This film was such a major cultural phenomenon in China that it would be remiss not to watch it. It was adapted from a popular novel but it would be fair to say that it in turn was inspired by real suicides among high students. It was directed by Derek Tsang who most people will know of as being the son of Eric Tsang but this is a China film through and through. Although it is well made and the young actors deliver excellent performances, it is ultimately a sentimental and shallow romance that panders to the sensitivities of the Chinese government and does a disservice to the issue of bullying in school.
This was a free game on Epic and I never considered buying it myself. But maybe I should have since this is a game by Remedy and I’ve always been a fan of their story-telling. Since I’m also a fan of the SCP website and the game is very obviously inspired by it, that’s even more reason to appreciate the setting. Many will know as being one of the first games to implement DLSS and ray-tracing. Even though my GPU technically supports the technology, the resolution looked so low to me that I just stuck with the older rendering methods.
Finally we get to the end of what is supposedly a trilogy by Michelangelo Antonioni. This one is no easier than any of the previous ones when it comes to figuring out what it actually means, yet the incredible power present in every scene impresses you nevertheless even as you scramble to make sense of things. Monica Vitti is the constant across all of these films and here she is at once both incredibly beautiful and incredible resistant to any simple dissection of her motivations. There are any number of ways that one could interpret this film but as some critics have pointed out perhaps it is its open-ended nature that is the real point.
So this is technically a sequel to the 2016 film that confusingly shares the same name but as it was terrible I don’t regret not watching that one. Thankfully it’s the Suicide Squad which means their team members change all the time and continuity isn’t that important. I fully agree with all of the critics that this truly is an outstanding superhero action movie on all counts with almost no flaws. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to have a good director like James Gunn who actually seems to like comic book stories instead of looking down on the genre and of course this wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t been allowed to let loose on the violence with an R-rating.
I’m taking a pause in my reading of The Wandering Inn for a while and catching up on other stuff. Worth the Candle is another work of online fiction that is now fully complete by a writer who goes by the name Alexander Wales. I read Wales’ fanfiction years ago and he is considered one of the writers who arose in the community around Eliezer Yudkowsky’s HPMOR but I haven’t been following up with what he has been doing recently. Well, this was what he was working on and at around 1.6 million words, it’s a pretty hefty epic. It seems to be moderately successful and the image I use here is taken from an approved translation of the work into the Korean language called This World I Made. As for what it’s about, on the face of it, it’s yet another entry into the crowded isekai genre but actually it is a very meta-fictional exploration of fantasy worlds and I think semi-autobiographical on the part of the writer.
While the more mainstream releases of Hong Kong’s cinema continues to fall to impress, we do get independent gems that worth our attention. Ray Yeung is a director who seems to have made a career out of highlighting homosexual issues and despite being himself gay and of Hong Kong nationality, this is his first film that is in Chinese and set in Hong Kong. I detect some inexpertness in the directing but the premise is both compelling and inarguably compelling.
We’ve got to run out of Alfred Hitchcock films to watch eventually and this one may even be it as I didn’t find it terribly interesting. It’s a war film that is a hodgepodge of different things: romance, spy intrigue, humor, action and so on and doesn’t gel together well at all. It isn’t at all like Hitchcock’s usual style and while it’s obviously based on World War 2, it uses fictional people and even a country to obfuscate matters, making it even more of a mess. Some critics at the time called it a glorified B-movie and that’s exactly what it feels like to me.
