This was directed by the same person who made Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda, apparently at the same time as well during breaks in the production of the better known film. Unlike it however this was not adapted from a manga but was written by the director himself based on his own mother. I would consider it a more mature, more serious work.
We went to the cinema for this on the strength of recommendations on Broken Forum and its high Rotten Tomatoes rating. Also, I suppose it’s amusing that it was made by the husband and wife team of John Krasinski and Emily Blunt. I expected it to be a horror film, but it’s also something of a science-fiction post-apocalyptic film. While it’s competently made and has a well developed atmosphere, it’s many flaws prevent me from being truly a fan.
So Iain Banks has been dead for a few years now and I’ve only now gotten around to reading this, considered the first book of his Culture series. I’ve read short stories set in this universe before but never any of the novels. I always knew I was going to have to read this one day and perhaps it is appropriate to do so now as this novel is apparently going to be adapted for television.
I added this to the list after being blown away by Paul Newman’s performance in Cool Hand Luke. It made me realize that I’ve never really watched any of the work by the legendary actor. This pick has the added benefit that it’s quite a famous film and even stars Robert Redford in his prime as well. I thought that having these actors side by side would make for a fantastic combination and I wasn’t disappointed.
A while back I wanted to watch a Israeli television series, Srugim, after reading a lot of discussion about it but ran into trouble getting good English subtitles for it. I suppose it’s more readily available now that it’s more well known. In any case, Jewish media seems popular in the US recently and this film has been getting plenty of praise. It counts as an American film but is entirely in Yiddish, being about a community of Hasidic Jews who live in New York.
After a lot of searching, I finally managed to find this film that my wife wanted so long ago. By now this is the third film we’ve watched by director Jia Zhangke but it’s the oldest one yet. Once again, it stars Zhao Tao who I have since learned is married to the director himself. I note that the English title for this is very inappropriate. Not only does it bear no relation with the Chinese title but the usual meaning of the phrase seems different from what the director intends here.
I’ve played pretty much all of Maxis’ games back in the day but one game I missed out on was SimTower and I never forgot that. I guess it was because I was busy with the school when it came out and it was actually made by a Japanese developer and not a Will Wright design. So when I saw this pop up on Steam I was immediately intrigued. Since I never played SimTower I had to look up information on it but I believe that while the games are visually and thematically similar, they are rather different in substance.