Shadow of Mordor is now considered to be one of the best games of 2014 but it was dismissed by many at first because it looked like a generic action game crapping all over the Lord of the Rings IP. I ignored it myself because it looked like a poor clone of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. But after reading reports that it’s closer to WB’s own Batman games, which I’m a big fan of, plus it adds a significant new innovation to the genre, I bought the GOTY edition.
This one was picked for three reasons: it stars both Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, it has the single most famous musical performance over the course of Monroe’s entire career, and it was directed by Howard Hawks, the man who can and will seemingly direct anything. It isn’t generally considered one of Monroe’s or Hawks’ best films though the characters played by Russell and Monroe are now icons in popular culture.
This animated film was made by the same production team behind The Secret of Kells, headed by director Tomm Moore. This shows both in its art style and the way that it showcases Irish folklore. As with the previous film, it’s traditionally animated, not CGI, which is always a novelty and once again it’s a story with children as protagonists.
As I noted earlier when writing about Los Olvidados, Luis Buñuel is remembered more for his surrealist works and this pick, The Exterminating Angel, is a fine example of that. The strangeness of the situation here doesn’t take long to show up either. The setting is a lavish dinner party in a huge mansion, one so luxuriously appointed that it looks impressive even today. Yet even before the dinner party starts getting underway, the servants beg permission to go off one by one, each for unrelated and trivial reasons until only the majordomo is left. We also see that there is inexplicably a herd of sheep and a small bear inside the house. What’s even stranger is that some scenes seem to be repeat themselves, at least to us as the audience but the characters in the film never seem to notice anything.
I pretty much only bought this game because I saw screenshots of it on a forum and was totally entranced. Later, I regretted this a bit when its Polish developers came out as being pro-GamerGate. This is a bit weird since it actually most resembles games like Gone Home and Dear Esther which gators love to deride as being not real games. But they don’t seem to have similar problems with The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Note that I played the original version and not the Redux version because I didn’t realize that it was available as a separate download for free.
Since I generally try to watch movies that are actually good, I must admit that this is an odd pick. After watching through the entirety of Deep Space Nine a couple of years back, a series I’d never watched when it first aired, we slogged through The Next Generation last year though instead of watching everything, I tried to pick and choose the best episodes. Both my wife and myself agreed that TNG is substantially better. I told my wife that she should probably watch one of the TNG movies but we’d never done that, until now.
I’m pretty sure that I got this from the exact same list as Jauja and both films were winners at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. That’s where the similarities end though since both my wife and myself found this to be fantastic. This one is a Turkish film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and is the first Turkish-language movie that I’ve ever written about in this blog.