I bought this purely because of its premise: instead of being the traditional do-gooder, you play as a minion of an evil overlord who has already won. Plus I suppose that Obsidian has a good reputation when it comes to RPGs. Unfortunately I found this to be a middling game, too small and short for the scope of the story it wants to tell and bizarrely packed with features that feel rushed, out of place and ultimately pointless.
Continue reading Tyranny
There is a kind of chilling resonance watching this amidst the coranavirus lockdown as the opening scene features someone in full hazmat protective gear and a doomsday sayer ranting on a soapbox. Still that’s not what this film is about though its message about gentrification and isolation amidst a rapidly changing city does have some thematic commonalities with our current crisis.
Continue reading The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
At about the same time last year, both of us were completely awestruck by the emotive power of Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City. Distant Voices, Still Lives is one of his earlier films and it is also essentially about growing up in the city of Liverpool. Whereas the documentary dealt with the city as a whole, this one focuses on one particular working-class family in the city in the 1940s and 1950s and we all understand that this is at least loosely based on Davies’ own life.
Continue reading Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
Given that Akira Kurosawa has never done wrong by us yet, it’s likely that we’ll eventually get around to watching all of his classics. This particular title well deserves that status as it was one of the first Japanese films to win international awards and indeed its name is now used in the common term the Rashomon effect to describe the unreliability of witnesses and mutually contradicting accounts.
Continue reading Rashomon (1950)
As promised, here is the second book of Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, though it has been more than half a year since I read The Just City. I loved both the premise and the characters in that book but after a while I do have to admit that it’s a bit of an intellectual lightweight when set against its ambition and promise. Similarly this book is a fun and highly satisfying read but ultimately ducks out of any real philosophical clash.
Continue reading The Philosopher Kings
This one has truly atrocious reviews but I wanted to give it a shot anyway because I have a fondness for weird films and this is the follow up after director David Robert Mitchell’s fantastic debut It Follows. Unfortunately after being given a decent budget and some name actors, what he created is a perfect example of what happens when a creator is given free rein on a project and indulges in every personal whim and fantasy without restraint.
Continue reading Under the Silver Lake (2018)
Despite what I wrote last time around, I still haven’t gotten around to watching the first two films of the so called Dollars trilogy. This one however is another Spaghetti Western, that is an Italian-made film set in the American West. It was directed by Sergio Corbucci and even features a score by Ennio Morricone. With all of the leads here being played by Europeans rather than Americans, it does feel much more European than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which we found quite discomfiting.
Continue reading The Great Silence (1968)