This was distributed for free a while ago on Steam, providing the perfect opportunity to experience what is now hailed as the forerunner of the walking simulator genre. Most people can probably complete this game in about an hour so I was never willing to pay anything like its normal asking price even though I was curious about it. I’ve played enough of the games that came later to already know what to expect and overall this title is pretty much what I thought it would be.
I have almost no interest in any of the Disney animated films these days as my watch list is too crammed to bother with work that might only be marginally interesting. This one made the cut largely because it’s set in Colombia and features heavy use of Spanish, plus its songs were written by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’d say it counts as a great success as pure spectacle and I do like how Disney seems to be moving towards stories where the conflict is purely internal such that there are no external enemies to defeat. The songs are great too though I can detect they are trying hard to rekindle the magic of Frozen. The plot is rather thin though and it relies on the song and dance sequences to distract audiences from that fact.
This was a frustrating film for me: a German science-fiction romantic film by a director, Maria Schrader, who I feel has no background and no interest in science-fiction. One problem is that the premise has been explored before, such as the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back for example. This might be fine as there is always more to add to the subject but this film demonstrates no awareness of previously existing interpretations and has zero interest in exploring the physical practicalities of such an android and the implications of the technology beyond the socio-cultural sphere. The film is excellent in other respects and even has a worthy argument to advance but it’s just terrible at being science-fiction.
After loving Local Hero so much, adding this equally highly regarded earlier film by director Bill Forsyth to my watch list was a must. This is a really low budget production, so cheaply made that the actors apparently just wore their own clothes. Yet this back to basics production values actually heighten its sense of authenticity and provinciality. I can’t say that I always get the film’s sense of humor but I really loved its charm and especially appreciated how it treats the subject of teenage infatuation and horniness with kindness and sweetness.
I found the last non-fiction book I read to be so engaging and rewarding that I think I might make more of a habit of it, even though I already read so much online and from my ongoing subscription to The Economist. This particular book caught my attention from an online discussion of books that most revolutionized their respective fields. That’s a rather bold claim that I’m not sure this book is able to satisfy. But its topic of trying to address the question of why so many large-scale interventions to reengineer human society fail is one that intensely interests me. This is a rather heavy and substantial book so I took my time getting through it. In the end, I found that it marshals such numerous examples and case studies that its arguments are undeniable. Still it also seems to me that so many those interventions failed because the planners were dumb, not that there is some deep, systematic reason for the failures.
Independent filmmakers come up with great horror concepts and this one mines the stuff of nightmares for its material. The director Anthony Scott Burns and the cast aren’t complete unknowns but they’re all new enough that most people probably haven’t seen anything they have been it. This film is imperfect in that it offers no satisfactory explanation to the strange phenomena that happens in it, yet as my wife notes that may be a deliberate decision to heighten its scariness and this is indeed one horror film that is undoubtedly scary.
Here’s another shot at a film by Claire Denis even though we keep not quite being able to get what critics love so much about her work. This one is a very subtle film, perhaps too subtle as it seems almost bereft of any plot, but after getting to know its characters, it comes closest to a film by this director that I actually like. It also presents a view of the Parisian suburbs that is almost completely inhabited by people of color. That isn’t directly relevant to the themes or the characters but it still is a rather startling portrayal of France.
