Celine Song earned enough goodwill from her debut feature Past Lives that her second film deserves a look even if its reviews are less impressive. It assembles a strong cast to explore a bold premise about how important material wealth is to a relationship. Unfortunately it’s a bust. Song raises the question only to offer the usual, familiar answer that love conquers all. Worse, she flubs her cultural references and fails to get strong performances out of the actors, making this only a middling rom-com.
We’ve watched quite a few films by Lee Chan-dong so far but here we go all the way back to his very first one. It’s relatively simple but it may just be my favorite of his works. It’s very similar in tone to the Hong Kong gangster films of the late 1980s and early 1990s but unlike those, this has real pathos and depth. As with Pigs and Battleships, we get the life of a low-level gangster shorn of any glory or dignity and there is no happy ending to be had with the femme fatale of this story.
I’ve lusted after this game for years but this was another PlayStation exclusive. The original version was in fact never adapted for PC. We had to wait until after the Miles Morales sequel added a Remastered version of the first game before that in turn was released for PC. So it took a very long time for me to be able to play this, but at least it does have updated graphics and supposedly better performance. It was absolutely worth the wait as even after so many years, this is a top notch superhero action game.
This is the first time I’ve watched a film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg and he even stars here as one of two cousins on a trip to Poland. It’s effectively travelogue which is always nice to watch as you feel like you’re part of the group tour with them, seeing what they see. More importantly, it’s a deep dive into the relationship between the two. It’s quietly understated, restrained in its ambitions and painfully authentic, all excellent reasons for me to love it.
Amidst all the much more well-known animated shows, this one seems to have fallen under the radar and ultimately failed. I was drawn to it both by its sci-fi setting of survivors trapped on an alien planet and its art design. Its visuals are reminiscent of Western graphic novels and indeed the immediate inspiration is the work of French artist Jean Giraud. I’m always keen on animated speculative fiction shows that are made for adults and this certainly counts. Unfortunately this is a show about vibes, not cerebral ideas, and once it became obvious that it has no interest in offering grounded explanations for anything, my opinion of it dropped by a few notches.
I’m continuing my deep dive into great science-fiction books that I missed out on back in the day so here’s one that was first published in 1993. It’s another book that is difficult to read because it’s full of slang words whose meaning you’re expected to infer from the context, there are no chapter breaks and it freely segues between the perspectives of different characters. Working one’s way through it is well worth your while however as it is simultaneously a very science-fiction novel, being a very detailed account of ordinary life on the surface of the Moon and a very mainstream one as it is an old-fashioned coming-of-age story.
Continuing the string of films that show the darker side of Japan, especially under US occupation, here’s one by ShÅhei Imamura. The title sounds ridiculous but makes complete sense given the context and even earns its comedic tone. At its heart is a rather old-fashioned love story between a girl and a bad boy but the incisive message about cultural imperialism elevates it above the usual fare. It’s rather cleverer and more multifaceted than it initially appears even if the moralizing is a tad obvious.
