This film needs no introduction. If nothing else, everyone knows about its famous orgasm scene. It also launched the career of Meg Ryan who would unfortunately then be forever typecast as the love interest in many similar rom-com movies. I’ve never watched it however as I was only thirteen years old when it was released and I suspect that most guys would watch it only if it were with a girlfriend. So when my wife wanted to add this to our list I was okay with watching it. After all, no one can deny the cultural influence it has had.
Michaelangelo Antonioni is apparently one of the great Italian directors and it’s on me that I have neither heard of him nor watched any of his films. This one regularly makes it onto lists of the world’s greatest films so it was an obvious choice to get to get to know this director. Unfortunately it was very wrong of me to expect something similar to Federico Fellini. While it isn’t difficult to tell what’s going on in this film, it is often impossible to figure the why of it or what to expect next. This made L’Avventura a very frustrating watch for me.
I bought this based on how much I’ve liked the previous games by Klei Entertainment and the good things I’ve read about it. I don’t think I’ve ever tried a turn-based stealth game either. Unfortunately it didn’t quite sink in for me that this is really a kind of rogue-like game and my personal gaming history has taught me that I simply don’t have the perseverance for this type of gaming experience. When I make gains in a game, I prefer to keep them instead of trying and failing over and over again. Invisible, Inc. really does play like that which is why I shelved it in short order.
My wife and I no longer climb much for recreation as I’m too lazy to train for the level of fitness required but I still retain a interest for what goes on in that milieu. Combine this with the fascination that most people have for the goings-on at Everest, and you have the explanation for why I wanted to watch this documentary by Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom.
The MCU films are the only franchise that can reliably draw me to the cinemas and Doctor Strange is only proving that my faith is well founded. Bringing this to the screen was always going to be problematic as this is a character that was difficult to portray even in the pages of comic books. As many writers have noted, magic in theory can do anything, so how you do define meaningful constraints on what Strange can do in a way that the audience can understand? This film chooses to solve this in an interesting way: magic is visually spectacular but in the end magicians seem to mostly fight in melee like the rest of the MCU characters.
Akira Kurosawa made this in 1980, at the age of 70. The legendary director would go on making films nearly until he died in 1998 but this together with Ran in 1985 are considered the last two films that are truly great. Apparently after a string of commercial failures, Kurosawa had such difficulty raising money to make new films that he attempted to commit suicide in the 1970s. Kagemusha was made possible only when Hollywood directors who are great fans of his work helped him raise funds for the film.
So this game was free on Ubisoft’s platform for a month recently so I took the chance to snag it. I’ve actually had this on my Steam wishlist for a while now, ever since Tom Chick named it as his game of the year a couple of years back. As is the norm for Chick, this was an unconventional choice and he was duly lambasted for it but I remember being intrigued as he called it the best CarPG ever made. What I didn’t realize is that in additional to its RPG elements, this is also more akin to an MMO than any single-player game. It’s an online-only game that requires you to log onto the servers and you’re constantly sharing the game world with other players. Playing it was certainly a novel experience for me.
