The Srebrenica massacre took place more than 25 years ago. I suppose it took this long for a major film about the event to be made. Yet watching it today feels extra meaningful due to the ongoing war in Ukraine. This film focuses on the perspective of a single fictional character and her family, while being very light on any exposition about the larger conflict. As a dramatic work, it is unquestioningly brilliant in putting the audience in the shoes of the hapless civilians who are powerless in the face of the disaster and death all of them can see coming towards them. Yet there is so little information about what is really going on that it can at times be very frustrating.
Here’s a mainstream novel with speculative fiction elements rather than a science-fiction novel for a change. It’s the newest book by Emily St. John Mandel who was already a bestselling writer but received a massive boost in popularity recently for obvious reasons as her 2014 novel was set during a pandemic. I chose to read this one first as I was more intrigued by its multiple timelines and thought it would appeal to my science-fiction preferences more. In the end I found this to be an exceedingly pleasant book to read but most of all, it reminds me of the essential differences between mainstream literature and science-fiction. The book is full of time travel but as an author Mandel has no interest in the concept of time travelling at all. She uses it as a narrative device to offer some humanistic insights that are admittedly interesting but also reinforce the universal and unchanging nature of humanity even as time passes and science advances.
While watching this, we had the vague impression that we’ve already seen this before yet couldn’t be sure. Since I now have a record of every film I’ve watched, I could check and see that it wasn’t the case. It’s just how the film makes use of the usual techniques of the horror genre that makes it seem so familiar. This is a supremely creepy, suspenseful film and it represents perhaps the very epitome of what can be achieved with this style. Yet it also illustrates their limits as it’s all pure atmosphere and the film doesn’t really go anywhere at the end.
I thought this film was a thriller but it’s really more of a psychological drama of a Vietnam War veteran’s weird ways of coping with his trauma. It’s a surprisingly more complex film that I expected yet the execution doesn’t quite live up to its full potential. This is the first film we’ve watched by director Ivan Passer but he was a close collaborator of fellow Czech Miloš Forman whose work we’ve loved. Imperfect as this film is, it seems to already be the pinnacle of Passer’s career so it’s doubtful that we’ll be watching more of his work.
Both my wife and myself somehow missed watched this film by Tsui Hark from back when he actually a good director. I thought about looking for it later but it seemed impossible to find anywhere except for YouTube. Recently my wife’s interest in it was rekindled after watching an online lecture about it and so we settled for the YouTube version despite its inferior quality. It is very much a film of its era with its kitschy special effects. Yet it is amazingly, even shockingly shock though perhaps much of the credit should go to Lilian Lee, as the author of the novel this was adapted from.
I’m still feeling a bit burned out on Warhammer 40,000 due to overexposure but so many people have been raving about this take on the traditional 4X genre that I felt like giving a spin. This isn’t really a 4X game in that in line with the Warhammer theme there is only war, so there’s no diplomacy or trade between factions. But you do still get to found cities, build an economy and most importantly raise armies with which to wipe out the map.
We’ve seen plenty of films by Akira Kurosawa already but we’re far from done. It’s another film set in post-war Japan and is loosely based on an American novel. It starts out as an old-fashioned kidnapping story of a type that we don’t really see nowadays any longer but nothing too remarkable. So it’s only when we see the police embark on a massive manhunt for the perpetrator that the film truly comes into its own. The investigation is so sophisticated and the step by step process shown here so detailed that I felt compelled to check if this was based on a true story.
