Martha Wells is another one of the a relatively recent crop of writers whose work gets nominated for awards over and over again. This year, her latest Murderbot Diary book Network Effect was nominated so I thought I’d check the series out beginning with the first book. Unfortunately it looks like this was only a novella and while this first one is priced cheaply on Amazon, the other three ones which complete arguably the first volume are each sold as full-price books. That explains why the reviews are full of complaints about this exploitative marketing practice.
This is of course the final installment of a trilogy that started all the way back in 1989, rumored but delayed for so long that it seemed increasingly unlikely it would ever be made. But of course the delay has been incorporated into part of the story with Bill and Ted being well into middle age with grown up daughters. While it is kind of impressive how they pull out all of the stops for this and the plot is fitting, this film lacks the spark of brilliance that made the first two so memorable. It makes for an adequate ending to the trilogy but no more than that.
Barbra Streisand’s song should be familiar to just about everyone but far fewer people should have watched the film it was made for. The film itself is quite highly regarded but I have difficulty saying that I enjoyed watching it. Yet I am blown away by its boldness and how it is in effect a brilliant transposition of the usual gender roles in a romantic film. I want to like it so much but it is held back by the very fact that it remains at its heart a romantic film.
Tsui Hark is of course a household name and this one was made smack in the middle of his heyday as a maker of Hong Kong kung fu films. Yet most people probably would not have watched this one as I think it was considered a failure at the time. Modern critics however have reevaluated it as with its brutal violence and cynical attitude to morality, it makes a bold statement that is markedly different from its peers. It remains poorly made in many ways and has many flaws, yet just by being so different it deserves our attention.
This is an indie game about the French Revolution made by Polish developers. I really wanted to like it due to the originality of its premise but ultimately have to give it a thumbs down because it has too many issues which are inherent in its design. Its story mode is also very frustrating in that you really have no control at all over what happens even if it appears at first that you do. I do credit this for being a worthwhile educational experience about day to day life during the Reign of Terror period of the French Revolution but you have to do your reading up of the facts separately. Even so I’m not sure that the game is worth your time.
Director Ken Loach’s latest and perhaps final film is a work that inhabits the same space and fights the same battles as his previous one I, Daniel Blake. I like this one quite a bit more not least because I’m much more sympathetic towards a family who has to face a succession of escalating problems rather than a single big crisis. Yet at the same time, I think this is another example of Loach being too out of touch with society as it is today and too dead set on interpreting everything through the lens of capitalism vs socialism when this seems like an increasingly outmoded way of looking at the world.
This ought to be the last of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films as we’ve pretty much watched everything else. It’s also very different from his other works in that there seems to be less emphasis on the sheer visual beauty of each shot. Instead this film is more ambitious in scope and features several large scale scenes. The sheer density of themes in it is impressive but unfortunately that also means that there is more here for me to fail to understand or simply miss.
