I had no great hopes for this but it did get decent reviews and it is the first Disney animated feature to be inspired by Southeast Asian culture so it seems almost obligatory to watch it. Unfortunately it pretty much falls in line with my expectations: it’s technologically impressive and the art design is fantastic. But it is an American film through and through with only a very superficial veneer of Southeast Asian aesthetics pasted on. In being very much a kids’ only show of little interest to adults, it also feels like it’s Disney and not Pixar, which is kind of interesting given their ownership structure.
Since I’ve developed an appreciation for the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, it makes sense to want to see more of his acclaimed films. Red Desert is the director’s first color film and I think even that fact holds significance in the film itself. Unfortunately I found it difficult to parse the director’s intended meaning here beyond a general indictment of industrialization and a nascent environmentalist message. Such a reading feels a little facile to me however and indeed the director himself insists that is not the whole story. Certainly this isn’t going to be one of my favorites.
I’ve been getting better lately about reading newer books and what could be more current than the newest book by Andy Weir that has just been released and is already at the top of all of the science-fiction sales charts. I liked The Martian enough that I probably would have picked it up eventually but after Amazon offered me a special discount after I had downloaded a sample but stopped short of buying the full book for a week or so. I wonder if this promotion was offered to everyone or the algorithm just picked me, anyway so here I am.
It feels like Daniel Kaluuya is in all of the good black American films these days. Not bad for a guy who isn’t even American but this is most certainly an excellent film. I don’t think director Shaka King has done much else of note on the big screen but this is a very impressive, well-rounded biographical drama. Though it is about events in the late 1960s it feels highly relevant today and it seems like the right time to reexamine American’s historical perception of the Black Panthers. I have no particular knowledge of this history but from what I can tell, shocking as this account is, it all seems broadly true.
So this was the media phenomenon of last year when even our niece came up to us to rave about how great this film is. Due to pandemic conditions it was even the highest grossing film of the year globally. But watching this necessitates actually sitting through the television show itself first which took a while. Overall I have not impressed as this is very much a standard shōnen show made for a younger audience. It may be well be the best shōnen around at the moment but it never aspires to anything more than that and I see nothing outstanding in it at all.
Still focusing on lighter games, here’s one that I bought a while back that really appealed to me on multiple levels. It’s set in what its makers call the Golden Age of American whaling, being inspired by the novel Moby Dick. It has a boardgame-like look and the mechanics to match. Plus it rocks some pretty great thematically appropriate sea shanties by a Bristol-based group called the Roaring Trowmen. It’s such an original work so different from anything on the market that I just had to get it.
Following up on the amazing First Cow which we both absolutely loved, here is an older film by the same director Kelly Reichardt and also set in Oregon. This is an even more minimalist film with basically just the two characters, plus a dog to liven things up a little. Not much happens here and really not that much dialogue either. Yet there is so much understated meaning in between these lines that you can sense how much effort has been put in crafting. Reichardt really is my favorite cinematic discovery this year and I sure as heck am putting more of her work on my list
