I found the last non-fiction book I read to be so engaging and rewarding that I think I might make more of a habit of it, even though I already read so much online and from my ongoing subscription to The Economist. This particular book caught my attention from an online discussion of books that most revolutionized their respective fields. That’s a rather bold claim that I’m not sure this book is able to satisfy. But its topic of trying to address the question of why so many large-scale interventions to reengineer human society fail is one that intensely interests me. This is a rather heavy and substantial book so I took my time getting through it. In the end, I found that it marshals such numerous examples and case studies that its arguments are undeniable. Still it also seems to me that so many those interventions failed because the planners were dumb, not that there is some deep, systematic reason for the failures.
Independent filmmakers come up with great horror concepts and this one mines the stuff of nightmares for its material. The director Anthony Scott Burns and the cast aren’t complete unknowns but they’re all new enough that most people probably haven’t seen anything they have been it. This film is imperfect in that it offers no satisfactory explanation to the strange phenomena that happens in it, yet as my wife notes that may be a deliberate decision to heighten its scariness and this is indeed one horror film that is undoubtedly scary.
Here’s another shot at a film by Claire Denis even though we keep not quite being able to get what critics love so much about her work. This one is a very subtle film, perhaps too subtle as it seems almost bereft of any plot, but after getting to know its characters, it comes closest to a film by this director that I actually like. It also presents a view of the Parisian suburbs that is almost completely inhabited by people of color. That isn’t directly relevant to the themes or the characters but it still is a rather startling portrayal of France.
I always knew I would play this after enjoying the previous game so much, only that was four years ago! It simply took this long for me to get around to it after waiting for all episodes to be released. I have to confess that I haven’t actually finished everything yet before writing this. There’s just too much content so I’ll leave the DLC content for a later date. Even with the base content trying to be truly completionist is too much. I’d had to settle for doing all of the mission stories and achieving level 20 mastery on each map but I gave up on the really exotic and tedious challenges.
Nicholas Cage does so much awful work these days that it was quite a surprise last year to see this low budget, independent film shoot to the top of critics’ charts. After learning about its premise, I was disinclined to like this, worried that it would be mostly about watching one or more animals suffer. As it turned out, this film isn’t really about the pig at all and is a lot more like John Wick than I ever imagined, albeit in a radically different direction. It sure is an interesting and creatively impressive film but it has as little to do with real cooking and food as John Wick has with real combat.
Due to how much I loved The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I am certainly going to watch more of the work of its two directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who as a duo call themselves the Archers. This is again a film that is really about Britishness itself, being inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, but set during the Second World War. As Chaucer’s collection of stories is about a group of pilgrims travelling to Canterbury, so too is this film about a group of people who befriend each other on the road and find themselves going to Canterbury as well. In this way, it captures a little of what the pilgrimage experience might have been like for those in the Middle Ages and shows off the city and its surroundings to wonderful effect.
As I write this, director Jafar Panahi has once again been imprisoned. His sad fate contrasts sharply with the tone of this, one of his better known films that is about the oppression of women in Iran but is lighthearted and patriotic. This is about how the country stops women from attending football matches but this doesn’t deter a determined group of female fans. It was apparently filmed in a stadium during an actual qualifying match which gives this an electrifying atmosphere and incredible sense of authenticity. It’s fiction of course because no way would real soldiers and police officers be as empathetic and as easily bullied as the ones shown here as the director’s own fate demonstrates. But it sure does make for a fun movie.
