This is an English language science-fiction film from Lithuania and I so love how different it is from work produced in the west. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world which is normal enough except that biotechnology dominates and all that is left of civilization depends on it. The plot is mostly solid with good acting by its mainly British cast and the visuals of weird synthetic organisms are appropriately otherworldly and fantastic. My only complaint is that the setting is very grim, yet the main heroine is way too hopeful and nice a person for what she must have lived through.
So this is the famous sim racing game that everyone loves despite its age because it has a ton of mods covering every possible car and track. I’m still mainly interested in rally racing games but I thought I owed it to myself to at least gain a little experience on the more serious side of sim racing. Even getting this properly installed with the Content Manager that is practically required these days plus the basic set of mods that everyone recommends was quite an undertaking. As expected, I fairly terrible at this and don’t have the dedication to really get good, but it’s been fun enough for me.
Banned from making films in Iran and barred from leaving the country, director Jafar Panahi is up to his usual tricks again. Here he purports to be remotely directing a film that takes place in Turkey while being holed up in a small village near the border. It’s a brilliant premise that is clearly inspired by his real life troubles but it would be silly to believe that any of this were actually real. Panahi’s films are usually rather mild in tone even as they are rebuking the Iranian authorities. This one therefore marks a notable departure with how grim and dark it is, reflecting the worsening outlook for freedom in the country.
This feels more like a documentary or even an ethnographic study in video form than a film. Indeed this made was by director Charles Burnett as his masters’ thesis. It features music from some big names and since it never secured the rights to them until 2007, it wasn’t even legal to release this. It seems that many people still managed to watch this and in the intervening time, its reputation has grown until it is now considered one of the greatest films of all time. I’d say that this is certainly something special and the music it uses is absolutely essential to its identity. This is another one of those films that aim only to capture a specific place, time and people and it does nothing short of bringing them to life before your eyes.
This subtly understated film is the directorial debut of Charlotte Wells and is so good that it instantly marks her as someone to take note of. The premise of a father and daughter visiting Turkey sounded great to me but I became less enthused as it became clear that they mostly just spend their time inside the resort. Yet we watch them engaging in a variety of mundane holiday activities, the full depth of the film emerges only slowly as the most important moments are actually the ones that are implied but never directly shown.
As I’ve always said, short stories are where the newest science-fiction ideas first appear and it’s been too long since I last read a decent collection of them. qntm is the pen name of Sam Hughes who seems to be a self-published author and makes many of his stories free to read on his personal website. I haven’t read those stories before but I do know that he is a contributor to the SCP Foundation website and I have read many of the stories there. This is a very short book and the individual stories are not so much stories as scenarios. That’s fine by me as I’m here for the ideas, not the dramatic arcs.
Continuing with my exploration of the works of Studio Ghibli, here’s the more childish Kiki’s Delivery Service. In terms of production values, this is a far cruder film than Spirited Away. There’s so little detail in the trees and landscape that Kiki whizzes past. Thematically it’s also much simpler, about a girl finding her independence and nothing else. Yet it’s so sweet and so heartfelt that I think I like it more. Spirited Away is objectively the superior film but this one is truer to itself, knowing what it wants to do and sticking to just that. My one major complaint is that Hayao Miyazaki is so obvious here about how he has a fetish for flying and wants to showcase it everywhere. Come on, there’s such a thing as too much.
