While I didn't read as many books as I had hoped to in 2021 in fact I changed my goal from 75 to 50 to 45 to 40 to 30 and still failed lol! But everyone always says its quality over quantity and I must admit that I did read a few really great books, so without further ado here are the 8 books that I loved in 2021.
Wong Kar-wai's films are cult classics of 90's Hong Kong Cinema. Here I discuss Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love after watching them recently.
Chungking Express stars Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung as two lovelorn Hong Kong police officers. They encounter two very different women, Brigette Lin's mysterious sunglasses and trenchcoat-wearing femme fatale and Faye Wong's Manic Pixie Dream Girl snack bar worker Faye.
In the Mood for Love stars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as neighbours Mrs Chan a secretary and Mr Chow a journalist, as they try to figure out how and why their respective spouses started cheating on them with each other. Feelings soon creep up, and romance blossoms between the two.
Let me know in the comments section whether you have seen these films and if you have what you thought?
Also if you know where to get a hold of DVD’s of Fallen Angels and Happy Together without having to break the bank here in the UK please let me know as I can’t quite stomach buying a DVD second hand for £50!!! And the rather stunning blu-ray boxset of Wong Kar-wai’s films is a hefty £149 currently and some people are saying there is an error on some of the discs!!!
I often find myself struggling to pick up a book. I work full time, and I love movies (and TV shows tbh) a bit too much!
This year I've not read as much as I usually do, part of that is because I'm not a student anymore and I don't have to read 1 million books to pass an exam, and it's also because I'm a slow reader and I get tired of reading long books.
So in an effort to re-ignite the reading spark, I've started reading short books and here I will share some old faves and some recent discoveries and also somehow talk about movies again...FFS.
Transit is a film of many layers, it’s about immigration, fascism, the transience of time and the nightmare of bureaucracy. It is Petzold’s final film in his unofficial ‘love in the time of oppression’ trilogy (Barbara and Phoenix being the other two). Transit stars Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer as spectral immigrants trying to flee France before it is overtaken by Fascism.
Petzold fascinatingly uses Anna Seghers novel of the same name but transposes it to the modern-day rather than the ’40s, creating an anachronistic film that belongs simultaneously in the past and the present, like ghosts if you will. The novel is very symbolic for the director as he was introduced to it many years ago by his friend, mentor and collaborator Harun Farocki and while I haven’t read the novel just yet (I will for sure after seeing the movie twice!) I can tell that his interpretation of the novel is respectful.
Many of Petzold’s films deal with transit, he has his characters often on physical journeys that lead them to moments of self-discovery, but perhaps Transit is his most literal and obvious mediation on the idea. Characters are stuck between freedom and certain destruction and as such, they drift around the port city of Marseille like spectres and perhaps non more so than Paula Beer’s Marie Weidel.
She is a woman searching for her writer husband that she abandoned, but out of guilt (and to get a ticket out of there!), she starts looking for him. She rushes around the city always wearing the same coat and very similar clothes almost as if she herself is haunting the place, that she is already beyond the realm of the living. Rogowski’s Georg encounters her several times, often because she has mistaken him as her husband, which is ironic because he has stolen her husband’s identity after the writer committed suicide. What occurs is a cycle of guilt for both characters and they slowly grow closer over the three weeks they are stuck in limbo at Marseille, but there is always a barrier between them.
I watched the film twice in close succession and I definitely found I preferred it on the re-watch, everything including subtext and symbolism sunk in just that little bit more on the second time around. I wonder if it will get even better with the third watch…
Did I watch Squid Game? Yes, like the rest of the universe, I'm sure even our alien neighbours in Alpha Centauri sat down and binged the Netflix drama. Let me know in the comments whether you're the only human on earth not to have watched it!
I also talk about the books I read, the TV shows that got me through the month and whether or not Denis Villeneuve’s Dune lived up to my expectations or not as a book reader - click here to read my full Dune Book Review.
