Highly rated films from the past tend to hit more often than miss with me because there’s usually a good reason why they’re still remembered decades later. I’d say this one is an exception. Billy Bob Thornton delivered an outstanding performance, of that there is no doubt. But when I realized that this film is basically all him, he also wrote and directed it, I started to get queasy. Because this is such a dark and atavistic piece, it makes me wonder about the kind of mindset involved in creating it. In the end, Thornton got what he wanted as this project made him a superstar but this isn’t a film that I would recommend at all.
As a big fan of the Wandering Inn, naturally I want to read every story written by Pirateaba that takes place in it. However the overall story now spans more than just the original web serial, encompassing a graphic novel and now this separate story published on the new Yonder platform. Many fans complained about the latter in particular and it seems that Pirateba does have some gripes about the global availability of the service. I don’t begrudge her trying to make some money off what is now an extremely popular web serial so I downloaded the app to read it. In the event, this method of monetizing web fiction is annoying but it doesn’t really cost much to read the whole thing on Yonder. What is a problem is that this is nowhere as good as the Wandering Inn itself and that makes it difficult to recommend to others.
Continuing through the filmography of Jean-Pierre Melville, here’s a film that is known as being one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorites. The intertitles explain that the title is slang referring to a police informant and so the audience is lead to wonder which character is the real informant the whole time. This is a twist movie that is only really good for watching once and I can’t say anything about it without spoiling it. So consider yourself warned if you continue reading. I admit that its gimmick is original and the visuals are beautiful but I wouldn’t consider this a great film.
This is a relatively recent British film but it looks very old because it was shot on a vintage hand-cranked camera. This anachronism nicely matches the film’s subject matter, about a curmudgeonly fisherman upset about the gentrification of his fishing village. I really wanted to like this and I felt that director Mark Jenkin was being remarkably fair even if his sympathies are obviously with the fisherman. Yet between the technical constraints of his chosen form and the amateurishness of the production, it’s too poorly made to be more than an interesting experiment.
Here’s yet another Senegalese film, an even earlier one that is apparently the first sub-Saharan African film to be internationally acclaimed. I didn’t like this very much as it’s just too simple and not very well made at all. None of the actors are very good and it’s infuriating to me that the main character Diouana has all these internal thoughts yet never voices any of them out loud. I get that this is really an allegory about colonialism but it’s so abstract and the ill treatment of Diouana by her employers so minor in the grand scheme of things that I found her reaction a shocking overreaction. I mean I get the point but this is all so removed from any real world situation that I found it impossible to get into it.
I’m playing this partly because I got it for free and partly to give my old joystick, a cheap Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, a workout. It’s been ages since I last pulled it out of storage and I wasn’t sure if it still worked. Plus it’s always fun to relive old memories of playing X-Wing and I was one of the unfortunates who never got around to playing TIE Fighter. Back then I didn’t own a joystick either so being able to fly a Star Wars starfighter with one sounds like fun! This is also really a multiplayer focused game but as usual I will only play the single-player story mode and in any case, I don’t think the multiplayer scene for this title ever really took off.
As with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind I keep being forced to revise my opinion of the works of Hayao Miyazaki. This is another extremely violent title, complete with death on a large scale. The environmentalism theme is familiar but the death and violence gives the conflict real bite and it’s not obvious which side is in the right. Unusually for the genre, this film provides good reasons for both humans and the animals of the forest to have the right to live. The fights look spectacular without glorifying the violence and the art is as amazing as ever. As my wife notes, it stumbles at the end by being unwilling to fully commit to a specific vision for the future but I’d easily rank it among the best of Studio Ghibli’s works and consider it a film that is definitely intended for adults.
