Charlie Kaufman has a well-earned reputation for incredibly hard to understand films. This one is actually not as difficult to understand as I had feared but it still has its surreal and abstract moments. Unfortunately it is largely a retread of Kaufman’s usual themes, which as one Broken Forum poster puts it is about a self-loathing old man with a girl who wishes she were elsewhere. This plays even worse nowadays and comes across essentially as an incel’s lament.
Even without deliberately setting out to do so, I’m slowly making a bit of a dent in director Billy Wilder’s filmography. This one isn’t one of his major works but it’s still brimming with energy and feels topical in its critique of the media creating its own news. I was surprised however to learn that it’s partially based on real rescue events that turned into giant media circuses, one of them dating back to the 1920s. I was inclined to be skeptical of the huge crowds shown in the film but apparently that was all too real too.
Brandon Cronenberg may be following in the footsteps of his father in terms of style but he sure isn’t in a hurry about it as this is his first film since Antiviral in 2012, which we really liked. I found this one less impressive unfortunately. It is of course very visceral in its depiction of a killer of takes control of the bodies of others to commit murders but the theme of her sense of self blurring as a result just isn’t a particularly original one.
Here is another film by Satyajit Ray who is of course the great director of the masterpiece The Music Room. This one is a short film that is much smaller in scope, being in effect an in-depth psychological study of its main character. It is nowhere as impressive being so much less ambitious but it remains a competently made film about a very specific human failing.
Soon after starting this up for the first time, I knew that even just buying this was a bad idea. Tekken is of course one of the very well-known fighting game franchises but I’ve had no experience with it since a short time button mashing a PSP version a very long time ago. I bought this out of curiosity and of course because I wanted more games to play on my Hori Mini fighting stick. But it was a bad idea because this is very technical fighting game franchise that has no place for amateurs at all and this particular installment has very scanty single-player content.
I put this off for a long time due to the awful reviews but I always knew I would get around to it eventually. As I feared, this is pretty bad, not so much because it is confusing but because it seems so sloppily made. The central conceit of moving backwards through time is sound enough but everything else around it is so generic and flat. At times, it was so bad that I wondered if Christopher Nolan was deliberately making fun at the inherent silliness of James Bond films but I fear that the humorless Nolan was being completely earnest.
I did not truly understand director Pedro Costa’s last film Horse Money but it did seem to have some interesting things to say. This one is puzzling in many ways as well but I felt that I more or less understood its themes. Unfortunately I also felt that it oversells itself by being so focused with its visuals that almost nothing else matters. This is a film that truly tries to aspire to being a painting in every frame, but shows its hand so much in doing so that we are reminded over and over again that none of this is real.
