Sadness

William Yang's Sadness is a short, poignant and powerful piece about loss and identity. There's something amazingly warm about it, despite the grim subject matter.

If you've got a spare hour, you should watch Sadness.

Fair warning though: as if the title didn't give it away, Sadness is a powerful and exceedingly sad film. It will make you feel things, and some of those things aren't pleasant. But they are important.

You can watch it RIGHT HERE, now.

William Yang is a social photographer, who has made a living taking pictures, but also uses his pictures to perform unique storytelling pieces in art galleries. In 1999, Tony Ayres directed a film based on one of those performances: Sadness. The performance basically consists of what is pictured above: Yang sits on a stool, facing the audience with an unwavering neutral expression. Behind him, a slide projector casts images on the wall from his photography. In monotone, he tells stories that link with the pictures.

If you want to be surprised by this film, stop reading now and go watch it. I'm going to give a little detail about the stories he tells, but it may be that they are more effective if you don't know what you're in for.

Laputa: Castle In The Sky

My favourite of the Miyazaki's that I've seen, and certainly up there with the best of Disney - a great, fun animated adventure!

Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have made some fantastic films across their career. I only say that to pass on what I know through the grapevine of cyberspace - I've only seen a handful of them; Totoro, Howls Moving Castle, Ponyo, and some of  Spirited Away and Kiki's Delivery Service. This is undoubtably the best piece I have seen from this studio.

Laputa: Castle In The Sky is a fairytale, at it's core. It's about a young boy named Patsu who sees a girl - Sheeta - floating from the sky; he catches her. She's being chased by the military, a secret agent and a gang of pirates, who all want the crystal necklace she's carrying. The crystal holds the potential to unlock the location and secrets of the legendary floating city known as Laputa. By some extraordinary coincidence, Patsu's father once saw Laputa, only to be laughed off for purporting its existence. Patsu dreams of proving his father right, so is absolutely keen beans to fight off pirates and big baddies to protect the girl and find the city.

Brave

Fun, family friendly, original, funny and beautiful; this films' only flaw is that it doesn't stack against the best of what Pixar can do.

Pixar have pretty well established themselves by this point as the 21st century's Disney. Everything they've produced appeals to adults as well as kids, and none of it could be considered 'crap', and the best of what they've given could undoubtably be called 'great'. Their last film was Cars 2, but the film before that (Toy Story 3) is arguably their greatest.

So with their latest offering Brave (directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman), I had high hopes; a Pixar film with an original story, set in Scotland, featuring bears and a strong red-headed princess... The problem with having high hopes, is that even small dints in them seem all the more disappointing.

Not that Brave is a bad film by any means. It's got a lot going for it. Pixar has mastered the art of side-stepping the uncanny valley, so even as their films get more and more photo-realistic, the human characters never look too real. There's always exaggerations and cartoonish quirks that make them amiable and never creepy. The setting for this film is fantastic; there was clearly a lot of effort put into recreating the natural beauty of the hills of Scotland, and they've done a stunning job, crafting a world of wonder and mystery that is enticing and exciting to inhabit.

Burnt By The Sun

In 1930s Russia, Kotov, a Colonel of the Russian Revolution is living it up with his beautiful wife and daughter, and their crazy family. But politics intrude, as the Great Purge slowly begins to intrude upon their happy life...

Set in the late 1930s, in the final few years before WWII, Burnt By The Sun follows a Colonel (Comdiv) of the Russian Revolution who falls victim to the 'Great Purge' - when Stalin had many of his former fellow revolutionaries executed without trial. A period characterised by paranoia, police surveillance, persecution and repression... Burnt By The Sun represents it as strangely peaceful.