By rights, I should be a huge fan of Iain M Banks’ Culture books as everything I have read about the setting makes it sound very appealing to me. Unfortunately I read the first book of the series Consider Phlebas a few years back, found it to be a not very impressive space opera and stopped right there. Recently I came across discussion of the Culture setting again and decided to give it another shot. This is of course the second book in the series and to my surprise, I absolutely loved it. This should be the first proper book to the series and introduction to the civilization of the Culture. It’s just downright wrong for the first book to be written from the perspective of characters who are the Culture’s enemies.
The personal story of Britney Spears as a musician and a celebrity isn’t that interesting to me but this film’s focus is on the media’s reaction to Spears than the person herself. It won critical acclaim and no wonder, it is one of the rare activist documentaries to actually succeed in its objective. Shortly after it was released, a judge ordered an end to her father’s involvement in her conservatorship and it certainly seems that this film had a part to play in that decision, so that’s quite amazing.
This is a French thriller which was commercially very successful and won its share of critical acclaim as well. It felt very much like an American thriller to me, and no wonder, for it was adapted from an American novel of the same title, with the story transposed to France. While there’s some novelty in seeing a French film in this style and some excitement when the main character is on the run from the police, I did not much care for the film by its end. It’s just too overwritten with too many characters and the protagonist has so little agency that he’s seems more like an observer than a participant.
The Grand Theft Auto series only really blew up when Rockstar made the change to a fully 3D world with an over-the-shoulder third-person-view with the third game of the series. But before that the first two games used a top-down view and that is what this game is doing. It’s basically a GTA clone using that top-down view using of course a modern engine and graphics. I myself have never played those versions of GTA so I thought I’d give this a shot.
Everyone knows about My Fair Lady but before that was this much earlier adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and the dramatist himself supervised this production and wrote the screenplay. Though it has been outshone by the musical now, this film was very successful in its day. Without the music, this is less fun but I feel that it does make the drama of the situation feel more serious and highlights the inherent unfairness of how much the way one speaks can alter a person’s fate.
Being the debut of its director Bao Tran and starring Asian leads, I thought this was another of the recent spate of films exploring Asian-American identities. It turns that this isn’t really the case as it’s a straight up martial arts film. The plot is simple and the ending feels abbreviated but it does make for an effective story and they do actually have real martial arts choreography. That makes this film a real pleasure to watch and something the director has good reason to be proud of.
This is a yakuza film by a director who is new to us, Masahiro Shinoda though he is known as being as assistant to such famous directors as Yasujirō Ozu. This one is considered a Japanese New Wave film and as such while one can follow the plot readily enough, it’s not so easy to discern what is the point it is driving towards. In the end I think it’s about self-destructive people who to go to extremes in search of a thrill to make themselves feel alive. It’s okay I suppose but not something I am particularly excited about.
