Ramblings on Cinematic Matters
Next in my Beatles retrospective, I look at two documentaries that get back to when the Fab Four first hit it big. Following the release of Yellow Submarine, the Beatles went on to participate in a documentary that ultimately became the film Let It Be. This would be the final film they participated in while …
Continue reading “Snapshots from the Eye of the Storm: Eight Days a Week and Beatles ’64 Review”
Next in my Zhang Yimou retrospective, I watch Coming Home Coming Home (2014), directed by Zhang Yimou and written by Zou Jingzhi, functions effectively as a thematic sequel to Zhang’s 2010 movie Under the Hawthorn Tree. Both movies focus on a romance: one between very young people in Under the Hawthorn Tree and one between …
Next in my Zhang Yimou retrospective, I look at The Flowers of War. Imagine one of the most wrenching scenes from Schindler’s List: the brutal sequence in which the Nazis forcibly round up the Jewish residents of the Krakow Ghetto, killing many of them. Now imagine that Steven Spielberg intercut that sequence with the Nepalese …
Continue reading “Historical Fiction: The Flowers of War Review”
Continuing my Zhang Yimou retrospective, I consider the bittersweet Under the Hawthorn Tree. Like many other artists, Zhang Yimou has certain scenarios and themes he returns to again and again. He also likes reworking essentially the same story in different variants, sometimes improving on the previous version: as I mentioned before, his early movie Ju …
Continue reading “Watering the Tree of Revolution: Under the Hawthorn Tree Review”
Here I look at one of the most talked-about movies of the year, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The life and career of J. Robert Oppenheimer seem tailor-made for dramatization. A brilliant theoretical physicist who taught at the University of California-Berkeley (he helped infer the existence of black holes decades before they were discovered), Oppenheimer is best …
Next in my Zhang Yimou retrospective, I look at House of Flying Daggers. House of Flying Daggers (2004) is Zhang Yimou’s second wuxia movie, and it raises the pressing question: “Does the movie live up to that title?” The answer is no, not quite (could any movie?). It comes close, though. Co-written by Zhang with …
Continue reading “Stabbed in the Back: House of Flying Daggers Review”
Two movies, made almost 30 years apart, offer two different interpretations of the same fanciful, melancholy book. In this review, I look at Night on the Galactic Railroad and Giovanni’s Island. Night on the Galactic Railroad, sometimes also translated as Milky Way Railroad, is a book by schoolteacher, poet, and children’s author Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933). …
Continuing my Zhang Yimou retrospective, I look at Hero. Hero (2002) is Zhang Yimou’s first entry in the wuxia genre, and it is a cracker: a fast-paced, visually sumptuous action movie that offers viewers all the duels, beautiful locations, and dramatic poses they could desire. Co-written by Zhang, Li Feng, and Wang Bin, Hero is …
I continue to catch up, over the holidays, on interesting content. Moving outside my usual reviewing scope, I look at a book and a miniseries. They are both about the movies, though, so it is not that big a change! Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (2014), by Mark …
Continue reading “The Celluloid War: Five Came Back (2014) and Five Came Back (2017) Review”
The holiday season is an excellent time to catch up on good and interesting movies I missed the first time around. Here, I catch up on One Night in Miami… When I reviewed The Trial of the Chicago 7 over a year ago, I lamented how an exciting premise—the debate among a group of radicals …
Continue reading “Fighting Together: One Night in Miami… Review”
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