After the near perfection of Arrival, I find it easy to forgive director Denis Villeneuve for how impenetrable Enemy was or how contrived Incendies was. Whether you like them or not however, you can’t deny that each of his films has been very unique and interesting in different ways. As my wife, his work so far defies being typed into any one genre and he looks to be continuing with this trend with the upcoming Blade Runner 2049.
So I’ve been making a tour of all of the online education portals. I’ve long been embarrassed by how weak my math skills are and I’ve been doing remedial work on them on Khan Academy, a site which is probably still best known for its math exercises. Recently however, I discovered that the site has expanded to include all kinds of different topics, including a vast library of videos covering the history of the world as a whole. There must be something like over a hundred hours of videos there on history. It took a ridiculous amount of time to do so but I can now happily say that I’ve been through every bit of the content that’s available so far.
I had no idea what this film was about. That it was included in critics’ lists of notable works and that it has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of nearly 100% are enough to make it worth watching for me. I knew that it was surprisingly short, at a little over an hour in running time, and is the feature film debut of an unknown director, Anna Rose Holmer, with unknown amateur performers.
The Maltese Falcon is another one of those films that everyone is expected to have watched. I don’t mean just film critics and film history buffs either but everyone considering how famous it is and how Sam Spade is nearly the American equivalent of Sherlock Holmes. For my part, I remember it being aired quite frequently on Malaysian television when I was young but I’ve never actually sat down to watch it.
Between all the movies, television shows and video games, I felt that the zombie genre was fully saturated and so I had no real interest in this film when it first came out. By the time I became aware of its hugely positive word of mouth reviews and tried to watch it, it had already fallen out of rotation at the cinemas. So here I am watching a popular movie months after its release.
This was an impulse purchase a while back that I quickly regretted as I didn’t even like the first game all that much. My completionist instincts pushed me to play it anyway so I more or less did my best speedrush my way through it relying on online guides to solve the puzzles. Even so, it took me more than 20 hours of playing to reach the end, though I did take the extra trouble of getting the true ending. That’s enough to make this a surprisingly substantial game I think.
Tom Ford is better known as a fashion designer, being at various times the creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, but he seems to be developing a second career as a movie director in his free time. Nocturnal Animals is only the second film that he has made and it’s almost unfair how good it is given how far removed a director’s skills are from that of the fashion industry.