Oh it's definitely a cynical marketing play to get China interested in Star Wars (China is the reason that Avatar, not The Force Awakens is still the number one grossing film), but Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen are much more promising choices than Fan Bingbing (Iron Man 3, X-Men: Time Nonsense).

The Bible is wonderful. It’s only one book, but you can put two grams of coke on top of the Bible, and you first take a line of coke and then you open the Bible. Because then you understand.

Just about any Woody Allen film.

And that's the biggest problem with the Maquis. It would be one thing if they'd been settled there for centuries, but I think in the timeline, they're maybe just hitting a third generation and most still seem to be first-generation settlers, so "ROOTS" is bullshit. And since the federation is post-scarcity, they can't…

My favorite ep is probably the Carole Lombard/Clark Gable one, but the Star Wars series in general is pretty great. Also, I've never had much interest in Madonna, but there are two really compelling episodes about her forays in Hollywood, so credit to Longworth on that.

The quotes are easily my least favorite part of the show, but they're unaffected and obviously not going for pitch-perfect accuracy, so I can live with them.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Every awful tendency of Allen's cobbled into one shit monster of a movie.

The Fiances is really incredible, and at 77 mins it's no slog at all. I don't like Il Posto or Tree of Wooden Clogs much, but the long distance relationship allows Olmi room to elevate the film by intercutting between the industrial beauty of factories in Sicily and bittersweet memories of the couple. And the last few…

As I understand it, the original Out 1 was only publicly presented twice—once in in 1971 and once at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 1989. Rivette then cut the Leuad scene in the final episode for a restored version that was released in 90/91, which is what has been available ever since. I think the b/w recaps that…

Also have to give a shoutout to Bernard Herrmann's score, which you can hear a bit of in the trailer. It's a far lusher score than you'd expect for a mean noir, but the anger rumbling beneath fits the film like a glove and really elevates (as the reviewer notes) what could easily slide into sentiment.

All the north can get bad in winter. I think Lanzhou is the crown jewel of pollution, but I lived in Urumqi for a year, and we had black snow and pea soup smog covering the school campus every morning of winter.

Are you still in China? His first three films are banned there (made underground without gov. approval), but you should be able to find them in any decent pirated DVD store (i.e., not the ones just across the border in Shenzhen). Subtitles shouldn't be a problem since they'll just be rips of the US/UK releases.

It's set in Jia's hometown Fenyang, near Taiyuan in Shaanxi. His first three films were also shot there.

The director's first big film, Platform, features slavic gimmick europop group Dschinghis Khan's hit Genghis Khan. He's got a soft spot for the fun and ridiculous.

His wuxia film Age of Tattoo has been talked about as his next film since Still Life . Hopefully it actually gets made now.

The World is my suggestion for a starting point. It's the easiest to find (good quality R1 DVD or a region free Bluray from the UK), and it has the broadest hook (people working in a park filled with replicas of world landmarks). But he's a very consistent filmmaker, so any of the other ones Username too long…

I think it's that Hitchcock figured he'd gotten as much as he wanted out of the audience not knowing what was going on, so he quickly dropped the plot and moved on to dramatic irony.

I mean, I love Weekend in part because it's so aggressively antagonistic. I don't get that from 2 or 3 Things. I suppose if you wanted a narrative from it, but it works fine as a cine-essay. The only (early) film that's as strident as Weekend in refusing to give the audience what it expects/wants is Les carabiniers.

Here's where the lines of "French New Wave" get blurry. I'd be okay to include Marker (only choices had to be made), but Pialat is a different era/style to me. I mean, L'enfance nue is in part responding to The 400 Blows and the earlier wave of filmmaking.

I don't like La chinoise as much I think I should, but there's definitely still enough distance between Godard and the youth to make it interesting. He sees the petty jealousies and foibles that hide beneath the kids' ideological furor, and there's a real question of whether they can accomplish anything.