Three Films Make A Post: It's never too late to start.

Living (2022): There’s so much that could have gone wrong with shifting Oliver Hermanus’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to 1950s London, but the resulting movie carves out its own, individual identity instead of being the original movie, but worse and set in the West. Kazuo Ishiguro’s script for the tale of a man confronted with the diagnosis of his looming death and what this does to him is delicate, intelligent and easily portrays the difficult bits of the human heart, so that a story that in the wrong hands could be just a piece of kitsch becomes deeply felt, thought and moving. Hermanus directs with quiet intelligence, a presence that’s never showy, and the ability to support his actors.

The cast, led by a typically wonderful Bill Nighy doesn’t exactly need the support, great as the ensemble does, but the film isn’t exactly getting worse by them and their director being on the same page.

Sri Asih (2022): Only the second film of the Indonesian Bumilangit Cinematic (superhero) Universe, and we’re already getting not only a female led (Pevita Pearce as the titular heroine) entry, but one directed by a woman – Upi Avianto – to boot. For my tastes, this is a better paced movie than Gundala is, a little slicker in presentation and choreography, and a lot of fun like this sort of big budget superhero thing is supposed to be, particularly – as with its predecessor - in the way it allows itself to be local as well as universal.

Hergé: In the Shadow of Tintin aka Hergé à l’ombre de Tintin (2016): Apparently, there are different cuts of Hugues Nancy’s documentary about the great pioneer of the Bande dessinée, Hergé. I have only been able to see the shorter, fifty-two minute cut. I suspect most of my problems with the film would be resolved by the thirty minutes longer version, for this version’s main problem seems to be its neck-breaking pace, racing through its subject’s life and work with so little breathing room, it can only touch on anything – his unpleasant early politics, the war years, his emotional struggle with being the Tintin drawing machine, the development of his style and so on – without ever finding the time to actually say anything deep about it, despite featuring an impressive number of experts as well as rare and valuable archive material from Hergé’s estate.

I’m not quite so sure the film’s tendency to hyperbole – there’s a lot of talk about “genius”, whatever that means, little talk about any comics work influencing Hergé and things like that – is going to be better in the longer version, but it running around like the White Rabbit really is its main problem in the short cut.