I bought this a while ago, motivated mainly because I now own a Hori Mini Fighting Stick and wanted to try different fighting games with it. Also because I have never played a single Soulcalibur game before and this newest entry in the franchise features Geralt of Rivia as a guest character. Beyond the fact that it’s one of the few fighting games involving characters who are armed with melee weapons plus the character Ivy in it often appears as a sex object, I knew nothing about this franchise beforehand.
Cabaret is another famous musical with particularly iconic imagery featuring Liz Minnelli sitting behind a chair. However unlike other musicals, you never hear its songs being played outside of the show itself. Watching this, I understand why. The songs themselves are nothing special but combined with the visuals and dance choreography, each has a unique effect. Similarly, the film affects a tawdry, tasteless look but actually harbors surprising emotional depth and insight.
This is Akira Kurosawa’s second last film and generally the last few films he made were not very well received. This one is conventional in terms of story and style but was nevertheless criticized at the time for serving an anti-American agenda, something which Kurosawa has never been known to do. Personally I thought this might have been a little too heavy-handed in its messaging but it’s far better than I expected and does exactly Kurosawa set out to do: restore the power of the atomic bombings to shock and terrify modern audiences.
So this is the last book of Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy about Athena and Apollo’s project to found Plato’s Just City. It’s pretty clear that this was written only to close out the trilogy as there is very little plot. Much of it consists of a series of philosophical essays by Crocus, the first of the Workers, the robots Athena brought to build the city, to gain sentience. The much promised renewed contact between the Platonic cities and the rest of humanity also turns out to be a bit of a damp squib. But it does have time-travel, aliens and even a dinosaur!
This purely black and white film is an amazing exercise in photography and with only two actors, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, it’s a tour-de-force of acting as well. It was made by the same director, Robert Eggers, who made The Witch. Unfortunately this is one of those films that is so jam-packed with hallucinations, insanity and symbolic references that one never knows how much of what we see is real or whether that even matters, and I tend not to like this kind of film as much.
Given that these historical epics seem to do well at the South Korean box office, it’s no wonder that they keep making them. This one is about the invasion of the Goguryeo kingdom by the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century and is rather cool if you like siege battles as the whole thing is one long extended siege. It goes too far in hyping up the exploits of the heroic commander Yang Manchun but does boast rather decent action movies and more interestingly, doesn’t go overboard on the nationalism.
This is a notable early Marlon Brando film that in of itself probably isn’t that important in the annals of cinematic history. Yet the iconic image of the tough biker in a leather jacket that we are so familiar with today probably first got its start here. In its own time, this look was copied by people like James Dean and Elvis Presley while closer to our time, this look helped launched Arnold Schwarzenegger to stardom. The film itself isn’t that good but it is interesting in that it doesn’t completely condemn the motorcycle gang that comes to wreck a small town as one might expect for a film of this era.
