This War of Mine earned some pretty impressive kudos when it came out. That’s no surprise given its premise of playing a group of civilians looking to survive a siege of their home city. Heck, the developers even partnered with a charity for children who are victims of war for authenticity. Looking at the screenshots, I also found the two-dimensional cutaways of buildings with lots of elements that you can interact with to be very appealing.
Double Indemnity is probably a film that needs no introduction. It is considered the paradigmatic film of the noir genre and set the stage for all others noir films to come. After watching it however, I realized that it’s highly unusual even for a noir film. The protagonist in this case is neither a police officer nor a private investigator. Instead, he is, as the audience learns from the opening narration, both the mastermind and the perpetrator of the crime that is at the center of this film.
Remember how I wrote that I didn’t much care for anthology films after watching Amores perros? Well, this is yet another anthology film except that it does things right. This is a collection of no less than eighteen short films with a total length of about two hours, each of them shot by a different director and cast, some of whom are pretty famous celebrities. What they have in common is that they’re all set in Paris and have something to do with love of one kind or another.
Wild was a pick that was added by my wife and indeed it ticks many of her boxes: it stars Reese Witherspoon, an actress that she likes, it has vaguely feminist themes and it’s about hiking in the great outdoors. As an adaption of a popular memoir and a film directed by Jean-Marc Vallée following the incredible success of Dallas Buyers Club, it was always going to be a highly prominent release. After watching this however, it seems to me that Witherspoon is its real auteur more so than the director as it was made by her production company and indeed she worked hard to obtain the filming rights even before the book was officially published.
As the impending release of the movie based on it makes obvious, this is one of the most prominent science-fiction novels in recent years. It started life as a piece of original fiction freely available on the web and was picked up by a publisher only after it gained popularity. Appropriately enough for our time, the print version of the novel is the last version to become available as both the ebook and audio versions preceded it. Personally I became interested in reading this because it shows up often in lists of recommendations in rationalist fiction circles, a sub-genre that is now burgeoning thanks to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
It was only after finishing this that I learned that it is actually considered part of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s loose trilogy of films that he made at the beginning of his career. Oddly enough, we’ve now watched all three of the films but I’m pretty sure that we did so in reverse order. This one is more like Babel than 21 Grams however in that it is an anthology of three separate stories, all of which are set in Iñárritu’s native Mexico.
Okay, no more space articles this month. Instead, it’s time for biology.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (August 2015)