All posts by Wan Kong Yew

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

Given how lukewarm my own reception was towards The Force Awakens, I decided to base my decision about whether to watch the sequel on its reviews and word-of-mouth. Its high Rotten Tomatoes was a point in its favor but the rabid backlash from the fanbase only made it even more intriguing to me. The audience reaction was so harsh that it made me really curious to see it what’s up with it for myself.

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Soul Mate (2016)

This is another pick from my cinephile friend who definitely has a better eye than me on what is happening in Asian cinema. This one seems to have been a big success in the Chinese market and won some local awards but is probably not notable enough internationally to come to my attention. It feels very hip and contemporary to me being adapted from a written work that was originally published in Chinese magazines.

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The Red Turtle (2016)

This film ticks all the right boxes for being added to my list: it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, it was nominated for the Academy Awards, and most intriguingly, it is a cooperative effort by a German company and Studio Ghibli. It was directed by Michaël Dudok de Wit, a Dutch animator, and its artistic sensibilities are distinctly European but I like to think that the Japanese provided their characteristic technical precision.

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Conquest of Elysium 4

Illwinter is a game company composed of a Swedish duo that has only ever made multiple iterations of two titles: the more famous Dominions series and the Conquest of Elysium series. As you can tell from these screenshots, their games have only very basic graphics and user interfaces that absolutely require reading the manual to make sense of. Still they have managed to garner quite a fanbase for themselves and in fact it was by playing Dominions 2 that I joined the forum of their then publisher Shrapnel and from there to the Quarter to Three and later Broken Forum discussion boards.

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Forty Thousand in Gehenna

I’ve been reading this as it was sold in an omnibus volume together with Merchanter’s Luck. This is course another novel by C.J. Cherryh that is set in her Alliance-Union universe. The two novels are however extremely different in tone, scope and complexity. Here the narrative spans hundreds of years and a score of characters. Considering how I disliked how the earlier novel focused almost exclusively on the PTSD of a single character, it’s no surprise that I like this a whole lot more.

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