I’m still on decompression mode and so continuing with the smaller games that won’t take too much time to play. As you can tell from its title, its a World War 2 strategy game covering the Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. You can play as either side and a game is short enough that you should be done in a few hours. The user interface is simple so it’s deceptively easy to just click a few buttons and see things happen. But actually knowing what you’re doing and playing well is something else.
It beggars belief that Russia’s war against Ukraine has gone on for more than four years now with no end in sight. This documentary shows how the conflict has changed and damaged Russia itself, especially its children and youth. That this film is set in Karabash which its subject Pavel Talankin jokes is the most polluted place on Earth is fascinating. That the people who live in it still lead happy lives is amazing. But then Putin launches his war and the Ukrainians’ resistance is beyond what anyone expected and so Pavel watches as his students are subjected to propaganda and the entire school is militarized to support the war effort. I think David Borenstein chooses to put Talankin onscreen more often than is warranted but there is no question that the footage that he smuggled out of Russia offers an invaluable perspective.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi wowed the world not long ago with two fantastic releases Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy in the same year. I’ve been on the lookout for his work ever since. Here we go all the way back to his student days as Passion was his masters-level graduate work from the Tokyo University of Arts. You can tell that it was made cheaply with a digital camera and I’m not sure that this film goes anywhere in the end, but it’s engrossing throughout and immediately recognizable as the work of an auteur of cinema. It isn’t easy to find as it wasn’t widely distributed but it’s well worth the time of any cinephile.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of those classics of science-fiction that has long entered the public consciousness. It’s so well-known as a staple of post-apocalyptic fiction that I’d somehow thought that I’d already read it. It’s embarrassing to realize that in fact I haven’t and reading it for the first time over the past month, I’m blown away by how powerful it is as an expression of the cyclical nature of history and the enduring faith of religious calling in persisting on a mission that spans thousands of years. This is a book that has not aged at all and feels just as relevant today as it did when it was published in 1959.
A science-fiction film about cloning starring Robert Pattinson should be right up my alley but I held off on this for a while due to its middling reviews. It’s like there are two versions of Bong Joon Ho: the one who can make Memories of Murder, Mother and Parasite; and the one who can make Okja and now this Mickey 17. Though the setup is for the identity crisis of a cloned person, in the end this just devolves into another monstrous creature that is actually cuddly inside movie. The worldbuilding is entertaining in a wacky way and Pattinson acts his heart out but this is a middling, missable film with a misplaced focus on what is most interesting.
I’ve been watching films seriously for a while now so it astounds me that I still come across great directors whose entire careers I seem to have missed. It’s the turn of Éric Rohmer this time, said to be the last of the French New Wave directors with an adaptation of what must be one of the lesser known works of Jules Verne. I loved it from the start for its naturalistic dialogue, achieved apparently by having the actors improvise most of their lines themselves. I’m not a fan of its facile resolution but I found it engrossing as a depiction of a woman’s depressive state.
Joy Ride came to my attention because it’s the directorial debut of Malaysian Adele Lim whose columns I used to read as a teenager in The Star newspaper. It’s a raunchy sex comedy the likes of which Seth Rogen used to make and he’s a producer here. Except here it’s a bunch of Asian American girls who are the thirsty ones and most of it is set in China. I thought that would be enough to make interesting at least. I will concede that it’s unpredictable the girls go for the dumbest and craziest ideas. But it’s a terrible film all around and actually manages to be vaguely racist against Asians even while being all about Asians.
