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.
Netflix hits it out of the park again with an animated series that replicates the flowing beauty of Japanese anime but is a Western production through and through. It has a bit of a slow start with a somewhat clichéd premise but I was hooked once once I saw the amazing fight choreography. Even better is that it is unabashedly an animated show for adults. It was deaths and amputations galore, full frontal nude shots, sex scenes, the works. I loved the story as well but of course it runs off of Western moral values and not Asian sensibilities. About the only complaint I have is that it ramps the stakes up so high that it’s a little ridiculous how only Mizu, the protagonist, is the only one who can get anything done.
As I recently noted, there aren’t that many good films about businesses so it’s heartening that there were two interesting ones in 2023. The rise and fall of the BlackBerry devices should be a familiar one for those of us who lived through the era so it’s great to have the story on film. It’s a fantastically entertaining account too, complete with cinematic embellishments and dramatic flourishes that make it legible to those not technically-inclined or don’t speak business lingo. Unfortunately it’s also probably not a very truthful depiction of events and some parts of it are downright icky. I did love the dynamic they establish between the two co-CEOs but as far as I understand, the characterization is entirely fictional.
This is probably the most popular mod for Assetto Corsa and I’ve wanted to play around with it for some time now. The system requirements are quite significant however so I put it off until I’d upgraded my PC. Now that I’ve done so, I thought I’d also put in the work to make this 10-year old game look as good as it possibly can. This means finally getting around to buying Pure, installing a new pp filter and even getting the right custom shaders patch settings. I can’t honestly say that it looks like a brand new game but it does make for a drastic graphical improvement.
We really should be watching more of the work of Wim Wenders and this tight package that is almost as perfect as the days it portrays is a good reason why. It’s such a neat confluence of exactly the elements that we tend to like in cinema: very sparse dialogue that relies on visual storytelling, a protagonist working a mundane job with a rich, inner life, and a positive attitude towards life. It does cheat a little I feel as I doubt that the daily routines of a real-life toilet cleaner even in Japan is this stress-free and Wenders’ musical picks alone carry so much emotion, but this really is one of the best films I’ve watched this year.
This is one of Lars von Trier’s best known films so it was always necessary to watch it at some point. It’s also one of his most accessible works as the director takes great pains to ensure that the audience understands exactly what is going on and what he means to say. I don’t much care for the psychosexual elements but it wouldn’t a von Trier film without them and it probably wouldn’t have as much shock value. This portrayal of a harsh version of Christianity doesn’t do the religion any favors but I think it’s more honest than the sanitized version we usually get and that’s a credit to this film.
This anthology horror film by Masaki Kobayashi consists of four separate stories and clocks in at three hours. The stories are all adapted from Japanese folklore, which explains why some are likely variations of stories everyone has already heard of. It’s rough going at first as it looks very much like something shot on a stage and the plot is just too predictable. But then I noticed that stories steadily improve in sophistication and even production values and started to appreciate the film better. I won’t say the film looks that good as you have to make a deliberate effort to buy into the stagecraft but it does some make bold artistic choices. The selection is overall quite good, representing a broad spectrum of traditional Japanese ghost stories.
