Given its subject matter, it’s particularly poignant to watch this now as Donald Trump has just won the election to once again become the president of the United States. This short film effectively consists of just one extended scene in which FBI agents arrive at the home of Reality Winner, a US Air Force veteran and translator for the NSA, and interrogate her. All dialogue is taken from the recording made by the FBI itself, with portions redacted as per the transcript. It’s remarkable how much tension director Tina Satter was able to inject into the material and it works especially well if you have no idea who Reality Winner is before watching this.
I briefly considered the recent Steven Spielberg remake but it received only middling reviews and I realized I’d never seen the original anyway. I wasn’t too enthusiastic either about watching yet another iteration of Rome and Juliet but I should do it anyway as a kind of completionist achievement. Unfortunately I found it to be fairly underwhelming. It’s a dance-centric rather than a music-centric and almost all of its songs are forgettable. The two sides, the Sharks and the Jets, are very much not equal as the Puerto Rican Sharks have a far more compelling story to tell. I think I prefer pretty much any of the other versions of the familiar story to this.
This was popular for a while when it was in Early Access but I usually wait until a game is finished before even considering buying it. Unfortunately this seems to be one of those cases when the finished game is worse than the work in progress version as the campaign is a real slog to get through and they even took out some ease-of-life features. The scenarios are quite difficult and they made an iron man style mandatory. It’s quite impressive how they’re not afraid of throwing absolutely massive hordes at zombies at you, but in the end it’s not worth the aggravation and I didn’t finish the game.
There’s no indication of it in the film itself, but this was based on the real-life murder of an infant by her mother in France and director Alice Diop attended the trial just as the main character here does. As a courtroom drama, it’s very talky with long scenes of the characters delivering their statements. It’s also a case in which all of the facts seem immediately clear, plain as day. Yet the lesson Diop teaches here is that there is still the matter of perspective as each person presents the facts in a way that benefits themselves as we struggle to understand the incomprehensible horror of why a mother would kill her own child.
My wife felt like a change from the usual television shows that we watch and wanted to try a cooking show. The latest season of this long-running, award-winning show popped up on Netflix, with each season focusing on a different cuisine, so I thought we’d check it out. Each episode is indeed filled with exquisite visuals of perfectly crafted dishes but the focus is really on the biographies of noteworthy chefs rather than the food itself. It’s okay but not really what we were looking for so we’re glad it’s only four episodes.
It’s pretty impressive how director Yorgos Lanthimos has transitioned from making weird, almost incomprehensible art films to mainstream success. With recognition comes a bigger budget to play with and so Poor Things is set in a gorgeous, steampunk version of Victorian England. It’s in service of a story that resembles the familiar one of Frankenstein’s monster, except with a female lead and the creation is allowed to grow and mature to full adulthood. I found this film a tad long and I think the overemphasis on sex is to the detriment of the other ways the character can grow. Still, it’s a beautiful film and a clever twist on a familiar story.
I loved the Pantheon series and seeing as I’ve never read any of Ken Liu’s original fiction, I thought I’d check out the collection of short stories it came from. In fact, only three of the stories in this collection form the basis of the television series and the written form is very different. The rest are a mixed bag. Some explore alternative versions of similar ideas. Others are purely fantasy stories. My favorites are when he explores questions about identity in which the speculative fiction elements are almost incidental. There’s no real central theme to this collection however so it must have been composed of whatever work Liu had that was available and I have to say that on the whole, it isn’t a particularly brilliant book.
