Once again I’m not a foodie so I hardly need much convincing that avant-garde haute cuisine is a ripe subject matter for mockery. Still, this exceeded my every expectation in how perfectly crafted it was and as I suspected would be the case, my wife was riveted too. The increasingly pretentiousness of the menu is expected and so too is the pivot to full on horror. What I didn’t expect is how it managed to work in passable backstories for all of the diners and tie everything together so well. It’s fantastic as comedy and a send-up of food culture and honestly one of the better all round films I’ve seen recently.
After years of not a single Malaysian film being featured here, we’ve seen a succession of them recently. This is a Malay language film to boot and was shot in black and white giving it an artistic flair. I really wanted to like this one and indeed the premise of a Malay man from Pahang trying to get by in Kuala Lumpur has a lot of promise. Unfortunately the film’s idea of a main plot is weak and makes poor use of the main character. Bella is a terrible supporting character and every interaction they have together is so clichéd and unconvincing that it really brings down the entire film. It’s still worth watching in my opinion for its portrayal of Kuala Lumpur but it could have been truly great.
Just a quick write-up on the expansion for the game. Like many modern DLCs, this one is set in a separate area of the game and chronologically takes place shortly before the final battle. As far as I’m concerned it’s a near perfect DLC: the frozen lands of the new area is different enough to feel fresh, the enemies are harder but still a logical expansion of the original ones, and I loved how you actually do get to talk to an AI at the end.
People have tried to make live-action Dungeons & Dragons films before and the results were not great. More than a decade later the game itself is more popular than ever thanks to YouTube videos and this feels like an underexploited franchise. This revival is instantly recognizable as being far more successful even from its trailers. It’s easy to see why: it appropriates the Marvel formula of combining action with humor and of taking the lore seriously while not obligating casual viewers to study up on it to enjoy the film. Needless to say, I’m all for it and I’d love to more fantasy films made in this style.
I think this will be the last of the films of Yasujirō Ozu we’re going to watch. It’s as highly rated as the rest but is considered one of the director’s darkest films. Indeed if you’ve been frustrated by how the characters in Ozu’s films maintain their reserved demeanor and never break down despite their difficulties and stresses, this is the film for you. I don’t like this as much as the director’s other films. Perhaps this isn’t the most comfortable space for him to explore after all and even tries to end with a moralizing lesson. Still it’s a very strong film and it gives you a look at Ozu’s regular cast playing characters a little outside of their usual range.
I put this on my list because I wanted to watch a definitive and faithful adaptation of the play. I’m no expert on Shakespeare but this version does seem plenty authentic to me down to casting leads who are closer in age to the characters as originally intended and having the men wear ridiculous looking tights. Romeo and Juliet hasn’t been considered anything close to an admirable love story for a while now but watching this really drove it home for me what a terrible example the couple are. Shakespeare’s writing still shines even though the plot is dumb and it’s very satisfying to recognize how the lines here are reused just about everywhere.
I discovered the Wild Cards series back when I was still in high school and of course this was also before George R.R. Martin became a household name. Being also a comic book reader at the time, this series ticked all of the right boxes for me: it had superheroes, it wasn’t afraid of adult themes and featured characters who had to deal with complex psychological issues, and its storylines tied in with real world news and US-based politics. Being a fan of this series made me feel all snobbish about how sophisticated I was. I eventually bought the books up to the seventh volume but I was missing the second book that I was never able to find. I could infer the events in it from what I read in the subsequent volumes yet every once in a while I would still recall that I never managed to read this. Now with the entire series available on Kindle, I thought I’d remedy this little hole in my life.
