Broken Age is easily the most high profile adventure game in years due to its massive KickStarter game and Tim Schafer’s name. I don’t consider myself a fan of the genre and I’ve never even played the famous Grim Fandango, but I have to admit that getting people like Elijah Wood and Wil Wheaton to do your voicework can still get my attention. Seems to me however that it’s just a way to make your game a lot more expensive than it needs to be.
Brooklyn is a film that was added to my watch list as one of the notable releases of last year but I honestly wasn’t expecting too much from it. One Broken Forum poster called it pleasant but somewhat pointless. Director John Crowley appears to be known more for theater work than for his films and though Saoirse Ronan has been in a few high profile releases, she’s not an acting heavyweight. In the event, my initial impressions were largely proven correct and my biggest surprise is how much my wife liked it.
Guru came to my attention when it was mentioned in The Economist and it was featured in a Marginal Revolution post by Alex Tabarrok, who called it the most important free market movie ever. The thing about this film that must be understood is that although it uses invented names throughout, including fictional names for the companies involved, it is really a very loose biography of Dhirubhai Ambani, one of India’s most famous tycoons, who founded the Reliance group of companies. This helps explain why this film is so fascinating to economists.
Another good mix of articles for this month, and for the first time, one is a video instead of an article.
Assault on Precinct 13 is a film that pops up from time to time in discussions of influential action movies in places like Broken Forum. This was only the second film made by John Carpenter and helped cement his reputation in Hollywood for being a director capable of making decent films on a very tight budget. I think it’s also remarkable that it stars a black man as the hero while being very much not a blaxploitation flick. Played by Austin Stoker, the character is a police officer who happens to be black, but his blackness isn’t emphasized by the film.
I had Elite Dangerous on my Steam wishlist for ages but it never dropped in price enough and many people complained that it’s pretty but rather boring. In the meantime, this little gem is both cheap and widely praised, including by Broken Forum’s space game aficionado, I decided to give it a whirl. It was basically made by only two guys working out of a garage.
This is a follow up to The Act of Killing, one of the most hard hitting documentaries I’ve ever seen. Director Joshua Oppenheimer is joined this time by a middle-aged Indonesian collaborator who appears onscreen but will not reveal his name for the safety of himself and his family. If you stay around to read the credits at the end of the film, you’ll also notice that plenty of other contributors including researchers and even cameramen have similarly chosen to be anonymous, an indication of how dangerous these revelations still are even decades after the massacres.