Whiplash is a film about music and as I have neither knowledge of nor much interest in music, it’s no surprise that this one is one of my wife’s picks. Still, it was one of the big winners for last year’s Academy Awards so it’s not like it’s a low-profile film. It’s also a film with a clear auteur, as Damien Chazelle both wrote and directed it based on his own experiences in a studio band.
As the post title indicates, this one is the 2012 RPG by Cyanide, not the 2014 adventure game by Telltale. I’d bought this because it was cheap and I’d heard that its story was surprisingly decent, as in people are used to Cyanide making shitty games and media tie-in games being crappy, but this turned out not to be the case. After finishing this, I have to say that I agree with this assessment. This doesn’t mean that it’s actually good, just that it’s better than it has any right being.
It’s a Wonderful Life is apparently one of America’s favorite films to watch during the Christmas season. That should give you a fairly good idea of what kind of movie this is. It also stars James Stewart, who together with Jack Lemmon, is becoming one of my favorite actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Out of his nearly a hundred or so roles, Steward seems to consider this one his favorite. At slightly over two hours long, it’s a fairly hefty film but at least one can be certain that it’s easy to watch.
I admit that when I first heard of this movie, my first thought was of the boardgame. Of course, this has nothing to do with that though both refer to the French port city bearing the name. It’s worth noting that while this is a French language film, it was directed by Finnish Aki Kaurismäki, which I think accounts for some of its strangeness.
As I’ve mentioned many times, I still consider Greg Egan to be my favorite science-fiction author though his best work was published in the 1990s and some of the latest novels can be quite boring (I’m looking at you Incandescence and Zendegi.) Still, I’m likely to read everything Egan writes eventually and so here we are at The Clockwork Rocket, the first book of the Orthogonal trilogy that was first published in 2011.
I was vaguely aware of this film when it played in the cinemas but it only really got my attention when lots of people on Broken Forum started talking about it. In particular, more than a few people chimed in to say how it’s a genuinely scary film that doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares. It was also very well received by critics, with a crazy high Rotten Tomatoes rating and comparisons with The Exorcist.
Coming fresh off the heels of a film about youths in Mexico in the 1950s, here’s a film about teenagers in America in the 1980s. Most Malaysians will probably know director John Hughes best for his Home Alone movies of the 1990s but he is more significant for a slew of highly influential films about high-schoolers and their problems a decade earlier. Of these, The Breakfast Club is probably the most highly regarded and caused the young actors who appeared in it to be lumped together as the Brat Pack.