After Jeanne Dielman unexpectedly topped a poll of the greatest films of all time in 2022, I’d bet I’m not the only person slowly working through the body of work of Chantal Akerman. This one is a very loose adaptation of a volume from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and knowing nothing of the novel itself, I am stunned by the intensity and alienness of the protagonist’s mindset. It actually made me want to read the book. I’m not certain that this is better than Jeanne Dielman but it is much less talked about and so I think severely underrated.
I can’t resist drive and deliver type games, so I decided to give this freebie on the Epic platform a shot. It’s something of a Grand Theft Auto-clone with an isometric perspective and set in 1959. Interestingly while you can step outside of your car, there’s no real combat and no one dies. The art and the world it depicts look great and it has solid voice acting throughout. It sounds like it should be good yet unfortunately it very much isn’t. Actual gameplay is frustrating due to the poor control scheme and the deliberate chaos it wants to encourage. Most of all, its makers seem much more interested in telling a story than making this an enjoyable game.
Being one of Ingmar Bergman’s early works, Summer with Monika is noticeably less refined and you won’t have any trouble understanding what it means. For that matter, it’s a familiar story that most will have seen many variations of already. Yet its rawness has its appeal and this can be considered a foundational film that inspired many others. I dislike its moralizing tone against so-called loose women as it seems unworthy of a director of Bergman’s stature so I would consider it a lesser work.
My wife and I are often leery of British comedies as we so often fail to get the humor but this is a sweet and relatively simple one. It seems this was originally a short film made by the two male leads Tim Key and Tom Basden. Now 18 years later, they’ve expanded it into a full feature film and it’s been a hit with the critics. The core idea of an aging musician performing for a single obsessive fan is just so cute. It’s very small in scale which I usually like but it’s not that deep either, so I’d call it a very pleasing distraction.
Again venturing a little outside our usual TV fare, this is a Taiwanese series based on the scam centres of Cambodia with a supernatural twist. I wasn’t expecting too much but it starts out strong with the titular resurrection happening early and moves at a good pace. Unfortunately while it would have been perfectly satisfying to have it play out as a straightforward revenge story, the writers insist on sudden, dramatic twists, resulting in an awful mess of ambiguous character motivations. They even flub the finale by angling for a second season that will likely never happen. It’s good in parts but still not really worth watching.
The Reality Dysfunction was a hefty read and so I wanted lighter and different in between the volumes of the massive trilogy. I picked Marcus Aurelius’ famous Meditations both because it’s definitely different from my usual reading material and because I’m getting of constantly seeing references to it and not knowing what it’s about. It is prominently featured in The Holdovers for example. Unfortunately it was largely a waste of my time. This is basically a self-help book and a very repetitive one at that. It’s impressive that it was so far ahead of its time for its genre and was written by an actual emperor of the Roman Empire but that’s about it.
I’d read the novel some years back after enjoying The Martian very much so I was always going to watch this film adaptation. Given the thickness of the book, I’m amazed they managed to fit it into a single film at all. It does speed through most of the scientific trials and skips many of more minor crises to focus on the relationship between Grace and Rocky. But it does cover all of the major story beats and is perfectly paced without any egregious errors. It is in fact one of the most faithful, straightforward adaptations I’ve seen and gets a solid thumbs-up from me.
