This film made the news for all the wrong reasons as it was released digitally by Netflix instead of a more conventional distribution and that apparently upset its director Alex Garland. I didn’t have high expectations of it but the director did make Ex Machina and this was adapted from a science-fiction novel that managed to win the Nebula Award in 2014. I haven’t read it however and after watching this I have no desire to at all.
It’s been a while since we’ve watched a Woody Allen film and as the director is currently out of favor in Hollywood due to the #MeToo movement, his career may very well be over. I added this one to my list after I read about it as being among his best work and I note that it’s also notable as being one of those in which he does not himself appear in it.
This came to my notice via the usual routes but I was apprehensive about it after learning that it contains gory content. I thought that it would be some variant of a torture porn film and I detest those. While the initial premise appears to bear this out it turned out to be a complete subversion and this is a far more original and effective film than I gave it credit for.
This is the first novel of The Witcher series proper as the first two books were collections of short stories. Intriguingly, it feels less like Geralt’s story than that of Ciri and one does feel the stage becoming bigger as we gear up to events that change the fate of nations, including the human-scale stories of the previous books. It also marks the first appearance of Triss Merigold and it’s rather surprising that Triss plays the part of the mother figure to Ciri before Yennefer comes into the picture.
Next we have yet another Japanese film by Hirokazu Kore-eda. The director seems to be on a roll as he is making noteworthy films every year. This one is unlike the others as it is a legal thriller and not a family drama. Yet somehow the director can’t resist filling it with flawed parental figures as well.
The second of the films that I caught on the plane is the latest work by Steven Spielberg and adapted from a popular young adult novel. Though I read plenty of crap on the Internet, I am not so juvenile as to think that stringing together a pile of pop culture references and packaging them into a game makes for anything resembling a decent novel. As such I had no real interest in watching this but then I did hear that this is a rare case of the film adaptation being better than the source material.
So I guess Dark Souls really is my favorite game series because immediately after finishing the game I went back and rolled a new character which I never do for any games. Note that this is the main game only as I bought it a while back and haven’t bought the DLC yet. I’m sure to do so eventually of course but the thought of confronting even harder bosses feels rather intimidating right now as I found the bosses in this game significantly harder than the two previous games.