Not long ago, I wrote about how Jafar Panahi’s newer films seem darker than his older ones. Well, I was wrong because I’ve now gone back to watch this and it’s far more depressing. Rather than having a central narrative, this film consists of a series of vignettes about a group of women who are all victims of the Iranian government and society. This is raw and brutal in a way that Panahi’s later aren’t. Even so I detect some amateurishness at this stage of his career, such as the way the camera sometimes focuses on details that are irrelevant.
I bought this largely because it’s a meme book and I was curious what the fuss was all about. This was originally published in 2019 and won some awards. But it only went viral earlier this year due to a tweet and shot straight up to the top of the bestseller charts. It’s a science-fiction romance story written in an epistolary format by its two co-authors, so really not something that I usually read. The pattern of the correspondence felt obvious and repetitive to me early and there’s really only one way a story like this can end. Still, the quality of the prose and the intensity of the emotions it evokes just about won me over towards the climax.
This is likely the last Orson Welles film featured here since we’ve already covered most of the important ones and my wife has difficulty getting into them. I suppose it’s appropriate that Welles’ himself thought this was his finest work and fought hard to get it made, even lying to his financiers about what he was making to get it done. It’s an adaptation of Shakespeare, pulling plot details and lines from several plays, to tell the story of the character of Falstaff who Welles plays himself. Personally though I found this at times amusing and was impressed by the scale of the production, I think it says more about Welles’ own philosophy of life than anything. Welles’ attempt to rehabilitate the character is unconvincing to me and that makes this distinctly not the great film he thinks it is.
A string of some of the recent films I’ve especially liked feature a back to basics approach. The same could apply to this film too as the story of a young girl getting an unwanted pregnancy is all too familiar. Offhand though, I can’t recall a single one of these stories that doesn’t put the blame squarely on the girl or end with her making peace with delivering the baby. This is unapologetically a pro-abortion film and it is far past time that something like it exists, to show just how powerless girls feel to have no control over the course of their own lives and how unfair it is that the burden falls entirely on girls while the guys just walk away with no consequences. At the same time, it doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of what an abortion really is either, making it practically required watching for sexual education purposes.
Obviously the RPG to play right is Baldur’s Gate 3 but I’m holding off on that until I get a better PC. In the meantime, there’s this little gem made by a virtually unknown company that uses the same 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons ruleset under the Open Game License. This means it uses the rules, with some modifications to adapt it for a video game, but must set it within its own original fantasy world. As a game made on a limited budget, it lacks polish and is somewhat short. Yet as many others have pointed out, its tactical depth and faithful implementation of the ruleset make it a better RPG experience than you’d expect.
The character of Ms. Marvel was created long after I’d stopped reading comics but I’d always thought it was a great idea and my impression was that they pulled it off very well. Introducing the character to the MCU was a natural choice so even though I’ve stopped watching most Marvel content, I wanted to give this a fair shake. As it turned out, the character as played by Iman Vellani is very likeable and it offers an intriguing look into the Pakistani Muslim community in the US. Yet it’s a pretty mediocre superhero show with poor action choreography, weak villains and weak worldbuilding. It’s about what I expected really and it’s a shame that this seemed to have been one of the least popular MCU shows.
Here’s yet another Studio Ghibli film as working through them is easy on Netflix. Watching this after Spirited Away is an especially illuminating experience as this one feels so much like a trial run for the later, much grander film. I like this a lot more however precisely because its restraint actually make the magical elements that are present all the more magical. That it’s more grounded also means that the shadow of grief and tragedy behind all of the sweetness feels more real and more poignant. The lessons here are that less really is more and it’s important to actually have things that matter even in a dream-like fantasy.
