One of my favorite sources of interesting films to watch these days are recommendations by the economist Scott Sumner on his blog and here is one of his picks. It’s a little hard to see the point of this at first as it’s about a guy who just commits murders seemingly at random. But immediately one suspects that this is based on a real event, so haphazard and pointless are his crimes, and this is indeed the case. Sumner even comments that these look like real murders and not movie ones. By the end, I’m convinced that this is an underappreciated masterpiece and one of the darkest films about Japanese society I have ever seen.
I play nearly every type of game there is but one popular genre I have never played is the JRPG. That is probably because I do all my gaming on PC and have never owned a console. I thought I ought to play one of them someday and since I don’t want to go back to one of the old classics, I thought I’d try this one that is one Steam. The first game was a full on collaboration between the developer Level-5 and Studio Ghibli. This one isn’t but still features Yoshiyuki Momose formerly of Studio Ghibli as character designer and music by Joe Hisaishi so I thought it would make for a decently modern introduction to the genre.
Here is another screwball comedy from the classic Hollywood era starring two of the biggest stars of the era, William Powell and Carole Lombard. The director here, Gregory La Cava, isn’t as well known but he did lead a career as a pre-Disney animator before he started making films, and that might explain the rather creative animated opening title card used in this film. This is only one of the many comedies of this era but I think it is an exceptionally good one, well suited to distract audiences from the then still ongoing Great Depression.
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.
