This marks the first film that we’ve watched in the cinema since the pandemic started and I suspect that this will be the case for quite a few people. We really should have gone earlier to watch Dune but that was just after things started opening up again. Anyway we still waited until after the early rush of people to catch this and by now spoilers are everywhere so I won’t care about it that so much. This features a huge slate of characters, which ordinarily is a bad idea but director Jon Watts somehow makes it all work. I have major gripes about the nature of evil as presented here but in all other respects this is a top tier action movie and a wonderful return to form for the MCU.
Akira Kurosawa is of course one of the greatest Japanese directors of all time but he is also judged to make films that are very Westernized. I mention this because this one feels particularly Westernized to me from the nature of its plot to its esthetic. Indeed I later read that it is considered a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and yet is firmly set in Japan’s postwar era, known both for its poverty and its endemic corruption.
I am of course way late in playing this and the reason is that I completely forgot that I even owned this. I have this on the GOG platform and never even bothered to install the GOG Galaxy client. I’ve never played the legendary first game either but of course know a bit about its history and how the Fallout series is kind of its bastard stepchild. This was kind of an old-fashioned game even back in 2014 but I found that I rather like it that way.
This is another one of Alfred Hitchcock’s more experimental films, set in a single location and elaborately planned out to create the illusion of a single continuous, uninterrupted take. Even the plot is novel as the audience is shown the body and who the murderers are right at the beginning so the whole thing is an elaborate game over which, if any, of the other characters catch on. This film had a mixed reception on release and some critics thought that it was technical cleverness and nothing else. Like much else of Hitchcock’s oeuvre however it has been redeemed nowadays and I don’t consider it a minor film at all.
I found it amusing to watch both Black Widow and this film with a rather similar premise in short order, young women superspies being a Hollywood staple now. This one seemed to have rapidly dropped off the radar soon after release which is a shame because it is an excellently made film in many respects and I really appreciated how it creates a character who comes across as every bit as deadly as Black Widow, if not more so, without feeling at all like a superhero movie. Unfortunately it also has flaws and might have made for a more impressive spectacle with a bigger budget.
The Russian people have suffered more than most under the Second World War and this is well represented on film. The Cranes are Flying is one of the earliest and most well known such efforts. Unfortunately while there is a lot of emotive power in the simplicity of this drama, it is a very traditional and old-fashioned film and as such feels to me more like a sort of prototype in what it is trying to achieve that has since been superseded by other films. It’s also a little too obviously nationalistic propaganda for my tastes.
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.
