This one was added to my list because of how much I liked just about every film directed by Philip Kaufman that we’ve watched so far. I think this is not very well known today and was a commercial failure but it swept the Oscars at the time. I suppose it should also be considered a historically important film as today almost no one remembers the Mercury Seven or even the program itself though everyone knows about the Apollo program.
I picked this up from the usual lists of notable films since it was aired at some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals and thought it was fairly serious Japanese family drama. However it turned out to be a very light watch, being an adaptation of a manga. In fact, despite being a live-action film that it feel so much like a Japanese anime that I suspected this was the case.
Samuel R. Delany is of course one of the giants of science-fiction and I am once again embarrassed to admit that before this I have never read any of his works. I thought it was high time I rectified this hole in my knowledge base with this pick from Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great. The experience however left me torn. On the other hand, I have absolutely no doubt that Delany’s in an incredible writer and this is an amazing novel. On the other hand, what he does here is so far above my reading level that I can only grasp the merest fraction of what he’s going for and so I found it impossible to truly enjoy this book.
It feels like it’s been ages since the last time I watched a proper, mainstream Hong Kong film while at the same I’ve had plenty of posts on this blog about Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese films. That is of course a reflection of the territory’s fading prominence. Just as China is becoming an economic center of the world so too is it slowly becoming a cultural center as well just as other superpowers before it have done. So it’s very apropos that this is precisely the theme of Trivisa, a film that was produced by Johnnie To but directed by a trio of first-time directors Frank Hui, Jevons Au and Vicky Wong.
So we’re now so on top of current releases that we’re watching a prominent 2017 release. It’s so new in fact that it doesn’t even have a proper Wikipedia page yet. This is a documentary by Jeff Orlowski who became known a few years back for Chasing Ice. We didn’t watch that one but we might go back for it in a bit though if this title is anything to go by, it must be a horribly depressing experience.
Despite it being a rather conventional zombie film, I rather liked Train to Busan and so I had high hopes for this animated prequel by the same director Yeon Sang-ho, especially after hearing that it’s better than the better known live-action film. Despite being a prequel, it was made and released after Train to Busan so it was reasonable to expect that it would indeed be better. Unfortunately this was very much not the case.
This one was a strong recommendation by a Broken Forum member who is absolutely insane about space-themed games. Its developer is the small and independent Soldak Entertainment. I’ve never played any of their games but they made a name for themselves a few years back with their action RPGs set on a procedurally generated maps. The really big deal however was that unlike traditional RPGs in which quest givers are content to wait around forever for the player to get around to doing them, in these games the world moves on even while the player does something else and quests can become irrelevant. There may even be other agents moving about the game world doing the quests if the player doesn’t get around to them in a timely manner.