It took way, way longer than I expected and I actually fell behind in other reading to do this, but I finally managed to complete Wildbow’s latest web serial Pale. It is his longest work to date and that seems to have surprised Wildbow himself because he explicitly set out to write an investigative procedural story with a less ambitious scope. I do think it’s his best writing to date and I love both the characters and the setting. That said, it is far, far too long. Too many conflicts devolve to physical combat when other forms of resolution are narratively more interesting. Wildbow is insistent on providing a backstory on every single character who shows up, no matter how minor. The whole world is just unnecessarily big. As much I enjoyed the main narrative and the protagonists, I found this to be a real slog to get through at times. I’m both happy to have read this but also relieved that I’m finally done, if that makes sense.
With its fast-paced dialogue and strange world in newspaper columnists are seemingly all powerful, this was a difficult title to get into initially. But I appreciated the attempt to film this unusual and complex subject and having both main characters be total sleazeballs is an amazingly bold decision. Even apart from the world itself, there are so many things in here that are so weird including J.J.’s obsession with his sister, but I loved it all, especially the savage pettiness of the characters and how it never lets up right up to the end.
I loved Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo but I haven’t had cause to watch his later films. Here we have him directing a very Chinese film with crisp visuals that evoke works such as Black Coal, Thin Ice. Yet this is no noir, it is instead a drama about the angst and aimlessness of Chinese youth, with a dose of confused romance. In theory, this is a thematically rich film with a lot going on. Unfortunately it never gelled together into a coherent whole for me. Reading up on it, it seems like Chen threw the script together in a matter of days while he was under quarantine in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Combined with the objective of making a freer, looser film, this does indeed seem to be the inevitable result.
I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a proper Japanese Godzilla film before this and I consider the American version one of the worst films I’ve written about. Given the critical reactions to this latest reboot, I had high hopes for this one and largely wasn’t disappointed. Hollywood is agog that it managed to look so good while spending so little on special effects but it’s still obvious that this isn’t a state of the art film. The story is kind of simple as expected but at least it isn’t too stupid and wrapping a life affirming theme around it is a laudable twist on post-World War 2 Japan.
As usual, I’m way late to the party on this one, so late that I bought this a while back on Steam and still hadn’t played it when Epic offered it for free. I did read up on opinions about it when it was first released and now that I’ve finished it, my thoughts are largely the same. It’s a fantastically original take on the turn-based tactics type of game that are now sometimes called the XCOM alike. But it has a staggering amount of out-of-combat story and exploration content that is way out of whack compared to the tactical gameplay. This ended up being a commercial failure which is why it was offered for free on Epic so quickly and that’s a real shame because the gameplay is really good and this is an excellent use of the Marvel license.
A while back, I mentioned how Martin Scorsese always seems to make the same type of mobster film. Well, he certainly proves me wrong on that count with this epic about a conspiracy to kill practically an entire American Indian tribe. Three and a half hours is long even by Scorsese standards, yet he makes good use of every second of it and just barely manages to tell the whole story. Telling it through the perspectives of Ernest and Mollie made all the difference as it creates this creeping sense of dread as Ernest is one of the conspirators killing her people all along. It’s the perfect material to be adapted to film really as you really want more people to remember this heinous crime.
We’ve worked our way through a fair number of the films of Satyajit Ray and while this one wasn’t made that late in his career, it feels more modern to me than many others. It takes place almost entirely on a train and while there are several supporting characters, the sole purpose is to shine light into the psyche of its main character. Between the flashbacks and the dream sequences that are rife with symbolism, it even has something of a postmodern feel to me. I had a little difficulty getting into it at first because I thought the stories of the other characters would matter more. Once I realized what it was going for, I was impressed by the richness of the characterization and how full of nuances it is.
