Pretty much the same gang of filmmakers seem to be making the most highly acclaimed films in Taiwan and so I keep watching them. We’ve seen work by director Chung Mong-hong a few times before this and I have mixed feelings about them. I’d rank this as one of the better ones due to its solid foundations and how it treats the topic of mental illness with maturity. It does unfortunately have the same kind of shock twist ending that this gang seems to favor but that I feel is detrimental to treating it as a serious film.
So finally I get around to play something that is relatively recent. This was a virtually unknown game when it was released by a brand new studio. It quickly gained attention due to its beautiful cyberpunk visuals and due to the bugginess of Cyberpunk 2077 on release, was even hailed as the superior game. To me, the isometric view and gun-based reminded me of Crusader: No Remorse, an old game I have fond memories of, so I bought it not long afterwards. Unfortunately while its visuals are indeed fantastic, I’d judge its gameplay to be only average while its story and characters are downright forgettable.
As a big fan of Jacques Demy’s musicals, I’ve had this musical by Jean-Luc Godard on my to watch list for a while now. This is one of Godard’s earliest films though and not considered among the best. Indeed it plays off the musical aspects as a kind of joke and even the title is a silly bit of wordplay. Underneath the absurdity the plot is rather straightforward and readily accessible. I enjoyed its sense of fun and humor and as well as how it puts the romantic couple in an entirely mundane domestic context but it’s also deliberately designed to frustrate fans of traditional musicals.
I almost never cover any Malaysian films here and that is because even the best of them are rather mediocre by international standards. Still, my wife wanted to watch this while it was showing in local cinemas as a small show of support. Tan Chui Mui is one of the most internationally prominent Malaysian directors these days, and she even wrote and stars in it herself. For my part, this definitely counts as an eccentric arthouse film and I’m fairly confident that I understand what the director was going for. Yet I do not like it at all and consider it a personal vanity project that was never intended to have wide appeal.
This is the third novella of the series and by now I know what to expect. It largely follows the same formula in having Murderbot unexpectedly run into a group of humans who are hopeless at protecting themselves and ends up saving them. A welcome twist is that most of the opposition here comes in the form of implacably hostile enemy combat bots, which ramps up the threat level to Murderbot considerably. This is still a very simple and straightforward young adult book. It amounts to little more than introducing all of the new characters and then throwing Murderbot right into the action. It’s a rollicking good read, being fast-paced and punctuated by Murderbot’s particular sense of humor, but it’s nothing very sophisticated.
This Coen brothers film opens with a prologue set in the 19th century about a Jewish couple in Eastern Europe. It seemingly has nothing to do with the rest of the film. The brothers wanted something that felt like a traditional Yiddish folklore and not knowing of anything suitable, seems to have wrote one themselves. The audience is left confused as to what it means and this may well be the point as the film is about the protagonist experiencing a series of setbacks in his life and being unable to make any sense of it. This film draws heavily from Jewish culture and as such parts of it are inaccessible to me. I enjoyed its bleak humor and admire how this seems to be very much a personal project of the brother, being directly inspired by their own familial backgrounds, but this won’t be one of my favorites.
This is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s debut feature film as a director and it’s a very strong entry. She doesn’t appear in it herself but there is plenty of other female star power in this woman-centric film. I’m not a fan of its central plot device since it’s transparently there just so that the main character has something that she can be involved in. But I do love it as an exploration of some of less discussed aspects of of motherhood including the sensation of it being a prison.
