Greg Egan is continuing to produce a fair amount new writing. I bought this book because it’s been a while since I last sat down with a good collection of short science-fiction stories and they’re how I first encountered Egan’s work. Unfortunately while many of the ideas in the stories here can be interesting and thought provoking, they’re also very small in scale. So small that they might rate a short blurb or a blog post but struggle under the weight and expectations of even a short story. Combined with Egan’s penchant for writing plain and straightforward stories with no dramatic twists, I’m left wondering: okay, so that happened, is that it?
This Finnish film had the bad luck of extremely poor timing. It’s a film about an unlikely friendship with a Russian man and how Russians in general aren’t so bad underneath their gruff exteriors. Then in 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, kicking off the largest war in Europe since World War 2 and with it went any hopes of this film being a success. It’s a solid art house film, not an especially outstanding one but certainly good enough to win more acclaim under more favorable circumstances. It’s especially poignant to us given that my wife once had a somewhat similar encounter on a train ride in China in her youth.
After quite a spate of Malaysian films, here’s a Singaporean one that has won critical acclaim on the international level. I went into this blind as usual without knowing anything about it and it really makes a difference. The film starts slow and gives little insight as to what the protagonist is really thinking. It took a while for it to sink in for me that this is a somber examination of the death penalty as it is carried out in Singapore. The sparse narrative and plain presentation make sense in order to treat the subject matter respectfully. It doesn’t fully commit to its ending which is a shame but it left me with an uneasy feeling about how capital punishment and the effects it leaves on the executioner and that is a sure sign of a successful film.
I keep adding films to my watch list due to their reputation but that doesn’t always mean that I’ll end up liking them. This epic Western film is considered one of the greatest American films of all time but I struggled for a long time to understand why. It has decent gunfight scenes and a complicated story and that seemed to be it. Later I realized that it has a very cynical take on the genre and that are really no good people in it on any side. I had to read up on it to understand that it’s a response to the Vietnam War and director Sam Peckinpah wanted to show audiences what he felt was the grim reality of real violence. As he later discovered, he failed because it turns out that there is no violence, no matter how horrific or graphic, that we humans won’t glorify and get excited over.
I sung the praises of the first game so how could I not play the sequel especially after Larian followed it up with the highly acclaimed Baldur’s Gate 3? This time around I soon felt that I had bitten off more than I could chew. This sequel is huge, especially with all of added content that is part the Definitive Edition, so there’s so much more of everything. Many of the elements that I liked the first time around were less appealing this time and the annoying things are much worse. It eventually got to the point where it felt like a slog that I had to power through. I still finished the game because I’m stubborn that way and I can understand why it appeals to some power gamers but this wasn’t a game I enjoyed very much at all.
German cinema is underrepresented in the films we’ve watched so far and this marks the first work we’ve seen by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Not being used to his style or German cinema, it’s difficult at times to parse if it’s meant to be humorous. Its story of an African immigrant in Germany is a powerful one yet it makes its point so bluntly and the scenario is such a patently unrealistic one that I keep thinking it’s some kind of satire. It’s a very stylized film and an effective one but I think I need more exposure to German cinema to better appreciate it.
Here’s one Studio Ghibli film my wife said she had difficulty getting into back in the day. And no wonder because rather than focusing on particular characters, it’s a larger story about the civilization of raccoon dogs having trouble adapting to the urban buildup of Japan. It actually goes so deeply into their culture and their magical abilities that I wondered how they are relevant, since after all this is all made up. It doesn’t hold back though, delighting in crude references to their balls, and explicitly shows both raccoon and human lives being lost as part of the conflict. Of course, this can’t be a story that has a happy ending but it strikes a heartfelt bittersweet note and that’s good enough.
