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Buster Keaton got his start in movies alongside Fatty Arbuckle. Keaton obviously ended up more famous due to the collapse of Arbuckle's career following a scandal. Nonetheless, their collaborations were usually enjoyable. An example is 1917's "His Wedding Night". It's basically an excuse for them to pull a series of zany gags, one involving a watermelon.

One of the most famous things about this short is that we get to see Buster Keaton smile, one of the rare instances when he did so onscreen. But even beyond that, it's just a funny short. It just goes to show that talent is main thing required to make any performance work. You're sure to enjoy it. Available on Wikipedia.

In the past thirty years, Robert Rodriguez has been known as the director of some of the grittiest exploitation flicks out there: Planet Terror, Machete, and the like. This repertoire started with "El mariachi", a tale of a guitar player forced to turn aggressive when he gets mistaken for a criminal.

Without a doubt, this will not be for everyone. In addition to the unflinching violence, the movie features no recognizable names. But it doesn't need those. Its head-on style is what makes it. This is one of those movies where entire sequences barely give the viewer time to breathe. Absolutely amazing for a movie that had a budget of only $7,000.

Does the movie count as a masterpiece? I guess that depends on how you define the word. What I can say is that this is a movie that you won't forget anytime soon. Definitely see it.

To us in the West, Taiwan is generally known as the island to which Chinese Nationalist forces fled after the 1949 revolution, establishing a government favorable to the West. We might not know about what happened after the Nationalist forces established the modern Republic of China.

Edward Yang's "Guling jie shaonian sharen shijian" ("A Brighter Summer Day" in English) focuses on a disillusioned teenager in Taiwan in the late '50s-early '60s. Affected by his parents' uncertainty about the future due to their dislocation - as well as Chiang Kai-shek's less-than-democratic governance - he joins a street gang. It becomes clear that something big is going to happen.

The movie (Taiwan's submission as Best Foreign Language Film to the 64th Academy Awards) has a deliberately ironic title, based on a line from an Elvis Presley song: there's nothing bright or sunny about people's uncertainty about their future, the country's repressive rule, or the undermining of Confucian values. Indeed, Elvis's music is but one example of the influence that the West wields over Taiwan (note the theater showing a Marilyn Monroe movie). I don't know whether or not this movie is considered Yang's grand masterpiece, but it's certainly a candidate for that title. If you consider yourself a film buff, then you owe it to yourself to see the movie. It might also make you want to go to Taiwan (in my case, I have an acquaintance there).