Let’s give you an example or two!
Top 5 Films That Robowitch Saw In 2018
According to my profile on film diary website Letterboxd, I watched twenty films this year. By my standards, this is what I would call a pretty good innings. I am not a huge film buff but think that cinema is fascinating; I endeavour to do better in watching more.
Reflecting on my year, here is a smattering of the films that I would like to talk about – it’s hard to watch a bunch of Kurosawa films and put anything else in your ‘top five’. Think of this more as a statement of what I want to talk about than an indication of the relative qualities of the films. As a non-film buff, my views are, at best, amateur hour.
5) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – I don’t really love comic book films, so that this film has stuck in my list despite being perhaps the most comic book film is a testament to its quality. From a relatively straightforward, but remarkably efficient, script to its fantastic animation work, this film is a very solid piece of work. I am still looking for that Gwen character poster, though…
4) The Shape of Water – My favourite 2018 release (technically). A deeply sentimental but caring film; I saw it twice in the cinema and have evangelised for it since.
3) High and Low – This listing is for, well, half of Akira Kurosawa’s work. In a week in which I endeavoured to watch a Kurosawa film a night for a week (I managed six of seven – let’s just say that something came up), I found the divide between Kurosawa’s modern and ‘period’ work to be quite fascinating. High and Low was the first film I watched and it augured a great deal of potential – it was the latest film in his filmography that I watched and the style was captivating.
2) Sanjuro – Sanjuro represents the flipside to the above in that it is both a period piece and, well, much sillier. I think I enjoyed this film more than its more influential predecessor – its sharp tone, brief but great action sequences, and transparent political commentary all did a lot for me. This is the film that made me realise how electric the chemistry between Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai was, as their relationship becomes the load-bearing pillar of the film. It’s the most fun I had watching Kurosawa – so it rises above the rest to be on this list.
1) Your Name – This is a film that truly does reflect my biases and eccentricities to the highest degree. Putting this at the top of my list is almost a testament to my tastes in a way that is almost entirely unflattering to me. However, Your Name is almost tailor-made to strike through me like a knife through hot butter, relying on conventions that fascinate me by nature and leading to a conclusion of a very particular sort. I read the His Dark Materials series when I was eight or nine and the ending of it, in which two lovers, Will and Lyra, are separated, permenantly, by a dimensional barrier stuck with me, a poignant and firm reminder that you can always lose what you love. While Your Name retreats from such a firm stance, it does play enough with notions of lost time and missed opportunity that it made me truly sad to watch. Yesterday never returns.
