This is probably the hottest film on the awards circuit right down due to its sweeping of the Golden Globe awards but it has been on my list ever since it made waves at the usual film festivals. My wife has been especially enthusiastic about it as it is both a romantic film and a musical.
Way late on this one and it wasn’t at all certain that I’d even get around to it. I’d skipped the second game after even if I did like the first one. As I grow older I find myself more and more reluctant to play the big AAA releases. My playthrough was further hampered by the realization that this is really more of an action RPG, that it absolutely requires a gamepad and by the sheer length of the game. I did end up completing it but I’m not sure that it was worth the time.
Due to some disturbances in our usual schedule, I had to skip a day of posting recently. I thought we’d get back into the groove with an easy to watch film. This is a Brazilian animated film that’s only about 80 minutes long. It turned out to be fairly heavy and depressing watch with no dialogue at all. The film does list voice actors but the only sounds they make are indecipherable mumbles and exclamations.
Like pretty much everyone who has read Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, I greeted the news of it being adapted into a film with incredulity. I loved the story and I’ve considered Chiang to be one of favorite science-fiction authors ever since I read Understand, but it seemed unfilmable to me. Having Denis Villeneuve as the director didn’t fill me with confidence either. He’s clearly talented and is very cerebral and my reaction to his films has always been mixed. Still, this was one film I absolutely must watch and was duly frustrated that while it was released in November in the US I needed to wait until January this year for it to come to Malaysia. Note that this post will be full of spoilers, so consider yourself warned.
Continuing with our ongoing efforts to make a dent in our list of backlogged Chinese films, here is another entry from back when Zhang Yimou made films that mattered. Once again this one stars Gong Li plus a smattering of other familiar faces from that era. What marks a difference from the previous two films I’ve covered so far is that this one is actually critical of Communism, though the criticism is less severe than I’d expected.
As promised, I’ve been slowly making my way through Rice University’s online AP Physics 1 course on the edX platform. WIth sixteen weeks of content and three separate exams, this is probably the longest single course I’ve taken. It’s so long that they were adding portions of the course even while I was taking it! (I know they actually had it all ready since this used to be on a fixed schedule before moving to a do-at-your-own pace format.) It’s mostly taught by the same professor Jason Hafner but joining him are teachers Gigi Nevils and Matt Wilson who are responsible for walking students through example problems.
One thing this course never really explains is what AP Physics actually means, maybe because it’s intended for American students and they should all already know what it is. As far as I can tell, this means it’s a college-level course who students who aren’t going to major in physics or engineering. Basically it’s as much physics as possible without having to resort to calculus. Apparently calculus is so verboten that Hafner secretly whispers to the camera that this is really calculus but he’s not supposed to tell us that. It works for me though since I found this to be much more accessible than the Electricity and Magnetism course. It’s still difficult enough for me to be reasonably challenged but I had no problems completing all of it.
We’re not completely out of all-time-great films yet. This one was included in the US National Film Registry which officially makes it a great American film and it’s also an adaptation of a great American novel. I understand that the novel is required reading for most US students. This adaptation was directed by John Ford, another great American director who is best known for westerns.