This was added to my list at some point because it is a highly celebrated film with many awards and is considered one of the last of the great musicals of the era. So when its very first big song, Thank Heaven for Little Girls, started up, I was shocked by the very obvious pedophiliac message in it. Things just get worse from there and the whole thing seems like a very malicious caricature of the French conception to love and romance. It’s a pretty film to be sure as it really was shot in Paris and even features scenes in the famous Maxim’s restaurant. But the music is banal and the morals are execrable as few other films are. I cannot believe that this film is as highly regarded as it still seems to be.
I learned about the existence of this film in a roundabout way, from reading an article about the historical figure by the economist Alice Evans. It’s strange to me that I’ve never heard of her before as she was Indonesian and this biographical film about her is available on Netflix. It’s a little too sentimental at times and tries too hard to achieve a happy ending when in fact the real Kartini died tragically young at the age of 25. Overall though it’s an outstanding production by the Indonesian film industry that champions a feminist heroine in a part of the world that is distinctly hard on women.
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.
