After American Sniper, I really wasn’t sure if I was going to watch this, especially as it’s a film about a relatively inconsequential event. This one does have something like 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Tyler Cowen named it as one of the year’s best films, not just an important one. Combined with the fact that it’s likely an undemanding watch, I decided to throw it into the rotation.
Robert Bresson is considered one of France’s greatest directors and apparently an inspiration for the New Wave filmmakers. We’ve never watched any of his films so I thought we should, starting with this relatively short piece that is supposed to be one his best works.
So I bought Assassin’s Creed: Unity not too long ago. Despite the bug reports, the chance of having a romp through a city I’ve been in a few times was too appealing to pass over. But then Ubisoft offered this one for free and I thought I might as well play this first to find out what actually happened to Desmond, so here I am. For the record, I’ve played all of the previous titles except Revelations. I didn’t intend to play this one either but you can’t beat the price of free.
I don’t have much love for Fox Studios’ stewardship of the X-Men intellectual property and skipped out on their last film. I was prepared to give this one a miss as well but a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and rave comments on Broken Forum made it impossible to ignore. In the end I found this to be a decent action movie but I would consider it to be more of a missed opportunity than anything else.
This one was once again an entry selected by my wife by a director belonging to China’s Fifth Generation of filmmakers, Tian Zhuangzhuang. This is the first time I’ve watched one of his films and he seems less internationally known than his peers but The Blue Kite seems to be a highly regarded film and predictably was banned in China following its release due to its critique of the policies of Mao Zedong.
So for this latest course I took I jumped ship yet again onto another platform, that of the rather pretentiously named MRUniversity. I’ve been following the Marginal Revolution blog for ages now, which I understand is that most popular economics blog on the net, so I’ve known that they’ve set up an online university of their own a while back. But this is the first time I went poking into what’s available from them and I was pleasantly surprised by how much of it there is. It looks like I’ll have plenty to occupy myself with for a while, starting right here with the Principles of Economics.
After two beefy films, I thought I’d end the week with lighter fare. This one is apparently a collection of three short films that were originally made and released independently but it’s clear that they were meant to be seen together. What’s remarkable is that they were mostly made by one single person, Don Hertzfeldt, who seems to have written, drawn and voice acted almost everything by himself.