I’m pretty sure I added this film to my ever growing list due to its specific notability as a war film. Its director Cy Endfield doesn’t seem to have made anything else of comparable stature and while the promotional materials for it now prominently feature Michael Caine this was actually his first major role and he only plays a supporting character here. Yet it is a fantastic war film and easily one of best I’ve ever seen about a single battle, while managing the almost miraculous feat of not being too racist.
This marks the third and last installment of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s coming-of-age trilogy. It’s interesting to note that each of the three films is about a main male character who is growing up, with the age increasing in each successive film though they are all different characters. Here the protagonist is a young man who must leave his home to make his own way in the world. Naturally this is also the age when he must deal with girl problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
