Moonlight was one of two films that swept the nominations during the Oscars earlier this year. La La Land went on to win most of them but Moonlight did win some important ones including the award for Best Picture. It’s also notable in a few other ways, such as being an all-black film, one that touches on LGBT issues even. I had high expectations for this one going in but it unfortunately was mostly a disappointment.
Together with The Salesman, this was one of the two front runners for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award earlier this year. My wife recently commented that we seem to watch disproportionately fewer German films and this is indeed the case. One reason might be that German film traditions feel odd even to those used to other European films given their links to German expressionism. I will certainly try to add more films to our watch list but in the meantime Toni Erdmann makes for a decent reminder how German films can be excellent and yet feel very strange to our sensibilities.
So I finally got around to playing this, hailed by many as perhaps the greatest RPG ever made. I held off for a long while because of the high recommended technical requirements for the CPU and I only just built a new rig a few months ago. It’s a massive undertaking and according to Steam, I spent over a 130 hours on it without any big DLC content. In fact, I’m so tired out after this that I probably won’t buy and play the DLC stuff even though they’ve been well reviewed.
One benefit of being a subscriber to The Economist and frequenting economics blogs is that I get film recommendations like this which I doubt appear on the radar of most critics. This documentary follows the efforts of Geng Yanbo who was the mayor of Datong, a small Chinese city in Shanxi province, to transform it into a cultural and tourism center. It doesn’t seem to be very well known as it wasn’t distributed widely.
This is the second film we’ve watched by Polish director Andrzej Wajda, the last one he made before he died in fact, and to no one’s surprise, it isn’t any less darker than Katyń. This one is a biography of Władysław Strzemiński, apparently a Polish artist of some renown beginning in the 1920s.
Today Lindsay Lohan is perhaps the poster girl for the teen idol whose career and life crashes and burns hard but there was indeed a time when she was Hollywood’s it-girl and Mean Girls is probably her best and most memorable role. I didn’t watch it back in the day and always hesitated about putting it on the watch list because it’s isn’t exactly acknowledged as a great film. I eventually caved in when some Broken Forum members named it as one of the best comedies of the new millennium. Plus we’ve watched so many films over the past couple of years that we’ve really been running down the list.
Once again, I had no idea that this was another first book of a trilogy instead of a standalone. In retrospect I guess the titles were an obvious clue. The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for 2016 and the second book The Obelisk Gate won the same award for 2017. Then again, author N.K. Jemisin is hardly a stranger to the awards circuit. This however is the first book I’ve read by her as I’ve been out of the loop for a while.