So this is another film by director Hirokazu Kore-eda and we’ve certainly watched a fair few of his works across the past several months. This is the earliest of his films yet and it’s based on a real event that took place in 1988 albeit very loosely. It’s odd now that I notice how so much of his work share a theme about parents failing their children.
Once again, I’ve barely watched any entries of the highly successful Mission Impossible franchise though I did write about the fourth one. The rave reviews for this latest entry, with some critics going so far as to call it one of the best action movies ever made, convinced me to turn up at the cinema for it. Like everyone else, I am left amazed by how hard Tom Cruise is still working at the age of 56.
So I decided to pay a bit more attention at what happens at the Hugo and Nebula Awards every year. Browsing through the list of nominees, I noticed this among the novellas, a work by a relatively new Singaporean writer JY Yang that is sometimes described as being in the ‘silkpunk’ genre. It was published together with the second book of the series Red Threads of Fortune as a bit of an experiment though each is short enough that I wonder why they didn’t just sell it as a single book. I only bought this one first to check it out however.
So I planned to watch both this and You Were Never Really Here in the same week without realizing that the newer film starred Joaquin Phoenix, who is of course the brother of River Phoenix. I’ve had this film in my sights for a while now due to RIver’s performance in it but the fact that it was also directed by Sidney Lumet is another plus in its favor.
This one arrived on my list via the usual recommendations and I thought it was simply a new, notable work by relatively unknown people. It turned out that it was directed by Lynne Ramsay who also the excellent We Need to Talk About Kevin and of course the male lead is Joaquin Phoenix though I could not recognize him at all due to how buff he made himself for this role. It’s one of those astonishing transformations that some actors pull off from time to time that seems unhealthy to me.
Considering how much I adore both The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, I suppose it’s only a matter of time until I got to this, director Jacques Demy’s first feature length film. The preamble states that it was restored as the original negative had been destroyed and the person in charge of that was Agnès Varda. We’d just seen Varda of course in Faces, Places but somehow I never realized that they were husband and wife.
As previously promised, I went back to play Infinifactory’s Resistance Campaign or at least tried my best at them. Story-wise, this set of missions takes place after the end of the first campaign and as its title indicates, covers the efforts of the escaped engineers to create a resistance against the Overlords. It’s a fair bit shorter than the first set of puzzles but more than makes up for it with the large sizes of the puzzles and their bewildering complexity.