September brought two trips to the cinema, both family stories, though the mood could hardly have been more different: one oppressive, one warm; one about leaving, one about coming back.
At the cinema
- Like a Rolling Stone: A film about a woman leaving, a modern Nora, adapted from a true story. I liked it very much and wrote about it separately, centering on women trapped by what counts as reasonable and the possibility that life might have other ways to be lived.
- How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies: The synopsis made it seem like perfect genre material, but it turned out to be a pure family film—very warm, though below my expectations and rather tepid. That may simply be because I do not warm to this kind of gentle family movie; I felt something similar about Ann Hui's A Simple Life.
At home
Three Indian films
- Maharaja: I watched this first, and it confirmed a feeling I had two years ago while watching The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Back then I said I disliked the karmic-justice ending in which the father does evil and the child pays for it; I did not expect a film to make exactly that its core. Still, the suspense was well handled, and the overall experience was good.
- I already had a decent impression of Indian crime suspense, so I followed it with Drishyam, apparently an adaptation of an older property: a criminal and the police trying to outsmart each other. After watching a number of Indian films, the thing that sticks with me most is how awful the rule-of-law environment in India seems.
- Bajrangi Bhaijaan gave me the child-and-grown-man pairing. France has Léon, America has A Perfect World; after enough of this type, I felt tired of it.
Two Chinese films
- Evacuate from the 21st Century: Li Yang is a highly stylized director, which inevitably divides audiences: those who click with him love him, and those who cannot enter his register feel nothing. I really like his early shorts Bad Future and Lee's Adventure. This film still carries the wild imagination and adolescent fervor of those earlier works, but its sense of humor wore me out. I could see a bit of Wan Wan Mei Xiang Dao in it, but mostly I felt bored and embarrassed.
- No More Bets: An anti-fraud propaganda film, with anti-fraud messaging that relies on scare tactics. The lead did not work for me.
Three American teen movies
I watched She's the Man, Mean Girls, and The Hot Chick through recap videos. I can no longer remember what happened, but I am very easily infected by that American teen-campus atmosphere.
I used to be quite averse to movie recap videos, but a chance viewing changed my view. A film that would feel mediocre and dull over 100 minutes can seem fine when cut down to 10. Does that mean these mediocre works really contain only 10 minutes of information?
One British series
Slow Horses, Season 1: I generally like spy material, but the pacing was very flat. By the end it was just office politics. I watched one season and dropped it.
I saw a review that put it well:
Post-Cold War spy dramas can only be made this way. The sharp, high-spirited part belongs to the past and to memory, to the Berlin Wall and the Stasi; the dispirited, messy part is right in front of us—a greasy old man leading a bunch of useless subordinates, fighting office politics while catching a few xenophobic far-right thugs.