I haven’t played a first person shooter in a very long time and this one is an old game, first released some ten years ago, though this Redux version I believe updates the engine some. I only played it for two reasons: because it was free, one of the many offered by Epic to lure players to try out their platform, and because I actually have read the novel it is based on. I didn’t really like the book either but I do know this game was a hit, spawning multiple sequels so I wanted to be able to compare.
It might be tempting to dismiss this as just the latest of the innumerable nature documentaries David Attenborough has narrated, but it would be a mistake. He means it when he says that this is his witness statement and so this is his personal observation of how much the world has changed since he was a boy. More significantly, you can say that this is where he takes the gloves off and lays into the real causes of the climate disaster and what needs to be done to turn things around.
Director Diao Yinan made international waves a few years back with his noir Black Coal, Thin Ice and this is his follow-up. It’s hard to call this a noir however as it is mainly about police on a massive manhunt for a gangster. It does feature beautiful visuals and a great sense of atmosphere with its night scenes. But on all other counts it is a failure, with flat characters, a directionless plot and no real central theme of any kind.
As with The Lady Eve, this is another comedy by director Preston Sturges and was even released in the same year. However while I didn’t really like that other one, I found this to be a work of pure genius. Its comedic skits are just as inanely dumb but it leans into the inanity to justify its worth and even features an unexpectedly dark turn. This is a film that surprised and delighted me at every turn while being mostly respectful about the poor and downtrodden in it.
This was briefly popular several years ago but as usual it takes me a while to get through my wish list of games. It’s a very simple game but I really felt like playing something light and quick as a palate cleaner after the monstrosity that was Pathfinder: Kingmaker. You can learn this in minutes and be done with the standard campaign in a few hours.
Once again sports film are very formulaic and often not worth the time. This one is a bit more promising, being less of a sports film than a personal redemption one about a one-time sports star turned coach. Unfortunately while it’s not bad, it’s not really that good. Oddly enough once you realize that the main character’s depression stems from the loss of a child, it starts to look like an inferior version of Manchester by the Sea, which of course starred Ben’s brother Casey Affleck.
This marks the first film we’ve watched by legendary Italian director Roberto Rossellini and part of his so-called Neorealist Trilogy, so named because they most use non-professional actors. While it is solid work, I didn’t find it particularly noteworthy because we’ve seen so much like it already. What is remarkable is that this film was made just one year after the real events it depicts about a Rome under German occupation, and hence the difficult conditions and crude production quality were due to the very limited resources available to the filmmakers.
