So I both love and hate this latest film by Brandon Cronenberg. I have to admit that it got me good by purporting to be about Western tourists taking a risk on the wild side of a lawless, undeveloped country, but of course it’s the tourists who are the predators all along, joke’s on me. On the other hand, I really hate films in which the main character is sort of high and in an altered mental state the whole time as is the case here. He is never able to articulate why he does the things he does and just sort of goes along with the flow. It’s got some neat ideas, but that’s all there is and it has no interest in world building at all.
I’ve been wanting to read this entry in the Culture series for ages but couldn’t because for some unknown reason it is not available on Kindle when all of the other books are. In the end, I was forced to buy a paperback book for the first time in years. I particularly wanted to read this book because it supposedly describes how the Culture responds when it encounters an entity far more powerful than itself. It’s easy to uphold your professed ideals when nothing actually threatens you so the real test is when you face at least a peer of equal power. Unfortunately this book did not adequately answer that dilemma at all as the entity is just not that hostile. It is arguably more about how the various factions inside the Culture itself exploits the opportunity the entity presents as well as a love story that I find distracting and not very interesting.
After reading Outlive, my wife and I dived deep into the longevity movement so we just had to watch this documentary about Bryan Johnson. The guy is pretty much the high priest of the movement and as this film shows, he seems to revel in that role. The film is about the man himself, so those looking for technical information on his Blueprint life-extension program will be disappointed. He’s obviously a very enthusiastic participant, yet director Chris Smith is to be credited for not turning this into just a hagiography. Johnson may be completely earnest in his aims and I don’t think he’s a scammer. But he’s also a deeply weird person with what seems like an unhealthy relationship with his son.
I haven’t seen many films by Mia Hansen-Løve and I’m mostly ambivalent about the last one Bergman Island. I was discomfited at first by how this one flits from scene to scene without dwelling on any given moment for very long but I soon grew to appreciate how it paints a broad portrait of the main character’s life. In fact, the style reminded me of the director’s even earlier film Things to Come and I realized that both are deeply drawn from her real-life emotions and experiences with her parents. The focus here is on the father character’s drawn out decline from a rare variant of Alzheimer’s disease. It is complemented by the story of the main character’s embrace of love at a later stage in life, an unusual combination that nonetheless works very well.
Here’s another film directed by Ernst Lubitsch and really it’s James Stewart in the leading role that is the draw for me. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a single film he has been in that I’ve disliked. The titular shop in this is definitely grander than I’d imagined, more like a department store, and it’s another film with a very obvious gimmick. Still Lubitsch makes it work and both Stewart and Margaret Sullavan are excellent in it. I think it’s a little mean how everyone except the girl learns the truth fairly early on and keep her in the dark. But it does make for great fast-paced fun throughout and now I’ve learned that the 1998 film You’ve Got Mail is considered a remake of this.
Lists of the greatest films of all time are usually topped by titles like The Godfather, Citizen Kane or something by Alfred Hitchcock. So it was a shock a couple of years ago when this work by Chantal Akerman arrived at the top of a respected poll. This made it an obligatory watch but I took a while to get around to it as it is very long and is said to be very boring. Indeed this can be considered a snooze fest and it requires patience to get through. Yet as critics have noted, there are subtle differences in the daily routine of the titular character across the three days and it does end in a rather dramatic climax. I do think I mostly understand what it’s trying to say and I can appreciate its significance in portraying a female perspective of life but I can’t say it especially resonated with me.
My wife asked to watch this cooking competition reality show and indeed I’ve even heard of this one in the online spaces I frequent. I’ve never watched any show of this kind before so I thought I’d do it at least once. My first impression is that it looks so lavishly produced with gigantic, amazing looking sets and vibes that were obviously inspired by Squid Game. I was also flabbergasted by how much the two judges must eat when the show starts with 100 competitors. The numbers do get whittled down quickly and the producers were incredibly creative in devising different formats for each round. I don’t care for the tricks they use to generate conflict but fortunately there’s not much of that. I have to admit that this was a better show than I’d expected and I enjoyed it.
