As expected, this film is quite similar to director John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath made only a year earlier. Both films concern themselves with the lives and times of a single family but while the former is about the travails of a sharecropping family who makes their way westwards during the Great Depression in the United States, How Green Was My Valley depicts the way of life in a Welsh mining village.
Not so long ago I was griping about how the Chinese films by the so-called Fifth Generation of directors all exhibit the same kind of fatalism about the misery that the country has suffered over the course of the twentieth century. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that in The Road Home, Zhang Yimou has made an entirely different kind of film instead. Most of it takes place during approximately the same time period as the earlier films and political events like Anti-Rightist Movement hangs like a specter in the background but the focus here is completely different.
I seem to have developed a real liking for these small American independent films. Since their budgets are tiny, they’re pushed to do more with what they have and are usually daring enough to try some new things. At the same time, they’re still mainstream enough that watching them isn’t too mentally taxing as few people are up for watching truly groundbreaking films all the time. This one was directed by Karyn Kusama who has actually made expensive big budget films before.
This is a companion game to Fallen London, a browser game that was pretty popular for a while on QT3 and Broken Forum. I’d tried it for a while but I couldn’t really get into it due to how these games always gate your progress by limiting you to a fixed number of actions per day. Sunless Sea is a standalone game that is set in the same world and uses many similar user interface elements but since it’s a real game that runs on your device, you’re free to spend as much time as you want on it and boy did it end up eating up a lot of time.
I picked this to watch as an easy way to ease back into our regular routine of watching films and writing about them after returning from holiday. Animated features are usually good for this as they aren’t too demanding and please my wife but my wife ended up not liking it, probably due to a combination of not getting the humor and not really liking Westerns much.
I haven’t updated my blog in a few days due to travel but I’m back just in time for this monthly feature. Just four of them this month and they’re all about biology.