With its title, this sounds like it should be a truly terrifying horror film but it’s really a samurai drama. What’s more, it begins with plenty of action, a depiction of the real Heiji rebellion 1160, yet that only serves as a preamble to the real plot. In fact this is actually a story about a samurai who falls in love with a woman and becomes obsessed with her to an unhealthy extent. This is a surprisingly colorful and good looking film. I don’t care for how terribly the Lady Kesa is treated here, but I have to concede that it does portray the demands of honor of that period in an artistically pleasing manner.
As to this summer’s choice between Oppenheimer and Barbie, I’m definitely in the latter camp. Even disregarding how grueling it would be to watch a three hour biopic in the cinema, I think this is obviously the richer and more artistically interesting of the two films. Indeed, director Greta Gerwig delivers not only an eye-searingly striking visual fest, but a powerful social commentary that encompasses the themes of gender relations, existentialism and even fits in a critique of Mattel itself. I’m not sure how much most people who watching this only due to the Barbie brand name are getting out of this, but to me, this is a very adult, very serious film.
Unsongis a web novel by Scott Alexander who is best known for the popular Slate Star Codex blog. I’m not really a regular reader but I do pay attention to it. The saga of the blog and the person behind it makes for a fascinating story in its own right but I won’t go into that here. This novel is set in an alternative history in which the Apollo 8 mission breaks the firmament around Earth as described in Biblical scripture and causes disruptions in the nature of reality. It turns out that everything described in the Talmud is literally true. Angels exist, the laws of physics are broken and the United States is broken up into fiefs led by local powers. People who learn to speak the Names of God can invoke magical effects and a worldwide organization called Unsong is formed to regulate their use.
Like most people I watched Disney’s version long ago but I don’t remember much of it. I do remember enough to tell that this version is different in many ways and as far as I’m concerned, they’re all good changes. As we’ve come to expect from Guillermo del Toro, it’s darker in tone and I loved Pinocchio looks like a crude, unvarnished wooden puppet. It seems that del Toro was inspired by one particular artist’s, Gris Grimly, illustrations. Instead of taking place in a fantasy version of Europe, this is set in World War 2-era Italy. Most importantly, whereas the original was all about telling children to be good and to be obedient towards their parents, this version subverts that lesson to have Pinocchio learn and decide what it means to be good on his own.
I add many films to my list from many different sources and now that we’ve watched many of the great classics, we’re moving on to films that aren’t quite universally acclaimed but may be notable. This one turned out to be a very competent noir of the period with a contrived twist and seems to have been beloved enough to inspire several episodes of popular television shows. Unfortunately it’s not anything that I would call great and not really worth going back for.
This was another free game on Epic that I thought looked pretty and might not take very long to play. It turns out that while you can technically complete the game very quickly if that’s all you want to do, there is plenty of content in it if you want to take your time. Also, while there is no combat and no way of losing, this isn’t a zero-friction game either. There are puzzles and hidden secrets which might take some effort to work out. I don’t really like it all that much but it’s not bad.
We watched the original classic quite some time ago and loved it. Since an updated version couldn’t possibly top it, my first instinct was to just skip it. But this did end up winning multiple Oscars and it is easily available on Netflix so I thought I should watch it to be part of the conversation. Unfortunately my instinct turned out to be correct as this veers too close to being an action movie to be treated seriously as a critique of the war and the changes director Edward Berger made leads me to question if he even understands the point of the original. This one is a cromulent war epic I suppose but it falls far short of the 1930 version.
