I added this to my list because it is highly rated and seems to have been a particular favorite of many actors. It features a stellar cast, many of whom took pay cuts just to appear in this low budget production, and the director had to turn away many more A-list actors. Unfortunately I think this must have worked better in its original form as a stage play because although the characters keep talking and talking and talking, they ultimately say nothing at all and the film feels empty and pointless.
This is another game by a Chinese developer and after hearing about its premise I knew I just had to try it out no matter how poorly made or not it is. As you can tell by its title, it’s a kind of life sim in which you guide a child from infancy to the gaokao, China’s National College Entrance Examination. making choices on how to spend your time and which skills and studies to focus on. Along the way, you’ll have to grapple with meeting the expectations of your strict parents, avoid having a mental breakdown due to over-studying and maybe even make some friends or kindle a bit of romance as you grow up.
Here’s something a little different, a Hebrew-language television series from Israel that was highly successful some years back. I first learned about this years ago when it was featured by The Economist and kept running into references to it here and there but as you can expect, trying to actually watch it before streaming became commonplace was difficult. But I never forgot about this and kept it on my watch list and so here we are.
So we finally sat down to watch The Irishman which really is quite an endeavor given its length and I can’t say that I enjoyed the experience much at all. Given that it’s by Martin Scorsese and all of the accolades it picked up, we couldn’t have skipped it but perhaps we should have as it feels like a retread of the director’s greatest hits, complete with his favorite actors, plot points, themes and characterizations. It’s excellent work to be certain but it all feels like something we’ve seen before, stretched out to epic length.
I’d planned on watching this a little earlier but it does seem appropriate to watch this alongside the drama of the 2020 US elections. This is a documentary that tells the story of how Dilma Rousseff was impeached as president of Brazil and how Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ended up being imprisoned. It is highly relevant to Brazil’s current situation as the eventual victor of the whole kerfuffle is Jair Bolsonaro who remains president today.
This Russian novel is probably best known as the inspiration of the video game of the same name though I have not played it as I rarely play shooters these days. It was however first made available online in the Russian language, making it an early example of the web fiction that I read so much of these days, and the author Dmitry Glukhovsky apparently started writing it at the age of 18. I decided to check it out after reading some good reviews of it and while it certainly feels like a Russian novel, I found that I don’t like it much at all.
My days of reading H.P. Lovecraft are long behind me and though I’m now innured to the literary tricks that he used to infuse his stories with mystery and horror and I’m wise to the more problematic elements in his characters, reading them is still a treasured childhood memory. Given how pervasive Lovecraft’s influence has been, it’s been mind-boggling that no one has thus far made a good adaptation of his work. Some have tried, but they’ve mostly been low budget, poor quality stuff. This particular film isn’t completely faithful to the short story but I think it’s good enough that we can consider it a success.
