This is billed as a documentary but it’s debatable whether it’s more of a film than a documentary. Its original Italian title makes more sense, Fuocoammare, in reference to a song that a woman requests on the radio in honor of the men who work as fishermen in the family. Apparently the Italian Prime Minister liked it so much that he gifted a DVD of it to each of the EU’s heads of state.
Any film made by Martin Scorsese is guaranteed to be among the year’s most notable works due to the director’s reputation alone. It duly went straight to the top of many critics’ lists though it met only middling success on the awards circuit. I thought it was intriguing, about the travails of Christians in 17th century Japan and so put it onto my own list.
Yes, I’m aware that the sequel to this is due to be released in a few months. I also know that this is a multiplayer-centric game and I have no intention of playing multiplayer mode for its sake. I had bought this a few months back due to three reasons: the strength of the Star Wars brand, especially its original trilogy setting, its reputedly excellent graphics and fond memories of the 2005 version of the game which I similarly only ever played single-player.
Almost all of the films that we actually watch in the cinema are superhero action movies, a fact that I find to be both somewhat embarrassing and depressing. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about this one either after so many superhero movie cinema outings so far this year and the fact that we’ve seen so many different iterations of the character already. This is why I’m far more enthusiastic about characters that have never been made into a movie before. In the end however the excellent reviews and great word of mouth on Broken Forum drew me to the cinema anyway.
Both this and Elle which I wrote about a few months back were released last year and star Isabelle Huppert. She may not be that well known outside of France but she is the most nominated actress for the César Award, France’s equivalent of the Oscars. Indeed she was nominated for multiple awards for both of these films. Of course the two films were made by different directors, the one here being Mia Hansen-Løve, and she plays very different characters in them.
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.