In Fabric (2018)

We have watched a film by director Peter Strickland though I didn’t remember that until I went back to check. It was the Duke of Burgundy about a lesbian BDSM relationship. This one is completely different, being a horror film about, of all things, a dress. It’s a little too weird for me to really like but I have to admit that it is highly original and of course its visuals are simply sumptuous, just like the earlier film.

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Yojimbo (1961)

We’re back to the classic Akira Kurosawa samurai film with this one. It’s full of the director’s favorite actors including of course Toshiro Mifune in the lead role and indeed the shot of him slowly striding down an empty street is one of the director’s most iconic images. The plot is comparatively simple but this characterization of a wandering samurai out to do good deeds through both guile as well as force of arms has been an influential one for good reason.

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The Redemption of Time

Back when I wrote about the final book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy I said I’ll probably pick up this semi-official companion book and now I have. Unfortunately I shouldn’t have bothered. This started out as a piece of fanfiction by a devoted fan Baoshu and became popular enough that it was acknowledged by Liu Cixin and his publisher. But it remains firmly in fanfiction territory as it is nowhere as creative or as well written as the original trilogy. It is also largely a companion piece to Death’s End instead of the trilogy as a whole as it features the characters from the last book.

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Little Women (2019)

It has been almost exactly a year since we watched the well loved 1994 adaptation so it’s still quite fresh in our minds. We were always going to watch this new version due to its stellar cast and the fact it is directed by Greta Gerwig. Unfortunately while this completely blows away the older film in terms of production values and visual beauty, it also makes some unconventional decisions with regards to presenting the sequence of events and emphasizing different aspects of their lives. This serves to differentiate the new version but I’m not sure that it’s for the better.

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Les Misérables (2019)

This most definitely not a musical film is the first directorial feature of its director Ladj Ly who previously made a name for himself for similarly themed short films. It immediately made waves upon its release and it’s easy to see why. Even from the very first shots, it seizes your attention with its energy and urgency and never lets up. As usual with such things, it can offer no easy solutions to longstanding intractable problems, but its revolutionary message rings loud and clear and it certainly lives to its adopted title.

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My Cousin Vinny (1992)

Sometimes I add a film to my list and leave it there for so long that I forget why I did so by the time I get around to watching it. This is the case for My Cousin Vinny which doesn’t seem to be that significant a film. Interestingly this film is basically about New York Italians who are forced to stop and deal with the locals in a small Alabama and much of the humor is in the clash of these two very different worlds. Yet the director Jonathan Lynn is British, best known for the Yes Minister television series.

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Field of Glory 2

Tabletop wargaming is of course the ultimate in grognard hobbies, especially historical ones. I will never of course actually play a tabletop wargame, never mind go to the immense expense and effort to buy and paint miniatures. But from time to time, I do wonder what the rules for one might be like and how it might feel to play it. Enter Field of Glory 2 which aims to recreate this sort of experience on the PC, minus the miniature collecting and painting part of course. I don’t know if this is actually a popular ruleset for wargamers but I do know that they publish a hardback rulebook for this so it is a real tabletop wargame.

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The unexamined life is a life not worth living