Continuing on my tour of the greatest science-fiction novels ever written, here is Norstrilia, the only novel published by Cordwainer Smith. Smith is genuinely one of the greats of science-fiction and is mainly known for his short stories. His real life is arguably as fascinating as his fiction, being an East Asian scholar who called Sun Yat-Sen his godfather and an expert in psychological warfare who worked for the CIA. I found this book to be an impressive example of building a complete fictional future history setting and a incisive dissection of what it means to be human. Due to its characters and moral sensibility, I can’t say that I enjoyed it very much. It’s yet another book that really is a product of its time.
This is a film noir that is remarkable on multiple measures for something from the 1950s. The lead is a black man, played by superstar Harry Belafonte. It’s nominally a film about a bank robbery, but the robbery itself is the least important part. It’s instead an in-depth portrait of two very different men and why they were driven to commit this crime. Finally, even though it’s a noir, most of the scenes actually take place in the day time. It’s all the better for it too as we then get all these outdoor shots of the New York of the period. The anti-racism message is too on the nose for us now but the film as a whole is solid and well worth watching even today.
If the last couple of films by Luis Buñuel have been less surreal than usual, this one more than makes up for it. It’s less a film than a series of vignettes about a group of friends who keep trying to sit down for a meal yet fail for increasingly ridiculous reasons. This counts as black humor but instead of laughing, you’d probably be wincing instead. The critique against the bourgeoisie is well observed and I love how Buñuel was seemingly inspired by a simple story of friends showing up unexpectedly. It’s a little too silly for me to care much about however and I’m not sure I even want to spend the brainpower to figure out what some of the weirder stories even mean.
I haven’t skipped a single one of Zachtronics’ puzzle games so far but now I’m thinking that I should probably have skipped this one. To me this feels like a rehash of SpaceChem but with hexes instead of squares. In reality, it goes back to an even earlier game by Zach Barth before he even founded the company but that was before my time. I loved SpaceChem but it was so difficult that I could never do some of the later puzzles. This title however is in line with their more recent games with drastically reduced difficulty. The main game posed no challenge to me at all and the accompanying story is so shallow I wondered why there needed to be a story at all.
I expected this Macedonian language film about witches in the 19th century to be squarely in the horror genre but as my wife notes, it really isn’t horror at all. It’s actually a sort of fantasy drama with very strong humanistic themes. The core premise is sound and fits the setting well. Unfortunately it is let down by lackluster production values including a weak eye for cinematography and cheap visual effects. It’s solid work but it’s perhaps more ambitious than what director Goran Stolevski could actually pull off.
I’ve skipped all of the Star Wars shows after the second season of The Mandalorian. No point in sticking with shows after they’ve jumped the shark. This one however caught my attention due to its rave reviews and best of all, it’s a prequel that builds up to perhaps the best Star Wars film of all time, Rogue One. I can say without exaggeration that this show is amazing and adroitly captures what it means to build a resistance movement from the ground up. It’s also one of the darkest interpretations of the franchise I’ve yet seen, as the rebels can and do make moral sacrifices in the name of the greater good.
The last Steven Spielberg film I watched was Ready Player One and that was only because it was on a flight. The last one that I’d actually sought out to watch was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and we hated it. I was doubtful that I’d ever watch a Spielberg film again but then he made what is effectively his autobiography and of course it instantly becomes essential watching. At first, I was annoyed by how this film telegraphs every single thing that it wants to say so very obviously. Yet I found myself immersed all the same in the world of Spielberg’s childhood and its insights about the power of cinema. By the end, it’s impossible to deny the conclusion that this is a triumph both artistically and personally for Spielberg himself.
