Again venturing a little outside our usual TV fare, this is a Taiwanese series based on the scam centres of Cambodia with a supernatural twist. I wasn’t expecting too much but it starts out strong with the titular resurrection happening early and moves at a good pace. Unfortunately while it would have been perfectly satisfying to have it play out as a straightforward revenge story, the writers insist on sudden, dramatic twists, resulting in an awful mess of ambiguous character motivations. They even flub the finale by angling for a second season that will likely never happen. It’s good in parts but still not really worth watching.
The Reality Dysfunction was a hefty read and so I wanted lighter and different in between the volumes of the massive trilogy. I picked Marcus Aurelius’ famous Meditations both because it’s definitely different from my usual reading material and because I’m getting of constantly seeing references to it and not knowing what it’s about. It is prominently featured in The Holdovers for example. Unfortunately it was largely a waste of my time. This is basically a self-help book and a very repetitive one at that. It’s impressive that it was so far ahead of its time for its genre and was written by an actual emperor of the Roman Empire but that’s about it.
I’d read the novel some years back after enjoying The Martian very much so I was always going to watch this film adaptation. Given the thickness of the book, I’m amazed they managed to fit it into a single film at all. It does speed through most of the scientific trials and skips many of more minor crises to focus on the relationship between Grace and Rocky. But it does cover all of the major story beats and is perfectly paced without any egregious errors. It is in fact one of the most faithful, straightforward adaptations I’ve seen and gets a solid thumbs-up from me.
Though made by a Spanish production company, this animated film is set in a pre-9/11 version of New York City and is based on an American graphic novel. Not that it matters as there isn’t a single line of dialogue in it. The story is instead conveyed through nonverbal sounds, body language and on rare occasions text. The themes of friendship and loneliness here are simple and the plot a little silly. Still, the emotions are intense and both the visuals and the music are appealing, so I’d consider this better than what the big American animation studios mostly produce.
I like to try games of all genres such that I’d at least have a passing familiarity in them even if I’m never going to be an expert. One obvious lacuna in my ludography are military simulators. Well, here we have a submarine simulator that renders the German u-boats of World War II in such detail that you can walk around inside one in first-person view and press all of the buttons and switches yourself. It’s kind of insane and actually not as difficult to learn as I’d feared. I still didn’t spend that much time on it because it’s realistic enough that running a submarine in wartime is tedium most of the time, punctuated by brief moments of pure terror. But I sure enjoyed learning all about how submarines work and it is a very pretty game!
It’s strange to think that barely weeks after Jafar Panahi announced that he would be returning to Iran after completing the awards circuit for this film despite knowing that he will certainly be arrested that the current war broke out. The director has always a critic of the regime yet in tackling the subject of torture head-on here, he is at his harshest yet. Through the dialogue of the victims, he exposes not just details of what the torture was like but also what he himself would want to say to those responsible. I’m not sure if this is his best film but it certainly is the hardest hitting one and fully deserves the acclaim that it has won.
One would think that the subject of androids questioning what it means to be human is already oversaturated but Kogonada shows us here that it is not so. Similarly to his feature film debut Columbus, this one brims with a quiet, understated power set in a world that is far more fascinating that it initially seems. I have doubts about just why their android cannot be repaired and how it tries to introduce some conflict in a film that really doesn’t have any. But it is in all other ways a masterful film that I believe has been underrated.
