I was under the impression that this was a documentary about the ill-fated Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 and so was blown away that it’s a dramatic reenactment with best in class production values. Everything else about the film is on point as well, the acting, how it handles cannibalism, how the survivors struggle to make sense of it all. It’s only the latest in a long line of adaptations about this disaster but it might be the most authentic one yet with its use of Uruguayan and Argentine actors.
Venturing a little outside of our usual picks for television shows, here’s a drama about Koreans who are in migrants in Japan. It’s really an American production, being an adaptation of an English-language novel by a Korean-American writer. That’s probably why this accords better with our tastes being a compact series with a fast moving pace, unlike the interminably long shows common in Asia. It covers multiple generations of the same family from roughly 1915 to 1989. We really liked the stories set in the distant past about the beginnings of the family but the material set in the 1980s seem uninspired. We’ll have to wait for the reviews to decide if we’re going to watch the upcoming second season.
So I don’t really care about being way late to the party for games but it does feel wrong to play this one-trick meme game so long after it first became popular. It’s an ultra-cheap game that blew up in popularity and spawned countless clones. It’s easy to understand why too: it makes you feel ridiculously powerful as you wade through screenfuls of enemies dolling out death yet it’s such a simple game to play that it takes no real effort. Some people have racked up hundreds of hours on this to unlock everything, which is just insane. For me, about a dozen hours was enough to experience all that the game has to offer. It feels addictive, sure, but it’s still a very shallow game.
This is another one of Agnès Varda’s documentaries, or video essays really, that she made late in her life. It won me over right from the beginning with the title card of her production company Ciné-Tamaris being her cat in her own house. Since everyone likely is wondering what gleaners mean, she goes straight to explaining the word from the Dictionnaire Rousseau. The film follows Varda as she travels all over France with her handheld digital camcorder to meet the people who gather the leftover crops after the harvest from fields in the countryside or scavenge food and trash in the cities. As the French title makes clear, Varda considers herself a gleaner as well as she gathers ideas, inspiration and meaning from those she meets.
I’ve soured on the works of Wes Anderson of late but after dithering for a while, I gave in and watched this one. Once again, it’s an ensemble film featuring an insane number of Hollywood luminaries and doesn’t really mean anything at all apart from the usual pathos of its characters. Yet I ended up rather liking this one because it’s very overt in telling the audience not to worry too much about it means and to just enjoy the show. It also helps that like the other Anderson films that I’ve most liked, it has more in the way of young adult characters and of course the retro-1950s science-fiction setting is great fun.
I hated The Poppy War but Babel is such a big deal in the speculative fiction genre that I feel obligated to read. Plus, I’ve had numerous people point out to me that it’s a very different book. This does actually cover some of the same ground and shares similar themes but it really is a much better book and I’d attribute that to Kuang’s writing skill having greatly improved since then. The characters this time around are much more convincing and it’s exhilarating how this is at once a love letter to Oxford and a condemnation of what the British Empire did to be able to afford to build the place. Even so, it has too many flaws for me to consider it a great book. It fails particularly towards the end as the climax is so obvious and made possible only because the great and mighty of the Empire act so dumbly.
I’ve left this, perhaps the most heartbreaking of the Studio Ghibli films, for among the last. I couldn’t help but be partially spoiled in advance as this is so well known but it turned out to be very different from what I expected. For example the famous firebombing scene takes place at the very beginning. It sets the stage for the trials of the brother and sister duo but doesn’t really play a part after that. In fact it seems to me that what causes their deaths isn’t the war at all and I found the situation that the two found themselves in to be implausibly contrived in order to maximize their suffering. Contrary to expectations, I didn’t much care for this film.
