I haven’t played basketball, either in real life or as a video game, since high school and even then it’s not I fully understood the sport anyway. But as most will know, this title was a giveaway on the Epic platform a while back and I was curious about what a modern sports game is like these days. Basketball at least isn’t totally cryptic to me like American football is but do note that I’m only taking a brief look at this game so this isn’t a real review or anything like that as this is all too unfamiliar to me. I don’t even know what most of the terms used in this game means.
This is another one of those films that has almost no plot, adapted from a short story by Herman Melville but transposed to a completely different setting and cast of characters. I don’t much care of what plot there is but I did find it fascinating in how this feels almost like a documentary, a sort of anthropological study of the soldiers featured here from an outsider’s perspective and even living in an exotic locale. I don’t believe that I will ever be a big fan of director Claire Denis but I do admit that her films are interesting.
This is a nearly two and a half hour long documentary about a musical duo that I’ve never heard of and you probably haven’t either. But it was directed by Edgar Wright and it’s listed as one of the best films of last year so that’s enough to get me onboard. This duo consisting of two brothers have been around for a while and while they have a large cult following, they have never achieved success on a global scale. This supremely entertaining film strives to serve as a comprehensive record of their career and tries to show that they have had an outsized influence on other artistes that you will have heard about.
It’s been a while since I sat down and read a proper non-fiction book. It’s not that I’m uninterested, it’s just that I read so much non-fiction online already that I don’t feel the need to do so to generally stay on top of current events and discoveries. This book however has been talked about so much among the economists whose blogs I keep up on that I felt compelled to buy it and really history is one of the subjects that it is better to read a proper book about than gain knowledge about through osmosis. Do note that I’m dispensing with the subtitle that is always so annoyingly long in modern non-fiction books and the author Steven Johnson is not himself a historian but a popular science author so this book is aimed at the mass market.
Films about the mental degradation that comes with age aren’t novel but this one does add something new: the subjective experience from inside the mind of the afflicted. Anthony Hopkins turns in what some have called the performance of a lifetime and given the kind of career he has had, that is saying something. This is a small scale film as befits an adaptation from a play with small sets and a small cast but it is exceptional at what it does with director Florian Zeller being himself the playwright of the original play.
This is one film that I did watch long ago but I barely have any memories of it. By now this is a cult classic but as is so often the case was a commercial failure on its release. It is best characterized as John Carpenter attempting to make a 1980s style wacky Hong Kong movie. My favorite part about it however is that it draws heavily on Chinese folklore but manages to more or less respect the source inspiration, casts a white man as the hero but doesn’t elevate him above his Chinese co-stars, making it a woke film that is far ahead of its time.
This Mexican film is dystopian enough to count as science-fiction and another indicator is how its characters are increasingly sidelined as they are overtaken by the plot. Walking into this blind, it is shocking to watch the comfortable lives of the moneyed elite being disrupted and then destroyed by an increasingly violent riot by the masses of the poor underclass. Yet instead of seriously engaging with the morality of both sides, the film pivots away to blame the military instead. This thoroughly ruins its credibility and with it any chance of treating it as a serious film.
