This is a must watch due to how it quickly rocketed to the top of various critics’ best of the year lists and garnered a slew of awards. Some may also remember it hitting the news due to the crew’s unauthorized filming inside Disney’s Magic Kingdom Park though it turns out to be for only a very short scene.
When I wrote my post about The Fifth Season I said I would be onboard for the next book and so here I am. Even so I am a little miffed that both books won Hugo Awards and the third book is similarly on track to do so. The rest of the nominees are no better, being novels that are part of a series by the same authors who win year after year. It’s honestly rather boring so it’s no wonder why Liu Cixin’s win in 2015 was such a breath of fresh air even if I didn’t like the book very much.
Having at least a couple of films by Takashi Miike, I can’t say that I’m a fan but this one has a decent Rotten Tomatoes rating and there are always moments such as now, given the high drama of politics in Malaysia, when we just don’t feel like watching anything too heavy. I thought that this fantasy samurai film, adapted from a successful manga, might at least be entertaining and pretty.
Late on this one as I was out of the country for almost all of last week, though of course I was always going to watch this. This is a highly anticipated film even to me and I still own the original Infinity Gauntlet comics. Still I kept my expectations to realistic levels and on the whole found this to be solid superhero film and about a good a capstone to the MCU as one could hope for though it isn’t exactly transformative.
Like everyone else sensible I use the trainwreck that is Star Citizen for popcorn-munching fun and actually bought Elite Dangerous instead. I’ve had this on the back burner for a while, as I’m not much of a fan of flight sims of any sort. I do have fond memories of playing Frontier: Elite II however so I thought I’d give this a go. Now that I have a bit more disposable income I thought I’d also give gaming with a proper joystick a go. I did try playing it with a standard gamepad for a bit but after having a lot of difficulty with just docking, I knew that this would be impossible. I bought a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, pretty much the cheapest on the stick on the market and was shocked by how much easier it is to control and how much more fun it is to fly ships with it.
This one was another recommendation from our cinephile friend and given his leftist sympathies, it’s not hard to see why he wanted us to watch this. British director Ken Loach is quite well known and has made a career out of making films like this but I don’t believe I’ve ever watched any of them. After watching this one however I can see that the director means well but I’m not sure that I can agree with his cause.
This is an older film by Stanley Kubrick that neither my wife nor myself have watched so it was automatically put on the list. I doubt that we will ever watch his earliest films made independently of the major studios but I certainly intend to watch all of the others eventually. His most famous collaboration with Kirk Douglas is of course Spartacus but before that they had made this lesser known film set during the First World War.