We’re just done watching the two seasons of this South Korean television series and naturally we’re only watching a Korean show because it’s really a zombie show. Setting a zombie outbreak in a period Korean setting is just an inspired decision and I especially appreciated how this is a relatively grounded show in which the characters actually try to understand the nature of the plague. It seems likely that there will be more but the first two seasons already tell a complete story, so no worries about this being a show with no end in sight.
For once, it looks like I’m on top of new releases as this book has just been nominated for a slew of awards but final results have yet to be announced. Of course this book was always going to be a high profile release given that this is by Susanna Clarke and this is only her second novel after the incredibly successful Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell. This is however a simpler, far less ambitious work than her first book which famously took over ten years to write and is short enough that some would question if it even qualifies as being a novel.
I’ve learned how pointless it is to say that this next one might be the last Hitchcock film I need to watch and someone always has something interesting to say about one of his work that I’ve yet to watched. This is an early one that is set entirely on a single lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. The script was written by John Steinbeck but apparently it was Hitchcock who came up with the initial idea. As usual the great director makes it work and despite the limited nature of the setting this wasn’t a cheap film to make either as filming on water is notoriously expensive and some of the stars were rather expensive.
This is the final installment of the trilogy that began with L’Auberge Espagnole and this time Xavier’s adventures in life brings him to New York. There are many film trilogies of course but it’s hard to think of many that are about the lives of the same group of people over real time, the best known example being of course the Before trilogy. This one is unfortunately nowhere as great but the sentiment of passing time as we watch the aging actors play familiar characters remains a powerful one. This last film is particularly good as well, comparable to the first one and far better than the forgettable second one.
It’s been a while since we had a variant of the Groundhog Day formula on film and this one actually manages to be rather good. It is a romantic comedy as well but changes things up by having both people being included in the loop and that allows this to be a far less solipsistic experience. At the same time it feels much more science-fiction with characters who experiment to find out the limitations and boundaries of the loop they are trapped in.
Continuing on with my run of short games, this is a totally free game that can be easily downloaded on itch.io but will also be coming to Steam soon. As you should be able to see from these screenshots, this is an old-style point-and-click adventure game with pixel graphics. The title itself refers of course to the famous novel by Italo Calvino, which I actually have read a while back due to my wife’s insistence, but barring some minor references the game doesn’t actually have anything to do with the book.
Here’s another zombie movie, this one from Canada. The unique twist here is that the events are centered around a community of First Nations Indians who are all immune to the zombie virus. Of course they must still deal with the other perils of a full blown zombie pandemic. Unfortunately while there is some promise early on here and there is some attempt at a deeper theme, it suffers from a weak follow-through and ultimately feels like a comic book movie. Visually it even tries to look like a comic book movie with some animated frames to illustrate some scenes.
