I didn’t care too much for director Huang Hsin-Yao previous film The Great Buddha+, finding it too overwrought, but I found this dark comedy much more up my alley. It has all kinds of references to the first film and as it is mostly in Taiwanese, even with the help of subtitles I’m afraid I probably missed quite a few of them. But it’s still enough to appreciate its black humor and uniquely Taiwanese identity, not to mention the eminently relatable stories of four middle-aged friends.
This is the third book of the Culture series and once again Iain M. Banks surprises me with how different it is from the previous two books. The first book showed the Culture from the perspective of its enemies. The second provided a look at a typical citizen of the Culture who is asked to help treat with another civilization. This one is again a story from the perspective of someone who is not born of the Culture and works for them as a sort of mercenary as part of their Special Circumstances organization. While there is a wider plot, the novel is largely a deep dive into the psyche of its protagonist. Personally while I commend the ambition and sophistication of this approach, I can’t say that I liked this novel terribly much as I don’t find examining the tortured minds of ex-soldiers that appealing and I question why the Culture needs to employ such people for their needs.
I never write about my travel trips anymore as I don’t go anywhere that millions of other people haven’t already been and I have no particular insights of my own to add to what everyone else has to say. Plus I don’t care about photography enough to take much effort with them so I don’t even have pretty pictures to show everyone. Still my recent trip to Lenggong, Perak right here in Malaysia was such an eye-opener that it merits making an exception. The phrase “underappreciated gem” is clichéd and overused but if ever a place deserves to be called that, this is surely it.
Any documentary that is three and a half hours long would be formidable to approach, let alone one that is about a library. Yet this is exactly that, a documentary about the New York Public Library, which is really a whole institutional system spread out across the entire city rather than a library in a single building. I do think this might a little longer than it needs to be and I can’t say I found every part of it that interesting. But it is an illuminating look at a system of much greater scale and breadth than I’d imagined by a director, Frederick Wiseman, who work I had not previously seen, and who seems to specialize in documenting the institutions of American society for posterity.
Films that are centered around other artistic endeavors are tough to judge when we have no basis on which to decide whether how good that art is. This is doubly true here in a film about a very specific form of north Indian classical music. Even if it’s hard for us who don’t even understand how this form of music is supposed to work, the reverence that the film holds for the art form shines through. Yet what elevates this film to greatness is that this is not blind reverence but a powerful memoir of one man’s journey and how he matures past the teachings of his beloved guru.
Despite my gripes, I did like the first game enough that I would eventually play this so now I have. There are so many things that are similar and so many that are different that it’s hard to decide where to start. I will note that like the first game this was quite a high-profile release but it’s still noticeably not an AAA-quality. It actually feels a little short for the epic scale that it is going for and there are all kinds of shortcuts in the writing and mechanics. Still it’s a solid party-based RPG and I suppose some compromises have to be accepted for it to even exist.
This film opens with the name of the production company and the title and nothing else, as if allowing the film to speak for itself. And speak it does. The director’s name and the acting credits only appear after the end of the film. The two leads apparently play some fictionalized version of themselves and the director Ramin Bahrani isn’t exactly a household name, but he was the scriptwriter for The White Tiger that we watched not long ago. As different as the settings of these two films are, both are about under the underclass of society and Chop Shop may well be one of the best films about the lives of illegal immigrants in the United States ever made.
