Maybe I’m not old enough to have been part of the discussions about Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movies, but one of my all-time favorites which I’ve never heard spoken except by my aunt who showed it to me is Joe vs the Volcano.
It’s very heavy-handed in its symbolism and story-telling, but damn is it effective.
Man working dead-end job in a no-window office building with shitty fluorescent light bulbs gets told by a doctor on a billionaire’s payroll that he’s going to die because of a fake disease. Said billionaire suddenly shows up and offers to pay “dying” man in a few weeks of luxury the likes of which “dying” man has never seen in exchange for convincing a small relatively uncontacted tribe on a remote island to allow billionaire to mine for computer manufacturing resources on their island. All along the way, “dying” man meets different versions of the same woman whose joyfulness is inversely proportional to how tied to the Things of Man she is.
It’s fuckin great.
Oh, yeah, and that movie Disney would prefer to pretend they never funded: A Bug’s Life.
Nearly all of Studio Ghibli’s earlier films weren’t shown in cinemas. The first one that got a theatrical release over here was Spirited Away (most likely because of its Disney backing).
Princess Mononoke still remains my favourite film.
Not sure if it’s not recognized, more like a bit forgotten: Men on the Moon (1999) For me it’s the best Jim Carrey performance and the whole story is so absurd and sad while funny and silly It’s the perfect mix. I can watch it countless times.
directed by miloš forman, who also directed one flew over the cuckoos nest, amadeus, and the people vs larry flynt. hard to believe anything hes done could end up being so underappreciated!
Pen-ek Ratanaruang. He is a Thai director, and he has made some excellent films. His most recent few are a bit too ‘artsy’ for me, but “Monrak Transistor”, " Talok 69", and “Last Life in the Universe” are some of my favorite movies.
I have a soft spot for Jee-woon Kim, a Korean filmmaker probably best know for The Good, the Bad, and the Weird or I Saw the Devil. He’s gotten some big recognition, and even made an American debut with a regrettably forgettable post-gubernatorial Arnold Schwarzenegger movie (The Last Stand).
But in the 2000s, he made a string of really phenomenal genre flicks (the two mentioned above, as well as A Bittersweet Life and A Tale of Two Sisters) that got me into Korean cinema even moreso than Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho, who I was also paying close attention to at the start.
His career has been less consistent though. The Arnold movie and his adaptation of Illang we’re both misfires. He does get good performances from his actors, and he can elevate a good script to it’s maximum potential, but he doesn’t do the same for bad scripts. I think his greatest strength though is his visual flair, and that just doesn’t generate as much attention as his contemporaries.
Add comment