker operates I’ve ever seen. The subject of livestreamed torture rooms is shocking enough and seems impossibly difficult to handle in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative. Yet Red Rooms goes one better by diving into the psyche of the kind of person who is obsessed with such content. A superlative film on all counts.
I’m not one for sports films nor have I watched any of the entries in the Rocky franchise aside from the first one. I was persuaded to add this to my watch list by the excellence of Sinners and the realization that it was Creed that convinced Hollywood that Ryan Coogler could be trusted with a blockbuster film. It’s impressive that he not only directed this, he also wrote the screenplay. The result is as good a passing-the-torch movie as you could ask for while staying firmly within the established conventions of the franchise.
