It’s been a while since I last wrote one of these broad overviews of the various pieces of online fiction I’ve been reading. The truth is that I spend far more time reading so-called amateur online fiction than published books nowadays and recently I find that I’ve been enjoying them more as well. And of course many of the most successful pieces of online fiction eventually make their way to become published as traditional books. By far, my current favorite of the lot is The Wandering Inn web serial by pirateaba. I’ve been following this for a few years now so I thought I’d already written something about this but it turns out that I hadn’t. So I’m writing this to convince more people to try it out.
Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars is of course his unofficial remake of Yojimbo, being similar enough that the Japanese production sued and Leone eventually settled out of court. Being one of the earliest Spaghetti Westerns, the European crew members were so nervous that they adopted fake American-sounding names. This is why the musical score really is composed by Ennio Morricone as you can tell immediately upon hearing it but it is credited to Dan Savio.
We have watched a film by director Peter Strickland though I didn’t remember that until I went back to check. It was the Duke of Burgundy about a lesbian BDSM relationship. This one is completely different, being a horror film about, of all things, a dress. It’s a little too weird for me to really like but I have to admit that it is highly original and of course its visuals are simply sumptuous, just like the earlier film.
We’re back to the classic Akira Kurosawa samurai film with this one. It’s full of the director’s favorite actors including of course Toshiro Mifune in the lead role and indeed the shot of him slowly striding down an empty street is one of the director’s most iconic images. The plot is comparatively simple but this characterization of a wandering samurai out to do good deeds through both guile as well as force of arms has been an influential one for good reason.
Back when I wrote about the final book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy I said I’ll probably pick up this semi-official companion book and now I have. Unfortunately I shouldn’t have bothered. This started out as a piece of fanfiction by a devoted fan Baoshu and became popular enough that it was acknowledged by Liu Cixin and his publisher. But it remains firmly in fanfiction territory as it is nowhere as creative or as well written as the original trilogy. It is also largely a companion piece to Death’s End instead of the trilogy as a whole as it features the characters from the last book.
It has been almost exactly a year since we watched the well loved 1994 adaptation so it’s still quite fresh in our minds. We were always going to watch this new version due to its stellar cast and the fact it is directed by Greta Gerwig. Unfortunately while this completely blows away the older film in terms of production values and visual beauty, it also makes some unconventional decisions with regards to presenting the sequence of events and emphasizing different aspects of their lives. This serves to differentiate the new version but I’m not sure that it’s for the better.
This most definitely not a musical film is the first directorial feature of its director Ladj Ly who previously made a name for himself for similarly themed short films. It immediately made waves upon its release and it’s easy to see why. Even from the very first shots, it seizes your attention with its energy and urgency and never lets up. As usual with such things, it can offer no easy solutions to longstanding intractable problems, but its revolutionary message rings loud and clear and it certainly lives to its adopted title.
